Дорис Лессинг – Shikasta (страница 28)

They report that limited unplanned matings took place between their representatives and these animals.

May your envoy take this opportunity of suggesting that when Canopean eugenists map possibilities for Shikasta, they take into account Shikastan sexual propensities. It has long been my opinion, expressed more than once, that when sexuality was emphasized to ensure survival of species, this was perhaps overdone? Your envoy discussed this with Sirian representatives. They, having spent time on Shikasta, agree. They are putting the same point to their eugenists. I would point out that there are few cases in Canopean or Sirian history of individuals or stocks being introduced, sometimes for very short periods of time, without unplanned mating taking place.

May your envoy take this opportunity of suggesting that a delegation of eugenists actually be sent to Shikasta to experience conditions for themselves?

JOHOR:

It is thirty thousand years since I was in Shikasta; 31,505, to be exact.

How dark it is here! How hard to move, pulled to the earth, pressed down, weighted.

The air we breathe is so thin and insubstantial, the supplies of SOWF so meagre.

Entering Shikasta – entering my memories – it is as if everything is dwarfed. Can these people really be the descendants of the towering and regal Giants, the magnificent Natives? So those seem to me now, as I look back from this shrunken time and these minified people who live eight hundred years, when once the expectation of life was many times that. A hurrying, and a scurrying and a frantic cramming of a life into a few starved breaths … scarcely born, and then adult, and then old, and then dead.

Our people here, maintaining their real life with such difficulty, all acquire a look of quiet endurance, which all too easily melts into horror at moments when the contrasts are too great. And it is only with the greatest of effort that we prevent ourselves from grasping at every sensation that seems to promise or guarantee a meaning, even usefulness – as these creatures do, who lacking the substance, chase after shadows, after anything that seems to remind them – for the memory is still there, somewhere deep in them, of Canopean truth. They look at the sun as if they want to pull it down to them, they linger under a moon which is much further away than I remember it – and they hunger, they yearn, holding up their arms to the sun, and wanting to bathe in moonrays or to drink them. The gleam of light on a tree, or on water, the brief heartbreaking beauty of their young, these things torture them, without knowing why, or they half know, and make songs and tales, always with the hunger behind, a hunger not one of them could define. Yet their little lives are ruled by it, they are the subjects of an invisible king, a kingdom, even while they court Shammat, who feeds their hungers with illusions.

I have been in the Areas of the Cities, which is where I was for most of my time before. Where the Round City was, the Square City, the Crescent City, and all the other marvels, cities have risen and fallen and risen, over and over again. The waters from the melting ice, the batteries of the ice itself, submerged, ground, destroyed. And yet it is green again, fertile, except where the deserts grow and spread and take possession. There are forests and green plains and herds of animals … I remember the great beasts of Rohanda, the wonderful ancestors of these little animals, miniature lions and tiny deer and half-size elephants that seem to these dwindled people so enormous – yet to those who knew those vast wise beasts of former times, they are endearing, almost toys for children. The children are heartbreaking now. In those times, the children of the Giants, the Natives’ children, were each one born after such deliberation, such thought, each one chosen and from parents known to be the best … each with such a long life, time to grow, time to play, time to think, time to ripen their inner selves and grow fully into themselves. Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born – and yet each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.

I do not like handling their infants, their children: it is a sad business.

And their women, who give birth to these potentials but not knowing it, or half knowing it.

And before we are through with the long sad story of Shikasta, so much more, and worse, to come.

There will be a time when these little lives will seem a great memory: a time when lives of two hundred years will seem a marvellous thing.

You are generous when you allow your envoys to express subjective feelings. But I have a spring of grief in me that you will be even more generous in not judging as complaint. Complaint is not allowed to the children of fatality, as the great stars move in their places …

I, Johor, from this dark place, Shikasta the stricken one, raise my voice, but it is not in complaint but mourning, as these poor creatures mourn their dead who have lived so briefly that once a sheep or a deer would have lived deeper and longer, breathed more fully.

Today I walked through the streets of the city that stands where the Round City once stood, an agglomeration of streets, buildings, markets, put up anyhow, anywhere, without skills or symmetry or mastery, or even an inkling of the knowledge of how such places may be built – I walked and looked at the faces of traders, brothel-keepers, dealers in money, saw how these victims treat each other, as if their fate were felt in them as a licence to cheat, lie, and murder and regard every passer-by only as a possibility for gain, to live as if each were alone in enemy territory and with no hope of reprieve.

Yet there are a few who are not like this, and who know that there will be reprieve – some day, somehow.

I sat in exactly that spot where I once sat with Jarsum and the others when they heard their sentence and the sentence of Rohanda: where that building was, surrounded by the warm glowing patterns and stones of the created city, is a narrow street of hovels made with sun-baked mud, and every face was deformed, inwardly or outwardly.

There are no eyes there that can meet your own frankly, without suspicion or fear, in acknowledgement of kinship.

This is a terrible city. And our envoys say that they are the same, all these great cities, every one engaged in warring, cheating, making treaties which are dissolved in treachery, stealing each other’s goods, snatching each other’s flocks, capturing each other’s people to make slaves.

There are the rich, but only a few; and the innumerable slaves and servants who are the owned and the used.

Women are slaves to their beauty, and they regard their children as secondary to the admiration of men.

Men treat the women according to their degree of beauty, and the children only according to how they will advance themselves, their names, their properties.

Sex in them is twisted, broken: their desperation with the little dream that is their life between birth and death feeds sex to a famine and a flame.

What is to be done with them? What can be done?

Only what has had to be done so often before, with the children of Shammat, Shammat the disgraced and the disgraceful …

My friend Taufiq has gone on a journey to the Northwest fringes, and he has said it is because he does not want to be here to see again what he has seen before.

I and your permanent agent Jussel left the cities and went among the herdsmen on the plains. We travelled from herd to herd, tribe to tribe. These are simple people, with the straightforwardness of those who deal close to the necessities of nature. I found descendants of Davidic stock, and they showed honesty, hospitality, and above all a hunger for something different.

With a tribe that manifested these characteristics more than the others, we stayed as ordinary travellers, and when affinity was accepted by them, showing itself as trust and wanting us to stay on with them, we revealed ourselves as from ‘somewhere else’, and on a mission. They spoke of us as Lords, Gods, and Masters. These terms remain in their songs and their tales.

We told them if they would maintain certain practices, which had to be done exactly, and changed as necessity required, keeping alive among themselves, their tribe, and their descendants the knowledge that these practices were required by the Lords, the Gods, then they would be saved from the degeneration of the cities (which they abhor and fear) and their children would be strong and healthy, and not become thieves and liars and murderers. This strength, this sanity, a bond with the sources of the knowledge of the Gods, would be maintained in them as long as they were prepared to do according to our wishes.