And so, returning again after an interval - but is it really so many thousands of years? - I am deliberately reviving memories, re-creating memories, and these attempts will take their place in this record where they may be appropriate.
From: NOTES on PLANET SHIKASTA
for GUIDANCE of COLONIAL SERVANTS
Of all the planets we have colonised totally or in part this is the richest. Specifically: with the greatest potential for variety and range and profusion of its forms of life. This has always been so, throughout the very many changes it has - the accurate word, we are afraid - suffered. Shikasta tends towards extremes in all things. For instance, it has seen phases of enormousness: gigantic life-forms and in a wide variety. It has seen phases of the minuscule. Sometimes these epochs have overlapped. More than once the inhabitants of Shikasta have included creatures so large that one of them could consume the food and living space of hundreds of their co-inhabitants in a single meal. This example is on the scale of the visible (one might even say the dramatic), for the economy of the planet is such that every life-form preys on another, is supported by another, and in its turn is preyed upon, down to the most minute, the subatomic level. This is not always evident to the creatures themselves, who tend to become obsessed with what they consume, and to forget what in turn consumes them.
Over and over again, a shock or a strain in the peculiarly precarious balance of this planet has called forth an accident, and Shikasta has been virtually denuded of life. Again and again it has been jostling-full with genera, and diseased because of it.
This planet is above all one of contrasts and contradictions, because of its in-built stresses. Tension is its essential nature. This is its strength. This is its weakness.
Envoys are requested to remember at all times that they cannot find on Shikasta what they will have become familiar with in other parts of our dominion and which therefore they will have become disposed to expect: very long periods of stasis, epochs of almost unchanging harmonious balance.
Envoys are requested to equip themselves by thorough preparation. It is left to them to make mental adjustments suggested by what they will find in Section 5 of the Planetary Demonstration Building.
For instance. They may care to stand in front of the Model of Shikasta, Scale 3 - scaled, that is, to roughly present sizes. (Dominant species half of Canopean size.) This sphere, which you will see as they see it on their mapping and cartographic devices, has the diameter of their average predominant-species size. You will observe over the larger part of the sphere a smear of liquid. It is on this film of liquid that the profusion of life depends. (This planet knows nothing of the little scum of life on its surface: the planet has other ideas of itself, as we know; but that is not our concern here.) The point of the exercise is this: to understand that the proliferation of organic possibilities, the harvest of potentiality which is Shikasta, depends, from one point of view, on a scrape of liquid that could be drunk in a moment by a rogue star, or shaken off like puddle-mud from a child's ball during a game if a comet came in from elsewhere. Which event would be, after all, not without its precedents!
For instance. Adjust yourself to the various levels of being which lie in concentric shells around the planet, six of them in all, and none requiring much effort from you, since you will be entering and leaving them so quickly - none save the last Shell, or Circle, or Zone, Zone Six, which you must study in detail, since you will have to remain there for as long as it takes you to complete the various tasks you have been given: those which can be undertaken only through Zone Six. This is a hard place, full of dangers, but these can easily be dealt with, as is shown by the fact that not once have we ever lost one of our by now many hundreds of emissaries there, not even the most junior and inexperienced. Zone Six can present to the unprepared every sort of check, delay, and exhaustion. This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined. Chimeras, ghosts, phantoms, the half-created and the unfulfilled throng there, but if you are on your guard and vigilant, there will be nothing you cannot deal with.
For instance. It is suggested that you take time to acquaint yourself with the different focusses available for viewing the creatures of Shikasta. You will find every dimension possible to Shikasta in rooms 1-100 in Section 31, from the electron all the way up to the Dominant Animal. The fascinations of these different perspectives are real dangers. On the scale of the electron Shikasta appears as empty space where tinily vibrate shaped mists - the faintest possible smears of substance, the minutest impulses separated by vast spaces. (The largest building on Shikasta would collapse if the spaces that hold its electrons apart were withdrawn, into a piece of substance the size of a Shikastan fingernail.) Shikastan experience in the range of sound is not something to submit yourself to, if you have not become practised. Shikasta in colour is an assault you will not survive without preparation.
In short, none of the planets familiar to us is on as strong and as crude levels of vibration as is Shikasta, and too long a submission of one's being to any of these may pervert and suborn judgement.
JOHOR reports:
When I was asked to undertake this mission, my third, it was not expected that I would spend much time in Zone Six, but that I would move through it fast, perhaps stopping only as long as I would need for a task or two. But it was not known then that Taufiq had been captured and that others would have to do his work, myself in particular. And do it quickly, for there would not be time for me to incarnate and grow to adulthood before attending to the various urgencies that had developed because of Taufiq's misfortune. Our personnel on Shikasta are stretched to capacity as it is, and there is no one equipped to replace Taufiq. It is not always realised that we are not interchangeable. Our experiences, some chosen, some involuntary, mature us differently. We may have all begun on one of the planets, and some of us even on Shikasta in the same way, and with not much more to choose between us than between puppies of the same litter, but after even some hundreds of years, let alone thousands, we have been fused, baked out, crystallised, into forms as different as snowflakes are to each other. When one of us is chosen to "go down" to Shikasta or any other planet, it is only after deliberation: Johor is fitted for this or that task, Nasar for that one, and Taufiq for a specific, difficult long-term job that it seemed he and only he could do - and in parentheses and without emphasis I confess here that there is a weight of self-doubt on me. Taufiq and I have more than once been considered as very like: not equivalents, never that, but we have often headed a short list, we have been friends for... But how many times, and in how many planets have we worked together! And if so alike, brothers, life-and-death partners, friends on that level where there is nothing that may not be said, and no aspect of each other for which both may not take on absolute responsibility; if we are so close, and he is lost to us, temporarily of course, but nevertheless lost and part of the enemy forces, then - what may I not expect for myself? I record here that as I prepare for this trip, one of whose main tasks it is to take over Taufiq's undone work, that I spend many units of energy reinforcing my own purpose: No, no, I shall not (I tell myself), I shall not go the way of Taufiq, my brother. And again: I shall withstand what I know I must... and this is why I reacted badly to the news that I must spend so much time in Zone Six. I know well from last time that it is a place that weakens, undermines, fills one's mind with dreams, softness, hungers that one had hoped - one always does hope! - had been left behind forever. But it is our lot, our task, over and over again to submit ourselves to hazards and dangers and temptations. There is no other way. But I do not want to be in Zone Six! I was there twice before, once as a junior member of the Task Force of the First Time, then as Emissary in the Penultimate Time. Of course it will have changed, as Shikasta has.