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 place 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...'