And leaving this little settlement half buried in snow, we went off into the town nearest this on the side away from that where Johor still sat listening to Alsi as Doeg; and found there that the wall was holding, though the ice was rearing up over it so fearfully that it could not hold long. And again we started on the wearing dragging painful business of rousing people up, and making them move out, and build themselves shelter.
And when that town was evacuated and the people 'safe' - as far as was possible - we went to the next... and the next... where we met Bratch again, Bratch the physician, at the work of rousing and reassuring, for all along the wall black cracks had appeared, and then the wall had collapsed and the ice had come pushing through, and people were being moved out of their towns farther away from the lands of the ice above the wall. And so we all laboured, teams of us, very many of us: we, Bratch, worked at saving minds and bodies. And there was not one of us who did not ask silently and secretly: Why? What for? Since these people will die here, in their snow huts, and only a little later than they would if they had been left in their own places and towns. For it is only we, the Representatives, that will be saved... but this thought, I could see, did not take root in them, the Representatives, just as, in me, it could not find a home, but was rejected, presenting itself back to my conscious thought as something refused. No, it was not a lack of justice that we rejected - that we, the few, should be saved when the others would not be, but would be entombed in a planet of ice - for justice is something not so easily understood. It was, quite simply, that there was something in the substance of the thought, in its texture and quality, that could not find acceptance in our minds. In our new minds - for we understood that everything in us was new, being new-made, new-worked, changed. While we laboured and fought and exhorted and forced the doomed wretches up and out of their saving kindly lethargy, we were being changed, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. And in the unimaginably vast spaces between the particles of the particles of the particles of the electrons and neutrons and protons - between the particles that danced and flowed and vibrated? Yes, in these faint webs or lattices or grids of pulses, changes went on over which we had no control. Which we could not chart or measure. Thoughts - but where were they, in the empty spaces of our beings? - that once we had regarded tolerantly, or with approval, as necessary, were now being rejected by what we had become.
When we had shepherded the people of yet another town, or city, or village out and away from the deadly wall which the ice was crushing, and into the white wilderness where only tiny ice huts sheltered them from the blizzards, and where they would be engulfed, sooner or later - then we were not able to see that our situation was any different from theirs. Both kinds of us, the people of Planet 8, the represented and the Representative - endured. The thought in our minds was that they were being changed by what we were forced to do; that we were being changed by their being made to stay alive when they would so very much rather have drifted away from our common effort into death.
So we employed ourselves, we, the Representatives, who were sometimes Bratch the physician, and sometimes Zdanye, those who sheltered and protected - for we did not think that we might properly use the word Masson, the builder, in connection with this work we did, of causing little huts of snow and ice to be made. Yet we did wonder if, in a world of only snow and ice - for we could believe that in the vastnesses of our galaxy such planets existed - whether the inhabitants could come to live with contentment, not knowing better. Those of us who had been taken to other planets in the course of our education as Representatives had seen such variety, such extremes, such unexpectedness, that we could believe there were beings who rejoiced in their icy worlds, as we had done once in the sunlit and favoured lands of our planet, where if cold winds blew this was enough of an event to make tales of it for our children. Yes, I could remember Doeg - my parents, older people, travellers - beginning a chronicle with, 'And so, my friends, you must imagine that on that day a very cold wind came fast across the sky, blowing the clouds together and apart, blew so strongly across our ocean that there were waves the height of small hills - yes, it is true, it was so. And then...' And the thoughtful eyes of the young people...