of dried meats, and I saw him break off a piece and taste it, not with pleasure, but certainly with interest – Canopus was going to be interested in everything that happened, had to be, by its nature –even if this was the death of a planet …
I woke to a consciousness of being awake: I am here, in this heavy warmth of hides and furs. I was understanding that while in happier days I had woken thus, thinking: This is my condition, that was my sleep, I shall now move myself into this or that activity, it had never been with this sharpness, this urgency.
The ease of our old sensuous life had not needed from us a certain kind of self-awareness. Now I came up through layers of sleep, and my body was supported on warmth as it might have been on the warm waters of our old life, and my mind was easy and free too, yet I knew that almost at once the strain and the pain of our new life must begin. I was wondering if this was how our vast shaggy beasts woke on a half-frozen hillside, muscles and bones relaxed inside their housing of shaggy pelt. Did they feel, as they lifted their heads, their eyes opening on a spin of snowflakes, that in a moment effort was going to drive through those cumbersome limbs of theirs, forcing them to their feet, and to the work of keeping themselves fed and fuelled … but meanwhile, while they lay there, they floated on sleep, and the good memories held in sleep … but up they must clamber, hooves slipping on rocks and pebbles, and their teeth would scrape on the surfaces of bitterly cold stones for the lichens there, and soft noses would be pushing aside loose snow to reach the earth that is half vegetable, the earth food that lies thick and uncomfortably on the stomach? I was beast with them, inside beast’s covering, thinking of beast’s food, and so strong was my identification with them that I felt cold air sinking in through the mats of hair on my shoulder and half believed it wind, and I turned my head and saw Johor come quietly in a door he opened as little as he could, shutting it at once against the cold.
He sat down on a heap of half-dried heather, and looked at me. I quickly shut my eyes, for I did not feel, yet, like facing the effort of making my mind meet his.
‘There is a blizzard,’ he said – for he knew I was awake. ‘No one is out – I have been from house to house through the town and in each one, they are lying as you do, silent and still inside layers of hides.’
I was looking up at the roof over us: a mass of heather over which had been piled sods and earth. There was a bloom of frost on the heather, and on the stone of the walls.
‘And as you stood there in the doorways,’ I said, ‘you saw heads lift, one after another, and the eyes shine up at you, and then go out, as the heads were lowered back into sleep.’
‘Yes. Back into sleep.’
‘Back into the dark from which we all come.’
‘Back into the – light from which we all come.’
‘I have not been dreaming of the light, Johor! I came to myself out of …’
‘What?’
‘Something sweet and wonderful – I know that. Something I long for.’
‘The light. A world of dazzling light, all a shimmering marvel – where the colours you yearn to see are shining – from whence you came.’
‘So you say, Johor.’
‘And where you will return.’
‘Ah, but when, when, when …’
‘When you earn it, Doeg,’ he said softly, but strongly enough to make me move inside my skins, stretch, and take on the burden of my limbs that did not want to feel my weight – the weight of living. The weight of thought …
But I made myself sit up and face him.
‘And they,’ I said, ‘those poor people huddled there dreaming of paradises that were falsely promised to them – how will they earn it? How will they reach the light at last – wherever it might be, for you haven’t told me that, Johor.’
He looked hard at me and said: ‘Representative Doeg, when you lie there dreaming, do you imagine your dreams are only yours – do you imagine that you spin dreams out of yourself that are uniquely yours? Do you believe that when you come to yourself from a world of dreams you think no one else shares, your consciousness of yourself, this feeling I am here, Doeg is here – belongs only to yourself, and no one else shares that feeling? As you come awake, feeling This is Doeg, this is the feeling of me, Doeg – how many others are at the very moment coming awake all over your planet, thinking This is me, this is the feeling of me?’
It was bitter to me, to let go that little place I was able to rest on, take refuge in – the thought, This is me, I, Doeg – and I resisted.
I said: ‘Not long ago I was a quick-moving, slender, brown-skinned creature, who woke in the morning thinking: Soon I will step out into a sun that will polish my brown skin into little gleams of colour, and the air will flow in and out of my lungs in balmy mildness … that was I, then, that was Doeg. And now I am a thick heavy greasy creature with dull greyish brown skin. But I am still Doeg, Johor – that feeling has stayed – and so, now, you say I must let that go too. Very well, I am not the elegant handsome animal I was, and I am not this lump of uncouthness. But I still come up out of sleep and feel: Here I am. I recognise myself. It is I who lie here, after so many journeys and adventures in my sleep.’
‘Your shared sleep.’
‘My shared waking – very well then, Johor, what am I to hold on to in this – blizzard that is blowing away everything, everything, everything …’
‘Do you remember how we, Canopus, came to you all and gave you instruction in what made you, made your world?’
‘Yes, it was not long before you came to us and told us to build – the wall that would shield us from the ice.’
‘Which has, and does shield you from the ice.’
‘Which would have done better to give way long ago, putting an end to this long dreariness and torment.’
‘No.’
‘Because there is something left to be done? What? You have come all the way here from your place in the galaxy, and you have sent away your Traveller, and you sit here with me in this shed, and …’
‘Well, Representative?’
‘What do I represent, Johor?’
‘Do you remember what we taught you?’
I sat up in my nest, and pulled up the thick coverings all around me and over my head, so that only my face was bare. Close to me, Johor’s face showed under his hood.
‘I remember how we first understood that you were teaching us something in a way none of us had done before – directly. You asked us all to go up into the hills on the other side of the wall, and to choose a place where the ground rose all around. We massed there, all of us from the town and from a long way about. You asked us to bring one of the animals – those that are extinct now – that we intended to kill for food. You asked us to have it killed before the people assembled, and we, the Representatives, were pleased that the act of killing was not to be associated with your presence, for while we did not conceal what lay behind our eating of meat, we tried to see that there was no reason to dwell on it all – the slaughterhouses, the preparations.
