Shikasta. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 reached, and on a large scale, over large parts of the central landmass, then this has to be thought of as different in kind and degree from one where sparse populations are widely spread, perhaps only just self-sufficient, where a single city whose main purpose was trade and not groups of cities in an imperial bond defined an area or areas, and where one or two of our agents could reach all the inhabitants of a large part of Shikasta simply by quite modest efforts in the course of a limited stay.

      Over the many thousand years of the Period of the Exhorten or Cautioners we observe this series of events, constantly repeated:

      It was observed by us, or reported to us, that the link between Canopus and Shikasta was weakening beyond safe levels.

      This was followed by reports that a culture, a city, a tribe, or groups of individuals vital to our interests were falling away from what had been established as a bond.

      It was urgently necessary to strengthen the link, the bond, by restoring selected individuals to suitable ways of life, thus regenerating and vitalizing areas, cultures, or cities.

      We sent down a technician, or two, or several. It might happen that all but one or two would be working quietly, unknown to the populace.

      This one would have to be born, through Zone Six, and bred in the ordinary way by suitable parents, in order that what was said by – usually – him could take effect.

      A note on sexual choice. Of course developed individuals with us are androgynous, to put it into the nearest Shikastan terminology possible: we do not have emotional or physical or psychological characteristics that are considered as appertaining to one sex rather than another, as is normal on the more backward planets. There have been many of our envoys who have manifested as ‘female’, but since the time of the falling away of the Lock, before when males and females were equal everywhere on Shikasta and neither exploited the other, the females have been in subjection, and this has led to problems which on the СКАЧАТЬ