Shikasta. Doris Lessing
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report is one of success.
It is this mission’s opinion that conditions are ripe for the establishment of the Lock. The Giants are anxious for this. Without in any way complaining or wishing to hasten phases which should not be hastened, they feel excluded from the common contacts of the galaxy. While none of them, as an individual, remembers genuine contact – the free flow of thought, ideas, information, growth between planet and planet across our galaxy – it is not long since the oldest of the Colony 10 immigrants died, and, in any case, their genetic memory is strong, active, developing. And all their preparations for the establishment of the Lock are made.
A WARNING
There are persistent rumours – mostly formalized as tales and songs told by the Natives, who get news very fast as their groups meet in the course of hunting or other expeditions – that ‘down South’ there are races of extremely warlike and hostile beings. The Giants have sent expeditions to the two main landmasses, and have found only that the species established by Sirius are flourishing. (These will be the subject of a subreport.) It is clear to us that the Sirian tutors have caused these rumours to spread, so as to prevent our experimentees from wandering over into their territory. The Giants, who understood this, have created new legends and stories, and are doing everything to create mental sets that will keep our bargain with Sirius.
Nothing of this is more than was to be expected, but there is something else. There are persistent rumours about ‘spies’, both among the Natives and among the Giants. These spies do not enter Giant territory, but appear quite frequently among the Natives, and everywhere over the northern hemisphere. At first the Giants believed these to be from Sirian colonies, on ordinary fact-finding missions, but they now believe there are also spies from some other empire. They are cautious about committing themselves, but repeat that the distinguishing feature of these creatures is not in appearance, but in behaviour. In short, they showed every feature of the Degenerative Disease. In our view everything we have heard can only confirm the presence of Shammat.
OUR CONCLUSIONS
1 The Lock may begin. We have optimum conditions.
2 It should not be forgotten in our plans that this planet is subject to sudden and drastic change.
3 Inquiries should be made from Sirius if spies from Shammat have been found in their territories.
4 Attention should be directed to what Shammat is likely to be wanting. On the face of it there is no place for Shammat on this planet.
Shortly after that the Lock was established, and was a success, making missions and special envoys unnecessary. The minds of the Giants – or to put it more accurately, factually, the Giant-mind – had become one with the mind of the Canopean System, at first partially, and tentatively, but it was an ever-growing and sensitizing current. What came through from Rohanda was all good news. To absorb the tapes and records from that period of nearly ten thousand years is to participate in achievement, success, development. Few of our colonies have fulfilled our plans so hearteningly. The ‘spies’ of the mission’s report mentioned above seemed to fade out of the picture. It was assumed on Canopus that they were destroyed by the suddenness of the Lock – that they had not been able to stand the change to higher and finer vibrations, though we did not rule out the possibility that these creatures of Shammat had evolved, rather than died out, and possibly even in a way that might contribute to the general variety and richness of Rohanda.
We have to look at things now rather differently. In short, it is a question, if not of apportioning blame – never a very helpful process, tending always to draw the attention away from essentials, rather than focusing it – then of knowing what went wrong, so as to avoid it on other planets. But the main cause of the disaster was what that word dis-aster implies: a fault in the stars. That we could not foresee, beyond acknowledging that nothing on Rohanda could be taken for granted. If there had not been that shift in stellar alignments, it would not have mattered what the Shammat agents were doing, or plotting.
But how was it we did not know they were there?
The fault was partly ours – Canopus. As for Sirius, our relations continued to be formally correct: exchanges of information took place between the Colonial Services on the mother planets. At the local Rohandan or Shikastan level, they did not behave worse than we had expected, considering the much lower level of their Empire. But it is this lower level of the Sirian Empire which is the key to this and other problems of Rohanda/Shikasta; and my understanding of it is different now. It must be remembered that we servants of Canopus are also in the process of evolution, and our understandings of situations change as we do. [See History of the Sirian Empire.]
In short, we were not thinking much of Shammat at all. It is easy now to say we were mistaken. Puttiora itself was concerned, or so it seemed, to keep well out of our way: the alliance between the Empire of Sirius and the Canopean Empire was not to be taken lightly! Throughout our part of the galaxy there was peace, there was harmonious development, and no one challenged us. Why should they? Seldom has the galaxy seen such a blaze of accomplishment, such a long period without any war at all.
Perhaps it is the fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same – to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel. It is not that Canopus did not guard itself from the vile Puttiora emanations, that we did not keep ourselves informed about that revolting empire, which dismayed us more because it could only remind us of our earlier, less pleasant stages of development – it was not that we were negligent in that. But Puttiora did not challenge us anywhere else – so why on Rohanda?
And so we did not take Shammat enough into account. That Puttiora should allow an outpost on a planet all rock and desert had always seemed to us inexplicable, though the rumours did come that Shammat had been colonized by criminals fleeing from Puttiora, that Puttiora had ignored them until it was too late. We had no idea at all of how Shammat was sucking and draining sources of nourishment everywhere they could be found, of how it built itself up, a thief getting fat on its loot. When Shammat was already a successful pirate state, we still thought of it as a disgraceful but unimportant appendage to the terrible but fortunately far-distant Puttiora.
And what of the Giants, that alert, intelligent species who had everything on Rohanda under their control?
Again, we believe that this is a question of benign and nurturing minds not being able to credit the reality of types of mind keyed to theft and destruction. Colony 10 had never been anything but a place of fruitful cooperation, and as I have said, they are peculiarly well adapted to harmonious symbiosis with others. And on Rohanda they had not experienced setback and threat. We now believe it is a disadvantage to allow too much prosperity, ease of development – and on none of our other colonies have we again been satisfied with an easy triumphant growth. We have always inbuilt a certain amount of stress, of danger.
But suppose there had never been a disaster? Probably no one would ever have known that Shammat was on Rohanda … for Shammat can succeed only where there is disequilibrium, harm, dismay.
We had very little notice of the crisis. There was no reason to expect it. But the balances of Canopus and her System were suddenly not right. We had to find out what was wrong and very quickly. We did. It was Rohanda. She was out of phase, and rapidly worsening. The Lock was weakening. There were shifts in the balance of the forces from inside the body of Rohanda. These answered a shift – and now we had to look outwards, away from Rohanda – in the balances of powers elsewhere, among the stars who were holding us, Canopus, in a web of interacting currents with our colonized planets. Rohanda had felt the wrong alignment first, because it is her nature to be sensitive. Rohanda was at risk, Rohanda must be urgently rescued, held in phase, adjusted – so went our early thought.
But it was soon established that this could not be. Rohanda could not hold her place in our System. It was not so much a question of jettisoning her, as of her jettisoning herself.
Very well then: we could cushion and provide … so went our thought in that second stage of our discovery.
Rohanda was in for a long period – but at that stage we had