Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  When the earth dried, they were told to return to their previous territories. They must live soberly, moderately, without oppressing each other, and as custodians of the animals, whom they must not harm and oppress. They might make animal sacrifices to the Gods, but not human sacrifices, and this must be done without cruelty to the animals. (It was unfortunately necessary to allow this: the Shammat perversion is too strong.) I left them with various artefacts, as instructed. I told them that these were to strengthen the bond between them and ‘somewhere else’.

  I end this report with a personal request. If it is considered not unreasonable, I would prefer not to be assigned to Shikasta again.

  ENVOY 159, TAUFIQ, reports:

  Since my last visit, twenty-one cities have been established in the old flood areas. Five are large, with populations of a quarter of a million or more. Trade flourishes between the cities and as far as the eastern areas of the main landmass, its Northwest fringes, the northern parts of Southern Continent I, the Isolated Northern Continent.

  The living is luxurious, wasteful, higher purposes forgotten, except for a few.

  There has been racial mixing with the results of experiments from both southern continents. The merits, demerits, and general peculiarities of these crosses are analysed in the accompanying Report by the Mission of Population Analysts, Envoys 153, 154, 155.

  The worst of the adverse factors is that there have been matings with Shammat stock, as a deliberate policy by Shammat to counteract our improvements as a result of genetic boosts before the inundation.

  Shammat is not only constantly at work persuading Shikasta into the ways of Shammat, but is now informing these unfortunates that Shikasta is being defrauded by ‘the Gods’, who exploit them, of their rightful heritage, and that if certain practices are followed, the Shikastans will become ‘as Gods’.

  This is now a popular belief everywhere. Revolts against us are being planned. These will take the form of mass attempts to ‘transcend’ themselves, by means suggested through Shammat spies. They congregate together for ‘higher practices’ – the vibrations of which are channelled off to Shammat. They perform mass slaughter of animals, as a ritual. They also practise spurious versions of the Art of the Stones, suggested by Shammat.

  I support the recommendation of 153, 154, 155 to disrupt their speech centres.

  Representatives from every region of Shikasta known to them are to gather in the Areas of the Cities to confer about ways to ‘become Gods’. Unknown to them, Shammat will preside.

  ENVOY 160, TAUFIQ, reports:

  The urgency of the situation again necessitated use of spacecraft. All six of us attended the conference, purporting to be delegates from the extreme Northwest fringes. As there were so many different types present, there were no difficulties. The recommended techniques were effective. As a result their communication systems malfunctioned, and eight main languages are now established on Shikasta. These will develop into hundreds, then thousands of languages and dialects because of the Shikastan Law of inevitable division, subdivision.

  I again apply for transfer from Shikastan service into any other branch of the Colonial Service.

  ENVOY 192, TAUFIQ, reports:

  As a result of reports from our local agents that the Areas of the Cities are currently unsuitable for our purposes, investigations have been made into the Northwest fringes and the Extreme-east fringes. The Northwest fringes are sparsely populated due to the harshness of conditions and the impoverished landscape after the time of the ice. We established a few local agents to create and maintain enough stone patterns to keep our current stabilized. Similarly, in the Extreme east. But there climatic conditions are good and the soil rich, and the population increasing. We have built there a few small towns to Canopean pattern, chosen inhabitants of a suitable type to live in them, and placed stone and tree patterns in appropriate areas.

  I visited the Areas of the Cities myself, and confirm that Shammat influence is so strong nothing can be expected there. I investigated in depth three of the cities and found not more than a hundred individuals who could respond in any way to Canopean vibrancies.

  Your envoy points out – as have former ambassadors – that races which receive genetic prods, while on the one hand being strengthened towards usefulness and Canopus-contact, on the other are more prone than the average to become corrupted.

  Nevertheless, since the contacts we have established in the Northwest fringe areas and the Extreme-east fringes will fall away from contact in 950 (their) years from now, it is recommended that further genetic addition be attempted on suitable candidates of Areas of the Cities in about four hundred years. This will allow time for the development of a new strengthened strain, but not enough time for this strain to be corrupted by Shammat. This is of course our usual optimistic forecast. I draw this comment to the attention of eugenists.

  ENVOYS 276 and 277, TAUFIQ and JOHOR, report: (Joint Mission.)

  TAUFIQ:

  I visited the Northwest fringes. Our staff, who set up the Stones, and instructed locals in the Art of the Stones, have all left, most to Planet 35, as instructed. A few went to the Areas of the Cities to instruct suitable candidates in maintaining contact.

  In the Northwest fringes is a stable but sparse population of indigenous stock. They practise agriculture and herd-keeping, neither on a high level. Our staff decided against advanced-level instruction as this has so often in the past led to the opposite of what was intended: extremes of accumulation and the oppression of others. (See later remarks about the Extreme-east fringes.) The basic unit is the tribe. It is still a meagre and unaccommodating landscape. These are very hardy people. Limited mating took place between them and our staff: unprogrammed. Their women are attractive, in a robust way. The progeny may be expected to improve the stock unpredictably. The indigenous people are small, dark-haired, wiry. The introduced genes tend towards tall, extremely fair-skinned blue-eyed or grey-eyed types. (Planet 14.)

  I visited the territories of the Extreme east. The accumulator villages have been abandoned, on instruction. They will soon be derelict. A few individuals were secretly visiting these sites for ‘sacred purposes’, history repeating itself. They have been warned. Our resident envoy has attempted threats and promises. These practices had already resulted in a deteriorating of the mentality. These remarks apply to the areas immediately adjacent to the accumulator villages.

  Otherwise this is a vast civilization already advanced to level G. It is growing, and constantly taking in territory, including the Southeast fringe islands. There is a stable and effective agriculture. The cities are very much more than trade centres. There is an extensive ruling class, previously efficient and devoted to duty, now luxury-loving and effete. The entire civilization is shortly to be overrun by a vigorous, more primitive culture from the north, the northwest, and the desert lands where there is no trace at all of our old Mathematical Cities, nor the more recent cities that flourished before the ice. The effete culture will therefore be revitalized. A selection of individuals has been taught contact. These are merchants and farmers; none of the enfeebled governing class had the qualities. Arrangements have been made to ensure that these instructed individuals will be absent when the invasion takes place, and will return afterwards, to take up their allotted positions.

  An earthquake recently completely devastated the chief east-fringe island. Nothing is left of any of the cities. There remains enough of the agriculture to restart a low level of culture.

  I met the representatives of Sirius. They report success with their experiments. Southern Continent II has been particularly useful to them. The animals introduced there in the last experiment evolved rapidly and well, and were removed, all at once, by intensive space-lift, back to Planet 3.

  They report that limited unplanned matings took place between their representatives and these animals.

  May your envoy take this opportunity of suggesting that when Canopean eugenists map possibilities for Shikasta,
they take into account Shikastan sexual propensities. It has long been my opinion, expressed more than once, that when sexuality was emphasized to ensure survival of species, this was perhaps overdone? Your envoy discussed this with Sirian representatives. They, having spent time on Shikasta, agree. They are putting the same point to their eugenists. I would point out that there are few cases in Canopean or Sirian history of individuals or stocks being introduced, sometimes for very short periods of time, without unplanned mating taking place.

  May your envoy take this opportunity of suggesting that a delegation of eugenists actually be sent to Shikasta to experience conditions for themselves?

  JOHOR:

  It is thirty thousand years since I was in Shikasta; 31,505, to be exact.

  How dark it is here! How hard to move, pulled to the earth, pressed down, weighted.

  The air we breathe is so thin and insubstantial, the supplies of SOWF so meagre.

  Entering Shikasta – entering my memories – it is as if everything is dwarfed. Can these people really be the descendants of the towering and regal Giants, the magnificent Natives? So those seem to me now, as I look back from this shrunken time and these minified people who live eight hundred years, when once the expectation of life was many times that. A hurrying, and a scurrying and a frantic cramming of a life into a few starved breaths … scarcely born, and then adult, and then old, and then dead.

  Our people here, maintaining their real life with such difficulty, all acquire a look of quiet endurance, which all too easily melts into horror at moments when the contrasts are too great. And it is only with the greatest of effort that we prevent ourselves from grasping at every sensation that seems to promise or guarantee a meaning, even usefulness – as these creatures do, who lacking the substance, chase after shadows, after anything that seems to remind them – for the memory is still there, somewhere deep in them, of Canopean truth. They look at the sun as if they want to pull it down to them, they linger under a moon which is much further away than I remember it – and they hunger, they yearn, holding up their arms to the sun, and wanting to bathe in moonrays or to drink them. The gleam of light on a tree, or on water, the brief heartbreaking beauty of their young, these things torture them, without knowing why, or they half know, and make songs and tales, always with the hunger behind, a hunger not one of them could define. Yet their little lives are ruled by it, they are the subjects of an invisible king, a kingdom, even while they court Shammat, who feeds their hungers with illusions.

  I have been in the Areas of the Cities, which is where I was for most of my time before. Where the Round City was, the Square City, the Crescent City, and all the other marvels, cities have risen and fallen and risen, over and over again. The waters from the melting ice, the batteries of the ice itself, submerged, ground, destroyed. And yet it is green again, fertile, except where the deserts grow and spread and take possession. There are forests and green plains and herds of animals … I remember the great beasts of Rohanda, the wonderful ancestors of these little animals, miniature lions and tiny deer and half-size elephants that seem to these dwindled people so enormous – yet to those who knew those vast wise beasts of former times, they are endearing, almost toys for children. The children are heartbreaking now. In those times, the children of the Giants, the Natives’ children, were each one born after such deliberation, such thought, each one chosen and from parents known to be the best … each with such a long life, time to grow, time to play, time to think, time to ripen their inner selves and grow fully into themselves. Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born – and yet each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.

  I do not like handling their infants, their children: it is a sad business.

  And their women, who give birth to these potentials but not knowing it, or half knowing it.

  And before we are through with the long sad story of Shikasta, so much more, and worse, to come.

  There will be a time when these little lives will seem a great memory: a time when lives of two hundred years will seem a marvellous thing.

  You are generous when you allow your envoys to express subjective feelings. But I have a spring of grief in me that you will be even more generous in not judging as complaint. Complaint is not allowed to the children of fatality, as the great stars move in their places …

  I, Johor, from this dark place, Shikasta the stricken one, raise my voice, but it is not in complaint but mourning, as these poor creatures mourn their dead who have lived so briefly that once a sheep or a deer would have lived deeper and longer, breathed more fully.

  Today I walked through the streets of the city that stands where the Round City once stood, an agglomeration of streets, buildings, markets, put up anyhow, anywhere, without skills or symmetry or mastery, or even an inkling of the knowledge of how such places may be built – I walked and looked at the faces of traders, brothel-keepers, dealers in money, saw how these victims treat each other, as if their fate were felt in them as a licence to cheat, lie, and murder and regard every passer-by only as a possibility for gain, to live as if each were alone in enemy territory and with no hope of reprieve.

  Yet there are a few who are not like this, and who know that there will be reprieve – some day, somehow.

  I sat in exactly that spot where I once sat with Jarsum and the others when they heard their sentence and the sentence of Rohanda: where that building was, surrounded by the warm glowing patterns and stones of the created city, is a narrow street of hovels made with sun-baked mud, and every face was deformed, inwardly or outwardly.

  There are no eyes there that can meet your own frankly, without suspicion or fear, in acknowledgement of kinship.

  This is a terrible city. And our envoys say that they are the same, all these great cities, every one engaged in warring, cheating, making treaties which are dissolved in treachery, stealing each other’s goods, snatching each other’s flocks, capturing each other’s people to make slaves.

  There are the rich, but only a few; and the innumerable slaves and servants who are the owned and the used.

  Women are slaves to their beauty, and they regard their children as secondary to the admiration of men.

  Men treat the women according to their degree of beauty, and the children only according to how they will advance themselves, their names, their properties.

  Sex in them is twisted, broken: their desperation with the little dream that is their life between birth and death feeds sex to a famine and a flame.

  What is to be done with them? What can be done?

  Only what has had to be done so often before, with the children of Shammat, Shammat the disgraced and the disgraceful …

  My friend Taufiq has gone on a journey to the Northwest fringes, and he has said it is because he does not want to be here to see again what he has seen before.

  I and your permanent agent Jussel left the cities and went among the herdsmen on the plains. We travelled from herd to herd, tribe to tribe. These are simple people, with the straightforwardness of those who deal close to the necessities of nature. I found descendants of Davidic stock, and they showed honesty, hospitality, and above all a hunger for something different.

  With a tribe that manifested these characteristics more than the others, we stayed as ordinary travellers, and when affinity was accepted by them, showing itself as trust and wanting us to stay on with them, we revealed ourselves as from ‘somewhere else’, and on a mission. They spoke of us as Lords, Gods, and Masters. These terms remain in their songs and their tales.

  We told them if they would maintain certain practices, which had to be done exactly, and changed as necessity required, keeping alive among themselves, their tribe, and their descendant
s the knowledge that these practices were required by the Lords, the Gods, then they would be saved from the degeneration of the cities (which they abhor and fear) and their children would be strong and healthy, and not become thieves and liars and murderers. This strength, this sanity, a bond with the sources of the knowledge of the Gods, would be maintained in them as long as they were prepared to do according to our wishes.

  We renewed our instructions for safe and wise existence on Shikasta – moderation, abstention from luxury, plain living, care for others whom they must never exploit or oppress, the care for animals, and for the earth, and above all, a quiet attention to what is most needed from them, obedience. A readiness to hear our wishes.

  And we told the most respected of the tribe, a male already old – in their terms – that in his veins ran the ‘blood of the Gods’, and his progeny would always remain close to the Gods, if they kept up the right ways.

  We caused him to have two sons, both irradiated by Canopean vibrancies.

  And we went back to the cities, to see if we could find any with enough individuals in them to make it possible to redeem them. None could be saved. In each were a few people who could hear us, and these we told to leave at once with any who would listen to them.

  We returned to our old man among his flocks whose sons had by then been born, and told him that apart from his family, his tribe, and certain others, soon none would remain alive, for the cities would be destroyed, because of their wickedness. They had fallen victim to the enemies of the Lord, who at all times worked against the Lord to capture the hearts and minds of our creatures.

  He pleaded with us.

  Others of the few good people in the cities pleaded with us.

  I do not wish to write further of this.

  Having made sure of the safety of those who could be saved, we signalled to the space-fleet, and the cities were blasted into oblivion, all at the same time.