Дорис Лессинг – The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (страница 3)
And so we went, day after day, and it was as if we walked into a spreading blight, for soon, even on the left side of the wall we saw how grasses shrank and dimmed and vegetation lost its lustre, and the skies lowered themselves with a white glare somewhere behind the blue. And on the right the snows were reaching down, down, towards us, and our familiar landscapes were hard to recognize.
There was a day that we stood all together on our barrier wall, looking up into the freezing immensities, with Canopus among us, and we saw that the enormous heavy animals that Canopus had brought us from another of their planets were crowding close in to the wall. They massed there, in vast herds, with the snow driving down behind them, and they were lifting their great heads and wild trapped eyes at the wall, which they could not cross. A short way ahead of us was a narrow gap which we had closed with a sliding door half the wall’s height.
Canopus did not have to tell us what we must do. Some of us went down the side of the wall on to the rough soil, where the grasses had long since gone, leaving a thin crust of lichens, and pulled back the gates. The herds lifted their heads and swung their horns and trampled their feet in indecision, and then saw that this was their deliverance – and first one beast and then another charged through the gap, and soon from all over the frozen lands came charging and thundering herds of animals, and they all, one after another, went through the gap. What heavy clumsy beasts they were! We could never become accustomed to their mass and weight and ponderousness. On their heads were horns which at their base were thicker than our thighs, and sometimes they had four and even six horns. Their hooves left behind prints that would make small ponds. Their shoulders, to support these crests and clubs of bone, were like the slopes of hills. Their eyes were red and wild and suspicious, as if their fate was to query forever what had ordained them to carry such weights of bone and horn and meat and hair, for their coats hung down around them like tents.
These herds passed through the gap in our wall, taking twenty of our days to do it, and soon there were none of these beasts of the cold in that part of our world that was doomed to be swallowed by the cold. They were all in the more favoured parts – and we knew, without Canopus having to say anything to us, what it meant.
Had we really imagined that our guardian wall would contain all of the snow and ice and storm on one side of it, leaving everything on the other side warm and sweet? No, we had not; but we had not, either, really taken into our understandings that the threat would strike so hard into where we now all lived … into where we were crowding, massed, jostling together, with so much less of food and pleasantness that our former selves, our previous conditions, seemed like a dream of some distant and favoured planet that we only imagined we had known.
We stood there, looking into hills and valleys where grass still grew, though more thinly, and where the movement of water was still quick and free; we saw how the herds of animals of the cold spread everywhere, making our ears ring and hurt with their savage exulting bellowing because they had found some grass. We were a company of thin yellow light-boned birdlike creatures, engulfed in the thick pelts of the herds, wildly gazing at a landscape that no longer matched us. And, as we had taken to doing more and more, we gazed up, our eyes kept returning to the skies, where the birds moved easily. No, they were not the small and pretty birds of the warm times, flocks and groups and assemblies darting and swirling and swooping as one, moving as fast as water does when its molecules are dancing. They were the birds of this chilly time, individual, eagles and hawks and buzzards, moving slowly on wings that did not beat, but balanced. They too had heavy shoulders and their eyes glared from thick feathers, and they circled and swept about the skies on the breath of freezing winds that had killed our familiar flocks sometimes as they flew; so that, seeing the little brightly coloured bodies drop from the air, we had looked up and imagined we could see, too, the freezing blast that had struck them down out of the sky. But they
Now that the herds had all gone through the wall, we filled the gap by pushing across the gate. But Canopus said that as soon as we got back to our houses, work parties must be sent out, and this gap, and the others that had been left, must be built up as strongly and thickly as all the rest of the wall. For the openings that had been ordered to be left in the wall long before there had been cold, or even the first signs of cold, to save animals that had not even been brought to our planet, had fulfilled their purpose. We no longer needed them. The wall must be perfect and whole and without a weak place.
We walked on for some days after that before there was a blizzard of an intensity we had not even been able to imagine. We huddled on the safe side of the wall, while the winds screamed over us and sometimes came sucking and driving down where we were, and we shivered and we shrank, and knew that we had not begun to imagine what we had, all of us, to face. And when the screaming and scouring stopped and we climbed up the little projecting steps to the top, carefully because of the glaze of ice on them, we saw that on the cold side snow had fallen so heavily that all the hollows and the heights of the landscape were filled in with billowy white, and the wall was only half its previous height.
By then we were not far from our starting place, and we all longed to be back in our homes, our new thick-walled solid houses with roofs that had been pitched to throw off any snowfall – so we had thought. But now wondered. Were we going to have to live under snow as some creatures lived under water? Were we going to have to make little tunnels and caves for ourselves under a world of snow?
But still, on our side of the wall, where our towns and cities and farms spread, there was some green, there was the shine of moving water. And knowing of our hunger and our desperation and our longing, Canopus did not now make us turn our faces from this livingness, but allowed us to stumble on, looking warmthwards, trying to ignore the snowy wilderness that was crowding down on us.
And it was during these days that Johor fell back with me, and talked to me, alone. I listened to him and I had my eyes on my fellows in front, the Representatives, and when I knew that what I was being told was for me, and not for them – not yet, at least, because they could not yet face it – there came into me an even deeper sense of what was in store. But what worse could there possibly be?
Ahead of us this great wall of ours stood high and black above marshes where the snows of the blizzard had partly melted, leaving streaks and blobs of thin white on dark water. We stood there, Johor and I, and watched our companions walk away, and become no more than a moving blur on the crest of the wall where it rose to cross a ridge and then disappeared from our view. It climbed again, and we saw it, still mighty and tall though so far away, showing exactly what its nature was, for on one side the snows piled, and on the other the beasts fed on wintry grass and on low grey bushes.
Johor touched my arm, and we walked forward to stand where the marshes lay on either side. On the right the dark white-streaked waters seemed channels to the world of snow and ice. But on the other side the marshes were an estuary which led to the ocean. We called it that, though it was really a large lake, enclosed by land. We had been told of, and some of us had seen, planets that were more water than land – where lumps and pieces and even large areas of land were in watery immensities. It is hard to believe in something very far from experience. With us everything was the other way about. Our ‘ocean’ was always a marvel to us. Was precious. Our lives depended on it, we knew that, for it helped us to make our atmosphere. It seemed to us to represent distant and rare truths, was a symbol to us of what was hard to attain and must be guarded and sheltered. Those of you who live on planets where liquids are as common as earth and rocks and sand will find it as hard to imagine our cherishing of this ‘ocean’ of ours as we found it to visualize planets where water masses bathed the whole globe in a continuous living movement, speaking always of wholeness, oneness, interaction, of rapid and easy interchange. For the basis of our lives, the substance which bound us in continuity, was earth. Oh yes, we knew that this soil and rock that made our planet, with water held so shallowly in it, and only in one place, except for the streams and rivers that fed it, was something that moved, just as water moved – we knew rock had its currents, like water. We knew it because Canopus had taught us to think like this. Solidity, immobility, permanence – this was only how we with our Planet 8 eyes had to see things. Nowhere, said Canopus, was permanence, was immutability – not anywhere in the galaxy, or the universe. There was nothing that did not move and change. When we looked at a stone, we must think of it as a dance and a flow. And at a hillside. Or a mountain.