Shikasta (60 page)

Again people talk to me and tell me things. I just move from one to another. I know all about this area and this town and who is in it and what they do and what they have done before the War and what they think. I have the most peculiar thoughts. They are the most extraordinary and outrageous thoughts, but I
am
having them and so I propose to stand by them. Tomorrow I am moving on with the Arab girl and the old woman from Norway. They haven't got work. Also a new travelling companion, a jaguar who walked into the guesthouse last night and lay down and was still with us in the morning. We thought he was tame but no one knows him. We gave him some maize porridge and some sour milk, and we expected him to turn up his nose but he didn't. Apart from the jaguar there is little Rachel's yellow bird, not a real one, it is made of dried grasses, and a very fine mongrel dog who has taken a fancy to me and he and the jaguar gallop along on all sides of us when we walk abroad.

A week later.

This time the town which we came
up
the hill to is octagonal, but we didn't work that out until we were well inside it. It is composed of six linked hexagons. The hexagons are gardens. The lattice is buildings. Again these buildings are strange considering what we are all used to, of bricks and adobe and dried grass screens and lacquered paper. Everything is very light and airy. The central place is a star, and it has a fountain, making patterns of stone and water that
echo each other. There are patterns on the walls and floors – different ones from the patterns in the last town. The old Norwegian woman got work in the kitchen of the guesthouse. The girl from the United Arab Emirates is with a man she met at the fountain. That leaves me and the jaguar and the dog. I have spoken with a lot of people in this town. Now I am going to have to say it. Regardless. This is what I have been thinking about all the way along these roads. We used to believe George was so special, well I am not saying he isn't. Not that I thought all that much about it then. I just went along with everything. But there are a lot like George. Did you realize that, you there, Suzannah and everyone? These people I keep meeting in the towns and the ones that are on the roads and walk with us a little way and then go off into the pampas or the forests again, as if they had expected to meet us and had something to say, well, these people are George-people. They are the same. I know this is impossible, but it is the conclusion I have come to. There are more and more George-people all the time.

It is the same in this town as everywhere else. Now I am getting used to walking into a town with my stomach muscles relaxed and not in a twist and not on my toes all the time in case something comes out at me from some corner, and not having to look out for the local Camps, and not feeling scared to death if I see a group of young people, the way we all were. Yes of course I wasn't exactly old myself. Do you suppose that living in a town has been like this in the past? I mean, people relaxed and easy and things happening the right way without laws and rules and orders and armies? And prisons, prisons, prisons. Do you think that is possible? Well, it is an outrageous thought, but suppose it is true?

It is four months later. I have been to four more towns, all new ones, a triangle, a square, another circle, a hexagon. Do you know something? People are leaving the old towns when they can and making new towns in new places, in this new way. Doesn't that make you think different thoughts? The people talk about the old towns and cities as if they are
hell.
If they are like what our cities used to be then they are hell.

I have had quite a few different travelling companions and heard all kinds of stories. From all parts of the world. Suzannah I think you are right when you don't want to hear talk of the events in Europe, etc. I didn't think you were right and in fact I despised you. I am telling you this Suzannah because you are so kind and you won't mind. I have noticed something. As I go along these roads I am sometimes alone with my faithful jaguar and dog but sometimes with others, and when talk starts about the awfulness, then it is as if people
are not hearing.
Not that they are not listening. Not hearing. They look vaguely at you. Blank. Do you know what I think.
They can't believe it.
Well sometimes I look back and it is such a little time, and I can't believe it. I think that dreadfulness happens somewhere else. I don't know how to say that. I mean, when awful things happen, even to the extent we have all just seen, then our minds don't take them in. Not really. There is a gap between people saying hello, have a glass of water, and then bombs falling or laser beams scorching the world to cinders. That is why no one seemed able to prevent the dreadfulness. They couldn't take it in.

I have understood that the vague blank look is from the past. It is not what we are now. Do you think it is possible it is not so much we
forget
things that are awful but that we never really believed in them happening.

But have you noticed that everyone is different now? We are all much more lively and alert and don't need to sleep all the time and we are all of a piece and not all at sixes and sevens. Do you know what I mean?

I have lost my faithful jaguar. I was walking up and up, along a quite high narrow path, among grasslands, and there was a shepherd, quite of the old sort, with a dog and a donkey. I was worried about the jaguar. The dog I could order about but not the jaguar. The shepherd, who was a young man with a wife and two small children in a nice little house on the hillside was worried too. But my big dog made friends with his dog. And then the jaguar went and lay down a little apart from the dogs. The woman came out of her house with some milk in a basin and he drank it. I slept the night there and then
went on alone because my jaguar decided to stay with the shepherd and the woman, and as I went off I saw him helping the shepherd round up some sheep, with the two dogs.

So I was quite alone for twenty miles or more. And then I saw someone ahead of me, and thought That looks like George. And it was George.

He told me you have had your baby, Suzannah, I am glad, and it is a boy. George said he is going to be called Benjamin so I suppose our Benjamin is dead. Benjamin and Rachel.

For a long time in the guesthouses and walking along by myself I was thinking of questions I wanted to ask George, and I asked him first of all about the towns, and how they came to be like that, and he said they are
functional.

He said that you over there are building a town and it is like the old Star of David. I said, how did you know what it had to be and where. His reply to that was, wait a little and you will see.

He took me first of all to one of the old towns, not a big one, it was on a branch of the Rio Negro. I hated being in it, I felt sick and uneasy from the moment I got into it. And it is a dying town. People are leaving it. Everywhere buildings are collapsing and not being rebuilt. All the centre was quite empty.

I said, Why?

He said, the new cities are functional.

I could see he wasn't going to explain, I had to work it out.

We stayed the night in a broken-down hotel. It was awful. People are still suspicious and frightened in these places. I felt ill and I could see George didn't feel good. All the next day we walked around the town quite aimlessly. People noticed George, and they wanted to talk to him. He talked to them. Or they would simply follow him. They all looked so desperate and needful.

In the evening he just walked away from the town and about three hundred people followed us, though he had not said one word about their coming too. It was cold that night, and it was wet and misty, and we were all pretty miserable, but we walked on steadily with George and still not a word
had been said about what was happening.

When the sun rose it was cold, cold, cold and we were all hungry.

George was standing on a hillside, a steep rocky one, and there was a plateau above us. The birds were wheeling about overhead as the sun came up and they shone in the sunlight. I have never been so cold.

George
remarked,
in a quite ordinary sort of voice, that it would be a good idea if we made a town there.

People said, Where? Where should we start?

He didn't reply. Meanwhile, we were all dying of hunger. Then there was a flock of sheep and another shepherd, and we bought some sheep and made a fire and cooked some meat, and got ourselves fed.

Then we were roaming about over the hillside and the plateau. There were about twenty of us doing this. Suddenly we all knew quite clearly where the city should be. We knew it all at once. Then we found a spring, in the middle of the place. That was how this city was begun. It is going to be a star city, five points.

We found the right soil for bricks nearby and for adobe. There is everything we can need. We have already started the gardens and the fields.

Some of us go into the decaying town every day to get bread and stuff, to keep us going.

The first houses are already up, and the central circular place is paved, and the basin of the fountain is made. As we build, wonderful patterns appear as if our hands were being taught in a way we know nothing about.

It is high up here, very high, with marvellous tall sky over us, a pale clear crystalline blue, and the great birds circling in it.

George left after a few days. I walked with him a little way. I said to him, What is happening, why are things so different? So he told me.

George says he is going into Europe with a team. He says that you knew he would be going, but not that he would be going now, and that I should tell you that when his task in
Europe is finished, his work will be finished. I did not understand until he had left that it meant he would die then and we would not see him again. So here we all are.

I am writing this, sitting on a low white wall that has the patterns on it. People are all around me, working at this and that. We are in tents in the meantime, everything makeshift and even difficult but it doesn't seem so, and everything is happening in this new way, there is no need to argue and argue and discuss and disagree and confer and accuse and fight and then kill. All that is over, it is finished, it is dead.

How did we live then? How did we bear it? We were all stumbling about in a thick dark, a thick ugly hot darkness, full of enemies and dangers, we were blind in a heavy hot weight of suspicion and doubt and fear.

Poor people of the past, poor poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, not knowing anything, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for.

I can't stop thinking of them, our ancestors, the poor animal-men, always murdering and destroying because they couldn't help it.

And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted and filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined.

And here we all are together, here we are …

Students are directed to:

The Shorter History of Canopus

Relations Between Canopus and Sirius

    1. War.    2. Peace.

The History of the Sirian Empire

The History of Puttiora

Shammat the Shameful

The Memoirs of Taufiq

Nasar, Ussell, Taufiq, Johor:
Selected Material

The Sirian Experiments on Shikasta

The Penultimate Days

Before the Catastrophe on Shikasta

The Little People: Trade, Art, Metallurgy

Envoys of the Last Days: A Concise History

Tales of the Three Planets

The Canopean Bond (On Shikasta, ‘SOWF'); properties of, densities of, variations in effects on different species, complete absence of. (Shammat) (Physics Section)

Shikasta
is the first in a series of novels with the overall title ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives‘; the second is
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
(1980); the third
The Sirian Experiments
(1981); the fourth
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
(1982); and the fifth
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
(1983).

NOVELS

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

The Summer Before the Dark

Memoirs of a Survivor

Diary of a Good Neighbour

If the Old Could …

The Good Terrorist

The Fifth Child

Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

Love, Again

Mara and Dann

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

The Sweetest Dream

The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

The Cleft

‘Canopus in Argos: Archives' series

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

The Sirian Experiments

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘Children of Violence' novel-sequence

Martha Quest

A Proper Marriage

A Ripple from the Storm

Landlocked

The Four-Gated City

OPERAS

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (Music by Philip Glass)

The Making of the representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

SHORT STORIES

Five

The Habit of Loving

A Man and Two Women

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

Winter in July

The Black Madonna

This Was the Old Chief s Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)

The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)

To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

London Observed

The Old Age of El Magnifico

Particularly Cats

Rufus the Survivor

On Cats

The Grandmothers

POETRY

Fourteen Poems

DRAMA

Each His Own Wilderness

Play with a Tiger

The Singing Door

NON - FICTION

In Pursuit of the English

Going Home

A Small Personal Voice

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

The Wind Blows Away Our Words

African Laughter

Time Bites

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Under My Skin: Volume 1

Walking in the Shade: Volume