Who went? And what was our name?

The teacher of children was there; and the guardian of the waters; the maker and creator of grains and fruits and plants; the keeper and breeder of animals; the storyteller who continually makes and re-makes the memories of populations; the tender of the very small and vulnerable; the healer - the discoverer of medicines and remedies; the traveller who visits planets so that knowledge may not be imprisoned and unshared - all these were there, among us and of us; all our functions and the capacities of our work were in the substance of these new beings, this Being, we now were - Johor with and of us, Johor mingled with us, the Representative of Canopus part of the Representative of Planet 8, the destroyed one -destroyed at least for our purposes - for who could say how this lump of ice spinning in the spaces of the heavens would modify itself, becoming gas perhaps, on its way back to soil and a shape and substance that would be recognizable to the eyes we once had owned.

The Representative swept on and up, like a shoal of fishes or a flock of birds; one, but a conglomerate of individuals - each with its little thoughts and feelings, but these shared with the others, tides of thought, of feeling, moving in and out and around, making the several one.

What were we seeing there, feeling there - and where? In what place or time were we, then: what were we, and when? We did not see wastes .of snow or ice, no, but a perpetual shifting and changing - we were seeing our planet in a myriad guises, or possibilities. We saw it in a flash or a glimpse as it had been, our warm and lovely place where everything had blessed us, and beside this brief vision, a thousand variations of the same, each slightly different, so that each one, had we seen it by itself, could have been judged by us as a stage in the development of our planet - but seen thus, merging so fast, and so subtly different, we knew that what we saw were possibilities, what could have been, but had not been, not in our space and time. But had been elsewhere? Yes, that was it, we were observing how, behind or beside or beyond - at any rate, some where or when - the various stages of development of our planet, had been so many others, the possibilities that had not been given actuality in the level of existence we had known, had experienced; but hovered just behind the veil, potentials, what might have been or could have been... Myriads there were, the unachieved possibilities; but each real and functioning on its own level - where and when and how? - each world every bit as valid and valuable as what we had known as real. Just as once, I, Doeg, had stood in front of mirrors in my old self and seen stretching out in an interminable line of possibilities, all the variations in the genetic storehouse made visible - sometimes so similar to what I was that I could hardly tell the difference, but then more and more of me, each a variation, and a variation farther away from what T was - each one the possible and potential housing of this feeling of me, Doeg, some easily recognizable to my fellows as I, Doeg, and others so wildly distant that only a turn of the head or the slightest familiarity in a slide of the eyes or a set of the shoulders could say, 'Yes, this, too, is of the family of Doeg, is Doeg's potential that did not step forward into this dimension or place' - so now we could see all the worlds that were not our planet, but lay there, lapping and touching it, each an absolute and a reality in its place and time.

Oh who then were Doeg and Alsi - were Klin and Nonni and Marl and the rest of us? What was our planet, which was one of so many? And, as we swept on there, ghosts among the ghostly worlds, we felt beside us, and in us, and with us, the frozen and dead populations that lay buried under the snows. Inside caves and huts and mounds of ice and snow the peoples of our old world lay frozen - the carcasses of these were held there for as long as the ice stayed, before it changed, as everything must, to something else - a swirl of gases perhaps, or seas of leaping soil, or fire that had to burn until it, too, changed... must change... must become something else. But what these had been, our peoples, our selves - were with us then, were us, had become us - could not be anything but us, their representatives - and we, together, the Representative, at last found the pole that was the extremity of our old planet, the dark cold pole that had been built, once, to guide in the space-fleets of Canopus, when they visited us. There we left that planet, and came to where we are now. We, the Representative, many and one, came here, where Canopus tends and guards and instructs.

You ask how the Canopean Agents seemed to us in the days of The Ice.

This tale is our answer.