Shikasta

Meanwhile, all the children of the village, including the bearers of the litter, are lined up by their parents under the orders of the priests, and are hustled forward two by two past the statue while the priests "bless" them. When this is over they are rewarded by a feast of cakes and sweet drinks as fine as the poor village can provide.

While even a few years ago this festival was entirely for the children, the economic pressure of the tourists has operated so that there are entertainments and food and drink for the adults as well. This year, for the first time, there were television cameras, and because of this, everything was more elaborate than usual. When the statue has been taken in and put away into its cupboard, dancing begins again, and continues until midnight.

This is a pleasant enough festival, and offers much needed relief to people whose lives are hard indeed.

It has not become much more elaborate since the report of Emissary 76, four hundred years ago. But we must expect that while tourism lasts, every year will show new feats of imagination.

There is no use left in this festival from our point of view.

I could not prevent myself wondering as I observed these lively (but well-policed) scenes, what would happen if I were able to stand forward and relate the real origins of the festival.

"Over a thousand years ago, a visitor came to this village. The Northwest fringes were backward, regarded as savage by other, more developed areas - such as those on the far side of the great inland sea you call the Mediterranean. These advanced cultures often sent people northwards, in various disguises, to wander from place to place in order to impart techniques and ideas that could lighten the appalling conditions. This particular visitor came with three young pupils, who were learning from him the art of bringing more advanced ideas to backward areas. Arriving at this bitterly poor place, they discovered that there were no softer influences here at all, nothing for miles around, except for some monks who lived sequestered from the lowly concerns of the villagers.

"The atmosphere of the village was appropriate, and the villagers ready to listen to tales about civilisation whose whereabouts they could not really understand, since they knew as little of geography as they did of their own origins - and future.

"The visitors stayed unobtrusively in the village for many weeks. They imparted information of a practical kind, about cleanliness, the usefulness of bathing in avoiding illness, the necessity of clean water supplies, the care of the sick, elements of medicine, all things these poor people knew very little of. When a few of the more intelligent had taken in enough to be able to pass it on, there came information on crafts like distilling, dyeing, the preservation of foodstuffs for famines and hard times, and certain techniques of husbandry and agriculture that were new to them.

"And then these visitors began to tell the villagers, in simple terms, sometimes in the form of tales, stories, songs, a little of their history, and what this meant for them - what they really were and could become.

"These people whose struggle to feed themselves, to keep themselves clothed and housed, was as much as they could sustain, heard the news without resistance, and this was already a great deal, for people whose lives are so close to an edge may very often simply refuse to listen: even good news, a message of hope, may be too much for them to bear.

"In the evenings as the light went and the villagers came back from their work in the fields to eat and rest, our visitors would sit in this place, the square - which was very like what it is now - and they talked, and told stories and sang.

"There would be smoke rising from the huts and houses. Children played in the dust. Ribby and ravening dogs scratched or scuffled. Ski

"The villagers sat quietly in the half-dark. Women held their infants in their arms.

"A woman was sitting on a stone, rocking a child and humming to it.

"The older man asked if they might take the baby from her for a short while, and she assented. He sat with the baby on his knee. It was drowsy and blinking, and he hushed his voice so that it might not be roused, and all the villagers had to lean forward to listen. He asked them to regard this child, which was one they all knew, was not set apart in any way from others, a child like any other, whose life would be like everyone's here, no different in any way, just as his children's would be, and his children's children...

"At which the woman leaned forward to say apologetically that this child was a girl.

"But this child, went on the visitor, was not what she seemed - no, it did not matter in the least if she was a girl, for a girl was as good as her brother... Ignoring the slight restlessness that occurred at this point, he went on. This child, girl or boy, was not what she seemed. No, what mattered was that she - or he - was the equal of anybody in the village, or in the villages around about, or even in the big town (which few of them had visited, though they had heard about it) or in the towns across the seas (which they had heard about, for a boy from the village had become a sailor and returned to tell them amazing and improbable tales which on the whole they thought it safer to disbelieve) or anybody, anywhere at all. They did not know it, but this village, which seemed to them so large, containing their lives and everything they knew, was only a tiny part of a great world. They must multiply this village by as many times as there were wheat grains in that field there, and the great towns by as many times as there were stones on that hillside - the light had almost gone, the moon was rising, and the hillside glimmered with white stones. The villagers were sitting silent, listening, listening... by now they trusted these people who had arrived 'like angels' among them, had taught them so many useful things which had already proved themselves. They all felt that amazing and wonderful things were being told to them, but it was all so difficult, so hard to understand. When the next town was the limit of their imaginations, how to believe in many such, and in cities a thousand times larger...

"There were cities in the world... cities of people as many as stars in the sky. People like angels, for it must not be thought that these visitors of theirs were in any way remarkable or out of the ordinary.

"The villagers listened, trying hard.

"There were cities in the world where people had all they wanted to eat and more. They had clothes, enough to warm them and keep them dry. Their houses were many times the size of these houses here, in the village. Yes, all this was true. But what mattered was that there was space and time in the lives of these wonderful people to learn all kinds of things, not just cheese-making and how to keep a cow from falling ill of the stagger-disease. No, people had room in their lives to study, to think, to dream. They knew all kinds of extraordinary and true things - yes, true, true, what was being said tonight was true.

"These people were able, for instance, to study the movements of the stars, which were not so far away as might be thought here, in this village, or in other poor villages. No, each star up there was a world, each one, made of substances everyone here knew as well as he, she, knew their hands, or feet, or the hair on their heads. Those stars up there, they were made of earth - like this; and of rock - like this. And of water. And of fire, yes, of fire swirling and turning.

"Next evening, and the next, and the next, our visitors sat, and borrowed a child from the crowd, any child, insisting that it did not matter whose child, or whether a boy or a girl, or what age, and, holding this child before the people, they insisted that this child, if it were to be taken away - no, no, that was not the intention (because the crowd suddenly stirred and muttered), the child was sitting here on this knee, in these arms, just to remind them of something - if this child or any other was taken away and brought up in one of these fabulous cities where people did not have to spend every minute in labour, but had time to learn, to study, then this child would be just the same as those. And if he, or she, were taken off on a visit to - let us say that little star up there? Yes! That one! Or that one! - then...