Shikasta

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  I had been gone half a year by the time I reached the settlement. I was concerned for Sais and David, but there was no news of them. It even seemed as if they had already been forgotten. I made myself a shelter of earth and logs, and waited. Meanwhile, I tried to teach those among the Natives who seemed intelligent what I could of Canopus and how they could live so as to limit the power of Shammat over them. But they could not take it in.

  They were prepared, though, to learn anything I could teach in the realm of the practical arts, which they were in danger of forgetting. I taught them - or retaught them - gardening and husbandry. I taught them to tame a goatlike creature, which could give them milk, and I demonstrated butter and cheese-making. I taught them how to choose plants for their fibres, and to prepare the fibres and to weave them, and to dye them. I showed them how to make bricks from the earth and fire them. All these crafts I was teaching to creatures who had known them for thousands of years and had forgotten them a few months ago. It was hard, sometimes, to believe that they were not making fun of me, as they watched me, and then their faces lit up with amazement and delight as they saw cheese, or fired pots, or the suppleness of properly cured hides.

  Two years after they had left me, Sais and David came. Even as they walked into the settlement, I could see they had had a hard time. They were wary and careful, and ready to defend themselves - which they nearly had to do, for their friends, even their family, had forgotten them. They were lean and burned brown. The girl had grown into her proper height in that journey, but was still much shorter than her father, shorter than the average of the Natives, and I saw that a reduction in height was very likely beginning.

  They had succeeded in reaching most of the settlements. They had walked, ridden on the backs of animals, used canoes and boats. They had not stayed in any one place more than a day. They had done exactly what I had ordered - talked of Canopus, watched for the effect, and never used the Signature unless they had to.

  In two places they had been chased away, and threatened with death if they returned.

  Both talked of dead people they had seen in the settlements. It was not fear they showed, or sorrow or grief: just as the death of Sais's mother had left her more puzzled than grieved, so the evidences of the nearness of death such as an unburied corpse lying in a forest, or a group going past with a dead person on a litter, excited in them efforts at understanding. My attempts to make death real for them, by linking it with the Signature, had not succeeded. They could not believe in death for themselves, because those robust bodies knew that hundreds of years of life lay ahead, and their bodies' knowledge was stronger than the feeble thoughts of their impaired minds. They told me as if it were an extraordinary fact I could not really be expected to believe that some corpses they had seen had been killed in quarrels: yes, people killed each other! They did! There was no doubt of it!

  In many settlements it had become the practice for many or most, particularly the older Natives who were finding it hard to adjust to new conditions, to make excursions to the Stones, and subject themselves to sensations felt first as horrible, and then as attractive or at least compulsive.

  Yet the repetition of my orders had made a difference. In nearly all the settlements people had memorised the words that had been brought to them by these two strangers, repeating over and over to themselves, to each other: Canopus says we must not make servants of each other, Canopus says... Canopus wills...

  Yes, over and over again, in a hundred different places, Sais had said, or chanted, for the words had turned into a song, or chant:

  Canopus says we must not waste or spoil,

  Canopus tell us not to use violence on each other

  and had heard these words being whispered or said or sung as she left. Sais had grown in every way in those two years. Her father remained an amiable, laughing man who could not keep anything in his head, though he had guarded her everywhere they went, since "Canopus said so." While of course in no way approaching the marvellous quick-mindedness and mental development of the time of "before the Catastrophe" - as the songs and tales were now putting it - she had in fact become steadier-minded, clearer, more able to apprehend and to keep, and this was because she had carried the Signature and had guarded it. She was a brave girl - that I had known before sending her out - and a strong one. But now I could sit with her and talk, and this was real talk, a real exchange, because she could listen. It was slow, for that starved brain kept switching off, a blank look would come into her eyes, then she would shake herself and set herself to listen, to take in.

  One day she handed me back the Signature, though I had not asked her for it. She was pleased with herself that she had managed to keep it safe and it was hard for her to let go of it. I took it back, only temporarily, though she did not know that, and told her that now the most important part of what she was to learn and do was just beginning. For quite soon I had to leave Shikasta, leave for Canopus, and she would remain as custodian of the truth about Shikasta, which she must learn, and guard and impart to anybody who could listen to her.

  She wept. So did her father David. And I would have liked to weep. These unfortunate creatures had such a long ordeal in front of them, such a path of wandering and hazards and dangers - but these they did not seem anywhere near being able to understand.

  I let them recover fully from their journey, and then I got the three of us together in a space between huts near where the central fire burned, and I laid the Signature on the earth between us, and I got them used to the idea of listening to instruction. After some days of this, while others had seen us, and some had stood listening a little way off, wondering, and even interested, I asked that all of the people of the settlement, who were not actually hunting or on guard, or in some way attending to the maintenance of the tribe - for now one had to call them that - should sit with us, every day, for an hour or so and listen. They must learn to listen again, to understand that in this way they could gain information. For they had forgotten it entirely. They remembered nothing of how the Giants had instructed them, could understand only what they could see, as when I rubbed stones over a hide to soften it, or shook sour milk to make butter. Yet at night they did listen to David, singing of "the old days," and then they sang, too...

  Soon, every day, at the hour when the sun went, just after the evening meal, I talked, and they listened; they would even acknowledge what I said in words that came out from the past, in a fugitive opening of memory - and then their eyes would turn aside, and wander. Suddenly they weren't there. How can I describe it? Only with difficulty, to Canopeans!

  What I told these Shikastans was this.

  Before the Catastrophe, in the Time of the Giants, who had been their friends and mentors, and who had taught them everything, Shikasta had been an easy pleasant world, where there was little danger or threat. Canopus was able to feed Shikasta with a rich and vigorous air which kept everyone safe and healthy, and above all, made them love each other. But because of an accident, this substance-of-life could not reach here as it had, could reach this place only in pitifully small quantities. This supply of finer air had a name. It was called SOWF - the substance-of-we-feeling - I had of course spent time and effort on working out an easily memorable syllable. The little trickle of SOWF that reached this place was the most precious thing they had, and would keep them from falling back to animal level. I said there was a gulf between them and the other animals of Shikasta, and what made them higher was their knowledge of SOWF. SOWF would protect and preserve them. They must reverence SOWF.

  For they could waste it, spend it, use it in the wrong way. It was for this reason they must never pervert themselves in the ruins of the old cities or dance among the Stones. This was why they must never, if they came on sources of intoxication, allow themselves intoxication. But coming from Canopus to Shikasta was a small steady trickle of this substance, and would continue to come, always. This was a promise from Canopus to Shikasta. In due time - I did not say thousands upon thousand
s of years! - this trickle would become a flood. And their descendants could bathe in it as they played now in the crystal rivers. But there would not be any descendants if they did not take care to preserve themselves. If they, those who sat before me now, listening to these precious revelations, did not guard themselves they would become worse than animals. They must not spoil themselves by taking too much of the substance of Shikasta. They must not use others. They must not let themselves become animals who lived only to eat and to sleep and eat again - no, a part of their lives must be set aside for the remembrance of Canopus, memory of the substance-of-we-feeling, which was all they had.

  And there was more, and worse. On Shikasta there were enemies, wicked people, enemies of Canopus, who were stealing the SOWF. These enemies enslaved Shikastans, when they could. They did this by encouraging those qualities that Canopus hated. They thrived when they hurt each other, or used each other - they delighted in any manifestation of the absence of substance-of-we-feeling. To outwit their enemies, Shikastans must love each other, help each other, always be equals with each other, and never take each other's goods or substance... This is what I told them, day after day, while the Signature lay glinting there, in the light that fled from the evening sky, and the light of the flames that burned up as night came.

  Meanwhile, Sais was my most devoted assistant. She chose, using faculties that seemed to revive in her, individuals that seemed to her most promising, and repeated these lessons, over and over again. She said them and she sang them, and David made new songs and stories.

  When enough people in this settlement were sure of this knowledge, I said, they must travel everywhere over Shikasta and teach it. They must be sure that everyone heard this news, and above all, remembered.

  And then it was time for me to leave and go to Zone Six. I put the Signature into Sais's hand before everyone, and said that she was the custodian of it.

  I did not say that it was the means of keeping the flow of SOWF from Canopus to Shikasta, but I knew they would soon believe it. And I had to leave her something to strengthen her.

  Then I told them that I was going to return to Canopus and that one day I would come again.

  I left the tribe one morning very early, as the sun was rising over the clearing that held the settlement. I listened to the birds arguing above me in the ancient trees, and I held out my fingers to a little goat who was a pet, and who came trotting after me. I sent it back, and I went to the river where it was very wide and deep and strong, and would sweep me well away from the settlement so that no one would find my body. I let myself down into it and swam out into the current.

  I now return to my visit in the Last Days.

  It was necessary that Taufiq should cause himself to be born into the minority race of the planet, the white or pale-skinned peoples indigenous to the northern areas. The city he had chosen was not on the site of one of the Mathematical Cities of the Great Time, though some of the present cities were in fact built on such sites - it goes without saying, without any idea of their potentialities. This site had never been up to much. It was low, had been marshy for much of its recent history, when the climate had been wet. The soil was always damp and enervating. Nothing about the place had ever been naturally conducive to the high energies, though for certain purposes and in certain conditions it had been attuned and used, though temporarily, by us. It was the main city of a small island that had, because of its warlike and acquisitive qualities, overrun and dominated a good part of the globe, but had recently been driven back again.

  Taufiq was John, a name he had used quite often in his career - Jan, Jon, John, Sean, Yahya, Khan, Ivan, and so on. He was John Brent-Oxford, and the parents he had chosen were healthy honest people, neither too high nor too low in the society, which, since it suffered the most cumbersome division into classes and castes, all suspicious of each other, was a matter of importance and of careful judgement.

  Taufiq's undertaking was, in order to accomplish what he had to do, to become a person skilled in the regulations with which the various, always warring or quarrelling individuals, or sections of society, controlled themselves and each other. And he had achieved this. His youth had been spent intelligently, he had equipped himself, and was outstanding at an early age. Just as in higher spheres promising youngsters are watched by people they know nothing about, though they may wonder or guess, so in lower spheres of activity possibilities are prepared for those who prove themselves, and John was from childhood observed by "people of influence," as the Shikastan phrase goes. But the "influences" were by no means all of the same kind!

  In this corrupt and ghastly age the young man could not avoid having put on him many pressures to leave the path of duty, and it was very early - he was not more than twenty-five years old - that he succumbed. Furthermore, he knew that he was doing something wrong. The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was "destined" to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but - more often and more deeply as he grew older - "impractical." That he did know quite well what he was doing is shown by his tendency to laugh apologetically at certain moments, with the remark that "he had been unable to resist temptation.' Yet these words on the face of it had little to do with the obvious and recognised mores of his society, which was why it was essential to laugh. The laugh paid homage to these modes and mores. He was being ridiculous, the laugh said... yet he was never without uneasiness about what he was doing, the choices he had made.

  It was necessary for him to be at a certain place at a certain time, in order to play a role that was essential to our handling of the crisis that faced Shikasta. He was to aim for a position - not only in his own country's legal system - but a leading one in the system of northern countries which unified, or attempted to, that part of the northern hemisphere which recently had conquered and despoiled a good part of the planet, and which had until very recently been continually at war among themselves. He was to become a reliable and honest person, in this sphere. At a time of corruption, personal and public, he was to become known as incorruptible, unbribable, disinterested, straight-speaking.

  But he was only just out of the last of his educational establishments, an elite one, for the production of the administrative class, when he took a false turning. Instead of going into a junior position in the Councils of the aforesaid bloc of northern countries, which was the position planned for him by us (and by him, of course, as Taufiq), he took a job in a law firm which was known for the number of its members who went into politics.

  World War II was just over - Shikastan terminology. (SEE History of Shikasta, VOLS. 2955-3015, The Century of Destruction.) He had fought in it, seen much ferocity, spoiling, suffering. His judgements had been affected: his whole being, just like everybody else. He saw himself in a crucial role - as indeed he should - but one of the strongest of the false ideas of that epoch, politics, had entered into him. It was not as simple as that he wanted crude power, crude authority: no, he visualized himself "influencing things for the good." He was an idealist: a word describing people who described themselves as intending good, not self-interest at the expense of others.

  And in parentheses I report here that this was true of a good many of our citizens - to borrow a Shikastan word - of that time. They turned into wrong and destructive paths believing that they were better than others whose belief in self-interest was open and expressed, better because they, and they alone, knew how the practical affairs of the planet should be conducted. An emotional reaction to the sufferings of Shikasta seemed to them a sufficient qualification for curing them.

  The attitudes outlined in this paragraph define "politics," "political parties," "political programmes." Nearly all political people were incapable of thinking in terms of interaction, of cross-influences, of the various sects and "parties" forming together a whole, wholes - let alone of groups of nations making up a whole. No, in entering th
e state of mind where "politics" was ruler, it was always to enter a crippling partiality, a condition of being blinded by the "correctness" of a certain viewpoint. And when one of these sects or "parties" got power, they nearly always behaved as if their viewpoint could be the only right one. The only good one: when John chose a sect, he was in his own mind motivated by the highest ideas and ideals. He saw himself as a saviour of some kind, dreamed of himself as leader of the nation. From the moment he joined this group of lawyers, he met with very few people who thought differently from him. On various occasions members of our staff attempted to influence him, tried to remind him, indirectly of course, but none of them succeeded: the ways of thinking and being that he had taken to the borders of Shikasta were now so buried in him that they surfaced only rarely, in dreams, or in moments of remorse and panic that he could not ascribe to their right cause.

  He had temporarily been written off. If it happened - so the judgement went on Canopus - that by some at present unforeseen processes Taufiq would "come to himself" - many such revealing phrases were common on Shikasta - and very often people apparently quite lost to us, at least temporarily, did "come to themselves," "see the light," and so on, quite often due to some awful shock or trauma of the kind Shikasta was so prodigal with, then, and then only, could trouble be spent on him. We were all so pressed, so thinly spread, and the situation on the planet so desperate.

  One of my tasks was to observe him, to assess his present state, and if possible, to administer a reminder.