Shikasta

For they could waste it, spend it, use it in the wrong way. It was for this reason they must never pervert themselves in the ruins of the old cities or dance among the Stones. This was why they must never, if they came on sources of intoxication, allow themselves intoxication. But coming from Canopus to Shikasta was a small steady trickle of this substance, and would continue to come, always. This was a promise from Canopus to Shikasta. In due time - I did not say thousands upon thousands of years! - this trickle would become a flood. And their descendants could bathe in it as they played now in the crystal rivers. But there would not be any descendants if they did not take care to preserve themselves. If they, those who sat before me now, listening to these precious revelations, did not guard themselves they would become worse than animals. They must not spoil themselves by taking too much of the substance of Shikasta. They must not use others. They must not let themselves become animals who lived only to eat and to sleep and eat again - no, a part of their lives must be set aside for the remembrance of Canopus, memory of the substance-of-we-feeling, which was all they had.

And there was more, and worse. On Shikasta there were enemies, wicked people, enemies of Canopus, who were stealing the SOWF. These enemies enslaved Shikastans, when they could. They did this by encouraging those qualities that Canopus hated. They thrived when they hurt each other, or used each other - they delighted in any manifestation of the absence of substance-of-we-feeling. To outwit their enemies, Shikastans must love each other, help each other, always be equals with each other, and never take each other's goods or substance... This is what I told them, day after day, while the Signature lay glinting there, in the light that fled from the evening sky, and the light of the flames that burned up as night came.

Meanwhile, Sais was my most devoted assistant. She chose, using faculties that seemed to revive in her, individuals that seemed to her most promising, and repeated these lessons, over and over again. She said them and she sang them, and David made new songs and stories.

When enough people in this settlement were sure of this knowledge, I said, they must travel everywhere over Shikasta and teach it. They must be sure that everyone heard this news, and above all, remembered.

And then it was time for me to leave and go to Zone Six. I put the Signature into Sais's hand before everyone, and said that she was the custodian of it.

I did not say that it was the means of keeping the flow of SOWF from Canopus to Shikasta, but I knew they would soon believe it. And I had to leave her something to strengthen her.

Then I told them that I was going to return to Canopus and that one day I would come again.

I left the tribe one morning very early, as the sun was rising over the clearing that held the settlement. I listened to the birds arguing above me in the ancient trees, and I held out my fingers to a little goat who was a pet, and who came trotting after me. I sent it back, and I went to the river where it was very wide and deep and strong, and would sweep me well away from the settlement so that no one would find my body. I let myself down into it and swam out into the current.

I now return to my visit in the Last Days.

It was necessary that Taufiq should cause himself to be born into the minority race of the planet, the white or pale-ski

Taufiq was John, a name he had used quite often in his career - Jan, Jon, John, Sean, Yahya, Khan, Ivan, and so on. He was John Brent-Oxford, and the parents he had chosen were healthy honest people, neither too high nor too low in the society, which, since it suffered the most cumbersome division into classes and castes, all suspicious of each other, was a matter of importance and of careful judgement.

Taufiq's undertaking was, in order to accomplish what he had to do, to become a person skilled in the regulations with which the various, always warring or quarrelling individuals, or sections of society, controlled themselves and each other. And he had achieved this. His youth had been spent intelligently, he had equipped himself, and was outstanding at an early age. Just as in higher spheres promising youngsters are watched by people they know nothing about, though they may wonder or guess, so in lower spheres of activity possibilities are prepared for those who prove themselves, and John was from childhood observed by "people of influence," as the Shikastan phrase goes. But the "influences" were by no means all of the same kind!

In this corrupt and ghastly age the young man could not avoid having put on him many pressures to leave the path of duty, and it was very early - he was not more than twenty-five years old - that he succumbed. Furthermore, he knew that he was doing something wrong. The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was "destined" to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but - more often and more deeply as he grew older - "impractical." That he did know quite well what he was doing is shown by his tendency to laugh apologetically at certain moments, with the remark that "he had been unable to resist temptation.' Yet these words on the face of it had little to do with the obvious and recognised mores of his society, which was why it was essential to laugh. The laugh paid homage to these modes and mores. He was being ridiculous, the laugh said... yet he was never without uneasiness about what he was doing, the choices he had made.

It was necessary for him to be at a certain place at a certain time, in order to play a role that was essential to our handling of the crisis that faced Shikasta. He was to aim for a position - not only in his own country's legal system - but a leading one in the system of northern countries which unified, or attempted to, that part of the northern hemisphere which recently had conquered and despoiled a good part of the planet, and which had until very recently been continually at war among themselves. He was to become a reliable and honest person, in this sphere. At a time of corruption, personal and public, he was to become known as incorruptible, unbribable, disinterested, straight-speaking.

But he was only just out of the last of his educational establishments, an elite one, for the production of the administrative class, when he took a false turning. Instead of going into a junior position in the Councils of the aforesaid bloc of northern countries, which was the position pla

World War II was just over - Shikastan terminology. (SEE History of Shikasta, VOLS. 2955-3015, The Century of Destruction.) He had fought in it, seen much ferocity, spoiling, suffering. His judgements had been affected: his whole being, just like everybody else. He saw himself in a crucial role - as indeed he should - but one of the strongest of the false ideas of that epoch, politics, had entered into him. It was not as simple as that he wanted crude power, crude authority: no, he visualized himself "influencing things for the good." He was an idealist: a word describing people who described themselves as intending good, not self-interest at the expense of others.