The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing Page A

let herself go at all into the general lassitude and indifference.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Very well,’ she said. ‘I 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.’
    â€˜You are complaining that we constructed you inadequately,’ he remarked, not without humour.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜You forget that we did not expect for you such ordeals.’
    â€˜Ah, Canopus, you do indeed expect a lot of us poor creatures, who are simply not up to what is needed.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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 ‘I’ 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 …
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Johor,’ I