Shikasta. Doris Lessing
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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 descendants 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.
Deserts lie where these cities thrived.
The fertile, rich, teeming places, with the populous corrupt cities – all desert now, and the heat waves shimmer and sizzle, for there are no trees, no grass, no green.
And again I have seen all the animals rushing away, great herds of them, galloping and tossing their heads and crying out – running from the habitations of men.
History of Shikasta, VOL. 997, Period of the Public Cautioners. EXCERPTS FROM SUMMARY CHAPTER.
While we can date the end of this period exactly, to the year, it is not so easy to mark its beginning. For instance, do we class Taufiq and Johor as public warners? On every one of their visits they cautioned – or perhaps reminded is the better word – anybody who could hear what was being said to them. Visits of various sorts continued without intermission almost from the time of the retreat of the ice, and while most were ‘secret’ – meaning that the individuals contacted were not aware this person among them was from another star system – there was always, somewhere on Shikasta, an envoy or agent of some class or calibre at work quite openly, explaining, exhorting, reminding. So it can be said that Shikasta has always been provided with public advisers, except for a very short time indeed, 1,500 (their) years at the end.
But this volume covers that period from about a thousand years before the first destruction, the inundation, of the cities of the peculiarly well-favoured and advantaged area around and south of the Great Seas, until that date 1,500 years before the end. A close reading of the various available texts will make it clear why this time was considered by us as worth the continuous supply of our emissaries. It cannot be said that there had been a change of policy towards Shikasta – that can never, could not, be possible: our long-term policies remain intact. Nor can it be said that the general degeneration of the Shikastan stock or stocks was unforeseen. The difference between this period and others is rather in emphasis, in scale. When civilization after civilization, culture after culture, has had to be tolerated as long as was possible because of its low level of accomplishment (according to Canopean standards) and then either allowed to run down and vanish from the weight of its corruption, or be destroyed deliberately by us as a danger to the rest of Shikasta, to us, or to other Canopean colonies, when such a state of affairs has been