Shikasta

She reaches for the child that plays on the floor but as she holds its fresh warmth to her face she knows that it is for the holocaust, and if by a miracle it escapes, then the substance of its inheritance is being attacked as the two of them stand there, close, the warmth of their mortality beating between them as the child laughs.

He looks at the child, thinking of nature, the creative fire spawning new forms as we breathe. He has to, for he knows that the species dwindle everywhere on Shikasta, the stock of gene patterns is being destroyed, destroyed, ca

She thinks, but there are the animals, the noble and patient animals, with their languages we don't understand, their kindness to each other, their friendship for us - and she puts down her hand to feel the living warmth of her little cat but knows that as she stands there they are being slaughtered, wiped out, made extinct, by senselessless, stupidity, by greed, greed, greed. She ca

He thinks, as the loneliness of his situation dizzies him, standing there and whirling among the stars, a species among myriads - as he has only recently come to know - that these thoughts are too grand for him, he needs to put his arms around his woman and to feel her arms around him, but as they turn to each other, there is tension, and fear, for this embrace may breed monsters.

She stands as she has done for mille

When he is at his work - if he has any, for he may be one who is being merely kept alive, not being used, or stretched, or developed through his labour - he, at his work, again and again, because the need is so old, renews himself in the thought that this work of his benefits others, that it links him with others, he is in a creative mesh and pulse with all the labourers of the earth... but he is checked, is stopped, the thought ca

She and he, making order in their living place, tidying and cleaning their home, stand together among piles of glass, synthetics, paper, cans, containers - the rubbish of their civilisation which, they know, is farmland and food and the labour of men and women, rubbish, rubbish, to be carried away and dumped in great mountains that cover more earth, foul more water. As they clear and smooth their little rooms, it is with a rising, hardly controllable irritability and disgust. A container that has held food is thrown away, but over vast areas of Shikasta it would be treasured and used by millions of desperate people. Yet there is nothing to be done, it seems. Yet it all happens, it goes on, nothing seems to stop it. Rage, frustration, disgust at themselves, at their society, anger - breaking out against each other, against neighbours, against the child. Nothing they can touch, or see, or handle sustains them, nowhere can they take refuge in the simple good sense of nature. He has seen once a pumpkin vine sprawling its great leaves and yellow flowers and sumptuous golden globes over a vast rubbish heap, where flies sizzle and simmer - at the time he hardly noticed it, and now it is an image for his imagination to find rest in, and comfort. She watches a neighbour trying to burn bits of plastic on a bonfire, while the chemical reek poisons everything, and she shuts her eyes and thinks of a broken earthenware bowl swept out of a back door in a village, to crumble slowly back into the soil.

In all of man's history he has been able to restore himself with the sight of leaves in autumn that will sink back into the earth, or with the look of a crumbling wall with sun on it, or some white bones at the edge of a stream.

These two stand together, high above their city, looking out where the machines that are destroying them rush and grind, in the air, on the earth, under the earth... they stand breathing, but the rhythm of their breath shortens and changes, as they think that the air is full of corrosion and destruction.

They turn taps and handles and water runs out willingly from the walls, but as they bend to drink or to wash they find their instincts reluctant and have to force themselves. The water tastes flat, and faintly corrupt, and has been already ten times through their gut and bladders, and they know that the time will come when they will not be able to drink it, and, setting out containers for rainwater, will find that, too, undrinkable from chemicals washed from the air.

They watch a flight of birds, as they stand together at their windows, and it is as if they are sorrowfully saying goodbye, with a silent corrosive, tearing apology on behalf of the species they belong to: destruction is what they have brought to these creatures, destruction and poisoning is their gift, and the swerve and balancing of a bird does not delight and rest, but becomes another place from which they learn to avert their eyes, in pain.

This woman, this man, restless, irritable, grief-stricken, sleeping too much to forget their situation or unable to sleep, looking everywhere for some good or sustenance that will not at once give way as they reach out for it and slide off into reproach or nothingness - one of them takes up a leaf from the pavement, carries it home, stares at it. There it lies in a palm, a brilliant gold, a curled, curved, sculptored thing, balanced like a feather, ready to float and to glide, there it rests, lightly, for a breath may move it, in that loosely open, slightly damp, human palm, and the mind meditating there sees its supporting ribs, the myriads of its veins branching, and rebranching, its capillaries, the minuscule areas of its flesh which are not - as it seems to this brooding human eye - fragments of undifferentiated substance between the minute feeding arteries and veins, but, if one could see them, highly structured worlds, the resources of chemical and microscopic cell life, viruses, bacteria - a universe in each pin-point of leaf. It is already being dragged into the soil as it lies there captive, a shape as perfect as a ship's sail in full wind or the shell of a snail. But what is being looked at is not this curved exquisite exactness, for the slightest shift of vision shows the shape of matter thi