Shikasta

"The people were laughing as they looked up, their mouths falling open as they gazed at the heavens, which on this evening were floury and thick with stars.

"Yes, that one. If this baby sleeping here was taken off to that star there, then he would be a star baby, would become a giant perhaps, who knew? Or grow wings, and feathers - who could tell?

"They laughed. Great shouts of laughter went up. But it was a marvelling and trustful laughter.

"Or become a child who could live in water, or in fire, perhaps!

"And this is the point, you see, this is always the point which they must remember: that every child has the capacity to be everything. A child was a miracle, a wonder! A child held all the history of the human race, that stretched back, back, further than they could imagine. Yes, this one here, little Otilie, she had in the substance of her body and her thoughts everything that had ever happened to every person of mankind. Just as a loaf of bread holds in it all the substance of all the wheat grains that have gone into it, mingled with all the grain of that harvest, and the substance of the field that has grown it, so this child was kneaded together by, and contained, all the harvest of mankind.

"These words and ideas, that were like nothing these people had ever heard or imagined, came into them, evening after evening, and always a child was held up in front of them.

"Remember, remember, that after a long time, not in your time, or your children's, or even your grandchildren's - but it will come, this time - your labours, and your hardships, and the burden of your lives, all will be redeemed, will bear fruit, and the children of this village and of the world will become what they have it in them to be... remember this, remember it... it will be just as if men came down from that little star there, twinkling away above those dark trees, yes, that one! and suddenly filled this poor village which is so full of hardship and of trouble, with good things and with hope. Remember this child here is not what he seems, is more, is everything, and holds within her, or within him, all the past and all the future - remember it.

"One morning very early a girl came ru

"When the soldiers came, there were no strangers in the village, they had gone away into the dangerous forests leaving behind them a pattern of stones on the hillside, a necklace around a child's neck, some designs drawn with coloured clays and earth on the walls of the only stone building in the village, which happened to be a storehouse. The villagers said that it was a false rumour, the talk of a foolish girl who wanted to make herself important, for of course it was the girl herself who had talked in the monks' kitchen, and then had become afraid of the results.

"When the soldiers had gone, a band of monks arrived.

"They visited the village perhaps once a year. They despised the villagers, though they were not much better themselves, being almost as poor, and not much less ignorant. This was when men, and women, might crowd together in shelters of various kinds calling themselves monks and nuns, as protection against the brutalities of the time.

"The monks had been instructed by the soldiers in the king's name to make sure undesirable vagrants did not shelter in the villages.

"This the monks impressed on the villagers, and returned to their stone rabbit warrens over the mountain.

"The villagers agreed with everything that was said to them.

"But they were as if stars had come closer and lived in their homes, their lives, and then suddenly disappeared. They kept what had happened close and secret, treasuring the crafts they had been taught, which soon spread among the villages around about - and even more, what had been told them.

"They would take a child up, and hold it, and repeat to each other what they could remember.

"None of the people who had been in the village in those days ever forgot. The children who had been held in the arms of the strangers were pointed out for all their lives. Something truly amazing had happened, and every one of them knew it, and soon the villages nearby knew it, too.

"The children of the children who had been held up before the little crowd in the village square kept a little of that quality in them or about them.

"But now it was not remembered exactly what had been said, or done, and who it was who had come - angels, was it?

"One evening, after a hot, dusty summer's day, when people sat around in their doorways, while the children ran about, the dogs scratched, and some ribby donkeys tried to find fresh grass where they would find none for weeks yet, they were saying: Do you remember? - No, it was not like that - Yes, my mother said - But that was not what - when a man who was the son of one of the baby girls held up before everyone picked up his own son and held him prominently on his knee and said, 'Let us try and remember exactly what was said, and then we will repeat it, and we will do it regularly, so that we will always remember.'

"Every year, this man held up his child before everybody, and they repeated to each other what they remembered, and looked up at the skies, laughing and shaking their heads. 'That star there!' 'No, that star there!' 'People made of fire!' 'Or of feathers!'

“This was kept secret, as many things were kept apart from the monks and the soldiers, but of course the ceremony came to be known. At first the monks forbade it and punished, but this made no difference. Every Year, on a certain evening, in one of the homes of the village, a child was chosen, and held up, while they repeated the phrases they had decided must be remembered.

“By now much of this sounded like the envious talk of the poor about the rich anywhere on Shikasta - or anywhere else, for that matter.

" 'I am as good as he, my child is as good as that rich man's, dress me up in her clothes and I'd be a fine lady, too.'

"Then monks and soldiers came and several people were taken away, and were put to death for rebellion, talk against the king, disobedience to the monks.

"The monks then instituted, on orders from above, the Ceremony of the Child, which took place every year, and which they conducted. A small church was built in the village, which previously had had none, and this was afterwards built and rebuilt many times. The Child was the Christ-child, the monks said, but the ceremony never lost its roots in that visit so long ago, for there was still force enough to make the people hold stubbornly to the knowledge that they, not the monks, had been blessed, that they, not the monks, had been shown the Child. By whom, though? By what? People who came from the stars? No, no, that could not be. People from the moon? What nonsense! But there had been someone, or several, and these had come, and had promised, and been chased away...

"And one day they would come again, and then there would be an end to these burdens and this labour and this terrible hardship which holds us all down in the dust and prevents us from rising...

"And this, good people, and visitors, and priests and tourists, and campers, and people from the neighbouring villages, this was the origin of the festival which you hold every year. This is how it was. And now I shall run for my life...."

[During the course of Johor's transmissions in this phase of his embassy he supplied information of a factual kind not requested by us believing (and he was not without reason) that our Colonial Service does not always appreciate certain local difficulties. The long view of planetary maintenance and development does not need, nor can depend upon, the sympathies, the empathies of the near, the partial, views. Yet to find oneself on Shikasta (two of the Archivists responsible for this note have themselves undergone the Shikastan experience) is to become affiliated with powerful emotions which have to be shed on leaving. We submit this piece, and another, believing that students may find them of use in more ways than one. Archivists.]