The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 Read Online Free PDF Page A

thoroughly species could change … disappear … come into being. What guarantee had we that some new climatic shift might not kill off these new beasts of ours as quickly as the animals of our old time had been killed?
    We were all together in one of our newly built places, thick walls around us, the roof heavy above. Very quiet our living had become, where we had been open to every breeze, every change of the light.
    In this deep silence we sat together and measured our situation by how our responsibilities had changed.
    The Representatives of the Representatives, of whom I was sometimes one, did not change their numbers. We were five, but sometimes we had other tasks as well. There was now one Grain Keeper and Grain Maker. The Fruit and Vegetable Makers had become Animal Makers, as I have suggested. The Food Makers had always been the most necessary of our Makers and Keepers. Next to them, those who built and cared for buildings. The numbers of these had not lessened, but increased. Fifteen of our fifty now concerned themselves with how to shelter our populations in this hard time. There were the Maintainers of the Wall. The others were concerned with the making of implements and artefacts of all kinds, some introduced by Canopus, others developed by us. Not long ago we had one Representative for the Law. Now there were several, because the tensions and difficulties made people quarrel where they had been good-humoured. It had been, before The Ice, a rare thing to have a killing. Now we expected murder. We had not thieved from each other: now it was common. Once civic disobedience had been unknown. Now gangs of mostly young people might roam about throwing sticks and stones at anything that seemed to antagonize them – often the base of the wall.
    But this meeting was not concerned with anything but food. It was necessary to discover, or make, or plan, new sources of food.
    What had we overlooked, or deliberately left unused? There was our ocean, filled with creatures of all sorts, but even now our sense of the sacredness of the place made us reluctant to look at it as a food source. I have to say that Canopus had never done more than remain silent, when we talked of our Sacred Lake: this was how they dealt with attitudes of ours they expected us to outgrow. There were a few of us who long ago had come privately to think that this sacredness and holiness was foolish, but we talked about our thoughts only with each other. We had learned from Canopus that argument does not teach children, or the immature. Only time and experience does that.
    So when some of our band of companions showed signs of emotion at the suggestion that our lake should be examined, we remained silent, as Canopus did at such times.
    There remained only what we had turned our backs on and what we so feared: the freezing wilderness. When we had made our observation tours along the wall we had seen that the great birds we so loved to watch had become a snowy white, were no longer brown and grey. Wings soft and feathery and white as some kinds of snow now balanced on those hostile currents. Sometimes we might see a great many birds, but it was hard to pick them out against the snow masses, and often showers or storms filled the air so that birds and snow together whirled about the skies. But they must be feeding on something … If we could not see any creatures on those white wastes, it did not mean they were not there.
    It was decided to send a party of us to the cold pole, and I was chosen, because I had been to the other planets and had seen – though not from as close as this – landscapes of the cold. And two of the others had been on similiar journeys. I, Doeg, Memory Maker and Keeper of Records, Klin who had once been our best Fruit Maker, and Marl who had been one of the Keepers of the Herds that had become extinct were the three who had been taken abroad by Canopus, and we were of those who sometimes found our companions