Shikasta

When the five were brought to trial and stood in the dock loaded with chains, and behind barriers of extra bars, they reached their fulfilment, the apex of achievement.

"This is what you are like," they were saying to the world. "These brutal chains, these bars, the fact that you will give us sentences that will keep us behind bars for the rest of our lives - this is what you are like! Regard your mirror, in us!"

In prison, and in court, they were elated, victorious, singing and laughing, as if at a festival.

About a year after sentence, Individual Six and two others escaped. They went their separate ways. Individual Six got fat, wore a wig, and acquired a correct clerkly appearance. He did not contact either the escaped members of his group or those in prison. He hardly thought of them: that was the past!

He deliberately courted danger. He would stand chatting to policemen on the street. He went into police stations to report minor crimes, such as the theft of a bicycle. He was arrested for speeding. He actually appeared in court on one charge. All this with a secret glowing contempt: this is what you are like, stupid, incompetent...

He went back to the town he had grown up in, and got an undemanding job, and made a life for himself that lacked any concealment except for the change of name and appearance. People recognised him, and he was talked about. Knowing this gave him pleasure.

His father was now in an institution for the elderly and incapacitated, his mother having died, and, hearing his son was in town, he took to hanging about the streets in the hope of seeing him. He did, but Individual Six waved his hand in a jolly, friendly, don't-bother-me-now gesture, and walked on.

He was expecting from his inevitable rearrest a trial of the same degree of publicity as his first. He wanted that moment when he would stand chained, like a dog, behind double bars. But when he was arrested, he was sent back to jail to serve his sentence.

An elation, a lunacy - which had been carrying him up, up, up, from the moment of truth when he had first seen what the world was like, had "had his eyes opened" - suddenly dissolved, and he committed suicide.

INDIVIDUAL SEVEN (Terrorist Type 5)

This was a child of rich parents, manufacturers of an internationally known household commodity of no use whatsoever, contributing nothing except to the economic imperative: thou shalt consume.

She had a brother, but as they were at different schools and it was not thought important that they should meet, she had little physical or emotional contact with him after early childhood.

She was unhappy, u

She did not hate them. She did not despise them. She found them irrelevant.

She went to university for three years. There she enjoyed the double life of such young people: democratic and frugal in the university, and the luxuriousness of an indulged minority to whom everything was possible, at home.

She was not interested in what she was taught, only in whom she met. She drifted in and out of political sects, all on the left. She used in them the cult vocabulary obligatory in those circles, the same in all of them - and they might very well be enemies at various times.

What they all had in common was that "the system" was doomed. And would be replaced by people like themselves, who were different.

These groups, and there were hundreds of them in the Northwest fringes - we are not now considering other parts of the world - were free to make up their own programmes, frameworks of ideas, exactly as they liked, without reference to objective reality. (This girl never saw for instance that during her years among the groups she was as passively accepting as she had ever been in her family.) [SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3011, The Age of Ideology, "Pathology of Political Groups."]

From the time the dominant religions lost their grip not only in the Northwest fringes, but everywhere throughout Shikasta, there was a recurrent phenomenon among young people: as they came to young adulthood and saw their immediate predecessors with the cold unliking eye that was the result of the breakdown of the culture into barbarism, groups of them would suddenly, struck for the first time by "truth," reject everything around them and seek in political ideology (emotionally this was of course identical to the reaction of groups that continuously formed and re-formed under the religious tyra

When Individual Seven left university, nothing she had learned there seemed of any relevance to her. Her family expected her to marry a man like her father or her brother, or to take a job of an unchallenging kind. It seemed to her, suddenly, that she was nothing at all, and nothing of interest lay ahead of her.

This was a time when "demonstrations" took place continually. The populace was always taking to the streets to shout out the demands of the hour.