Shikasta

Craft from the Three Planets were also visitors to Shikasta. Their happy balances in the structure of forces had long been affected by the Shikastan descent into barbarism, and to maintain their health had not for a long time been easy. The Twentieth Century War with its evil and deadly emanations, useful only to Shammat, had affected these planets. Their visiting craft were for observation. At all times our servants have been on the best of terms with them, have given them every assistance. They were waiting, as were we all, for the moment when Shikasta's long night would end, and be succeeded by a slow return to the light.

It will be seen, then, that a large part of the work of the visitors to Shikasta was for monitoring and observation, and was no threat at all to that unhappy planet - on the contrary. But that there were so many different visitors, with so many different types of craft, was not known by them. There was of course and in addition the already mentioned fact that the major powers all had weapons of war kept "secret" from each other, and certainly kept secret from the populace, and since from the point of view of such powerful weapons, the skies of Shikasta were small enough, every part of the globe was visited by craft originating in Shikasta itself.

Nor did Shammat fully understand the nature and extent of these many different craft, many visitors.

How very much did Shammat not understand; and what damage she did; and how she did crash about and blunder and spoil!

For instance, in her ignorance, Shammat's agents would often destroy large numbers of people whose proper term on Shikasta had not ended - and whose destruction was no help at all to herself. These we would return to Zone Six and immediately reintroduce into Shikasta for service as soon - sometimes - as they could talk and walk.

For instance again: Shammat's preoccupation was always to weaken and soften the moral fibre of the inhabitants. Ours was always the opposite effort. But Shammat was not always - and increasingly less so, towards the end - able to control her own efforts or to observe and understand ours.

Again: Shammat's agents prowled and lurked, feeding the spirit of hatred, antagonism, unreason, contention: we did the opposite always, but they were never able to observe, let alone understand, the techniques working against them, and this led sometimes to situations quite farcical, where they might be working against themselves, without knowing it.

Again: Shammat's agents, relying on the link between Shikasta and Shammat, often saw this bond where it did not exist, or had been destroyed or weakened by us. People who in fact were free of Shammatan influence, and who had clung to us, understanding - perhaps at first only in an inkling, or the thread of a thought - that salvation lay with us, people who in fact were in our service, and often without knowing it, were trusted by Shammat, who did not have the means to recognise the situation.

All over Shikasta, in those last days, moved our agents, our servants, our friends, and with them went the Signature, imprinted on them, in them, in their substance, just as the sick distortion of Shammat was imprinted on Shammat's kith and kin; and anyone who retained, anywhere, even a vestige of the shadow of the Signature, felt our presence, looked up - recognised - and followed. Or tried to. I am not saying that our struggle was anything but desperate, dire, awful. There were many casualties, failures. But just as, during the last days, in the last phase, Shammat's agents filled Shikasta with horror, and terror, and self-disgust, and destruction, so, too, did the Shadow of the Signature summon everyone who could remember... there was a sweetness, a promise, a lightness of heart and of hope in those dreadful last days.

Notes added to the above by JOHOR, TAUFIQ, USSELL, and others

With so large an area of Shikasta due to be laid waste, one of our preoccupations was of course the preservation of adequate representative genetic material. This was partly accomplished by judicious and specific pressures on certain individuals and groups of individuals capable of putting personal concerns aside in the interests of the broad perspective. For when directed to certain places temporarily or comparatively "safe," this was not necessarily with the idea of their personal survival. Certain types of Shikastan were able to respond very welclass="underline" in fact their capacity to respond made them eligible. But of course our difficulty was that admirable and useful traits were so mixed with the undesirable. Sirius and its colonies, Canopus and its colonies, Shammat - and others too - all were now in the inheritance of Shikasta. And the increasing pressure on the Shikastan stock from local and external radiation; from the increasingly poisoned and adapted atmosphere; from their sustenance itself, full of every sort of chemical and radiation, from, too, the sober knowledge deep within them of the responsibilities of their destiny: all this had the effect of adapting the genetic material even more, causing sports of all kinds. Some of these were - and are - valuable, with potential. But others, alas, not.

We shall mention, as an example, a particular hazard that was overcome by - very - long-term foresight and planning: this because it has formed part of the story in this volume, not because it was more or less important than others of our concerns.

It had long been foreseen that there would be a strong reaction against the white races, whose technology had ruined so much of the world, and so many of its people. There was a real danger that feelings would run so high that there would be a serious depletion of genetic material. The "white race" - or races - were of a very varied genetic mix. Some parts of the globe, even at the end, were still comparatively homogenous, still virtually unmixed: but the central and western areas of the central landmass, particularly the Northwest fringes, had absorbed such a number of different stocks, from other parts of Shikasta and from outside Shikasta, that it was undesirable this "race" should be lost. A great deal of effort, some of it apparently even bizarre, went into making sure that enough of these animals survived to carry on their genes into the future: these efforts were continuous and energetic everywhere over the northern hemisphere. Or almost everywhere: the Isolated Northern Continent, originally uniformly populated by a fairly homogenous genetic stock, indigenous, adapted to the surroundings, was supplanted by a conquering people, mostly from the Northwest fringes and the central landmass with nothing in the way of genes that was not already receiving our attention.

On the whole, the morale of the white "race" in the northern hemisphere did not assist our efforts. Their partial overrunning by the "yellow" races, their continuous and systematic starvation by the "coloured" races anterior to this conquest, out of the typically Shi-kastan (or Shammatan!) desire for revenge for past humiliations and deprivations, their slow acceptance of the rest of the globe's view of themselves, which caused a sharp painful readjustment and a relinquishing of assumption of superiority which had sustained them for centuries - all this lowered the tone, and stamina, in the Northwest fringes particularly, to the point where it was affecting not only their own will to live, but also the emanations from these areas: and good strong emanations were essential to our task of trying to prevent unnecessary suffering and bloodshed. The failure of morale swung so far that large numbers of - first of all - the youth, and then the older people, were unable to sustain in themselves any pride in their past at all. All they had accomplished in the way of technical advances, energetic experimentation in patterns of society, justice - fine in concept if not always a success in practice - these accomplishments of theirs seemed to them to be nothing at all, and they were tending to sink into abasement and sullen withdrawal. In fact, this emotional reaction, seeing themselves entirely as villains, the despoilers of the globe, a view reinforced every moment by a thousand exterior sources of propaganda, was as narrow and self-centred as their previous view - when they saw themselves as God-given benefactors of the rest of Shikasta. Both viewpoints failed to see things in interaction, a meshing of events, the reciprocation of needs, abilities, capacities. The "white races," subjugated, insulted, famished, deprived, with large masses of its population drawn off for cheap labour for the use of the reviving parts of the globe, with nothing of its wealth, and little of its culture left, was as unable to see itself as part of a whole as ever it had been. The Shikastan compartmentalism of mind reigned supreme, almost unchallenged - except by our servants and agents, continually at work trying to restore balances, and to heal these woeful defects of imaginative understanding.