Shikasta (14 page)

But if he stayed as a member of his local parliament, he would feel even more unused and frustrated than he had been – this was not even an alternative for him.

And then, jumping up from his disordered bed in his disordered room, or flinging himself down, or rocking, or' pacing, he visualized the other possibility, that he should return seriously to his law firm and watch for opportunities to use himself in ways in which he could easily envisage … extraordinary how attractive this prospect was … and yet there was nothing there to feed this ambition of his … he would be stepping out of the limelight, the national limelight, let alone the glamour of the wider fields open to him. And yet … and yet … he could not help being drawn to what had been planned for him, and
by
him before this entrance to Shikasta.

Here I intervened.

It was the middle of the night. It was quiet, in this pleasant and sheltered street. The din of the machines they all lived with was stilled.

Not a sound in the house. There was a single source of light in the corner of this room.

His eyes kept returning to it … he was in a half-tranced state, from fatigue and from alcohol.

‘Taufiq,' I said. ‘Taufiq … remember! Try and remember!'

This was to his mind, of course. He did not move, but he tensed, and came to himself, and sat listening. His eyes were alert. In those strong black eyes, thoughtful now, and all there, I recognized my friend, my brother.

‘Taufiq,' I said. ‘What you are thinking
now
is right. Hold on to
it.
Act on it. It isn't too late. You took a very wrong bad turn when you went into politics. That wasn't for you! Don't make things worse.'

Still he didn't move. He was listening, with every atom of himself. He turned his head cautiously, and I knew he was wondering if he would see somebody, or something, in the shadows of his room. He was half remembering me. But he
saw nothing as he turned his head this way and that, searching into the corners and dark places. He was not afraid.

But he was shocked. The intervention of my words into his swirling half-demented condition was too much for him. He suddenly got up, flung himself down and was instantly asleep.

He dreamed. I fed in the material that would shape his dream …

He and I were together in the projection room of the Planetary Demonstration Building on Canopus.

We were running scenes from Shikasta, recent scenes, of the new swarming millions upon millions upon millions – poor short-lived savages now, with the precious substance-of-we-feeling so limited and being shared among so many, the tiniest allowance for each individual, their little drop of true feeling … we were both overwhelmed with pity for the fate of the Shikastans, who could not help themselves, while they fought and hated and stole and half starved. Both of us had known Shikasta at such different times, he much more often and more recently than I. We were there together in the projection room because he had been asked to make this journey, and to take up this task.

There was no question of his refusing: we did not refuse such requests. Or some of us did not! [See 
History of Canopus,
VOL. 1,752,357,
Disagreement re: Policy for Shikasta, Formerly Rohanda.
SUMMARY CHAPTER.] But it was as if he had been asked to allow himself to be made lunatic, mad, deranged, and then put into a den of murdering savages. He agreed at once. Just as I agreed, shortly afterwards, when it was evident that he had failed.

He was lying utterly still on his bed. This dream caused him to stir and almost come to the surface again. But he sank back, exhausted.

He dreamed of a high bare landscape, full of coloured mountains, a brilliant unkind sky, everything beautiful and compelling, but when you looked close it was all desert. Cities had died here, been blasted to poisoned sand. Famine and death and disease were denuding these deadly plains. The
beauty had a sombre deathlike under-face: yet was soaked with the emotion of longing, wanting, false need, and these were coming from Zone Six, and causing this nightmare, which made him start up, muttering and groaning, and rush for water. He drank glass after glass, and dashed water on to his face, and he resumed his pacing. As the sky outside lightened, and the night sank down he paced, and paced. He was sober now, but really very ill.

A decison would have to be made. And soon, or he would die with the stress of it.

All that day he stayed in that room high up in his house. His wife came to him with food, and he thanked her, but in a careless, uncaring way that caused her then and there to decide she would divorce him. He left the food untouched. His eyes had lost life. Were staring. Were violent. He flung himself down to sleep, and then jumped up again. He was afraid. He feared to encounter me, his friend, who was his other self, his brother.

He was being terrified to the point of lunacy by Canopus, who was his home and his deepest self.

When he did at last fall asleep, because he could not keep himself awake, I made him dream of us, a band of his fellows, his real companions. He smiled as he slept. He wept, tears soaking his face, as he walked and talked in his dream with
us,
with himself.

And he woke smiling, and went downstairs to tell his wife he had made up his mind. He was going to take up this new position, this new important job. His manner as he told her this was full of the lying affability of his public self.

But I knew that what I had fed into him as he slept would stay there and change him. I knew – I could foresee, and exactly, for there was a picture of it in my inner sight – that later in the frightful time in front of us, I, a young man, would confront him, and say to him some exact and functioning words. He would remember. An enemy – for he was to be that for a time – would become a friend again, would come to himself.

History of Shikasta,
VOL. 3012,
The Century of Destruction.

EXCERPT FROM SUMMARY CHAPTER.

During the previous two centuries, the narrow fringes on the north-west of the main landmass of Shikasta achieved technical superiority over the rest of the globe, and, because of this, conquered physically or dominated by other means large numbers of cultures and civilizations. The Northwest fringe people were characterized by a peculiar insensitivity to the merits of other cultures, an insensitivity quite unparalleled in previous history. An unfortunate combination of circumstances was responsible. (1) These fringe peoples had only recently themselves emerged from barbarism. (2) The upper classes enjoyed wealth, but had never developed any degree of responsibility for the lower classes, so the whole area, while immeasurably more wealthy than most of the rest of the globe, was distinguished by contrasts between extremes of wealth and poverty. This was not true for a brief period between Phases II and III of the Twentieth Century War. [See VOL. 3009,
Economies of Affluence.
] (3) The local religion was materialistic. This was again due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances: one was geographical, another the fact that it had been a tool of the wealthy classes for most of its history, another that it retained even less than most religions of what its founder had been teaching. [See VOLS. 998 and 2041,
Religions as Tools of Ruling Castes.
]
For these and other causes, its practitioners did little to mitigate the cruelties, the ignorance, the stupidity, of the Northwest fringers. On the contrary, they were often the worst offenders. For a couple of centuries at least, then, a dominant feature of the Shikastan scene was that a particularly arrogant and self-satisfied breed, a minority of the minority white race, dominated most of Shikasta, a multitude of
different races, cultures, and religions which, on the whole, were superior to that of the oppressors. These white Northwest fringers were like most conquerors of history in denuding what they had overrun, but they were better able than any other in their ability to persuade themselves that what they did was ‘for the good' of the conquered: and it is here that the above-mentioned religion is mostly answerable.

World War I – to use Shikastan nomenclature (otherwise the First Intensive Phase of the Twentieth Century War) – began as a quarrel between the Northwest fringers over colonial spoils. It was distinguished by a savagery that could not be matched by the most backward of barbarians. Also by stupidity: the waste of human life and of the earth's products was, to us onlookers, simply unbelievable, even judged by Shikastan standards. Also by the total inability of the population masses to understand what was going on: propaganda on this scale was tried for the first time, using methods of indoctrination based on the new technologies, and was successful. What the unfortunates were told who had to give up life and property – or at the best, health – for this war, bore no relation at any time to the real facts of the matter; and while of course any local group or culture engaged in war persuades itself according to the exigencies of self-interest, never in Shikastan history, or for that matter on any planet – except for the planets of the Puttioran group – has deception been used on this scale.

This war lasted for nearly five of their years. It ended in a disease that carried off six times as many people as those killed in the actual fighting. This war slaughtered, particularly in the Northwest fringes, a generation of their best young males. But – potentially the worst result – it strengthened the position of the armament industries (mechanical, chemical, and psychological) to a point where from now on it had to
be said that these industries dominated the economies and therefore the governments of all the participating nations. Above all, this war barbarized and lowered the already very low level of accepted conduct in what they referred to as ‘the civilized world' – by which they meant, mostly, the Northwest fringes.

This war, a phase of the Twentieth Century War, laid the bases for the next.

Several areas, because of the suffering caused by the war, exploded into revolution, including a very large area, stretching from the Northwest fringes thousands of miles to the eastern ocean. This period saw the beginning of a way of looking at governments, judged ‘good' and ‘bad' not by performance, but by label, by name. The main reason was the deterioration caused by war: one cannot spend years sunk inside false and lying propaganda without one's mental faculties becoming impaired. (This is a fact that is attested to by every one of our emissaries to Shikasta!)

Their mental processes, for reasons not their fault never very impressive, were being rapidly perverted by their own usages of them.

The period between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Second Intensive Phase contained many small wars, some of them for the purpose of testing out the weapons shortly to be employed on a massive scale. As a result of the punitive suffering inflicted on one of the defeated contestants of World War I by the victors, a Dictatorship arose there – a result that might easily have been foreseen. The Isolated Northern Continent, conquered only recently by emigrants from the Northwest fringes, and conquered with the usual disgusting brutality, was on its way to becoming a major power, while the various national areas of the Northwest fringes, weakened by war, fell behind. Frenzied exploitation of the colonized areas, chiefly of Southern Continent I, was intensified to make up for the damages sustained
because of the war. As a result, native populations, exploited and oppressed beyond endurance, formed resistance movements of all kinds.

The two great Dictatorships established themselves with total ruthlessness. Both spread ideologies based on the suppression and oppression of whole populations of differing sects, opinions, religions, local cultures. Both used torture on a mass scale. Both had followings all over the world, and these Dictatorships, and their followers, saw each other as enemies, as totally different, as wicked and contemptible – while they behaved in exactly the same way.

The time gap between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II was twenty years.

Here we must emphasize that most of the inhabitants of Shikasta were not aware that they were living through what would be seen as a hundred-years' war, the century that would bring this planet to almost total destruction. We make a point of this, because it is nearly impossible for people with whole minds – those who have had the good fortune to live (and we must never forget that it is a question of our good fortune) within the full benefits of the substance-of-we-feeling – it is nearly impossible, we stress, to understand the mentation of Shikastans. With the world's cultures being ravaged and destroyed, from end to end, by viciously inappropriate technologies, with wars raging everywhere, with whole populations being wiped out, and deliberately, for the benefit of ruling castes, with the wealth of every nation being used almost entirely for war, for preparations for war, propaganda for war, research for war; with the general levels of decency and honesty visibly vanishing, with corruption everywhere – with all this, living in a nightmare of dissolution, was it really possible, it may be asked, for these poor creatures to believe that ‘on the whole' all was well?

The reply is – yes. Particularly, of course, for those
already possessed of wealth or comfort – a minority; but even those millions, those billions, the ever-increasing hungry and cold and unbefriended, for these, too, it was possible to live from meal to scant meal, from one moment of warmth to the next.

Those who were stirred to ‘do something about it' were nearly all in the toils of one of the ideologies which were the same in performance, but so different in self-description. These, the active, scurried about like my unfortunate friend Taufiq, making speeches, talking, engaged in interminable processes that involved groups sitting around exchanging information and making statements of good intent, and always in the name of the masses, those desperate, frightened, bemused populations who knew that everything was wrong but believed that somehow, somewhere, things would come right.