She sat staring in front of her a while, then her fists dropped from either side of her face, and her hands touched lightly just once the upper part of her chest, and then, in disbelief and repudiation, went lower... what we could see there was her rib cage, with the yellow skin stretched tight over it, each bone evident and - where were her breasts? Her hands crept lower, as her eyes were fixed, unconscious, ahead of her, and she pulled aside more garments and we saw that from the lower part of her chest two skinny bags depended, and these bags ended in small hard lumps, and on the skin that held the lumps were brown wrinkles - her nipples. She held these lumps in her large still strong hands, and then let them go, and explored with her hands her shoulders, where the bones and the joints showed clearly under stretched skin.
She was not weeping now, or grieving, but on her face was the look of one trying and trying to accommodate the impossible. The old, the very old woman's body, shrivelled by starvation, was displayed there before us, and her face was bare to us - gaunt, sallow, with sunken black eyes. Yet in the hollows near the sockets there was a vulnerability, something still fresh and youthful, and I was thinking, stoutly: Well, when we Representatives are all taken off here, and we eat again, as we need to eat, then Alsi will become a young woman, it is not too late and... But this thought sank away into the depths of my mind, and was not at ease there. No, I was thinking, no, that's not it, it is not - I must not make up these tales and fabrications, comforting myself, thinking how others must be comforted.
She put back the folds of her rags over the skin-covered bones, and pulled the thick coat around her again, and the hood down over her head, and was again not much more than strong dark eyes peering out from greasy shaggy hides.
'Alsi!' said Johor.
'Very well then! I was born... and now I shall die. No, Johor, if you want me to say how I see my life, then that is how, more and more often, I do see it... Tell me, when you look back along your life, do you - no, that is a useless question, I know it before I ask. You live so much longer than we do, it must seem to you when you look at us just as it seems to us when we look at these little creatures here whose lives are so short - or to them when they look at a snow-beetle! All the same I shall ask it, for it fills my mind, Johor, I cannot stop thinking and wondering about how you, you people with your Canopus minds, how do you experience your memories? For that is what you are wanting me to talk about now, isn't it? Memory, a thin transparent sort of stuff which is all that is left of a life when you have lived it? Do you feel as if your life has had no substance in it? No, of course you don't, but all the same I must ask. Do you feel as if you could blow aside your memories with a single strong breath? For that is how I see my life, like a scrap of cloth lying in a corner, or the fragment of a highly coloured web, the colours fading as I look: memory - memories, for there's nothing there of my life! Yes, I know I am going to die before I normally would, but if a life is something, then the third of a life is something and I am a third of the way through mine. It is nothing, my life, a little dream: I swear, Canopus, that when I come back into myself after a sleep, my dreams sometimes seem more vivid to me than my life does. And yet - here is where I have to ponder, and brood, and still make no sense of it all when I'm done with it - as I begin a day, it is like a hill I must climb, a weight I have to push uphill, something that has a weight of difficulty in it. Sometimes, as I wake, I cannot face the long heavy day ahead. Often, in the middle of a day, the thick dragging quality of it is such that it crushes me back into sleep again, even if only for a few moments, anything to lose the burden of being... conscious. Yes, of being awake to what is the texture and substance of a day - like a piece of cloth you weave, which may have patterns that you have chosen, but which you cannot choose not to weave, cannot refuse to finish, because this is a task which has been set. I stand sometimes in one of those pens out there, with the snow falling around me in one of its thousand ways - light or thick, and blowing sideways or straight or wet or dry, or in crumbs or the large soft masses flakes make when they are clinging together - I look, and I feel as if every step I take to here, where the food is, and the task of carrying it all out and spreading it about, and then checking on how the snow-beasts are, and how many, and if any have died... all this is so difficult, Johor, it is as if every atom of my body is being held in a force. And yet I do it - and having done it, I say: That's done, I've accomplished that, I've finished that task, and the next task lies ahead - collecting the others who make up Alsi to gather food for the beasts, or whatever is the next thing that has to be done. All day, one burdensome effort after another; and then the day is finished, and the blessed night is here, and I look back at the day - and it's gone! A little coloured smear of thought, a few pictures running together, a scene of me standing in a pen, with the animals gathering around waiting to be fed, or me walking with hunched shoulders through a blizzard, and perhaps the sensation of cold around my neck or numbed chilled feet. A day! The memory of a day! A day that was so hard to accomplish, and when it is done - nothing! A life... the memories of a life. Surely, Canopus, there is something here that is out of phase, out of a proper fitting together? It seems to me more and more impossible, wrong, that the actual doing of a thing, the living it, has as its shadow so fleeting and faint a record: memory. And I ask myself more and more, is this why we need Doeg? What is Doeg but an attempt, and even a desperate and perhaps a tragic attempt, to make the faint coloured shadow, memory, stronger? Give our memories more substance? Is that what Doeg is - and why you want me, now, at this time, to be Doeg?'
'I am not sure what your name is, when you ask these questions, but it is not Doeg!'
She smiled here, acknowledging what he said, and sat quietly for a time, thinking.
'Very well,' she began again, 'but it seems to me that what I have to remember is so - nothing, Johor; and it is all over, gone under the ice... When I came to be aware of myself, when I entered into the feeling, here I am, I was with my parents in our house. You came to our house once. It was in a little town, one of a group of small towns, all occupied with the production of cloth. Each town was known for something. Our town actually wove the cloth. The town across the valley made the machinery that made the cloth. On the other side of our hill was a town where everyone was involved with the production of dyes. Some were natural, which we had discovered for ourselves from plants and clays and rocks, but others were artificial, and it was Canopus who made us think in ways that led to the discovery of how to evolve dyes. Another town nearby made all kinds of yarns and threads. The cluster of towns grew like this, nothing was planned - and now when I think of all that time, what distinguished it was a naturalness in the way things grew and happened. But there was a change, wasn't there, Johor? There was a point when our lives, instead of being a function of what was around us, growing out of what was there, became more..." conscious, is that the word? Can we use that word for a collective way of looking at - '
'Alsi,' said Johor.
'Yes. Very well. I grew as all children did then. We learned everything we had to know from the adults around us. And now I have to make the comment that it was unconscious, Johor! Both on the part of the children, and on the part of the adults! That was before Pedug came...'
'No, before Pedug felt that a name was necessary.'
She thought about this, and soon nodded. 'Yes. For of course children have to be taught what is necessary - and what is necessary has to change. All the adults were Pedug, for children learned, as naturally as they breathed, from the adults. But then there was a change, and it was when you, Canopus, brought the instrument that made small things visible - yes, Canopus, that was when a certain kind of naturalness and pleasantness ended. It was not just that you brought only a few of these instruments, for of course you could not bring one for every household, or even one for every town! No, you brought us as many as you could, but for every person on our planet to look, and to learn what it is we are really made of, the instruments had to be carried around from p
lace to place. By Pedug. And for the first time children and young people left the circle of their parents and friendly adults and gathered together, as children being taught, at a particular time and in a particular place, and sat around Pedug and were instructed. And what an extraordinary, what an absolutely fundamental change that was, Johor! And of course you knew it was, and had calculated it all, and understood that what was happening must change the way we all looked at ourselves. For, once, children never left their own parents and relatives and friends, all of whom were responsible for them, and hardly knew what it was they were learning, for it was taken in everywhere, all the time, in every possible way. I, for instance, who know all there is to know about the processes of making cloth, don't know how I learned it! But when I sat in a large space, listening to Pedug who made me apply my eyes to the instrument, and made me look at what was there, and made me think about it - oh, then, Johor, indeed everything was changed. We became conscious that we were learning, and of how we learned... and this was at the same time as we saw the substance of our bodies, and found that it vanished as we looked, and knew that we were a dance and a dazzle and a continual vibrating movement, a flowing. Knew that we were mostly space, and that when we touched our hands to our faces and felt flesh there, it was an illusion, and that while our hands felt a warm solidity, in reality an illusion was touching another illusion - and yet, Johor, in all my life, which of course is going to be so short, and perhaps does not deserve the name of a life at all... but you are going to say that I have gone off again, I've not stuck to the point, I'm not doing what you ask! But Johor, isn't that in itself an illustration of what I am saying to you? I simply cannot keep my mind on what seems like a short and - at least at the beginnings of it -delightful dream...'
'You lived with your parents in a house in...?'
'I was born in Xhodus, which was one of four small towns that together made cloth. While I was small my parents were both employed in the processes of weaving, though later both became Pedug and were often away from home, travelling around our planet with the new instrument, teaching the new ways of seeing and thinking. I had two brothers and two sisters, and we were all learning the skills of our group of towns. As for me, during the time when my parents were taking me into all kinds of places and situations to find out what my nature was, I was taken to a farm, an hour's walking away, that produced fleeces for our cloth makers. I and my parents and the other children lived for some weeks on that farm, but my brothers and sisters were not attracted to any of the kinds of work there, while I was. I told my parents that I wanted to be Alsi, to be one of those who were engaged with the nurture of growing animals. And that is what I became, very young, for I often visited there, and agreed to be apprenticed when the time came at that farm, and expected to spend my life there. But then the cold came... and now all that life, the towns, the animals, the trees - all, everything, gone under deep ice. And I see it like this, that a dream lies there under the ice, something that had no substance to it; and yet it was life, was living, was a long, complex process of living that... But it was a good and real and honest life, wasn't it, Johor? Nothing that we need to be ashamed of now? Though that is an absurd way of talking, for how can one be ashamed of something one has not chosen - we did not choose our lives or how we evolved, how we changed. For we were changing, I know that now, even before you brought the instrument that we all had to look through and find that our selves, that the ways we experienced ourselves, were all illusion. And perhaps those changes were not all good? How can we say now? For I cannot properly remember! I talk to others who were young with me - those of us who are still alive, that is, or who still move around upright trying to work in spite of the blizzards and the storms - and we all remember different things. Isn't that strange, Johor? And so while we all agree that, yes, there were changes, and that these changes could be described by saying that an innocence was going from our lives, by saying that there was a new kind of self-consciousness, even before the new instruments came, we cannot agree at all about what these changes were. I say, Do you remember this and that? And they say, No, but surely you remember...? Johor, there is something intolerable here, you must see this? Must agree? Must - '
'Alsi,' said Johor.
'Yes. The house that I was born in was like all our houses then. We would make a house in a few days, and perhaps a hundred people would come and help. We had feasts and festivals when we decided it was time for a new house. A house could be entirely of reeds or slats of thin wood held together on string. Roofs and walls were always movable, so we could open and close them as the winds altered or if it rained. A house then changed all through the day, walls being lowered and lifted, roofs being tied back, and people came and went all day and all night too, for we did not have any rigid ordinances about when we had to sleep, day or night. It was a communal life, and a flexible one, and it was easy, and we were easy with each other - for I have noticed that since the cold, and the difficulties we have now, we are hard on each other, and we criticise and make demands, and punishments come easily to our minds though they never did before. That was what I think of most in our old life, how fluid it was, how adaptable, houses and streets and towns change as plants do, turning towards or away from light. How we would pull a house down one day, and the next another went up. How on the farm we moved the enclosures for animals around, daily, it seems now; how even storehouses and places that had to have some sort of solidity were always being rebuilt. And yet I remember, too, how when the new building went up for the machinery that had just been invented to weave cloth more quickly, we all stood around it and felt uncomfortable and threatened. This was not one of the familiar buildings, all lightness and slatted shadows and breezes blowing, that we could pull into a new shape by tugging a rope or pushing across a screen; no, it was built of stone and earth and had a thick roof, so that the old way of living of ours was already challenged, before the cold, before The Ice, and I wonder - '
'Alsi, describe yourself, as if you were someone else, as if you were telling a story. Take some incident you remember, any incident.'
'An incident you want, Johor! A little tale! How I fear these little incidents our memories store up! In our house came to live my father's mother and my mother's father - these two old people had to be listened to, every day, by somebody. We used to take turns to listen, as a task. For what was remembered was always the same. Both these old people would sit there - not together, for the old woman liked the sun and the old man chose a shady place, and in any case old people like the company of the young and not of each other - they sat there, and when one of us went to listen, out came exactly the same incidents, in the same words - a life. A string of a few incidents, always the same. We children would listen to these same words for the tenth, then the hundredth, then the thousandth time. A life. What was eaten on a certain day, nearly a hundred years before. What another had said fifty years ago. Over and over again. Memory... And so now you want me to create a memory that I will bore my grandchildren with - but of course I am not going to have any, so I am safe! Very well, Johor. I came from the farm one warm and pleasant evening, to visit my family, and on the way something happened I did not expect. I had not gone more than a few minutes' walking from the farm when I saw in front of me... I see myself walking there, a girl of about twelve. She is a tall child, rather scrawny, and she is wearing a bright green cloth tied around her waist, and a red cloth over her breasts which have just begun to show. She is carrying a present for her parents from the farm, of some dressed meat. The meat attracts some birds that gather in the air above her. At first she does not notice them but walks along, swinging her basket and very proud of how she looks in her new coloured cloths and her new points of breasts. Suddenly she sees shadows moving fast all around her on the path and on the grass, and she looks up and sees hanging in the air just above her the great birds, their talons bunched up under them, their beaks pointing down. She shouts up at them, and hears her voice thin and reedy, and hears the
loud scream of a bird, and an answering scream from another. The birds are flapping now around her head, trying to frighten her. She feels the hot breeze on her cheek made by the wings, smells the warm rank smell. She will not give up her basket, she will not; and then a bird comes straight into her face, and alights for just a moment on her head. She can feel the sharp talons in her scalp, and she drops the basket and runs off, and looks back to see three birds settling around the meat that has spilled out of the basket. She yells at them all kinds of abuse. You filthy greedy beasts, you horrible things - and they are off into the blue air, their claws full of red lumps of meat, and her basket is lying empty and on its side in the brown dust. She picks up the basket and walks on home with it, already framing in her mind the words she will use to tell her parents about it -and because she did that, made the effort to choose the right words that would make of her plight there along the road between farm and little town a sympathetic and interesting thing, so that they all, parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, neighbours would come close and listen and perhaps say Poor Alsi, you must have been frightened - because of that, the incident stuck in the girl's mind, so that she can see it as clearly as if she were standing on the side of the road watching the young girl come jauntily along in her bright colours, and how the great birds came together overhead, and conferred and then allowed themselves to sink through the warm air till they were just above the girl, ready to beat and battle with their strong spread wings.'
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