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

When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when what they are to inherit is pitiful and so reduced, then the shame of it goes too deep for reasoning. No, it was not our fault that our children had to learn such hardship, had to forgo so much that we, the 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