Shikasta

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  Over the many thousand years of the Period of the Exhorters or Cautioners we observe this series of events, constantly repeated:

  It was observed by us, or reported to us, that the link between Canopus and Shikasta was weakening beyond safe levels.

  This was followed by reports that a culture, a city, a tribe, or groups of individuals vital to our interests were falling away from what had been established as a bond.

  It was urgently necessary to strengthen the link, the bond, by restoring selected individuals to suitable ways of life, thus regenerating and vitalising areas, cultures, or cities.

  We sent down a technician, or two, or several. It might happen that all but one or two would be working quietly, unknown to the populace.

  This one would have to be born, through Zone Six, and bred in the ordinary way by suitable parents, in order that what was said by - usually - him could take effect.

  A note on sexual choice. Of course developed individuals with us are androgynous, to put it into the nearest Shikastan terminology possible: we do not have emotional or physical or psychological characteristics that are considered as appertaining to one sex rather than another, as is normal on the more backward planets. There have been many of our envoys who have manifested as "female," but since the time of the falling away from the Lock, before when males and females were equal everywhere on Shikasta and neither exploited the other, the females have been in subjection, and this has led to problems which on the whole are considered by our envoys as an unnecessary added difficulty to already difficult enough tasks. [SEE CHAPTER 9, this volume, "Manifestation of Envoys as Female for Local Cultural Purposes."]

  As our envoy or representative grew to maturity in the chosen culture, he, or she, would become notable for a certain level of perception and understanding demonstrated in conduct which was nearly always at odds with the local ideas and practices.

  Those individuals who were drawn to our envoy, by liking, or - as often happened - first by antagonism overcome by a growth of understanding which became liking, formed a core or nucleus which could be used to strengthen and maintain the link, the bond.

  In the earlier times, these individuals were often many, and could form quite strong subcultures of their own. Or, spread among whole populations, formed a strong enough yeast to raise the whole mass to standards of decent and wholesome living in conformity with the general needs of Canopus. Then, as time passed, because of the growth of populations everywhere, which meant always less of the substance-of-we-feeling to go around, and because of the always growing strength of Shammat, there were fewer and fewer individuals who could respond, or who - having responded initially were able to maintain this response as a living and constantly renewed contact with us, with Canopus. In a city where the mass of the population had sunk to total self-interest, it was common that there might be one, or two, of our link-individuals, no more, desperately struggling to survive. Sometimes whole civilisations had none, had never had any, of this "yeast"; or, if our efforts had been successful in seeding a few, they were quickly driven out, or destroyed, or themselves succumbed from the weight of the pressures on them. Sometimes it was only in madhouses or as outcasts in the deserts that these valuable individuals could survive at all.

  It has not been unknown for some of our own envoys, not more than a few, however, to fall victim of these pressures, either temporarily or permanently. In the latter case, they were subjected to long periods of rehabilitation on their return to Canopus, or sent to a suitable colonised planet to recover.

  During the entire period under review, religions of any kind flourished. Those that concern us most here took their shape from the lives or verbal formulations of our envoys. This happened more often than not, and can be taken as a rule: every one of our public cautioners left behind a religion, or cult, and many of the unknown ones did, too.

  These religions had two main aspects. The positive one, at their best: a stabilisation of the culture, preventing the worst excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. The negative: a priesthood manipulating rules, regulations, with punitive inflexibility; sometimes allowing, or exacerbating, excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. These priesthoods distorted what was left of our envoys' instruction, if it was understood by them at all, and created a self-perpetuating body of individuals totally identified with their invented ethics, rules, beliefs, and who were always the worst enemies of any envoys we sent.

  These religions were a main difficulty in the way of maintaining Shikasta in our system.

  They have often been willing agents of Shammat.

  At no time during this period was it possible for an envoy to approach any part of Shikasta without having to outwit, stave off, or in some way make harmless, these representatives of "God," "the Gods," or whatever was the current formulation. Often our emissaries have been persecuted, or murdered, or worse - for everything of their instruction, vital and necessary to that particular place and time, was distorted. Very often the grip a "religion" had on a culture, or even a whole continent, was so pervasive that our agents could make no impact there at all, but had to work elsewhere on Shikasta where conditions were less monolithic, perhaps even - according to current ideas - more primitive. Many times in the history of Shikasta our bond has been maintained by a culture or subculture considered contemptible by the ruling power, which was nearly always a combination of the military and a religion: the military using the priests, or the priests the military.

  For long periods of the history of Shikasta we can sum up the real situation thus: that in such and such a place, a few hundred, or even a handful, of individuals, were able with immense difficulty to adapt their lives to Canopean requirements, and thus saved the future of Shikasta.

  The longer this process continued, the harder it was for our agents to make their way through the meshes of the emotional and intellectual formulations originating from former visitors. Shikasta was an olla podrida of cults, beliefs, religions, creeds, convictions; there was no end to them, and each of our envoys had to take into account the fact that even before he, she, was dead, his instruction would have already taken flight into fantasy, or been hardened into dogma: each knew that this newly minted, fresh, flexible method, adapted for that particular phase, would, before he had finished his work, have been captured by the Shikastan Law, and become mechanical, useless. She, he, would be working against not only a thousand past frozen formulations, but his own... An envoy put it like this: it was as if he were running a race at the top of his speed, to keep ahead of his own words and actions springing up just behind him, and turned into enemies - what had been alive and functional a few minutes ago was already dead and used by the dead. By the representatives and captives of Shammat who, in this particular epoch, brought itself to a height of beastliness, of effective destructiveness, and almost entirely on what was channelled off from Shikasta. Shammat representatives were always on Shikasta, just as ours were. Shammat captured whole cultures, civilisations, so that they were never anything but out of our reach. Shammat was, from its own point of view, an entirely successful coloniser of Shikasta. But never entirely, never totally. This was not possible.

  The major religions of the last days were all founded by Grade I emissaries. The last of these religions remained somewhat less riven and sectarian than the others. It was on its popular level a simple, emotional religion, and its basis was a scripture whose lowest reach of understanding - the level on which the religion was stabilised - was all threats and promises, for this was all that Shikastans by now could respond to. By then, very few of them could respond to anything, except in terms of personal gain, or loss. Or, if such individuals by prolonged and painstaking contact and instruction did learn that what was needed from her, him, was not on the level of gain or loss, then this had to be at a later stage, for the early stages of attraction to Canopean influences were always seen as everything was seen on Shikasta by then: something given, bestowed.

  For Duty, in that last time, wa
s all but forgotten. What Duty was, was not known. That something was Due, by them, was strange, inconceivable news they could not take in, absorb. They were set only for taking. Or for being given. They were all open mouths and hands held out for gifts - Shammat! All grab and grasp - Shammat! Shammat!

  Whereas, in the early days of the post-disaster time, it had sometimes been enough for one of us to enter a village, a settlement, and sit down and talk to them of their past, of what they had been, of what they would one day become, but only through their own efforts and diligence - that they had dues to pay to Canopus who had bred them, would sustain them through their long dark time, was protecting them against Shammat, that they had in them a substance not Shikastan, and which would one day redeem them - told this, it was often enough, and they would set themselves to adapt to the current necessities.

  But this became less and less what we could expect. Towards the end one of our agents would begin work knowing that it might take not a day, or a month, or a year, but perhaps all his life to stabilise a few individuals, so that they could listen.

  Records, and reports and memoirs from our messengers show always harder and more painful effort put into less and less return.

  Handfuls of individuals rescued from forgetfulness were the harvest for the efforts of dozens of our missionaries, of all grades, kinds, and degrees of experience on a dozen planets. These handfuls, these few, were enough to keep the link, the bond. But at what a cost!

  How much has Shikasta cost Canopus, always!

  How often have our envoys returned from a term of duty on Shikasta, amazed at what the link depended on; appalled at what they had seen.

  It has to be recorded that more than once discussions have been held on whether Shikasta was worth the effort. A full-scale conference, involving all Canopus and our colonies, argued the question. There grew up a body of opinion, which remained a minority, that Shikasta should be jettisoned. This is why Shikasta is in a unique position among the colonised planets: service there is voluntary, except for those individuals who have been concerned with it from the beginning.

  JOHOR reports:

  This is the requested report on individuals who, if Taufiq had not been captured, would have been in very different situations, and on events that would have been differently aligned. I shall not always amplify, or sometimes even mention, the exact role that John Brent-Oxford might have played.

  To contact them I entered Shikasta from Zone Six, at various points, but making use mostly of the Giants' habitat.

  INDIVIDUAL ONE

  Although she was born in a country of ample skies and capacious landscapes, she was afflicted, and from her earliest years, with feelings of being confined. It seemed to her that she ought to be able to find within herself memories of some larger experience, deeper skies. But she did not possess these memories. The society around her seemed petty, piffling, to the point of caricature. As a child she could not believe that the adults were serious in the games they played. Everything done and said seemed a repetition, or a recycling, as if they were puppets in a play being staged over and over again. Afflicted by an enormous claustrophobia, she refused all the normal developments possible to her, and as soon as she was self-supporting left her family and that society. How she earned her living was of no importance to her. She went to another city in the same continent, but there everything seemed the same. Not only identical patterns of thought and behaviour, but the people she met tended to be friends or relatives of those she had left. She moved to another city, another - and then to a different continent. While there was a general conspiracy - so it seemed to her - to agree that this culture was different from the one she had left in ways meriting a thousand books and treatises political, psychological, economic, sociological, philosophical, and religious - on the contrary, to her it seemed the same. A different language, or languages. Slightly more generous in one way - how women were treated, for instance. Worse in another: children had a bad time of it. Animals respected here but not there - and so on. But the patterns of human bondage - which was how she saw it - did not seem to vary much. And, no matter where she travelled, she met no new people. This man encountered in an improbable situation - by chance in a laundrette or at a bus stop - would turn out to be a relation of an acquaintance in another city, or a friend of a family she had known as a child. She left again, choosing an "old" society - which was how Shikastans would see it - more complex, textured, various, than those she had known. Again, differences were emphasized where she could see only resemblances. She earned her living as she could, in ways that could not bind her, would not marry, and had three abortions, because the men did not seem to her to be originally enough minted from the human stock to make their progeny worthwhile. And she could not meet new, different people. She understood she was in, or on, some invisible mesh or template, envisioned by her in bad black moods as a vast spider web, where all the people and events were interconnected, and nothing she could do, ever, would free her. And never could she say anything of what she felt, for she would not be understood. What she saw, others did not. What she heard, they could not.

  She was in a certain country in the Northwest fringes. It occurred to her that this move of hers, to this country, which had cost her, so she had imagined, a good deal of effort in the way of choosing right, this great self-transportation, had not been her will at all: it was her father's. He had always wanted, so she now recalled, to live in this particular city, this country, and in a certain way. While she had not duplicated his dreamed-of way of life - for it had become obsolete - she was living a contemporary equivalence. Shortly after this discovery, she found herself outside a door in a street she had never been in before, to visit a doctor, and remembered that the address was one an aunt had lived in: she had written letters here from her home country.

  She left again, for the extreme north of the Isolated Northern Continent. She was in a small town, which for most of the year was under snow. No one came there for pleasure. It was a working town, and she had a job in a shop that sold goods to trappers and what Indians still remained. She could not have found for herself a situation more at odds with anything her parents or her background might have foreseen for her. Then into the shop came a man she knew. He was a doctor last seen in her hometown, fifteen years before. They had been linked briefly by an impersonal pairing bond typical of that time.

  She fled back to the Northwest fringes. She was in the heart of a great sprawling unshaped city of several million inhabitants and, getting off a bus on an impulse and entering a little restaurant for a cup of tea, she sensed something familiar. She was greeted by a girl working as a waitress: she was the sister of the doctor.

  The world had finally snapped around her like a handcuff. She screamed, leaped up, broke crockery and overturned tables.

  The police came. She was taken to hospital. About whether she was mad or not, the doctors could not agree; and the restaurant brought a charge against her. But the lawyer who would have been the right one for this task was not there. If he had been, the case could have reached far beyond its beginnings, and influenced events, people...

  She was kept in hospital for longer than she felt was warranted, things dawdled and delayed. She was at last fined in court, which some kindly person paid for her. She was set free and felt that she was in a prison worse than any human being could devise.

  If John (or Taufiq) had defended her, he would have been able to influence her to sit still at last and allow herself to see what it was that imprisoned her.

  I arranged an alternative, a temporary attack of paralysis, diagnosed as hysterical.

  Unable to take flight, she struggled inwardly for a time, and then, exactly as a cornered hawk sinks down among his fluffing and awkwardly extended feathers, bright eyes staring at her assailant, so she, too, learned to gaze steadily into what frightened her most.

  INDIVIDUAL TWO

  Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism f
or achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic - kindness to animals, for instance - but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition.

  Ventriloquism was popular. A person with a bland and conforming appearance and personality developed a subsidiary personality and presented it as ventriloquist's dummy. This other personality could be of their own species, or variations on the animal theme. A popular one was a canine, endearing in appearance, who was clever in methods of successful dishonesty. In every episode of his story this animal stole, lied, and cheated, was able always to cover up after a failure, to deceive and boast and flatter and manipulate. It was also inordinately greedy for food. This creature was no major criminal or monster, only a small-scale trickster and, if you accepted the premise, it was quite funny. Of course, it was possible to find it humorous at all only in times of almost total corruption.

  Children were identified with these "unreal" figures, which could never be taken for anything but dolls, or puppets, and which were particularly useful to take as secondary selves, simply because they did not demand the levels of self-criticism which would be demanded by creatures like themselves, who were "real."

  A certain group of children, much neglected by parents, who were all working, and who left them almost entirely to themselves, developed a private world in which each one of them was this puppet, the half-grown dog with a typically flattering name, Crafty Collie. These children lived more and more inside the world they had created, taking, like their exemplar, to small ways of trickery, cheating, and lying - this in a motivated, patterned way, for all they had to do every afternoon was to press a button in order to see a programme for their alternative selves to follow. They took to more intricate crimes. Soon they had a leader. She was female, a bright resourceful child of eleven years. She it was who kept them together, who made sure they watched the succeeding episodes of the ventriloquist's dramas, and who translated into action the messages of Crafty Collie. This went on for three years, while the children became young adults, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Their crimes, at this time when nearly everybody engaged in some form of cheating or stealing, were not remarkable. They stole from shops, broke into houses, kept themselves supplied with money and goods. After every escapade, the group would gather in a ritual where what they had done was played out in terms of their pattern.