‘Ambien, listen to me.’
‘When did I ever do anything else?’
‘Good. After watching us at work for the long time you have been involved with us, are you still able to believe that we deal in failure?’
‘No.’
‘Remember that then. Remember it.’
He made a jaunty little gesture of farewell, and went up the steps into his house. I then left Rohanda, without going back to its moon. The Four were waiting for me.
This time it was not possible to put them off. They had to have some sort of information.
After a good deal of thought, I dispatched this message to Klorathy. (We always used their term, Shikasta, for Rohanda in such exchanges.)
Private letter sent through the Diplomatic Bag,
AMBIEN II of SIRIUS, to KLORATHY, CANOPUS
In haste. Have just been looking through our reports from Shikasta. In case – which is unlikely, I know – you have not got this information, Shammat called a meeting of all its agents in one place. This in itself seems to us symptomatic of something long suspected by us – and I know, by you, too. Conditions on Shikasta are affecting Shammatans even more than Shikastans, or affecting them faster. Their general mentation seems to be deteriorating rapidly. They suffer from hectivity, acceleration, arrhythmictivity. Their diagnosis of situations, as far as they are capable and within the limits of their species, is adequate. Adequate for certain specific situations and conditions. The conclusions they are drawing from analyses are increasingly wild. That Shammat should order this meeting, exposing its agents to such danger, shows the Mother Planet is affected; as much as that the local Shammat agents should obey an obviously reckless order.
This condition of Shammat and its agents, then, seems to us likely to add to the spontaneous and random destructivity to be expected of Shikasta at this time.
As if we needed anything worse!
Our intelligence indicates that you are weathering the Shikastan crisis pretty well – not that anything else was ever expected of you. If all continues to go well, when may we expect a visit? As always we look forward to seeing you.
Shortly after this, I was called by the Four, who had of course read this and discussed it.
‘Why is it that you do not tell us what has really happened between you and Klorathy?’
‘Between Sirius and Canopus.’
They were not so much annoyed at this, as alarmed.
I had a vision of our mind, the mind of the Five – five globules or cells nestling together in a whole, and one of them pulsing at a different rate. And the Four shrinking closer while the one, me, vibrated more wildly, because of the space around it.
‘You tell us nothing, nothing.’
‘I tell you everything I can.’
‘Ambien, you are going to have to tell us. Because if we cannot produce, as a whole – we as the Five – a consistent and convincing reason for our activities on Rohanda, then we are all threatened.’
‘You have the remedy,’ I said, looking at each in turn, steadily.
‘But we obviously don’t want to use it.’
‘Do you really imagine that all I have to do is to find a formula, a set of words, some phrases strung together – and then you would nod your heads and say: Oh of course, that’s it! and then you would release them to the Empire and everyone would be happy?’
This meeting, I have to emphasize, was at the height of the debate, which still continues, and threatens to destroy our foundations.
What foundations?
What uses, what purposes?
What service? What function?
At length I said to the Four that to explain to them as they wanted would mean my talking for a year or writing a book.
‘Well, why not write a book, Ambien?’
I saw that many purposes would be served by this.
‘It comes hard to an old bureaucrat, to write a history of the heart, rather than of events,’ I said.
The jokes made between those who have been very close and who are so no longer are indeed painful.
They sent me on extended leave. In other words, I am under planet arrest, on Colonized Planet 13.
I would do exactly the same in their place. In my view the institution of the Five, now – I hope, temporarily – the Four, is the most valuable regulator of our Empire. It should not be destroyed. I make a point of saying this, hoping that my millennia-long service and experience will not be entirely dismissed.
It is hard for me to be confined to this one planet, accustomed as I have been to range at will through the Galaxy, but I am not complaining. I feel it is a privilege for me to be allowed to write this account of what I know is a unique experience.
To think of Rohanda gives me pain, though I try to comfort myself with Nasar’s last words to me.
If I have learned so much that I never expected, what more can I hope to learn and understand, providing I am patient, and do not allow myself to ask useless questions?
This is Rohandan Ambien, Ambien II
of the Five, from Planet 13 of the
Sirian Empire
DIRECTIVE FROM THE FOUR,
TO THE SIRIAN MOTHER PLANET
AND ALL COLONIZED PLANETS OF THE SIRIAN EMPIRE:
Attention! There is a document in general circulation that purports to be the work of Ambien II, formerly of the Five. That this so-called memoir has never been printed and therefore shown to be approved is evidence enough that it is not authentic, to those who use their judgement. We wish, however, to emphasize that this is a crude invention, and the work of unfortunates who wish to subvert the good government of our Empire. Ambien II, after her long and valued service to our Empire, succumbed to a mental disequilibrium, due to an overprolonged immersion in the affairs of the planet Rohanda. She is under treatment, and we her colleagues are confident that in due course she will be able to resume her duties, even if only to a restricted, and less taxing, degree.
LETTER FROM AMBIEN II TO STAGRUK:
I have seen your Directive. I can see that with the turn events have taken, and the danger of a revolution in every part of our Empire, you Four had to take some such action. I have received your kind messages about my health. Yes, thank you, I am well, and I have no need of anything. Of course, I cannot help craving a real participation in affairs. Old habits die hard! Meanwhile, it is a consolation to me that – not for the first time, as you know! – I receive visits from each one of you separately. These are a great pleasure to me. I like to feel that my experience is even now being put to use in this indirect way. I reflect on the fact that you all assure me of your personal support, and your sympathetic understanding of why I took the steps I did to make sure my manuscript reached general circulation, even in its somewhat archaic form. I agree with you that unpalatable facts have to be released to the populace in measured and often ambiguous ways. Was it not I who first introduced this view? I reflect, too, that this rapport between us old colleagues may stand us all in good stead yet when – as you will, I am sure, agree seems more and more likely to happen – we all find ourselves together in ‘corrective exile’ on this quite pleasant though tedious Planet 13.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.
By the same author
NOVELS
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
Memoirs of a Survivor
Diary of a Good Neighbour
If the Old Could…
/> The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
The Fifth Child
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
The Cleft
‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
OPERAS
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (Music by Philip Glass)
The Making of the representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)
SHORT STORIES
Five
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories
Winter in July
The Black Madonna
This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)
The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)
To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)
London Observed
The Old Age of El Magnifico
Particularly Cats
Rufus the Survivor
On Cats
The Grandmothers
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
DRAMA
Each His Own Wilderness
Play with a Tiger
The Singing Door
NON-FICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
African Laughter
Time Bites
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin: Volume 1
Walking in the Shade: Volume 2
Read on
Have You Read?
A selection of other books by Doris Lessing
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
The Good Terrorist
Love, Again
The Fifth Child
The Grass is Singing:
Chapter 1
MURDER MYSTERY
By Special Correspondent
Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered.
It is thought he was in search of valuables.
The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.
And then they turned the page to something else.
But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.
To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would have never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.
Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.
And then it was that someone used the phrase ‘poor whites’. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. ‘Poor whites’ were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.
Though the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.
Thus the district handled the Turners, in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves ignored. They apparently did not recognize the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.
The more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary the case becomes. Not the murder itself; but the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.
For instance, they must have wondered who that ‘Special Correspondent’ was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder. One could say that he practically controlled the handling of the case, even taking precedence over the Sergeant himself. And pe
ople felt that to be quite right and proper. Whom should it concern, if not the white farmers, that a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned? It was their livelihood, their wives and families, their way of living, at stake.
But to the outsider it is strange that Slatter should have been allowed to take charge of the affair, to arrange that everything should pass over without more than a ripple of comment.
For there could have been no planning: there simply wasn’t time. Why, for instance, when Dick Turner’s farm boys came to him with the news, did he sit down to write a note to the Sergeant at the police camp? He did not use the telephone.
Everyone who has lived in the country knows what a branch telephone is like. You lift the receiver after you have turned the handle the required number of times, and then, click, click, click, you can hear the receivers coming off all over the district, and soft noises like breathing, a whisper, a subdued cough.
Slatter lived five miles from the Turners. The farm boys came to him first, when they discovered the body. And though it was an urgent matter, he ignored the telephone, but sent a personal letter by a native bearer on a bicycle to Denham at the police camp, twelve miles away. The Sergeant sent out half a dozen native policemen at once, to the Turners’ farm, to see what they could find. He drove first to see Slatter, because the way that letter was worded roused his curiosity. That was why he arrived late on the scene of the murder. The native policemen did not have to search far for the murderer. After walking through the house, looking briefly at the body, and dispersing down the front of the little hill the house stood on, they saw Moses himself rise out of a tangled ant-heap in front of them. He walked up to them and said (or words to this effect): ‘Here I am.’ They snapped the handcuffs on him, and went back to the house to wait for the police cars to come. There they saw Dick Turner come out of the bush by the house with two whining dogs at his heels. He was off his head, talking crazily to himself, wandering in and out of the bush with his hands full of leaves and earth. They let him be, while keeping an eye on him, for he was a white man, though mad, and black men, even when policemen, do not lay hands on white flesh.
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