Shikasta

He had nothing but his feeble presence, and his voice, which was not strong, but was at least steady and deliberate.

Throughout, and the point was of course lost on no one, he was attended by two of Benjamin Sherban's Children's Contingent, one white and one jet black, a Britisher from Liverpool in England. These, it was soon known, had a personal attachment to him, having been befriended by him when their parents died. He was, in short, in the position of foster-father.

Benjamin Sherban was nearly always stationed behind the old white's chair, in a posture of responsibility for the children. His position with the Children's Camps, which was well known to everyone, had its effect.

My informants were all, without exception, struck by this disposition of the arena, that there was no clear-cut, unambiguous target for their indignation. I feel I must remark that my reports throughout this "Trial" were far from boring: I wish I could say this more often.

I come to what was heard. Now comes an interesting point. Whereas every other one of my recommendations was contermanded - troops, extra rations, standpipes for water, proper lighting - one was permitted. This was provision for loudspeakers. Yet loudspeakers were not used at all.

Why were loudspeakers permitted? Perhaps an oversight! It is not too much to say that a large part of the time of every administrator must be spent in wondering about the possible i

Why did the organizers not avail themselves of them?

The effects were negative, increasing tension and irritation. To sit on crowded stone seats from five in the afternoon till midnight, straining to hear; to sit crammed on hard gritty surfaces from four in the morning through the rising heat of dawn until eight, straining to hear - this was hardly calculated to alleviate the general hardship.

One of my agents, Tsi Kwang (granddaughter of one of the heroes of the Long March), sat high up on the rim of the amphitheatre in order to be able to observe everything. She reports that to begin with, when she realised she would have to strain to catch every syllable, she was angry. Murmurings and complaints filled the tiers of people. Shouts of: Where are the microphones? But these shouts were ignored, and it was left to these five thousand delegates to infer that "The Authorities" (us, by implication, and on this occasion in fact) had not only refused extra rations and so forth, but also "even" microphones.

Tsi Kwang reports that at that height, "it was as if we were looking down at little puppets." "It had a disturbing effect." She felt "as if the importance of the occasion was being insulted." (All of our agents were of course emotionally identified with the anti-white side, and were hoping that the Trial would show the whites up as total villains. Which of course it did up to a certain point. How could it not?)

With no microphones, only the unaided human voice, everything said on that small space far below (I am seeing it as I write through Tsi Kwang's eyes) had to be simple, because it had to be shouted. And this added to the challenge of the spectacle, for everything else was kept informal. Casual. (Except of course for the necessary guards.) But what was said had to be reduced almost to slogans, or at least to simple statements or questions, for from halfway up the tiers no one could have heard complex argument, legal niceties.

Everyone present - and all had come with their minds full of historical examples, memories of their own, or their parents' or their ancestors' experience of being oppressed, ill-treated - every person present had come burning with the need to hear at last! (as Agent Tsi Kwang put it) the Truth.

The "Trial" began straight away, on the first evening. The delegates were still arriving, were exhausted and some famished. Makeshift trestles stood about among sparse trees on the parched grasses, with jars of water and baskets of the local bread. These supplies vanished instantly, and everyone understood the signs of parsimony to come. The tents were going up over several acres. The first lootings had taken place and been stopped. Thousands of young people milled about. Some, from the extreme north, the Icelanders, the Scandinavians, were devastated by the heat. The deep burning skies were particularly noted by Agent Tsi Kwang. (She is from Northern Province.) The cicadas were loud. The usual dogs had arrived from nowhere and were nosing about for what they could find. At precisely four o'clock the word went around that the "Trial" would begin at once. And even as those travel-tired, hungry delegates crowded on to the hot stone seats under that scorching sky, with no preliminaries at all, the two groups of contenders filed down into the arena and took their places. The torches had not yet been lit, of course, but the children were in their places, two to a torch.

On the small wood tables were no books, papers, notes - nothing.

George Sherban stood by the table on one side, with his group, where the shade was soon to engulf them. On the other, in full sun, sat the frail old man, the white villain, whose history of course they all knew, since word of mouth is the fastest, if not most accurate, means of conveying information. Each young person on these tiers knew of George Sherban and that the villain had been of the old British left, had been imprisoned for crimes against the people, and rehabilitated, and brought here by the Youth Armies to defend an impossible case.

It was a restless crowd. They shifted about on the hard stone, grumbled because of the heat, the lack of microphones, that the "Trial" had begun even before many delegates had come. There were the greetings of people who might not have met for years or months, at some Conference perhaps halfway across the world. And there was an under-mood of desperation and of anxiety, which did not relate to the present scene at all, but to our general preoccupation that war is obviously imminent. And perhaps, even then, before so much as a word had been exchanged between accuser and accused, it was evident to everyone that the "Trial" was hardly central to humanity's real problems, that it is not enough to ascribe every crime in the book to any particular class or nation or race - I say this relying on your understanding, for I do not want it to be thought that my long (or so it seems to me) exile in these backward provinces has caused any softening of my ability to see things from a correct class viewpoint. But our human predicament is grave indeed, and it was not possible for those five thousand, the elected "cream" of the world's youth, to sit there in those surroundings face to face, in all their gaunt threadbare hungry desperation, and not to see certain facts writ clear.

They were allowed no more than half an hour for settling themselves, for the absorption of what they could see - of what they were being forced to see - when George Sherban opened the "Trial" by strolling forward two steps from the table and saying:

"I have been elected to represent the nonwhite races in this Trial by - " and he recited a list of something like forty groups, organisations, armies. Agent Tsi Kwang said the silence was profound, for almost at once the moving and the whispering and the coughing ceased as they all understood they had to remain completely still to hear anything at all. And this was the first opportunity they all had to absorb the assault on their expectations of the man's appearance.

He had no list in his hand, but recited the names, long ones some of them, and some often sounding absurdly bureaucratic (I make this comment relying on our old understanding of the necessary absurdity of some forms of organisation) without any aid to memory. He stood there, so said Agent Tsi Kwang, quite calm, relaxed, and smiling.