Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  All over Shikasta, in those last days, moved our agents, our servants, our friends, and with them went the Signature, imprinted on them, in them, in their substance, just as the sick distortion of Shammat was imprinted on Shammat’s kith and kin; and anyone who retained, anywhere, even a vestige of the shadow of the Signature, felt our presence, looked up – recognized – and followed. Or tried to. I am not saying that our struggle was anything but desperate, dire, awful. There were many casualties, failures. But just as, during the last days, in the last phase, Shammat’s agents filled Shikasta with horror, and terror, and self-disgust, and destruction, so, too, did the Shadow of the Signature summon everyone who could remember … there was a sweetness, a promise, a lightness of heart and of hope in those dreadful last days.

  Notes added to the above by JOHOR, TAUFIQ, USSELL, and others

  With so large an area of Shikasta due to be laid waste, one of our preoccupations was of course the preservation of adequate representative genetic material. This was partly accomplished by judicious and specific pressures on certain individuals and groups of individuals capable of putting personal concerns aside in the interests of the broad perspective. For when directed to certain places temporarily or comparatively ‘safe’, this was not necessarily with the idea of their personal survival. Certain types of Shikastan were able to respond very well: in fact their capacity to respond made them eligible. But of course our difficulty was that admirable and useful traits were so mixed with the undesirable. Sirius and its colonies, Canopus and its colonies, Shammat – and others too – all were now in the inheritance of Shikasta. And the increasing pressure on the Shikastan stock from local and external radiation; from the increasingly poisoned and adapted atmosphere; from their sustenance itself, full of every sort of chemical and radiation, from, too, the sober knowledge deep within them of the responsibilities of their destiny: all this had the effect of adapting the genetic material even more, causing sports of all kinds. Some of these were – and are – valuable, with potential. But others, alas, not.

  We shall mention, as an example, a particular hazard that was overcome by – very – long-term foresight and planning: this because it has formed part of the story in this volume, not because it was more or less important than others of our concerns.

  It had long been foreseen that there would be a strong reaction against the white races, whose technology had ruined so much of the world, and so many of its people. There was a real danger that feelings would run so high that there would be a serious depletion of genetic material. The ‘white race’ – or races – were of a very varied genetic mix. Some parts of the globe, even at the end, were still comparatively homogeneous, still virtually unmixed: but the central and western areas of the central landmass, particularly the Northwest fringes, had absorbed such a number of different stocks, from other parts of Shikasta and from outside Shikasta, that it was undesirable this ‘race’ should be lost. A great deal of effort, some of it apparently even bizarre, went into making sure that enough of these animals survived to carry on their genes into the future: these efforts were continuous and energetic everywhere over the northern hemisphere. Or almost everywhere: the Isolated Northern Continent, originally uniformly populated by a fairly homogeneous genetic stock, indigenous, adapted to the surroundings, was supplanted by a conquering people, mostly from the Northwest fringes and the central landmass with nothing in the way of genes that was not already receiving our attention.

  On the whole, the morale of the white ‘race’ in the northern hemisphere did not assist our efforts. Their partial overrunning by the ‘yellow’ races, their continuous and systematic starvation by the ‘coloured’ races anterior to this conquest, out of the typically Shikastan (or Shammatan!) desire for revenge for past humiliations and deprivations, their slow acceptance of the rest of the globe’s view of themselves, which caused a sharp painful readjustment and a relinquishing of assumption of superiority which had sustained them for centuries – all this lowered the tone, and stamina, in the Northwest fringes particularly, to the point where it was affecting not only their own will to live, but also the emanations from these areas: and good strong emanations were essential to our task of trying to prevent unnecessary suffering and bloodshed. The failure of morale swung so far that large numbers of – first of all – the youth, and then the older people, were unable to sustain in themselves any pride in their past at all. All they had accomplished in the way of technical advances, energetic experimentation in patterns of society, justice – fine in concept if not always a success in practice – these accomplishments of theirs seemed to them to be nothing at all, and they were tending to sink into abasement and sullen withdrawal. In fact, this emotional reaction, seeing themselves entirely as villains, the despoilers of the globe, a view reinforced every moment by a thousand exterior sources of propaganda, was as narrow and self-centred as their previous view – when they saw themselves as God-given benefactors of the rest of Shikasta. Both viewpoints failed to see things in interaction, a meshing of events, the reciprocation of needs, abilities, capacities. The ‘white races’, subjugated, insulted, famished, deprived, with large masses of its population drawn off for cheap labour for the use of the reviving parts of the globe, with nothing of its wealth, and little of its culture left, was as unable to see itself as part of a whole as ever it had been. The Shikastan compartmentalism of mind reigned supreme, almost unchallenged – except by our servants and agents, continually at work trying to restore balances, and to heal these woeful defects of imaginative understanding.

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

  Greetings!

  Greetings to the Shammat 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 animositie
s 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 World …

  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 their 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 Goldridge 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 Goldridge 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 … 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 now. 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, civilization, to imagine we ever complained of you, complained about any nasty little part of you …