Shikasta. Doris Lessing
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was enough of the communal mind left to have allowed the other cities to sense what was happening at the Round City? I and David and some others went first of all to the Crescent City, where we found bands of people wandering about outside in the fertile fields of the great river delta. They told us that their city was ‘full of demons’ but that many of the population had not left, for ‘there had been no one to tell them to go, they were waiting for the Giants to come.’ Those who had escaped were making reed huts, and the ground had been cleared for spring planting. The animals had left. We had passed through flocks of every kind moving away from the deadly environs of the Crescent City, and from the creatures moving on two legs who had become their enemies.
To shorten this part of my account: We went from city to city, splitting ourselves into several bands; from the Square City to the City of the Triangle, from the Diamond City to the Octagon, from the City of the Oval to the Rectangular City – and on, and on. It took a full term of the Shikastan journey around its sun. The bands that set forth did not remain as they had been, for some decided to stay with settlements that attracted them, some sickened and died, some, finding a particularly beautiful forest or river, could not leave there: but about a hundred or so, with those who joined, wishing to be of use, or impelled by the new restlessness which was such a feature of this Shikasta, journeyed incessantly for a year, and found that everywhere was the same. The cities were all empty. Not one was anything but a death-trap or a madhouse. Where people had stayed, they had killed themselves or were idiots.
Around each were the new settlements of Natives living in every kind of roughly contrived hut, eating meat they had hunted, wearing skins, tending gardens and fields of grain. If there were any clothes left from their city past, these were being hoarded, were already part of ritual. The storytellers were singing of the Gods who had taught them all they knew, and – for this had been fed into the tales at the beginning – would ‘come again’.
When we got back to the Round City, meaning to walk outside the edge of the Stones, the vibrations had become so bad that we had to make a wide detour. For miles around, there was no life, no animals, no birds. And the vegetation was withering. The settlements we had left had been moved well out and away.
The biggest change was that more children were being born than before. The safeguards had been forgotten: gone was the knowledge of who should give birth, who should mate, what type of person was a proper parent. The knowledges and uses of sex had been forgotten. And whereas previously an individual who died before the natural term of a thousand years was unlucky, it was clear that life-span was about to fluctuate. Some had died already, very young, in middle age, and many of the new babies had died.
This was the situation all over Shikasta a year after the Lock had failed.
At least, there were enough people living well away from the old cities to continue the species. And I knew that although for a time the cities would become more and more dangerous, after three or four hundred years (inadequate information made it impossible to be more definite), when the weather and the vegetation had done their work on the buildings and in the Stones, the cities would all become heaps of ruins, with no potency left in them for good or for harm.
I come to the final phase of my mission.
First of all I had to locate the rebel Giants. I now did have an idea of where they were, for when I was in the Hexagonal City to the north of the Great Mountains, I had seen from very far off a settlement where none was expected, and there were rumours about ghosts and devils ‘the size of trees.’
Again, it was David I decided to take with me. To say that he understood what went on was true. To say that he did not understand – was true. I would sit and explain, over and over again. He listened, his eyes fixed on my face, his lips moving as he repeated to himself what I was saying. He would nod: yes, he had grasped it! But a few minutes later, when I might be saying something of the same kind, he was uncomfortable, threatened. Why was I saying that? and that? his troubled eyes asked of my face: What did I mean? His questions at such moments were as if I had never taught him anything at all. He was like one drugged or in shock. Yet it seemed that he did absorb information, for sometimes he would talk as if from a basis of shared knowledge: it was as if a part of him knew and remembered all I told him, but other parts had not heard a word! I have never before or since had so strongly that experience of being with a person and knowing that all the time there was certainly a part of that person in contact with you, something real and alive and listening – yet most of the time what one said did not reach that silent and invisible being, and what he said was not often said by the real part of him. It was as if someone stood there bound and gagged while an inferior impersonator spoke for him.
He mentioned, when I asked him to come travelling again with me, that he did not want to leave his youngest daughter. He had not ever mentioned this daughter. Where was she? Oh – with friends, he believed. But did he not see her? Was he not responsible for her? He seemed to want to please me, by eagerly nodding his head and producing some phrases to the effect that she was a good girl, and could look after herself. This was the first time I encountered what was to become a typical Shikastan indifference to their progeny.
His daughter Sais was a large, light brown girl, with a mass of bronze tightly curled hair. Everything about her was wholesome and lively. She was not much more than a child, and indeed could look after herself – she had had to. She seemed to have no memory of having been brought up in the Round City, or of her life there with both her parents. She talked of her mother as if she had died many years before, but I discovered she had been killed hunting with a party for deer. A couple of tigers had lain in wait, and knocked her dead with blows from their great paws. Sais did not know that so recently as a year ago such a thing would have been inconceivable. Tigers were, always had been, enemies of Native-kind!
She agreed to come with us.
When the spaceship had first set me down on the planet, it was well to the north of the Great Mountains, on the east of the central landmass. I had walked and ridden west. Now we were walking back eastwards but to the south of the Great Mountains which are such a feature of Shikasta, towering over every other part. The foothills here were higher than the tallest mountains of the southern continents, and we climbed and climbed. All around the central peaks and masses, not one range, but range after range, chain after chain, peak after peak – a world of mountains, north and south, east and west. We looked down from immense heights into the dead Hexagonal City, with its surrounding settlements, which we could not see at all from there. But I did see something quite unexpected. Far below me, in a clearing on a mountainside, was a column, or a pylon – something that glittered, and must be of metal, and was extremely tall, though from here it looked so tiny. This must be something to do with Shammat. Besides, even from where we were high in that marvellous tonic air, I could feel an evil message coming from it to me. I did not want to expose David and Sais to it, and marked where it was, so that I could return to it alone.
We went on down, down, giving the Shammat thing a good distance, and then standing on the slopes of a minor peak, surveying interminable plains, I saw what I expected. We were looking down into the queerest kind of settlement. It had not been put together for shelter or for warmth or for any of the familiar purposes, but was an act of impaired memory.
A tall cylinder lacked a roof, but a couple of branches had been laid across the top. Another, square, had a ragged gap in it. A five-sided shack was leaning and crooked. Every shape and size of building were there, not one complete. The materials had been taken from the Hexagonal City. To carry great stones for several miles was not difficult for these Giants.
What had been in their minds, though? What did they remember of the old cities? How did they explain the vicious radiations they must have submitted themselves to, and how had they been affected?
As we three walked down and down through the wooded slopes of the lower mountains, I spoke of the Giants to David and Sais. We would soon be meeting very tall, very strong people, but no, these were not the Great Ones of the stories and ballads. We would have to be careful and on our guard at all times. It was possible they might harm us.
Thus I tried to prepare these two for what I feared. But how to explain to those who had never known anything like it, never even heard of such a thing, what slavery was,