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.