Shikasta Read online

  A twilight of grief, mists of hungry longing, a sucking drag of all the emotions – and I had to force each step, and it was as if my ankles were being held by hands I could not see, as if I walked weighted by beings I could not see. Out of the mists I came at last and there, where last time I was here I had seen grasslands, streams, grazing beasts, now was only a vast dry plain. Two flat black stones marked the Eastern Gate, and assembled there were throngs of poor souls yearning out and away from Shikasta, which lay behind them on the other side of the dusty plains of Zone Six. Feeling me there, for they could not then see me, they came jostling forward like blind people, their faces turning and searching, and they groaned, a deep yearning groan, and as I still did not show myself, they began a keening chant, or hymn, which I remembered hearing in Zone Six all those thousands of years before.

  Save me, God,

  Save me, Lord,

  I love you,

  You love me.

  Eye of God,

  Watching me,

  Pay my fee,

  Set me free …

  Meanwhile, my eyes were at work on those faces! How many of them were familiar to me, unchanged except for the ravages of grief, how many of them I had known, even in the First Time, when they were handsome, wholesome, sturdy animals, all self-reliance and competence. Among them I saw my old friend Ben, descendant of David and his daughter Sais, and he sensed me so strongly that he was standing close against me, tears running down his face, his hands held out as if waiting for mine. I manifested myself in the shape he had seen me last, and put my hands in his, and he flung himself into my arms and stood weeping. ‘At last, at last,’ he wept, ‘have you come for me now? May I come now?’ – and all the others pressed in about us, clutching and holding, and I nearly lost myself into the gulf of their longing. I stood there feeling myself sway, feeling my substance dragged out of me, and I stepped back from them, making them release me, and Ben, too, took away his hands, but stood close, moaning, ‘It’s been so long, so long …’

  ‘Tell me why you are still here?’ I insisted, and they became silent while Ben spoke. But it was no different from what he had told me before, and as he finished and the others stood crying out their stories one after another, I knew I was caught and bound by the necessities of Zone Six, and my whole being was fermenting with impatience and even fear, for all my work was ahead of me, my work was calling me – and I could not get myself free. What they told me was always the same, had always been the same – and I wondered if they remembered how I had stood here, they had stood there, so long ago, saying the same things … they had made themselves leave this gate, and they had turned themselves around and crossed the plain, and had entered Shikasta – some of them recently, some of them not for centuries or millennia – and all had succumbed to Shikasta, had suffered some failure of purpose and will, and had been expelled back to this place, clustering around the Eastern Gate. They had tried again, some of them, had succumbed again, again found themselves here – on and on, for some, while others had given up all hope of ever being strong enough to enter Shikasta and win its prize, which was, by enduring it, to be free of it forever; and hung and drifted, thin miserable ghosts, yearning and hungering for ‘Them’ who would come for them, would lift them out and away from this terrible place as a mother cat takes its kittens to safety. The idea of rescue, of succour, was evidenced here always, at this gate, as strongly as I have known it anywhere, and the clutch and cling of it was maddening me.

  ‘Ben,’ I said, and I was speaking to them all, through him, ‘Ben, you have to try again, there is no other way.’

  But he was weeping and clasping me, begging, pleading – I was in a storm of sighs and tears.

  He had not given up. I could not accuse him of that! Again and again he had hovered waiting at Shikasta’s ‘gates’, and when his turn came he had gone down full of purpose and determination that this time at last … but then, it was not until he left Shikasta, after months or years or a full life-span (whatever it was at that time) that he remembered, back in Zone Six, what he had set out to do. He had meant to save himself by the use of the terrors and hazards of Shikasta so that he would crystallize into a substance that could survive and withstand, but when he came to himself he realized he had spent his life again in self-indulgence and weakness and a falling away into forgetfulness. Again and again … so that now he regarded the place with such horror that he could not force himself to line up with the crowds of souls waiting at the Shikastan entrances for a chance of rebirth. No, he had given up. He was doomed, like all the rest here, to wait and to wait until ‘They’ came to take him away. Until I came … and he held me and would not let go.

  I said what I had said to them before, to him before: ‘You must all make your way across the plain to the other side, and you must patiently wait your turn – but it will not be so long a wait now, for Shikasta is being crowded with souls, they are being born in droves, more and more. Go, and wait and try again.’

  A great clamour and a complaint went up all around me.

  Ben cried, ‘But it is worse now, they say. It gets worse and harder. If I could not succeed then, why should I now? I can’t …’

  ‘You must,’ I said, and began to force my way through them.

  And now Ben let out a roaring raucous laugh, an accusation. ‘There you go,’ he shouted, 'you're all right, you can come and go as you please, but what of us?’

  I had passed through. Well away from them, I looked back. The crowd there wailed and lamented and swayed about under the force of their grief. But Ben took a step forward from them. And another. I pointed across the plain, and watched him take a painful step forward. He was going to try. He was on his way over that vast, painful plain. I heard them singing as I went on:

  Eye of God,

  Watching me,

  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. S
irius 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.