Shikasta

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  From TAFTA, SUPREME LORD of SHIKASTA, to SUPREME SUPERVISORY LORD ZARLEM on SHAMMAT, Greetings!

  Greetings to the Shammot General Rule!

  Obeisance!

  Obeisance to Puttiora!

  All things obey Puttiora, the All-Magnificent!

  Shikasta lies beneath your heel, Shikasta awaits your will!

  From Zone to Zone, from Pole to Pole, from end to end, Shikasta subserves you.

  How deep and fine the service of Shikasta to Shammat, servant of Puttiora!

  From end to end, these disgraceful little animals squirm and writhe under our all-seeingness!

  In every land these degraded beasts fight and kill and suffer, the aromas of pain and of blood rising like red smoke above every part of Shikasta, deliciously rise to the nostrils of deserving Shammat.

  How strong the nurturing flow from Shikasta to Shammat, stronger every day the flow that feeds Shammat, ever stronger the millennial link that provides power which is the right and the due from Shikasta to Shammat, earned by our tutelage, our Overlordship, our Superiority in the Scales of the Galaxy!

  Oh Shikasta, bleeding little animal, how we praise you in your willing squalidness, how we applaud you in your subservience, how we succour you, our other self, our sac of blood, our source of strength!

  Day and night, and from moment to moment, roll in your Tributes, oh Shikasta, our slavish one, the Vibrations of hatred and dissension feed us, sustain us, make us exalt, Shammat the All-Powerful!

  Night and day, oh nasty degraded one, you supply our food to us, the clash of arms, the cries of warriors, the roar of machines in hostility.

  Day and night, planet that is lowest of the Low, you shake and shiver beneath our Rule, Shammat the Glorious, the all-glorious son of Puttiora the Glorious, offering your fat and your substance, the perfumes of your anguish, the aromas of your cruelties, your disgustingness.

  How low is Shikasta, the worm in the dust, writhing heaps and pits of worms in corruption, all, all, all feeding us, Shammat, feeding Puttiora. Over your skies, Shikasta, the shine and shimmer of your contentions, your frightful inventions, all feeding us with the fuel of your hatreds. Under your oceans, Shikasta, the grind and clash and vibration of your manoeuvring machines, all feeding and perfuming us, Shammat. In your sick minds, Shikasta, the perverted minds of backward and ignorant animals whose good fortune it has even been to attract our kindly rule, flame the animosities that nurse us, Shammat!

  Everywhere move our magnificent ones, ever aware, ever watching, ever guarding our own!

  Everywhere our Eyes and Ears, and nothing escapes us!

  We observe the pitiful heavings of your attempts at revolt, we note and we Crush!

  We have watched the movements and machinations of our enemies on Shikasta, and have undone them all - confound their knavish tricks, compound their politicks, writhe and expire, suffer and die!

  We Shammat, Shammat of Puttiora the glorious, confirm the Flow is extant, the Flow is stronger, the Flow is ever and eternal, the Flow is for all time, the sustenance and food of Us, Lords of the Galaxy, Lords of the Worlds...

  NOTE ATTACHED to ABOVE:

  Hey, Zarl!

  I request sick leave. There is some goddamned new virus. We are going down all over the goddamned place. Or if it isn't a virus then it's Treachery. Why aren't I in the new Government? What sort of shitting gratitude is that? There are going to be some changes made, I'll simmer them in their own filthy blood, see if I don't.

  LYNDA COLDRIDGE to BENJAMIN SHERBAN

  (No. 17. "Various Individuals.")

  Your brother told me to write to you. He says to me that he has told you he is in contact with me. I hope he has done this. Otherwise why should you trust me. It is a hard thing to ask these days. You must trust me for the sake of these people who are coming to you. Otherwise they will be dead. When you think things can't get worse, they can. I've known about all this happening for a long time. But when it does, then it is still a shock. George says these people must come to you. He says you are in Marseilles. That must be a difficult place to be in. These people are trustworthy. All from the hospitals I have been in. They are mostly patients. But some doctors and nurses. So these will be useful. We are not sending you the people who have been so ill they may be a nuisance. Doctor Hebert has helped choose the people. He knows all about these things. Doctor Hebert and I have been working together. I forget how long. I want him to go to you with the others but he won't. He says he is old and due to die. I do not agree with this. He knows so much about useful things, and he is not ever Mad, like me. I hope you know what I mean when I say that about Useful Things. I asked your brother about Doctor Hebert. Your brother says Doctor Hebert must do as he believes is right. Conscience. The individual. Rights of. I am staying. I am old too. Your brother wants me to stay. He has asked me to. He says it will be useful. There will be people left alive, in spite of the awfulness. They will be few. There are underground places. Most of them for bigwigs. Friends of ours have made an underground place. No one knows about it except a few. This is for about twenty people. Most of them have the Capacities of contact. George says you sometimes have them. I have tried to contact you but couldn't. Perhaps we aren't on the same wavelength! (Ha Ha) The twenty people are of all ages. Some are children. They are all ready for what is to come. The Wrath. Sometimes I think that if they knew what is to come they wouldn't be. Ready, I mean. I wish it would all happen, and we could get it over. We are going to take into the underground place more people than it is really made for. That is because I won't live long. And Doctor Hebert won't either. And there are two other old people. Doctor Hebert will be the only doctor with us, apart from a half-trained young one. He can train some more. Also he has quite a lot of Capacity. I know when Doctor Hebert and I will die. By then all the others will be trained in the Capacities. They will all live until the rescue teams come and England is opened up again. I don't know if George has told you all this. George just says this and that according to what is necessary. Then he switches off. I mean, we don't have a proper talk. Not a chat. From this I gather he must be very busy. Well I can see he must be. When I first contacted him, it was by accident. I thought it was my own mind talking to me. I wonder if that will make sense to you. Perhaps it will. I know that one's own mind can say all kinds of things. You think it is someone else but it isn't, it is you. Do you understand this. I am writing too much. It is because it is a funny thing working for years and years to rescue people, and not even knowing if you can. Sometimes it was very difficult. At first no one believed me or Doctor Hebert. And it took such a long time. And then after all that you send them off to someone never met. In Marseilles! It will be an awful journey. We have got all the false papers together. And the uniforms. Everything. I can't help worrying. At any rate, we have done what we planned. We said we would rescue people and we have. Here they are. We won't be having any contact after this. Not unless you get better at the Capacities! So goodbye. If this letter gets to you then the people will have reached you. It is a funny thing, isn't it, having to trust someone in this way. I mean, because of the quality of an instruction "over the air." So good luck. Lynda Coldridge.

  DOCTOR HEBERT to BENJAMIN SHERBAN

  Attached is a list of all the people who are about to leave on the dangerous and difficult journey to you. Mrs. Coldridge says that a short description of each one will be helpful and I believe she is right. The qualifications of the professional people are briefly sketched, and the medical history of those who were patients in various hospitals Mrs. Coldridge and I have worked in. In each we found people who had various Capacities in embryo or in potential and because of a misunderstanding of the phenomena they experienced had been classed as ill and incarcerated temporarily or permanently, but due to good fortune or a stronger than usual constitution their treatment had not damaged them. Of course nothing could or can be done for the victims of more draconian or prolonged treatments. It has been no easy task to persuade these people of th
eir own possibilities, since such arguments fell on ears conditioned to be thinking of these either as unscientific or as so "lunatic fringe" that they could not even be listened to. But patience has worked wonders, and here are the results of many years of efforts, all of them undertaken behind the backs of hospital authorities and in conditions always of difficulty and sometimes even of danger. Mental hospitals have not been the safest places to be, not anywhere in the world! These are all people, too, who because of their experience are inured to hardship, misunderstanding, uncertainty, and a capacity for suspending judgement that is the inevitable reward of having to undergo years of suspending judgement on the workings of their own minds. These are most useful qualities! You can believe that I speak from experience! When I discovered in myself certain Capacities my first reaction was that of one who has found an enemy within the gates. For until I met Mrs. Coldridge and could understand what it was she was saying, and - even more - understood her long and painful history, I did not have the ability to be patient with my own flounderings in a realm so new to me that it seemed at first enemy territory. To sharpen this point: all these people can take weight, responsibility, burdens, difficulties, delays, the loss of hope. As we know, this is essential equipment for these hard times... I write this and marvel at the inadequacies of language! What we all live through is worse than our worst nightmares could have warned us of. Yet we do live through them, and some of us, a few, will survive. And that is all that we - the human race - need. We must look at it this way. I want to say something to you that I regard as a testament, an act of faith! It is that if human beings can stand a lifetime of the sort of subjective experience that it has been Mrs. Coldridge's lot to undergo, if they can patiently and stubbornly suffer assaults on their very bastions, as she has done, if we can face living, day after day after day, through what most people could only describe as "hell" and come out the other end, on some sort of even keel, even if damaged - as Mrs. Coldridge would be the first to agree she is - if we, the human race, have in us such strengths of patience and endurance, then what can we not achieve? Mrs. Coldridge has been the inspiration of my life. When I first encountered her, a bedraggled unfortunate, a mere skeleton with vast frightened blue eyes wandering along the corridors of the Lomax Hospital in a dreadful suburb of one of our ugliest cities, she was just another of the deteriorated wrecks among whom I had spent so much of my life, and whom I certainly never regarded as holding the possibilities of any revelations or lessons - yet it was this lunatic, for she was that when I first met her - who has taught me what courage, what tenacity, is possible in a human being, and therefore in us all. What else is there for any of us but courage? And perhaps even that is only a word for being prepared to go on living at all. I send you my best wishes for the success of your undertakings - hoping that this assembly of tired phrases will in fact convey to you what I feel. And I entrust to you these people who... what can I say? I part with them in the same spirit a child uses when he launches a leaf into a torrent of street water. I shall pray for you and for them. This on behalf of myself only, for I fear Mrs. Coldridge is scornful of religion. With her experiences I feel she will be forgiven.

  BENJAMIN SHERBAN to GEORGE SHERBAN

  Well my little brother! Here we all are, present and correct. Five hundred of us. The Pacific is terrific, despite everything, forgive the frivolity in these hard times. To get down to essentials. The inland water is clean - well, more or less, the food plentiful, and no natives, for these were taken off twenty years ago to clear the area for H. Bomb tests. Who were they to protest? When their Masters spoke? Anyway, it is an ill wind, for there is now plenty of room for us. So far no casualties. Very little illness, and anyway we have suitable supplies both of medics and medicines. Quite a little township is already up, with all cons if not all mod cons. It is Paradise nowe. But for how long? Aye, there's the rub. If I sound manic, then of course it is because I simply cannot believe that any of us is still alive. Resisting the temptation to despatch this in a corked bottle on the next retreating tide, I am sending it by canoe, then cargo ship, then air to Samoa. And will continue to send reports as long as these amenities continue. Ah, civilisation, to imagine we ever complained of you, complained about any nasty little part of you...Please accept my assurances at all times that I remain, your obedient servant. Benjamin. I assume you do know Suzannah is in Camp 7, Andes, with Kassim and Leila?

  GEORGE SHERBAN to SHARMA PATEL

  Dearest Sharma,

  First of all, Greetings! In any style you like. No, I am not laughing at you, I assure you. I am writing this in great haste late at night because I get the impression very strongly that you have a change of plan. Yes, I do remember how you laugh at me when I say such things. And I feel sorrowful because I have something of importance to say, but I feel you will not listen to me. But perhaps you will, perhaps you can, just this once, and so I am writing to say this to you: Please stick to your plan and please leave at the time you said you would. Please do not go down into Encampment 8. I beg of you. And if you are prepared, just this once, to trust me, to believe me, take as many of your staff with you as will go with you. Don't stay where you are and don't go down into Camp 8. How can I reach you? How can I persuade you? Do you have any idea what it feels to know someone as I know you, to hear you say I love you, and with such depth of feeling and such sincerity! - and yet know that I shall not be believed, no matter what I say. You will not do as I ask, I know that. And yet I must try.

  Sharma, what can I do to make you listen to me? This once, believe me. If I said to you, leave your position at the head of your Army, leave your honours and your responsibilities, you would lecture me for my lack of understanding of your equality with me, my ignorance about women and their capacities, but you would suddenly, even surprising yourself, leave everything behind you, your powers, your position, as if you had been hypnotised, and you would come with me, like a sleepwalker, presenting yourself to me with a smile that said: Here I am. And from that moment you would never again agree with me in anything, or fall in with anything I wished, or trust me. Your life would be a demonstration of how badly I treated you. Do you know this, Sharma? Is that not a remarkable thing? Perhaps you do not agree that this is exactly what would happen. And no, I am not saying that I want you to do any of these things, no I do not. I am only begging you, begging you - listen to me, and don't go down to Encampment 8. Sharma my love, will you listen to me, please listen to me...(This letter was not sent.)

  [SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3015, The Century of Destruction, Twentieth Century War: yd and Final Phase. SUMMARY CHAPTER.]

  From SUZANNAH in CAMP 7, THE ANDES,

  to GEORGE SHERBAN

  My darling,

  It is very cold tonight. It is not easy to get adjusted to this altitude. Kassim and Leila are all right, and that is the main thing. A lot of people are finding it hard. We have a lot of chest troubles. Our doctors are working all the time. Luckily we have plenty of medicines. But I wonder for how long. 63 people came in. They got out from France. They say there is nothing much left of Europe. They are full of all kinds of stories but I said I didn't want to hear. I don't see the point. I think it is morbid. What is done is done. So I came to our hut and left them talking. It would be a good thing if you could get hold of warm clothes for all the children. We have nearly 1,200 children now. I did what you said and put Juanita in charge of the children and she has made her husband work with her. They are a good team. All the children like them. Today a party came in from North America. 94. They want to stay here but I said this camp is full. Well it is. How are we going to feed everybody? That is what is on my mind. I said they could stay some days to rest and then they should go to Camp 4. It is only 200 miles. They can leave the weak ones and the children with us. They say North America is full of troubles but I said I didn't want to listen any longer. I have my work cut out. Can you try and find some shoes for the children? I think it would be a good thing if some more camps got set up, if the refugees
are going to come and come like this. I don't see what can be possibly left up there. But I don't want to think about it. Kassim says he wants to come and be with you. I said he is too young but he is fifteen. Leila wants to come too. I said definitely no. I said I would find out what you think about Kassim. And they would have to obey. That is a question.

  When you think about winter coming up in the North, it is a good thing for the epidemics I suppose, but it is a bad thing for the people who are left. But I don't want to think morbid thoughts.

  Philip came in just now and says he saw you and you are working hard. He says you will be coming next week. When you come we should get married because I am pregnant. I am sure now. I wasn't sure until today. It is all very well these young people saying things like that don't matter in these times, but I think we should set an example.

  I am two months and two days pregnant.

  I hope it is a boy but with my luck I suppose it will be a girl. I don't really mean that, only partly.

  I have got Pedro to mend the roof of this hut. Pedro is very nice and I want to suggest we should adopt him when you come. What I mean is, we should tell him we regard him as our child. He is feeling insecure. I can always tell things like that. It is not good for an eight-year-old boy to have no parents and nothing at all. I think we should have some kind of ceremony. We can always think of something. By the time we have finished I expect we shall have a dozen or more, if this goes on! Many a true word is spoken in jest.