'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.'