It is a very remarkable thing how ideas come into a mind, or minds: one minute we are thinking this or that, as if no other thought is possible to us; shortly after, there are quite different beliefs and possibilities inside our heads. Yet how did they get there? How do they arrive, these new notions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, dispossessing the old ones, and to be dispossessed, of course, soon enough in their turn?
I knew, as we all waited shivering inside our coats, with the faint pale sunlight on our faces, that while my companions muttered: Canopus will come, we shall be saved - and the other shreds and pieces of our old dreams - changes were going on inside them that they were not conscious of.
And so we stayed there, being together on the hillside that had patches of grass and low tough plants on it, with the snowy lands behind us from where drove harsh and bitter winds. Nor did any of us show any disposition to move, or to talk of our responsibilities to our populations, or to discuss what we ought to do - whether to go in search of the vanished herds, or to send messages about their disappearance, or any of the other things that normally would have driven us up and into activity.
We were watching not only the dreary spaces of moor and tundra around the column but, more than these, each other. Increasingly, our eyes were on each other, searchingly, patiently - as if we did not know every one of us, as in fact we did; so very well that we could at any moment take on each other's work and - in a sense - become each other. We gazed close into eyes and faces as if there was very much more to be learned there than we had ever believed. And, soon, we were all in a rough circle, looking in and not out at the little spaces of our 'summer'. We faced inwards, as if the truth available to us was there, between us... in us... among us. In our being there together, in that way, in our extremity.
And so, later, were we found by Alsi and Johor who came out of the white wilderness towards us, showing by the way they stumbled and slid over the roughnesses of the ground how exhausted they were. And they flung themselves down among us, and lay there, eyes closed. And we saw how the yellow skin stretched over the bones of their faces.
We waited until Alsi opened her eyes and sat up, and Johor did the same.
I said to her, 'And how was it with you, as Doeg?' She said, smiling, 'Doeg, it seemed to me that as I spoke, everything that had happened to me, all my thoughts and my feelings, everything that I believed I had to be, was being put together in words, words, words - parcelled up, packaged up, and sent away... yes Doeg, I-Doeg - saw Alsi doing this and that, feeling thus or thinking so - and who was Alsi? I watched her, saw myself moving there among all the others... and now, I look back at myself as Doeg sitting in the shed with Johor, I see myself there, and see Johor, two people sitting together talking. And who was Doeg? Who, Doeg, is Doeg? And where now are Alsi or Doeg - for what is left of us all now? And to whom will you or I or any one of us be telling our little tales, singing our little songs?' And she looked, smiling, at me, and then at Johor who was listening as he lay propped on his elbow, and then at all the others. Slowly she looked at one after another, and we all looked back at her. When Alsi came back to us, with Johor, our small assembly of people had been made even more sharply aware of ourselves, our situation. We felt ourselves, as sharply as we saw - on a cold hillside, under a low cold hurrying sky, half a hundred individuals sitting together, fifty heaps of dirty shaggy animal skin and inside each a shivering parcel of bones and flesh, and thoughts and feelings too (but where were they, what were they?). We huddled there, listening to how the blizzards on the horizon squealed and raged and threatened this brief summer of ours which was no more than a small space or time at the very extremity of our planet, for the frosts of the approaching winter were beginning to show themselves. White on black, small white particles on black soil, crumbs and crystals of white scattered on the rocks and the grey-green grasses and on the wiry little plants - and in the air around us white flakes, only a few still, drifting, catching the weak sunlight, floating and sinking to settle with the frost on the earth. High above us, under heavy white clouds that had black crevasses, circled the great birds of the snow, white on white.
'If you are no longer Alsi,' I said to her, 'that means the snow animals are dead?'
'The pens are empty now, all of them.'
We all looked, and then understood that this was what we were doing, at her hands: those knots of thin bones that had once been so large and so capable, tending so well the small, the weak, the vulnerable.
And she was looking at Johor. And that was a look not so easily described. For one thing, there was nothing in it of suppliance. Or even of need. What was there, and most strongly, was the recognition of him, of Canopus.
'I am no longer Alsi,' she said to him. 'Not in any way, or in any capacity.' This sounded almost like a question; and in a moment she answered it. 'Somewhere else there is Alsi - another place, another time. Alsi cannot disappear since Alsi is and must be continually re-created.' Again she seemed to wait for him to speak, but he only smiled. 'Though we cannot see them, since it is day now, and the sunlight up there obscures this truth, our sky is full of stars and planets and on them there is Alsi. Alsi -there I am, since it must be so.'
'Since it must be so,' voices echoed her from our group.
'So, since this is not Alsi, who am I, Johor, and what is my name?
I said to him: 'Doeg tells tales and sings songs in all times and all places, everywhere people use sounds to communicate, so if I am no longer Doeg, then Doeg still is, and perhaps as the dark comes down...' - and it was coming down, as we talked, and small distant stars appeared - '... we are looking as we raise our eyes at worlds where Doeg is at work, for Doeg has to be. But who am I, Johor, and what is my name?'
And then Klin, the Fruit Maker, the Guardian of the Orchards: 'There is not one orchard or fruit tree or fruit anywhere in this world of ours, nothing is left of all that beauty and richness - and so Klin I am not, since Klin was what I did - Klin is at work somewhere else, there Klin grafts shoots to shoots, Klin buds and blends and makes, and causes branches to he heavy with blossom and then with fruit. But not here, not anywhere here, and so I am no longer Klin. And what is my name?'
And Bratch: 'The skill in my mind and in my hands is at work now, at work everywhere there are creatures of flesh and sinew, and blood and bone - Bratch is needed, and so Bratch must be, though it is not here, for here there is nothing left to do, since all over this world of ours our populations lie dying in their icy homes. Bratch I am not, since Bratch is what I did - and what is my name, Johor, what is my name?'