Shikasta

I have understood that the vague blank look is from the past. It is not what we are now. Do you think it is possible it is not so much we forget things that are awful but that we never really believed in them happening.

But have you noticed that everyone is different now? We are all much more lively and alert and don't need to sleep all the time and we are all of a piece and not all at sixes and sevens. Do you know what I mean?

I have lost my faithful jaguar. I was walking up and up, along a quite high narrow path, among grasslands, and there was a shepherd, quite of the old sort, with a dog and a donkey. I was worried about the jaguar. The dog I could order about but not the jaguar. The shepherd, who was a young man with a wife and two small children in a nice little house on the hillside was worried too. But my big dog made friends with his dog. And then the jaguar went and lay down a little apart from the dogs. The woman came out of her house with some milk in a basin and he drank it. I slept the night there and then went on alone because my jaguar decided to stay with the shepherd and the woman, and as I went off I saw him helping the shepherd round up some sheep, with the two dogs.

So I was quite alone for twenty miles or more. And then I saw someone ahead of me, and thought That looks like George. And it was George.

He told me you have had your baby, Suza

For a long time in the guesthouses and walking along by myself I was thinking of questions I wanted to ask George, and I asked him first of all about the towns, and how they came to be like that, and he said they are functional.

He said that you over there are building a town and it is like the old Star of David. I said, how did you know what it had to be and where. His reply to that was, wait a little and you will see.

He took me first of all to one of the old towns, not a big one, it was on a branch of the Rio Negro. I hated being in it, I felt sick and uneasy from the moment I got into it. And it is a dying town. People are leaving it. Everywhere buildings are collapsing and not being rebuilt. All the centre was quite empty.

I said, Why?

He said, the new cities are functional.

I could see he wasn't going to explain, I had to work it out.

We stayed the night in a broken-down hotel. It was awful. People are still suspicious and frightened in these places. I felt ill and I could see George didn't feel good. All the next day we walked around the town quite aimlessly. People noticed George, and they wanted to talk to him. He talked to them. Or they would simply follow him. They all looked so desperate and needful.

In the evening he just walked away from the town and about three hundred people followed us, though he had not said one word about their coming too. It was cold that night, and it was wet and misty, and we were all pretty miserable, but we walked on steadily with George and still not a word had been said about what was happening.

When the sun rose it was cold, cold, cold and we were all hungry.

George was standing on a hillside, a steep rocky one, and there was a plateau above us. The birds were wheeling about overhead as the sun came up and they shone in the sunlight. I have never been so cold.

George remarked, in a quite ordinary sort of voice, that it would be a good idea if we made a town there.

People said, Where? Where should we start?

He didn't reply. Meanwhile, we were all dying of hunger. Then there was a flock of sheep and another shepherd, and we bought some sheep and made a fire and cooked some meat, and got ourselves fed.

Then we were roaming about over the hillside and the plateau. There were about twenty of us doing this. Suddenly we all knew quite clearly where the city should be. We knew it all at once. Then we found a spring, in the middle of the place. That was how this city was begun. It is going to be a star city, five points.

We found the right soil for bricks nearby and for adobe. There is everything we can need. We have already started the gardens and the fields.

Some of us go into the decaying town every day to get bread and stuff, to keep us going.

The first houses are already up, and the central circular place is paved, and the basin of the fountain is made. As we build, wonderful patterns appear as if our hands were being taught in a way we know nothing about.

It is high up here, very high, with marvellous tall sky over us, a pale clear crystalline blue, and the great birds circling in it.

George left after a few days. I walked with him a little way. I said to him, What is happening, why are things so different?

So he told me.

George says he is going into Europe with a team. He says that you knew he would be going, but not that he would be going now, and that I should tell you that when his task in Europe is finished, his work will be finished. I did not understand until he had left that it meant he would die then and we would not see him again.

So here we all are.

I am writing this, sitting on a low white wall that has the patterns on it. People are all around me, working at this and that. We are in tents in the meantime, everything makeshift and even difficult but it doesn't seem so, and everything is happening in this new way, there is no need to argue and argue and discuss and disagree and confer and accuse and fight and then kill. All that is over, it is finished, it is dead.

How did we live then? How did we bear it? We were all stumbling about in a thick dark, a thick ugly hot darkness, full of enemies and dangers, we were blind in a heavy hot weight of suspicion and doubt and fear.

Poor people of the past, poor poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, not knowing anything, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for.

I can't stop thinking of them, our ancestors, the poor animal-men, always murdering and destroying because they couldn't help it.

And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted and filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined.

And here we all are together, here we are...

Students are directed to:

The Shorter History of Canopus

Relations Between Canopus and Sirius

1 War. 2. Peace.

The History of the Sirian Empire

The History of Puttiora

Shammat the Shameful

The Memoirs of Taufiq

Nasar, Ussell, Taufiq, Johor: Selected Material

The Sirian Experiments on Shikasta

The Penultimate Days Before the Catastrophe on Shikasta

The Little People: Trade, Art, Metallurgy

Envoys of the Last Days: A Concise History

Tales of the Three Planets

The Canopean Bond (On Shikasta, "SOWF"); properties of,

densities of, variations in effects on different species, complete

absence of. (Shammat) (Physics Section)