Shikasta

Pay my fee,

Set me free,

Here I am,

Waiting here,

Save me, God,

Save me, Lord … on, and on, and on.

Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless, I ran across the plain, feeling the dust thick and soft underfoot. I remembered the grasses and bushes and rivers of my last visit, while I stepped across dry channels and used dry riverbeds as roads. Crickets and cicadas, the shimmer of hot light on rock – this would be desert very soon. And I thought of what I must face when I at last was able to enter Shikasta.

Sitting on an outcrop of low stone I saw a figure that was familiar, and I approached a female shape drooping in sorrow and lassitude so deep she did not move as I approached. I stood over her and saw it was Rilla, who on my last visit had been with the crowds at the Eastern Gate.

I greeted her, she lifted her face, and I saw it set in dry, obdurate woe.

‘I know what you are going to say,’ said she.

‘Ben is trying again,’ I said. But when I looked back I could not see him: only the dust hanging reddish in the air, and the dry broken grasses. She looked with me, passively.

‘He is there,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’

‘It is no use,’ she said. ‘I have tried so often.’

‘Are you going to sit here for the rest of time?’

She did not answer, but resumed her post, looking down, motionless. She seemed to herself a static weight, empty; to me she was like a whirlpool of danger. I could see myself, thinned and part transparent, could feel myself sway and lean – towards her, into her locked violences.

‘Rilla,’ I said, ‘I have work to do.’

‘Of course,’ said she. ‘When do you ever say anything different?’

‘Go and find Ben,’ I said.

I walked on. Long afterwards I looked around – I did not dare before, for fear I would turn and run back to her. Oh, I had known her, I had known her well. I knew what qualities were shut up there, prisoners of her despair. She was not looking at me. She had turned her head and was gazing out into the hazy plains where Ben was.

I left her.

I had lost my way. Memories of the last time were not helping me, could not – everything had changed. I was looking for the abode of the Giants. I did not want to see them, because of the degeneration I knew I would find. But they were the quickest way to Taufiq. Taufiq’s condition, as captive of the Enemy, must be – could be no other – an excess of self-esteem, pride, silliness. I could contact Taufiq through the equivalent qualities here. The Giants, then … I had to!

Far away across the deserts were towering peaks of rock, bare black rock, like clusters of fists held into a blood-red sky. Purple clouds, unmoving, thick, heavy. Beneath them drifts of sand hanging in the air like armies of locusts. A still, moribund world. My long spidery shadow lay behind me almost to the horizon, following me black and menacing, an enemy. Shadows lay across the sands to my feet from the peaks. Deep tormenting shadows, full of memories … one of them bulged, moved, separated itself … out came a troop of Giants, and at the first sight of them I felt the movement of the heart like a leaking of strength that means sorrow.

This was the magnificence I remembered? These?

They were tall, their forms were something of what they had been, but they had lost strength and substance. A company of lean, lean-to, shambling ghosts, their movements awkward, their faces empty and full of shadows, they came towards me across the blowing sands, which kept rising and obscuring them and then billowed away behind them, so that they appeared again on a background of suddenly darkened sky, which was a blackish grey on red, grey making turbid the purple clouds, grey heavying and dragging everything, and rising in mists around their feet. They waded towards me through the eddying sands, wraiths, shadows … this was the great race I had come to warn on my first visit, came to warn and sustain, and – it was no use, I could not help it, I heard a wail of mourning come from my lips, and this was echoed by a wail from them, but in them it was a battle cry, or so they meant it. A sad mourning cry, and every gesture, every movement, was stiff with ridiculous hauteur, this company of wraiths was sick with pride of a falsely remembered past, and they would have struck me down with the bones of their arms and hands if I had not held out to them the Signature. They recognized it. Not at once or easily: but they were pulled up short, and stood on the sands in front of me, about two hundred of them, uncertain, half remembering, looking at me, at each other, at the glinting gleaming Thing I was confronting them with … and I was looking from one worn attenuated face to another and yes, I could recognize in those faces the kingly beings I had known.

After a while, at a loss as to what else to do, they turned about, enclosing me in their company, and walked, or stalked, or shambled towards the great rocks. Among these they had built a rough castle, or association of towers. These clumsy structures had nothing in common with what these Giants had built for themselves, in the First Time, but were expressions of pathetic grandiosity. I wanted to say, ‘Do you really imagine that this savage place is anything like what you created to live in when you were yourselves?’

They took me into a long hall of crudely dressed stone. Around the hall were set chairs and thrones, and in these they had placed themselves. At least they did have some inkling that they had been equal, a company of free companions. They sat in poses that said ‘power’, in heavy robes that said ‘pomp’, holding baubles and toys of all kinds, crowns and coronets, sceptres, globes, swords. Where had they found such rubbishy stuff? A trip must have been dared into Shikasta to fetch it!

I looked at these shadows and again was tormented with the need quite simply to keen out my mourning for the loss of all that the First Time had meant, but I was reminding myself not to waste my forces in this way, for I could not afford to let loose what I felt.

I held the Signature out before them, and asked them how they had fared since I had seen them last. A silence, a stirring, and the great hollow faces turned to each other in the shadows of the hall … I noticed I was finding difficulty in distinguishing their features, and peered closely at them. Shining black faces, the various hues of brown, of yellow, ivory, cream … but it was hard to see them. Over a hundred had trooped with me into the hall and filled the chairs and thrones, but it seemed as if there were fewer now. Some chairs stood empty. As I glanced around, chairs that had held occupants stood empty, as forms vanish in a deepening twilight. Only the Signature held light, and life, the Giants were so thin and grey and gone that they were almost transparent – yes, on a shift of pose they seemed to disappear, so that an enormous brown man in his gaudy robes would become a cloak folded over the back of a throne, and strong peering eyes searching my face for clues to memories only just out of mind would dwindle to the dull glitter of paste jewels in a broken tiara slung over the knob of a chairback. They were all dissipating and disappearing even as I sat there and watched.

I said to them, ‘Will you not take your chances on Shikasta? Will you not try to win through that way?’ – but a hiss ran through the company, they moved their limbs and heads restlessly, they checked gestures of aggression, and would have killed me if it had not been for the Signature.

‘Shikasta, Shikasta, Shikasta …’ was the murmuring whisper all around me, and the sound was the hissing of a snake, was hatred, loathing – and a dreadful fear.

They were remembering a little of what they had been: the Signature induced this in them. Nothing much, but they did remember something splendid and right. And they knew what their descendants had become. That was what their faces stated: that even the word Shikasta confronted them with filth and ordure.

‘I need to sit with you here,’ I said, ‘for as long as it takes me to make a visit to Shikasta.’

Again the stirring rearing movement, like threatened horses.

I said, as it was my duty to do, even knowing that they would not listen (not could not, for otherwise I would not have wasted my energies, already depleting), I said, ‘Come with me, I’ll help you, I’ll do everything I can to help you win your way through and out.’

They sat there frozen, this company of half-ghosts. They were unable to move. ‘Very well, then,’ I said. ‘You must sit where you are, till I come back. It is through you I can make this journey.’

And surrounded by these hosts of the dead, sustained by their awful arrogance, I was able to part the mists that divided me from the the realities of Shikasta, and search for my friend Taufiq.

But first I shall set down my recovered memories of my visit to Shikasta, then Rohanda, in the First Time, when this race was a glory and a hope of Canopus. I am also making use of records of other visits to Shikasta in the Time of the Giants.

The planet was for millions of years one of a category of hundreds that we kept a watch on. It was regarded as having potential because its history has always been one of sudden changes, rapid developments, as rapid degradations, periods of stagnation. Anything could be expected of it. But a period of stagnation had held for millennia when the planet was subjected to a prolonged radiation from an exploding star in Andar, and a mission was sent down to report. It was fertile, but mostly swamp. There was vegetation, but it was uniform and stable. There were varieties of lizard in the swamps, and small rodents and marsupials and monkeys on the limited areas of dry land. The drawback to this planet was the short expectation of life. Our rival Sirius had planted some of their species there, and they did not become extinct, but at once their life-spans, previously normal – some thousands of years – adapted, and individuals could expect to live no more than a few years. (I am using Shikastan time measurement.) There had been conferences between specialists on Canopus and Sirius to discuss the possibilities of these short-lived species, and if it was worthwhile to allocate the landmasses between us. Since the Great War between Sirius and Canopus that had ended all war between us, there had been regular conferences to avoid overlapping, or interfering with each other’s experiments. And this practice continues to this time.

The conference was inconclusive. It was not known what to expect from the burst of radiation. Sirius and Canopus agreed to wait and see. Meanwhile, Shammat had also made an inspection – but we did not know about this until later.

Almost at once our envoys reported startling changes in the species. The whole steamy swampy fertile place was sizzling with change. The monkeys in particular were breeding all sorts of variations, some freaks and monsters, but also dramatic variations that showed the greatest promise. And so with all life: vegetation, insects, fish. We saw that the planet was on its way to becoming one of the most fruitful of its class, and it was at this time that it was named Rohanda, which means fruitful, thriving.

Meanwhile, it was still a place of mists, swamps, and dismal wetness. (There are no more depressing places than these planets that are all warm water, cloud, fen, bog, dampness – and no one likes visiting them.) But there was a change in the climate. Water was steaming off the marshes and the swamps and hung in vast lowering clouds. More dry land appeared, though approaching the planet, nothing could be seen but the rolling, seething cloud masses. There was another, completely unexpected, blast of radiation, and the poles froze, holding masses of ice. Rohanda was on its way to becoming the most desirable kind of planet, one with large landmasses and water held in defined areas, or running in channels and streams.

Long before we had planned it, Sirius and Canopus conferred again. Sirius wanted the southern hemisphere for experiments that would complement others they were making in temperate and southerly areas in another of their colonies. We wanted the northern hemisphere, because it was chiefly here that a subgroup of the former ‘monkeys’ had established themselves and were developing. They were already three and four times the height of the little creatures who were their ancestors. They were showing tendencies to walk upright. They showed rapid increases in intelligence. Our experts told us that these creatures would continue a fast evolution and could be expected to become a Grade A species in, probably, fifty thousand years. (Provided of course there were no more accidents of the cosmic type.) And their life-span was already several times what it had been: this was considered the most important factor of all.

Canopus decided to subject Rohanda to an all-out booster, Top-Level Priority, Forced-Growth Plan. This was partly because another of our colonies, unstable, like Rohanda, was known to have only a short life ahead of it. A comet was expected to shift it off course in twenty thousand years. This would upset the so carefully maintained balances of our System. (See Maps and Charts Nos. 67M to 93M, Area 7D3, Planetary Demonstration Building.) If Rohanda could be brought up to operational levels by then, it could take the place in our cosmic scheme of that unfortunate one – whose future alas was exactly as forecast: knocked off balance, it lost all life, and very quickly, and is now dead.

What we needed, to be precise, was to progress Rohanda up to the appropriate level in twenty thousand, not fifty thousand, years.

As is customary, we put out tenders among our colonies for volunteers, and we chose a species from Colony 10, which has been remarkably successful in symbiotic development.

Of course, a species has to be of a certain mental set even to consider such conditions: let us say that they must be adventurers! While the main outlines of a probable development are known, it is never possible to forecast exactly what will happen when two species are put into symbiosis: there are too many unforeseens. And it was not kept from them that Rohanda was by nature unpredictable, unusually subject to chance and change. Above all, it was not known how their life-spans would adjust: if badly, down to the Rohandan current norm, then this volunteering of theirs could be regarded as not far from racial suicide.

But it is enough to say that at that stage and at that time these were a strong and healthy species; they were alert and mentally adaptable; they had the genetic memory of experience in similar experiments.

Small groups of Colony 10 volunteers were introduced successfully onto Rohanda, in various parts of the northern hemisphere. There were a thousand in all, male and female, and almost at once – that is to say, within five hundred years – it was obvious that this was going to be a most successful experiment.

The interaction between the two species was admirable, both being well affected. There were no instinctive aggressions due to genetic incompatibility. We on Canopus were congratulating ourselves.

Well within the twenty thousand years, the younger (ex-monkey) race would have attained the required level; and the fast-developing Colony 10 people would have advanced themselves to a stage where they could be said to have taken an evolutionary step forward that in usual conditions might take ten times as long.