Shikasta. Doris Lessing
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they had died out, perhaps from an epidemic, and now there was only himself. If there were others now on the mountain he did not know of them. He came shambling along beside me as I walked up mountains and down them, and up them and down again, and then left them behind and went down and down, with snows behind us, and then through the marvellous untouched forests and down again through regions of flowering scented bushes – and there in front of us were the steamy southern jungles, and beyond them, but very far away, the sea. Did he know of the sea? But he could not understand anything of my attempts at explanation.
What I had to do was to walk back to the settlements of Natives who had escaped from the Round City, for there I would meet again with Sais and her father. I tried to persuade this poor animal to come with me, for I believed that the Natives would befriend him. At least Sais would. But when I reached the low foothills beyond which stretched the jungles, he became silent and morose, turning his face away from me continually, as if I had turned myself away from him, and then he came stumbling and running to me, and he clutched at my arms, and tried to hold my hands so fast in his I could not leave him. Great tears ran from his kind brown eyes, and disappeared into the fur of his cheeks, and streaked his chest with wet. He let out whimpers, then a roar of pain, and ran back, falling and getting up again, till he reached the shelter of the trees. He stood with the foothills at his back, and stared and peered after me, and shouted farewells that were a plea: come back, come back! Then he ran out a little way after me, but retreated again. I waved until he was no more than a little dot under the trees that it was hard to believe from where I stood a couple of miles away were so tall. But I had to go on. And so I left him to his solitudes.
I had been gone half a year by the time I reached the settlement. I was concerned for Sais and David, but there was no news of them. It even seemed as if they had already been forgotten. I made myself a shelter of earth and logs, and waited. Meanwhile, I tried to teach those among the Natives who seemed intelligent what I could of Canopus and how they could live so as to limit the power of Shammat over them. But they could not take it in.
They were prepared, though, to learn anything I could teach in the realm of the practical arts, which they were in danger of forgetting. I taught them – or retaught them – gardening and husbandry. I taught them to tame a goatlike creature, which could give them milk, and I demonstrated butter and cheese-making. I taught them how to choose plants for their fibres, and to prepare the fibres and to weave them, and to dye them. I showed them how to make bricks from the earth and fire them. All these crafts I was teaching to creatures who had known them for thousands of years and had forgotten them a few months ago. It was hard, sometimes, to believe that they were not making fun of me, as they watched me, and then their faces lit up with amazement and delight as they saw cheese, or fired pots, or the suppleness of properly cured hides.
Two years after they had left me, Sais and David came. Even as they walked into the settlement, I could see they had had a hard time. They were wary and careful, and ready to defend themselves – which they nearly had to do, for their friends, even their family, had forgotten them. They were lean and burned brown. The girl had grown into her proper height in that journey, but was still much shorter than her father, shorter than the average of the Natives, and I saw that a reduction in height was very likely beginning.
They had succeeded in reaching most of the settlements. They had walked, ridden on the backs of animals, used canoes and boats. They had not stayed in any one place more than a day. They had done exactly what I had ordered – talked of Canopus, watched for the effect, and never used the Signature unless they had to.
In two places they had been chased away, and threatened with death if they returned.
Both talked of dead people they had seen in the settlements. It was not fear they showed, or sorrow or grief: just as the death of Sais’s mother had left her more puzzled than grieved, so the evidences of the nearness of death such as an unburied corpse lying in a forest, or a group going past with a dead person on a litter, excited in them efforts at understanding. My attempts to make death real for them, by linking it with the Signature, had not succeeded. They could not believe in death for themselves, because those robust bodies knew that hundreds of years of life lay ahead, and their bodies’ knowledge was stronger than the feeble thoughts of their impaired minds. They told me as if it were an extraordinary fact I could not really be expected to believe that some corpses they had seen had been killed in quarrels: yes, people killed each other! They did! There was no doubt of it!
In many settlements it had become the practice for many or most, particularly the older Natives who were finding it hard to adjust to new conditions, to make excursions to the Stones, and subject themselves to sensations felt first as horrible, and then as attractive or at least compulsive.
Yet the repetition of my orders had made a difference. In nearly all the settlements people had memorized the words that had been brought to them by these two strangers, repeating over and over to themselves, to each other: Canopus says we must not make servants of each other, Canopus says … Canopus wills …
Yes, over and over again, in a hundred different places, Sais had said, or chanted, for the words had turned into a song, or chant:
Canopus says we must not waste or spoil,
Canopus tells us not to use violence on each other
and had heard these words being whispered or said or sung as she left.
Sais had grown in every way in those two years. Her father remained an amiable, laughing man who could not keep anything in his head, though he had guarded her everywhere they went, since ‘Canopus said so.’ While of course in no way approaching the marvellous quick-mindedness and mental development of the time ‘before the Catastrophe’ – as the songs and tales were now putting it – she had in fact become steadier-minded, clearer, more able to apprehend and to keep, and this was because she had carried the Signature and had guarded it. She was a brave girl – that I had known before sending her out – and a strong one. But now I could sit with her and talk, and this was real talk, a real exchange, because she could listen. It was slow, for that starved brain kept switching off, a blank look would come into her eyes, then she would shake herself and set herself to listen, to take in.
One day she handed me back the Signature, though I had not asked her for it. She was pleased with herself that she had managed to keep it safe and it was hard for her to let go of it. I took it back, only temporarily, though she did not know that, and told her that now the most important part of what she was to learn and do was just beginning. For quite soon I had to leave Shikasta, leave for Canopus, and she would remain as custodian of the truth about Shikasta, which she must learn, and guard and impart to anybody who would listen to her.
She wept. So did her father David. And I would have liked to weep. These unfortunate creatures had such a long ordeal in front of them, such a path of wandering and hazards and dangers – but these they did not seem anywhere near being able to understand.
I let them recover fully from their journey, and then I got the three of us together in a space between huts near where the central fire burned, and I laid the Signature on the earth between us, and I got them used to the idea of listening to instruction. After some days of this, while others had seen us, and some had stood listening a little way off, wondering, and even interested, I asked that all of the people of the settlement, who were not actually hunting or on guard, or in some way attending to the maintenance of the tribe – for now one had to call them that – should sit with us, every day, for an hour or so and listen. They must learn to listen again, to understand that in this way they could gain information. For they had forgotten it entirely. They remembered nothing of how the Giants had instructed them, could understand only what they could see, when I rubbed stones over a hide to soften it, or shook sour milk to make butter. Yet at night they did listen to David, singing of ‘the old days,’ and then they sang too …
Soon, every day, at the hour when the sun went, just after the evening meal, I talked, and they listened; they would even acknowledge what I said in words that came out from the past, in a fugitive opening of memory – and then their eyes would turn aside, and wander. Suddenly they weren’t there. How can I describe it? Only with difficulty, to Canopeans!
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