Shikasta

DOCTOR HEBERT to BENJAMIN SHERBAN

Attached is a list of all the people who are about to leave on the dangerous and difficult journey to you. Mrs. Coldridge says that a short description of each one will be helpful and I believe she is right. The qualifications of the professional people are briefly sketched, and the medical history of those who were patients in various hospitals Mrs. Coldridge and I have worked in. In each we found people who had various Capacities in embryo or in potential and because of a misunderstanding of the phenomena they experienced had been classed as ill and incarcerated temporarily or permanently, but due to good fortune or a stronger than usual constitution their treatment had not damaged them. Of course nothing could or can be done for the victims of more draconian or prolonged treatments. It has been no easy task to persuade these people of their own possibilities, since such arguments fell on ears conditioned to be thinking of these either as unscientific or as so "lunatic fringe" that they could not even be listened to. But patience has worked wonders, and here are the results of many years of efforts, all of them undertaken behind the backs of hospital authorities and in conditions always of difficulty and sometimes even of danger. Mental hospitals have not been the safest places to be, not anywhere in the world! These are all people, too, who because of their experience are inured to hardship, misunderstanding, uncertainty, and a capacity for suspending judgement that is the inevitable reward of having to undergo years of suspending judgement on the workings of their own minds. These are most useful qualities! You can believe that I speak from experience! When I discovered in myself certain Capacities my first reaction was that of one who has found an enemy within the gates. For until I met Mrs. Coldridge and could understand what it was she was saying, and - even more - understood her long and painful history, I did not have the ability to be patient with my own flounderings in a realm so new to me that it seemed at first enemy territory. To sharpen this point: all these people can take weight, responsibility, burdens, difficulties, delays, the loss of hope. As we know, this is essential equipment for these hard times... I write this and marvel at the inadequacies of language! What we all live through is worse than our worst nightmares could have warned us of. Yet we do live through them, and some of us, a few, will survive. And that is all that we - the human race - need. We must look at it this way. I want to say something to you that I regard as a testament, an act of faith! It is that if human beings can stand a lifetime of the sort of subjective experience that it has been Mrs. Coldridge's lot to undergo, if they can patiently and stubbornly suffer assaults on their very bastions, as she has done, if we can face living, day after day after day, through what most people could only describe as "hell" and come out the other end, on some sort of even keel, even if damaged - as Mrs. Coldridge would be the first to agree she is - if we, the human race, have in us such strengths of patience and endurance, then what can we not achieve? Mrs. Coldridge has been the inspiration of my life. When I first encountered her, a bedraggled unfortunate, a mere skeleton with vast frightened blue eyes wandering along the corridors of the Lomax Hospital in a dreadful suburb of one of our ugliest cities, she was just another of the deteriorated wrecks among whom I had spent so much of my life, and whom I certainly never regarded as holding the possibilities of any revelations or lessons - yet it was this lunatic, for she was that when I first met her - who has taught me what courage, what tenacity, is possible in a human being, and therefore in us all. What else is there for any of us but courage? And perhaps even that is only a word for being prepared to go on living at all. I send you my best wishes for the success of your undertakings - hoping that this assembly of tired phrases will in fact convey to you what I feel. And I entrust to you these people who... what can I say? I part with them in the same spirit a child uses when he launches a leaf into a torrent of street water. I shall pray for you and for them. This on behalf of myself only, for I fear Mrs. Coldridge is scornful of religion. With her experiences I feel she will be forgiven.

BENJAMIN SHERBAN to GEORGE SHERBAN

Well my little brother! Here we all are, present and correct. Five hundred of us. The Pacific is terrific, despite everything, forgive the frivolity in these hard times. To get down to essentials. The inland water is clean - well, more or less, the food plentiful, and no natives, for these were taken off twenty years ago to clear the area for H. Bomb tests. Who were they to protest? When their Masters spoke? Anyway, it is an ill wind, for there is now plenty of room for us. So far no casualties. Very little illness, and anyway we have suitable supplies both of medics and medicines. Quite a little township is already up, with all cons if not all mod cons. It is Paradise nowe. But for how long? Aye, there's the rub. If I sound manic, then of course it is because I simply ca

GEORGE SHERBAN to SHARMA PATEL

Dearest Sharma,

First of all, Greetings! In any style you like. No, I am not laughing at you, I assure you. I am writing this in great haste late at night because I get the impression very strongly that you have a change of plan. Yes, I do remember how you laugh at me when I say such things. And I feel sorrowful because I have something of importance to say, but I feel you will not listen to me. But perhaps you will, perhaps you can, just this once, and so I am writing to say this to you: Please stick to your plan and please leave at the time you said you would. Please do not go down into Encampment 8. I beg of you. And if you are prepared, just this once, to trust me, to believe me, take as many of your staff with you as will go with you. Don't stay where you are and don't go down into Camp 8. How can I reach you? How can I persuade you? Do you have any idea what it feels to know someone as I know you, to hear you say I love you, and with such depth of feeling and such sincerity! - and yet know that I shall not be believed, no matter what I say. You will not do as I ask, I know that. And yet I must try.

Sharma, what can I do to make you listen to me? This once, believe me. If I said to you, leave your position at the head of your Army, leave your honours and your responsibilities, you would lecture me for my lack of understanding of your equality with me, my ignorance about women and their capacities, but you would suddenly, even surprising yourself, leave everything behind you, your powers, your position, as if you had been hypnotised, and you would come with me, like a sleepwalker, presenting yourself to me with a smile that said: Here I am. And from that moment you would never again agree with me in anything, or fall in with anything I wished, or trust me. Your life would be a demonstration of how badly I treated you. Do you know this, Sharma? Is that not a remarkable thing? Perhaps you do not agree that this is exactly what would happen. And no, I am not saying that I want you to do any of these things, no I do not. I am only begging you, begging you - listen to me, and don't go down to Encampment 8. Sharma my love, will you listen to me, please listen to me...(This letter was not sent.)