Johor said: 'Please collect together as many of you as have the will for it, and go to these places and say to them, Canopus asks you to stay alive for as long as you can. Say it is necessary.'
'It is necessary?'
'Yes.'
'Although we shall all die very soon?'
This was only the breath of a reproach, and she found it hard to look at him. But she did, and there was such a bewilderment there he felt it strike him - I could see how he shifted his limbs about inside the skins, as if he were adjusting himself to take on a physical burden. She was such an honest direct creature, so strong, so fine - and she had not let herself go at all into the general lassitude and indifference.
'There is more than one way of dying,' he said gently.
He looked straight into her eyes. She looked back. It was a moment when invisible doors seemed to want to open, want to let in truths, new knowledge... I could feel in myself these pressures. I was watching her eyes, so bravely searching Johor's. Meanwhile she stroked and stroked the head of her little friend, who looked up at her with such trust.
'Very well,' she said. T will see that the message gets to them all.'
And Johor nodded, in a way that said: Yes, I can count on you, and she slid out again, letting in the roar of the storm outside, and a flurry of white flakes that did not melt, but lay in a patch on the stone of the floor near the door.
I said to Johor: 'It is easier to bear the news of the death of a million people than to think that Alsi will die of starvation inside a heap of stinking furs. And I hate that in me, Johor. I have never been able to accept that partiality in us.'
'You are complaining that we constructed you inadequately,' he remarked, not without humour.
'Yes, I suppose I am. I cannot help it. I have never been able to see someone weep and agonize because of the death of someone close, yet respond not at all to some general ill or danger, without feeling I am in the presence of some terrible lack, some deep failure.'
'You forget that we did not expect for you such ordeals.'
'Ah, Canopus, you do indeed expect a lot of us poor creatures, who are simply not up to what is needed.'
'And yet when Alsi stood there just now, and took on so well and so bravely what I asked her, it seemed to me that as a species you are proving to be very capable of what is needed.'
'Again, one person, one individual is made to represent so many!'
And, as I spoke, I felt now familiar pressures, the announcement deep in myself of something I should be understanding.
And that was when I let myself go away into sleep, having taken in what I could for that time. And when I woke Johor was sitting patiently, waiting for me to resume. I had not done much more than register: Here I am! - and add to it the thought: But the T of me is not my own, cannot be, must be a general and shared consciousness - when Johor said: 'Doeg, tell me what you all learned during that long time when you studied the material of your planet through the new instruments.'
It was very quiet. The raging of the wind had stopped. I imagined how outside the snow would be lying in billows of fresh white. Through the snow Alsi would be pushing her way, waist high, accompanied by those she had been able to rouse, and others would be trudging to the near towns and villages wondering if they would get there before the storm came again and crowded the air with white, white, white...
'We learned that everything is made up of smaller things. And these of the smaller and finer... these organs of ours, a heart or a liver, which we don't think of at all, but know are there, doing their work, are composed of all sorts of parts, of every kind of shape -strings and lumps and strips and layers and sponges. And these bits and pieces are made up of cells of all kinds. And these - every one of which has an energetic and satisfactory life of its own, and a death too, for you can observe these deaths, like ours - are composed of clusters of smaller living units, and molecules, and then these are made up again of just so many units, and these too...'
My eyes, which had in fancy been dissecting a lump of flesh, a heart, seeing it dissolve into a seethe of tiny life, now again perceived Johor, a mound of skins, from which a pallid face showed. But even so, it was unmistakably Johor who sat there, a presence, a strength - a solidity.
'Johor,' I said, 'I sit here feeling myself solid, a weight of matter, dense, with a shape I know every slope and surface of, and my mind is telling me that this is nothing - for I know that through what we have seen with your devices.'
'What then was there when you came to the minutest item that we can see?'
'There is a core - of something. Yet that dissolves and dissolves again. And around it some sort of dance of-pulsations? But the spaces between this - core, and the oscillations are so vast, so vast... that I know this solidity I feel is nothing. A shape of mist, I am, a smear of tinted light, as when we see - or saw, for we see only snow now, filling the spaces of sunlight - a spread of light with motes floating there. I am, from a perspective of vision very far from my own proper eyes, not dense or solid at all... But Johor, while I can see what it is you have been leading me to say to you, that this heaviness... for I am so heavy, so heavy, so thick and so heavy I can hardly bear it - this heaviness is nothing at all. A shape of light that has in it particles slightly denser in some places than in others. But what my mind knows is of no use to my lumpishness, Johor. What you see of me, with those eyes of yours that belong to another planet, a differently weighted star - I can imagine, for I have seen cells and molecules disappear into a kind of dance, but...'
'A dance that you modify by how you observe it. Or think of it,' he remarked.
The silence that is a listening deepened around us. But the claims of my discomfort and my impatience made me break it. 'And yet this nothingness, this weight and labour of matter that lies so painfully on us all, is what you work with, Johor, for you sit here, you sit in this freezing place, and what you say is, Don't let yourselves die yet, make the effort to keep alive - and what you are wanting to keep alive are these bodies, the flesh that disappears when you look at it with different eyes, into a something like motes with the sun on them.'
Yes, I did sleep then, dropped off, went away, and came back remarking: 'I have often wondered, when I looked at the tiny oscillations and pulsations that compose us, where, then, are our thoughts, Johor? Where, what we feel? For it is not possible that these are not matter, just as we are. In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living - in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?
'I watch myself, Johor... I feel myself... inside this mass of liquids and tissues and bones and air which is so heavy, so very heavy, but which is nevertheless nothing, scarcely exists - when I feel anger, does anger blow through the interstices of the mesh and web which is what I know myself to be? Or when I feel pain, or love... or... I say these words, and everyone knows what I mean by anger, by wanting, by loss, and all the rest, but do you have instruments on Canopus that can see them? Can you see them, Johor, with those different eyes of yours? Do you see me sitting here, this poor beast Doeg, as a smear of tinted light, changing in colour as rage or fear sweeps through me? Where from, Johor? The substance of our flesh, the matter which makes us, dissolves into - vast spaces, defined by the movements of a dance. But we have not yet put fear or loneliness under instruments.'