older ones, had inherited. Our fault it was not; but we felt that it was. We were learning, we old ones, that in times when a species, a race, is under threat, drives and necessities built into the very substance of our flesh speak out in ways that we need never have known about if extremities had not come to squeeze these truths out of us. An older, a passing, generation needs to hand on goodness, something fine and high – even if it is only in potential – to their children. And if there isn’t this bequest to put into their hands, then there is a bitterness and a pain that makes it hard to look into young eyes, young faces.
We, the three Representatives, agreed to go on.
Because the skies were clear and blue on that third day we could see the great white birds everywhere, floating over the snows and the ice, looking downwards for – what prey? At first we could see nothing, but then, straining our eyes against the glare, did see small movements that seemed to creep and run in a way different from the smoke and the surge of snows moved by the wind. And then we saw little black specks on the white, and they were droppings; and then larger pieces that were the droppings of the white birds, which had in them fur and bones, and from these we were able to form some picture of the little snow animals before we actually saw one: we were on it, it was under our feet, and it rolled over in a pleading confiding way as if in play. A sort of rodent, completely white, with soft blue eyes. And once we had seen them we were able to pick them out, running around, though not very many – certainly not to be seen as a food supply. Unless they could be bred in captivity? But what were they feeding on? We saw one eating the droppings of the big birds … if the birds ate them, and they ate their own remnants in the birds’ droppings, then this was a closed cycle and hardly feasible – but there seemed nothing available for them to eat. We did see a few, a very few, snow-beetles, or some kind of insect, white too – but what did they feed on, if they were the food of the little white beasts?
As we planned to travel polewards for several days yet, we did not capture specimens but pressed on. Ahead I knew was a range of hills and in them some deep caves, and we hoped they would not be completely iced in. On an afternoon when the sky was a metallic dark-blue glare, we slid and staggered our way up a river that we knew was one only because we had enjoyed it when it ran between green fertile banks and was crowded with boats and swimmers. The sides now rose sheer up, cliffs of ice. To reach the place of the caves we had to cut steps in the ice, and the boy Nonni fell and hurt his arm very badly, though he pretended not to be much hurt.
Although it would soon be dark and we wanted very much to be sheltered, we had to give him time to recover. We sat down in a hollow in the ice, with our backs to the cliff and looking out over a coldly brilliant scene: a sharp blue sky that seemed to us cruel, defining the dead white of the landscape. We were breathing shallowly and as little as we could because each breath hurt our lungs. Our limbs ached. Our eyes kept trying to close themselves. Yet we knew that what we felt was nothing compared to the pain that made Nonni sit cramped there, breathing at long intervals in great gasps, his eyes seeing nothing of the vivid blue and white and dazzle around us. He was not far from slipping off into unconsciousness, and Alsi put her arms around him from behind, carefully because of his broken elbow, or shoulder – we could not tell what was broken, because of the mass of clothing – and she enclosed him in her vitality and her strength. To us three watching, the contrast between the two young faces was a warning: hers, in spite of what she had to endure, so alive and commanding, his all drowse and yellow indifference.
‘Nonni,’ she began, in what was at once evident to us as a deliberate attempt to rouse him, ‘Nonni, wake up, talk to us, you must keep awake, you must talk …’
And, as his face showed the peevishness and irritation of his reluctance, she persisted, ‘No, no, Nonni, I want you to talk. You lived near here, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Come on, tell us!’ He shifted his head from side to side, and then turned it away from the pressure of her cheek on his, but his eyes opened and there was consciousness in them: he understood what she was doing for him.
‘Where did you live?’
He indicated with a weak lift of his head, which at once fell back against her shoulder, that it was somewhere there in front of us.
‘And how? And what did you do?’
‘You know what I did!’
‘Go on!’
Again he resisted her, with an involuntary movement that said he wanted only to slide away into sleep, but she would not let him, and he gasped out: ‘Before The Ice, it was there – there.’
There was now the plain of snow, undulating, cut by crevasses and sending up small eddies and whirls of snow.
‘And you lived in a town down there, and it was one of our largest towns, and people used to come from all over the planet to visit it, because it was the only town like it? A new kind of town?’
He struggled to evade her with irritable shiftings of his head, shutting his eyes, but again his will to live came back.
‘The town was built there because these hills are full of iron. Under the ice here are the mine workings. A road goes from here to there – the best road on the planet, because of what it had to carry, heavy loads of ore, from which we made trucks to carry even more ore …’
Here he seemed to drowse again, and Alsi said: ‘Please, Nonni.’
‘Before our town was built and we began mining, there was no centre for making iron, though it was made in a small way everywhere. It was Canopus who told us to look for iron here, and what to look for, and then how to work it and mix it with other metals. It was clear to us that these metals we were making would change the way we all lived. Some people did not like what was happening. Some left our town again and went to live in other places where life had not changed.’
‘And you, did you like it?’
‘It seems that I must have, because I was going to be a worker in metals, like my parents. Both of them knew all the new processes. Just before The Ice I travelled with them, to a town not far from our ocean, and it was the first time I had seen anything different.’
‘And how did it seem?’ said Alsi, teasing him, for she knew.
‘It seemed to me charming,’ he said, full again of the youthful scornfulness he had felt, so that we all laughed, and he laughed too, since now he was able to look back and see himself. ‘Yes, it was so pretty, and so soft. With us everything was so much harder. Every day we had a new invention or discovery, and we were learning to make metals we hadn’t ever thought of. It seemed as if something quite new had happened to us, and we could not help but make new things and have new ideas. After that visit, I was glad to get back. And Canopus came again about then. Because we had seen how differently people lived in other parts of the planet, and we could make comparisons, we asked Canopus how things were on other planets. And suddenly our minds seemed filled with newness … we were stretched … we were much larger than we had been … we knew how many different ways there were of living, we talked about how species began and grew and changed – and died out…’ Here he stopped for a moment and was silent, a darkness coming over his face.
‘Nonni, we are not going to die out, Canopus says so.’
‘Some of us will not,’ he said, in a direct statement of something he felt, something he knew, and it chilled us. We knew then, or at least we older ones did, that Nonni would not survive.
‘That was the real change, it seems to me now. Not only that because we were making new metals and all kinds of machines we knew life on our planet would change, but because for the first time we thought in this way
