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I now return to my visit in the Last Days.

It was necessary that Taufiq should cause himself to be born into the minority race of the planet, the white or pale-skinned peoples indigenous to the northern areas. The city he had chosen was not on the site of one of the Mathematical Cities of the Great Time, though some of the present cities were in fact built on such sites – it goes without saying, without any idea of their potentialities. This site had never been up to much. It was low, had been marshy for much of its recent history, when the climate had been wet. The soil was always damp and enervating. Nothing about the place had ever been naturally conducive to the high energies, though for certain purposes and in certain conditions it had been attuned and used, though temporarily, by us. It was the main city of a small island that had, because of its warlike and acquisitive qualities, overrun and dominated a good part of the globe, but had recently been driven back.

Taufiq was John, a name he had used quite often in his career – Jan, Jon, Sean, Yahya, Khan, Ivan, and so on. He was John Brent-Oxford, and the parents he had chosen were healthy honest people, neither too high nor too low in the society, which, since it suffered the most cumbersome division into classes and castes, all suspicious of each other, was a matter of importance and of careful judgment.

Taufiq’s undertaking was, in order to accomplish what he had to do, to become a person skilled in the regulations with which the various, always warring or quarrelling individuals, or sections of society, controlled themselves and each other. And he had achieved this. His youth had been spent intelligently, he had equipped himself, and was outstanding at an early age. Just as in higher spheres promising youngsters are watched by people they know nothing about, though they may wonder or guess, so in lower spheres of activity possibilities are prepared for those who prove themselves, and John was from childhood observed by ‘people of influence’, as the Shikastan phrase goes. But the ‘influences’ were by no means all of the same kind!

In this corrupt and ghastly age the young man could not avoid having put on him many pressures to leave the path of duty, and it was very early – he was not more than twenty-five years old – that he succumbed. Furthermore, he knew that he was doing something wrong. The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was ‘destined’ to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but – more often and more deeply as he grew older – ‘impractical’. That he did know quite well what he was doing is shown by his tendency to laugh apologetically at certain moments, with the remark that ‘he had been unable to resist temptation.’ Yet these words on the face of it had little to do with the obvious and recognized mores of his society, which was why it was essential to laugh. The laugh paid homage to these modes and mores. He was being ridiculous, the laugh said … yet he was never without uneasiness about what he was doing, the choices he had made.

It was necessary for him to be at a certain place at a certain time, in order to play a role that was essential in our handling of the crisis that faced Shikasta. He was to aim for a position – not only in his own country’s legal system – but a leading one in the system of northern countries which unified, or attempted to, that part of the northern hemisphere which recently had conquered and despoiled a good part of the planet, and which had until very recently been continually at war among themselves. He was to become a reliable and honest person, in this sphere. At a time of corruption, personal and public, he was to become known as incorruptible, unbribable, disinterested, straight-speaking.

But he was only just out of the last of his educational establishments, an elite one, for the production of the administrative class, when he took a false turning. Instead of going into a junior position in the Councils of the aforesaid bloc of northern countries, which was the position planned for him by us (and by him, of course, as Taufiq), he took a job in a law firm which was known for the number of its members who went into politics.

World War II was just over – Shikastan terminology. [SeeHistory of Shikasta, VOLS. 2955-3015, The Century of Destruction.] He had fought in it, seen much ferocity, spoiling, suffering. His judgments had been affected: his whole being – just like everybody else. He saw himself in a crucial role – as indeed he should – but one of the strongest of the false ideas of that epoch, politics, had entered into him. It was not as simple as that he wanted crude power, crude authority: no, he visualized himself ‘influencing things for the good’. He was an idealist: a word describing people who described themselves as intending good, not self-interest at the expense of others.

And in parentheses I report here that this was true of a good many of our citizens – to borrow a Shikastan word – of that time. They turned into wrong and destructive paths believing that they were better than others whose belief in self-interest was open and expressed, better because they, and they alone, knew how the practical affairs of the planet should be conducted. An emotional reaction to the sufferings of Shikasta seemed to them a sufficient qualification for curing them.

The attitudes outlined in this paragraph define ‘polities’, ‘political parties’, ‘political programmes’. Nearly all political people were incapable of thinking in terms of interaction, of cross-influences, of the various sects and ‘parties’ forming together a whole, wholes – let alone of groups of nations making up a whole. No, in entering the state of mind where ‘politics’ was ruler, it was always to enter a crippling partiality, a condition of being blinded by the ‘correctness’ of a certain viewpoint. And when one of these sects or ‘parties’ got power, they nearly always behaved as if their viewpoint could be the only right one. The only good one: when John chose a sect, he was in his own mind motivated by the highest ideas and ideals. He saw himself as a saviour of some kind, dreamed of himself as leader of the nation. From the moment he joined this group of lawyers, he met with very few people who thought differently from him. On various occasions members of our staff attempted to influence him, tried to remind him, indirectly of course, but none of them succeeded: the ways of thinking and being that he had taken to the borders of Shikasta were now so buried in him that they surfaced only rarely, in dreams, or in moments of remorse and panic that he could not ascribe to their right cause.

He had temporarily been written off. If it happened – so the judgment went on Canopus – that by some at present unforeseen processes Taufiq would ‘come to himself' – many such revealing phrases were common on Shikasta – and very often people apparently quite lost to us, at least temporarily, did ‘come to themselves’, ‘see the light’, and so on, quite often due to some awful shock or trauma of the kind Shikasta was so prodigal with, then, and then only, could trouble be spent on him. We were all so pressed, so thinly spread, and the situation on the planet so desperate.

One of my tasks was to observe him, to assess his present state, and if possible, to administer a reminder.

He was in his early fifties: that is, he was well past the halfway mark in the pitifully brief life which was all that Shikastans could now expect. As it happened he was scheduled for a longer life than most: his final assignment called for him to be about seventy-five when he would represent the aged. A respected representative: though at the moment it was hard to see how this could be brought about.

He lived in a house in an affluent district of the city, in a style which he would have described as moderate, was not excessive contrasted with what was usual then in that geographical area, but according to how it was to be judged very soon after – by global standards – in a shameful, wasteful, and profligate way. He had two families. A first wife had four children by him, and lived in another part of the city. His present wife had two children. The children were all indulged, spoiled, unfitted for what lay ahead. The women’s lives were devoted to supporting him, his ambitions. Both felt for him emotions characteristic of anyone who had ever been close to him. He was a person who had always provoked people into extremes of liking and disliking. He influenced people. He changed lives – for good and bad. A powerful inner drive (something supremely valuable which had as it were slipped out of true) had caused his life – and again this was hardly unusual in those times – to resemble where a swathe of forest fire had passed: everything extreme: blackened earth, destroyed animals and vegetation, and then stronger brilliant growth to follow, a change in the genetic patternings, potential of all kinds.

In appearance he was ordinary: dark hair, dark eyes in which even now I liked to imagine I could see traces of those far-distant ancestors, the Giants. A pale skin which possibly came from the genetic freaks among the Giants. His sturdy energetic body reminded me of the Natives. But of course by now there were so many admixtures, from the Sirian experiments, the Shammat spies, and others.

Like all people in public life at that period, he had public and private personalities. This was governed by the fact that no such person could ever tell the truth to the people he was supposed to represent. Some sort of attack in the personality was essential equipment: persuasiveness, forcefulness, charm. And it was necessary to use methods that in other times, places, planets, would have been described as deceitful, lying, and in fact criminal. The qualities prized in ‘public servants’ on Shikasta were, almost invariably, the most superficial and irrelevant imaginable, and could only have been accepted in a time of near total debasement and falseness. This was true of all sects, groupings, ‘parties’: for what was remarkable about this particular time was how much they all resembled each other, while they spent most of their energies in describing and denigrating differences that they imagined existed between them.

John had become a national figure by the time he was forty. This was because he was in certain positions and places: not because he was more than ordinarily competent, or had more than the usual grasp of public affairs – seen from local viewpoints, of course. He was handicapped because of his self-division. His suppressed inner qualities made him disappointed with what he was. He knew he had greater qualities than any he was using but did not know what they were. This restlessness had caused him to drink too much, indulge in bouts of self-denigration and cynicism. He was not respected in ways that matter, and he knew it. He was only another among the hundreds, the thousands, of the politicians of the globe of whom nothing much was to be expected – certainly not by the people they were supposed to represent. These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get ‘their’ representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on – even forcibly and violently – opinions and sets of mind that a short time later – years, a month, even a few minutes – they might utterly repudiate.

At the time when I located his dwelling, and positioned myself (of course well ensconced in Zone Six) where I could take in as much as was needed to make my decisions, and to influence him, if possible, he was in a period of intense emotional activity.

He had choices to make. Inwardly he knew this was another crisis for him. The political faction he represented had just been deprived of power. His faction had been in and out of a governing position several times since the Second World War (or as we put it, the Second Intensive Phase of the Twentieth Century War) and it was not this that was affecting him. Pressure was being put on him (indirectly by us) to return full-time to his legal firm and become active there, for he would be enabled to cultivate that kind of reputation which is most solidly based: among people who work in the same sphere as oneself. If he did this, it would still be time for him to take on a series of cases in ways which would be useful. The other work offered to him was in the Councils of the northerly bloc of countries. But it was a high position, he did not have the qualities to sustain it, and we knew that he would not be in exactly the right place to take up the defence of the white races at the moment when they were to be threatened with extermination. He would not have the necessary qualities. From our point of view, his acceptance of this post would be a bad mistake.

His present wife thought so, too. She had an inkling of what could happen. She did not like him as an impassioned sectarian. Neither had his first wife. Both women in fact had married him because of being attracted to his hidden unused powers or potential, which he then did not fulfil, and this was the real reason for their dissatisfaction with him – which fact they did not understand, and this caused in them all kinds of bitternesses and frustrations. This second marriage was likely to break up. Because of all this he was in mental breakdown. His home was a seethe of emotions and conflict. [See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3012, Mental Instability During the Century of Destruction. SECTION 5. PUBLIC FIGURES.] He had broken down before, and had prolonged treatment. In fact, most of the politicians of that time needed psychiatric support, because of the nature of their preoccupations: an unreality at the very heart of their everyday decision-making, thinking, functioning.

I watched him for some days. He was in a large room at the top of his house, a place set aside for his work, and where his family did not enter. Because he was alone, the ghastly charm of his public self was not in use. He was pacing up and down, his hair dishevelled (the exact disposition of head hair was of importance in that epoch), his eyes reddened and unable to maintain a focus. He had been drinking steadily for weeks. As he paced he groaned and muttered, he would bend over and straighten himself, as if to ease inner pain; he sat and clasped himself with both arms, hands gripping his shoulders, or he flung himself down on a day-bed and slept for a few moments, starting up to resume his restless pacing. He had decided to take the position with the northern bloc. He knew this was a mistake, and yet did not know. His rational self, the one he relied on – and indeed he possessed a fine, clear reasoning mind – could see nothing but opportunities for his ambition … which was never described to him in terms other than ‘progress’, ‘justice’, and so forth. He imagined this northern bloc becoming ever more powerful, successful, satisfying to all concerned. And yet the general collapse of the world order was apparent to everybody by then. That problems were not to be solved by the ways of thinking then accepted by partisan politics was also evident: certain minorities, and some of them influential ones, were putting forth alternative ways of thought, and these could not but appeal to John, or Taufiq … and yet he was committed to patterns of partisan thinking, and must be for as long as he was a politician. And he did not want his marriage to break up. Nor did he want to disappoint these two children as he had the children of his first marriage – he feared his progeny, as the people then tended to do. But of that later.

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 decision 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.

It is not too much to say that in a country devastated by war, lying in ruins, poisoned, in a landscape blackened and charred under skies low with smoke, a Shikastan was capable of making a shelter out of broken bricks and fragments of metal, cooking himself a rat and drinking water from a puddle that of course tasted of oil and thinking ‘Well, this isn’t too bad after all …’

World War II lasted five years, and was incomparably worse in every way than the first. All the features of the first were present in the second, developed. The waste of human life now extended to mass extermination of civilian populations. Cities were totally destroyed. Agriculture was ruined over enormous areas. Again the armament industries flourished, and this finally established them as the real rulers of every geographical area. Above all, the worst wounds were inflicted in the very substance, the deepest minds, of the people themselves. Propaganda in every area, by every group, was totally unscrupulous, vicious, lying – and self-defeating – because in the long run, people could not believe the truth when it came their way. Under the Dictatorships, lies and propaganda were government. The maintenance of the dominance of the colonized parts was by lies and propaganda – these more effective and important than physical force; and the retaliation of the subjugated took the form, first of all and most importantly in influence, of lies and propaganda: this is what they had been taught by their conquerors. This war covered and involved the whole globe – the first war, or phase of the war, involved only part of it: there was no part of Shikasta by the end of World War II left unsubjected to untruth, lies, propaganda.

This war saw, too, the use of weapons that could cause total global destruction: it should go without saying, to the accompaniment of words like democracy, freedom, economic progress.

The degeneration of the already degenerate was accelerated.

By the end of World War II, one of the great Dictatorships was defeated – the same land area as saw the worst defeat in the first war. The Dictatorship which covered so much of the central landmass had been weakened, almost to the point of defeat, but survived, and made a slow, staggering recovery. Another vast area of the central landmass, to the east of this Dictatorship, ended half a century of local wars, civil wars, suffering, and over a century of exploitation and invasion by the Northwest fringes by turning to Dictatorship. The Isolated Northern Continent had been strengthened by the war and was now the major world power. The Northwest fringes on the whole had been severely weakened. They had to let go their grip of their colonies. Impoverished, brutalized – while being, formally, victors – they were no longer world powers. Retreating from these colonies they left behind technology, an idea of society based entirely on physical well-being, physical satisfaction, material accumulation – to cultures who, before encounter with these all-ravaging Northwest fringers, had been infinitely more closely attuned with Canopus than the fringers had ever been.

This period can be – is by some of our scholars – designated The Age of Ideology. [For this viewpoint see VOL. 3011, SUMMARY CHAPTER.]

The political groupings were all entrenched in bitterly defended ideologies.

The local religions continued, infinitely divided and subdivided, each entrenched in their ideologies.

Science was the most recent ideology. War had immeasurably strengthened it. Its ways of thought, in its beginnings flexible and open, had hardened, as everything must on Shikasta, and scientists, as a whole — we exclude individuals in this area as in all others – were as impervious to real experience as the religionists had ever been. Science, its basic set of mind, its prejudices, gripped the whole globe and there was no appeal. Just as individuals of our tendencies of mind, our inclinations towards the truth, our ‘citizens’ had had to live under the power and the threat of religions who would use any brutalities to defend their dogmas, so now individuals with differing inclinations and needs from those tolerated by science had to lead silent or prudent lives, careful of offending the bigotries of the scientific global governing class: in the service of national governments and therefore of war – an invisible global ruling caste, obedient to the warmakers. The industries that made weapons, the armies, the scientists who served them – these could not be easily attacked, since the formal picture of how the globe was run did not include this, the real picture. Never has there been such a totalitarian, all-pervasive, all-powerful governing caste anywhere: and yet the citizens of Shikasta were hardly aware of it, as they mouthed slogans and waited for their deaths by holocaust. They remained unaware of what ‘their’ governments were doing, right up to the end. Each national grouping developed industries, weapons, horrors of all kinds, that the people knew nothing about. If glimpses were caught of these weapons, the government would deny they existed. [See History of Shikasta, VOLS. 3013, 3014, and CHAPTER 9 this volume, Use of Moon as Military Base.] There were space probes, space weapons, explorations of planets, use of planets, rivalries over their moon, about which the populations were not told.

And here is the place to say that the mass of the populations, the average individual, were, was, infinitely better, more sane, than those who ruled them: most would have been appalled at what was being done by ‘their’ representatives. It is safe to say that if even a part of what was being kept from them had come to notice, there would have been mass risings across the globe, massacres of the rulers, riots … unfortunately, when peoples are helpless, betrayed, lied to, they possess no weapons but the (useless) ones of rioting, looting, mass murder, invective.

During the years following the end of World War II, there were many ‘small’ wars, some as vicious and extensive as wars in the recent past described as major. The needs of the armament industries, as much as ideology, dictated the form and intensities of these wars. During this period savage exterminations of previously autonomous ‘primitive’ peoples took place, mostly in the Isolated Southern Continent (otherwise known as Southern Continent II). During this period colonial risings were used by all the major powers for their own purposes. During this period psychological methods of warfare and control of civilian populations developed to an extent previously undreamed of.

Here we must attempt to underline another point which it is almost impossible for those with our set of mind to appreciate.

When a war was over, or a phase of war, with its submersion in the barbarous, the savage, the degrading, Shikastans were nearly all able to perform some sort of mental realignment that caused them to ‘forget’. This did not mean that wars were not idols, subjects for pious mental exercises of all sorts. Heroisms and escapes and braveries of local and limited kinds were raised into national preoccupations, which were in fact forms of religion. But this not only did not assist, but prevented, an understanding of how the fabric of cultures had been attacked and destroyed. After each war, a renewed descent into barbarism was sharply visible – but apparently cause and effect were not connected, in the minds of Shikastans.

After World War II, in the Northwest fringes and in the Isolated Northern Continent, corruption, the low level of public life, was obvious. The two ‘minor’ wars conducted by the Isolated Northern Continent reduced its governmental agencies, even those visible and presented to the public inspection, to public scandal. Leaders of the nation were murdered. Bribery, looting, theft, from the top of the pyramids of power to the bottom, were the norm. People were taught to live for their own advancement and the acquisition of goods. Consumption of food, drink, every possible commodity was built into the economic structure of every society. [VOL. 3009, Economies of Affluence.] And yet these repulsive symptoms of decay were not seen as direct consequences of the wars that ruled their lives.

During the whole of the Century of Destruction, there were sudden reversals: treaties between nations which had been at war, so that these turned their hostilities on nations only recently allies; secret treaties between nations actually at war; enemies and allies constantly changing positions, proving that the governing factor was in the need for war, as such. During this period every major city in the northern hemisphere lived inside a ring of terror: each had anything up to thirty weapons aimed at it, every one of which could reduce it and its inhabitants to ash in seconds – pointed from artificial satellites in the skies, directed from underwater ships that ceaselessly patrolled the seas, directed from land bases perhaps halfway across the globe. These were controlled by machines which everyone knew were not infallible – and everybody knew that more than once the destruction of cities and areas had been avoided by a ‘miracle’. But the populations were never told how often these ‘miracles’ had taken place – near-lethal accidents between machines in the skies, collisions between machines under the oceans, weapons only just not unleashed from the power bases. Looking from outside at this planet it was as if at a totally crazed species.

In large parts of the northern hemisphere was a standard of living that had recently belonged only to emperors and their courts. Particularly in the Isolated Northern Continent, the wealth was a scandal, even to many of their own citizens. Poor people lived there as the rich have done in previous epochs. The continent was heaped with waste, with wreckage, with the spoils of the rest of the world. Around every city, town, even a minor settlement in a desert, rose middens full of discarded goods and food that in other less favoured parts of the globe would mean the difference between life and death to millions. Visitors to this continent marvelled – but at what people could be taught to believe was their due, and their right.

This dominant culture set the tone and standard for most of Shikasta. For regardless of the ideological label attaching to each national area, they all had in common that technology was the key to all good, and that good was always material increase, gain, comfort, pleasure. The real purposes of life – so long ago perverted, kept alive with such difficulty by us, maintained at such a cost – had been forgotten, were ridiculed by those who had ever heard of them, for distorted inklings of the truth remained in the religions. And all this time the earth was being despoiled. The minerals were being ripped out, the fuels wasted, the soils depleted by an improvident and short-sighted agriculture, the animals and plants slaughtered and destroyed, the seas being filled with filth and poison, the atmosphere was corrupted – and always, all the time, the propaganda machines thumped out: more, more, more, drink more, eat more, consume more, discard more – in a frenzy, a mania. These were maddened creatures, and the small voices that rose in protest were not enough to halt the processes that had been set in motion and were sustained by greed. By the lack of substance-of-we-feeling.

But the extreme riches of the northern hemisphere were not distributed evenly among their own populations, and the less favoured classes were increasingly in rebellion. The Isolated Northern Continent and the Northwest fringe areas also included large numbers of dark-skinned people brought in originally as cheap labour to do jobs disdained by the whites – and while these did gain, to an extent, some of the general affluence, it could be said that looking at Shikasta as a whole, it was the white-skinned that did well, the dark-skinned poorly.

And this was said, of course, more and more loudly by the dark-skinned, who hated the white-skinned exploiters as perhaps conquerors have never before been hated.

Inside each national area everywhere, north and south, east and west, discontent grew. This was not only because of the gap between the well off and the poor, but because their way of life, where augmenting consumption was the only criterion, increasingly saddened and depressed their real selves, their hidden selves, which were unfed, were ignored, were starved, were lied to, by almost every agency around them, by every authority they had been taught to, but could not, respect.

Increasingly the two main southern continents were torn by wars and disorders of every kind – sometimes civil wars between blacks, sometimes between blacks and remnants of the old white oppression, and between rival sects and juntas and power groups. Local dictators abounded. Vast territories were denuded of forests, species of animals destroyed, tribes murdered or dispersed …

War. Civil War. Murder. Torture. Exploitation. Oppression and suppression. And always lies, lies, lies. Always in the name of progress, and equality and development and democracy.

The main ideology all over Shikasta was now variations on this theme of economic development, justice, equality, democracy.

Not for the first time in the miserable story of this terrible century, this particular ideology – economic justice, equality, democracy, and the rest – took power at a time when the economy of an area was at its most disrupted: the Northwest fringes became dominated by governments ‘of the left’, which presided over a descent into chaos and misery.

The formerly exploited areas of the world delighted in this fall of their former persecutors, their tormentors – the race that had enslaved them, enserfed them, stolen from them, above all, despised them because of their skin colour and destroyed their indigenous cultures now at last beginning to be understood and valued … but too late, for they had been destroyed by the white race and its technologies.

There was no one to rescue the Northwest fringes, in the grip of grindingly repetitive, dogmatic Dictatorships, all unable to solve the problems they had inherited – the worst and chief one being that the empires that had brought wealth had not only collapsed, leaving them in a vacuum, but had left behind false and unreal ideas of what they were, their importance in the global scale. Revenge played its part, not an inconsiderable part, in what was happening.

Chaos ruled. Chaos economic, mental, spiritual – I use this word in its exact, Canopean sense – ruled while the propaganda roared and blared from loudspeaker, radio, television.

The time of the epidemics and diseases, the time of famine and mass deaths had come.

On the main landmass two great Powers were in mortal combat. The Dictatorship that had come into being at the end of World War I, in the centre, and the Dictatorship that had taken hold of the eastern areas now drew into their conflict most of Shikasta, directly or indirectly. The younger Dictatorship was stronger. The older one was already in decline, its empire fraying away, its populations more and more in revolt or sullen, its ruling class increasingly remote from its people – processes of growth and decay that had in the past taken a couple of centuries now were accomplished in a few decades. This Dictatorship was not able to withstand the advance of the eastern Dictatorship whose populations were bursting its boundaries. These masses overran a good part of the older Dictatorship, and then overran, too, the Northwest fringes, in the name of a superior ideology – though in fact this was but a version of the predominating ideology of the Northwest fringes. The new masters were clever, adroit, intelligent; they foresaw for themselves the dominance of all the main landmass of Shikasta, and the continuance of that dominance.

But meanwhile the armaments piled up, up up … The war began in error. A mechanism went wrong, and major cities were blasted into death-giving dusts.

That something of this kind was bound to happen had been plentifully forecast by technicians of all countries … but the Shammat influences were too strong.

In a short time, nearly the whole of the northern hemisphere was in ruins. Very different, these, from the ruins of the second war, cities which were rapidly rebuilt. No, these ruins were uninhabitable, the earth around them poisoned.

Weapons that had been kept secret now filled the skies, and the dying survivors, staggering and weeping and vomiting in their ruins, lifted their eyes to watch titanic battles being fought, and with their last breaths muttered of ‘Gods’ and ‘Devils’ and ‘Angels’ and ‘Hell’.

Underground were shelters, sealed against radiation, poisons, chemical influences, deadly sound impulses, death rays. They had been built for the ruling classes. In these a few did survive.

In remote areas, islands, places sheltered by chance, a few people survived.

The populations of all the southern continents and islands were also affected by pestilence, by radiations, by soil and water and contamination, and were much reduced.

Within a couple of decades, of the billions upon billions of Shikasta perhaps 1 percent remained. The substance-of-we-feeling, previously shared among these multitudes, was now enough to sustain, and keep them all sweet, and whole, and healthy.

The inhabitants of Shikasta, restored to themselves, looked about, could not believe what they saw – and wondered why they had been mad.

Report by Emissaries TAUFIQ, NASAR, and RAWSTI, MEMBERS of the SPECIAL INVESTIGATORY COMMISSION into the STATE of SHIKASTA, PENULTIMATE TIME. SUMMARY. [This was the first mission sent to the planet from Canopus since Johor’s visit at the Time of the Catastrophe.]

1 We have thoroughly surveyed the northern hemisphere, and have had meetings with the representatives of Sirius, both those stationed here, and visiting. We have also encountered Shammat’s agents, without their knowledge. We confirm reports by our visiting and indigenous agents that there is an unexpected development. All over the northern hemisphere are a race of ‘little people’, which is how they are referred to everywhere. Blood, tissue, and bone tests suggested Sirian origin, and Sirian representatives confirmed they originated from experiments by Sirius as far back as the epoch of Johor’s visit at the Time of the Malalignment. A great part of the northern hemisphere has been covered by ice. This process has locked up more of the Shikastan waters, and water levels have sunk, and dry land has appeared where none was, making bridges between landmasses and islands, facilitating the movement of these ‘little people’ everywhere. Sirius confirms their extensive presence on the two major southern continents and the smaller southern continent.

2 These ‘little people’ can be no more than a span in height, and at their tallest are not more than four spans. They are of various types, ranging from squat, heavy, and physically very powerful to slight, exquisite, and beautiful even by Canopean standards. The former extreme tends to dwell underground in caves, caverns, and subterranean places of all kinds, sometimes very far beneath ground, to the extent they may seldom or never see the surface at all. They are skilled in mining, smelting, surveying. They produce and use iron, copper, bronze, gold, silver. The more delicate types live in and with vegetation, understanding the uses of plants, or are adapted to water and its properties, or are creatures of fire. All shun the larger inhabitants of Shikasta to the point that in some parts they are already the stuff of myth and legend. But in some places a link has been established and maintained, even to the extent of exchange of information and commodities. These races have in our opinion little or no evolutionary potential. They dwindle in size and numbers and most have already transferred themselves – not to Zone Six, where they are not at home, but to Zones One and Two.

3 Because of the pressures of the polar ice masses so far south, there have been extensive movements of the two stocks we are interested in. The Giants, established mainly in the mountainous and plateau areas of the main landmass, spread out towards the east, and emigrated to the Isolated Northern Continent in large numbers, over the new ice bridges. There they flourish. They are now two-thirds of their former height. They live about two thousand years. Their life-spans and their stature both lessen fast.

The Natives, who were settled further south and further north than the Giants, have crowded in on areas the Giants left empty or sparsely settled and have also emigrated southwards everywhere, even to the extent of establishing themselves over the northern areas of Southern Continent I. They, too, are losing height, and are two-thirds of what they were in Johor’s time. They live about eight hundred years. As with the Giants, their life- span and stature dwindle rapidly.

4 There is now mating between these two races, which produces a physically improved type, sturdy, healthy, but above all adaptable, able to withstand extremes of climate, to sustain themselves on any diet, and to fit themselves rapidly to sudden and drastic changes. For instance, they are living adequately on the very edge of the ice cap. Their mentalities are not better than either the Giant or the Native stocks, but are ingenious and – again – very adaptable, within the limits, of course, imposed by the limited ingestion of SOWF by the planet.

The new hybrid lives among or near the Natives, but the Giants are less amenable. There is always, and increasingly, disharmony on personal and intergroup levels, but this does not yet show signs of developing into war, nor is war something considered inevitable or desirable. On the contrary, enough of the substance of Johor’s ‘Rules’ remains to make all species uneasy when they fall into bellicosity, even briefly; and antagonisms remain local and short-term affairs.

These three species – for the Cross should now be considered as a new species – breed and develop animals of all kinds, for food, for transport, and for use in agriculture. The use of metals is little understood, even though rumours of the skills of the ‘little people’ suggest all kinds of experiments and attempts. We have inspired individuals in every part of Shikasta to search out the ‘little people’ and learn from them what they can, particularly in the realm of metals.

5 The ‘Laws of Canopus’, as described by Johor, have to a certain extent stabilized themselves not only in the various ethical structures, but even genetically. Transgressions cause discomfort, and have to be compensated for, in sometimes unfortunate and nonproductive ways. But we have to report that, as was expected, these Laws rapidly diminish in effect. Not least because of the efforts of Shammat, whose agents are energetically at work. The psychological malaise caused by ‘transgressions’ provide fruitful grounds for Shammat’s needs. For instance, they have successfully established human sacrifice as a means of ‘pleasing the Gods’. This practice is everywhere on the increase. Shammat encourages in every place and in every way the falling away of Shikastans into animalism. As this does not differ from what we already know of Puttiora and Shammat elsewhere, there is no need to enlarge.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS:

a A boost of Canopean genes to the new Cross. This in our opinion has the greatest evolutionary potential, showing a tendency towards frequent and varied mutation.

b More frequent visits from our representatives. We know that Shammat’s theft of SOWF cannot be stopped, but their efforts towards degenerating the stock can be combated.

ENVOY 99, TAUFIQ, reports:

I covered the designated areas. The polar ice is retreating. The level of the oceans is almost at its former height.

The populations are settled mostly in the regions of the great inland seas, because of the climatic advantages, and on the islands in the ocean that separates the Isolated Northern Continent from the central land mass. (These islands are unstable.) That is, between 20 degrees and 40 degrees north, their measurement. The Giant/Native Cross proves, as forecast, the most enduring. Purebred Giants and purebred Natives are now minorities, and tend to live by themselves. Both are seen as ‘Giants’ by the new Cross. This breeds with every generation shorter, smaller, and very strong and vigorous. It is intellectually inferior, even within the limits imposed by the depredations of Shammat. They are belligerent, acquisitive.

There is accumulation of wealth and even land by the few at the expense of the many, who are often in the position of slaves and servants. Some of these are escaping northwards after the retreating ice, and establishing themselves in harsh conditions. They make frequent forays southwards to raid and plunder crops and livestock. There is now continual fighting and looting everywhere.

Little remains of the instruction left them by Envoy Johor and subsequent visitors.

Systems of taboos operate around objects and artefacts and animals. Human and animal sacrifice is operated mostly by ‘priests’, self-appointed custodians of the ‘Divine’.

MY RECOMMENDATIONS:

a I support the recommendation of the Commission that there should be a genetic boost. There is an argument that there are already too many species on Shikasta. Against this I urge that the Giant/Native Cross will soon predominate. Its peculiarly violent and rapacious qualities must be reduced. There will otherwise be no species left at all! For instance, the ‘little people’ are now almost extinct, except in certain mostly northern parts where the severity of the climate preserves them. They have been hunted down for sport. I need say no more in underlining my contention that Shammat’s influences are almost overwhelming.

b Our servants have been instructed to remain unnoticed where possible. Their function has been mostly to monitor and observe. I believe we should embark on a new policy of vigorous intervention. It will be necessary to work inside the existing mental sets and tendencies. This means making use of existing ‘religions’ and perhaps introducing new ones.

ENVOY 102, TAUFIQ, reports:

Our plans must be postponed. The instability of this planet has again been confirmed. Shikasta flipped over on its axis and back again. I have arranged for the relevant experts to ascertain the cause. There were floods, storms, earthquakes. Some islands submerged. There will be changes in climate. Shikasta is slightly distanced from its sun. The effect on its moon is as yet not certain. There was great loss of life, more in the northern than in the southern hemisphere. Several promising cultures, carefully monitored by us, have been wiped out. Adalanterland is one. Agent Nasar, now permanently established on Shikasta, is sending an independent report. These events however do not change the basic situation, and after an interval for the effects of the events to lessen, the recommendations of my report should be followed.

ENVOY 105, TAUFIQ, reports:

I picked up five males from Eastern Sector, Canopus, five from Planet 19, and five from Planet 27.

There is not now much evidence of the recent unfortunate events, but the population levels remain reduced.

The males were divided into five groups and put down as follows: To the immediate north of the Great Mountains. To the immediate south of the same. In the extreme north of Southern Continent I. Two groups south of the Great Seas, one of which I accompanied. All of these had to acclimatize themselves for several days, before allowing themselves to be noticed.

The group of three I was with was on a mountain near a flat space where our craft put down. This flat area has sacred connotations in the area.

Our problem was that only the chosen females should mate.

I approached descendants of the old Davidic strain, who because of natural superiority tend to hold positions of influence. I told each ‘in secret’ that ‘sacred beings’ were present, drawn down from ‘higher regions’ because of their beauty. These selected women were led to the males and mating was accomplished. There were about fifty of them, each at first believing she was unique.

Our plan was that they should tell others ‘in confidence’. This was to ensure the spread of rumours about Gods and so forth. But we did not wish mating to become general.

In a short time the high place on the mountain where our volunteers were ensconced was under siege from willing females and from suspicious males. The four of us made our way as unnoticeably as possible to the space vehicle, but two of the women followed us, and mating took place in spite of my remonstrances that these were not designated women. Suggest that Planet 27 is unsuitable for this work. Planet 19 less enthusiastic.

We made sure the take-off by our vehicle was observed by the two females, who will have returned to talk about celestial chariots.

ENVOY 111, TAUFIQ, reports:

I made preparations to carry out our first plan. This was for me to descend through Zone Six. It had been intended that I incarnate and become visible as mentor. Reports from our agents of unexpected conditions on Shikasta interdicted this plan.

I therefore again approached by spacecraft. Our agents’ reports were soon confirmed. The ice caps were melting at a quite unforeseen pace. This was the more unexpected because there has been a period when they have in fact made a minor advance, conquering some of the territory they had relinquished. The sudden reversal has again swamped coastlines everywhere. It has filled the Shikastan skies with cloud that never lifts. The resulting gloom has led to a change in the Shikastan temperament. They are less volatile, are sullen, suspicious, slower to react.

I covered the indicated areas. This survey was done as quickly as possible because of the urgency felt by me.

This is what I found. The descendants of the genetic boost – Planets 19, 27, and Canopus East – are satisfactory. The general decline halted. They form a noticeably superior strain. But the others are sinking fast to a lamentable condition. Our plans for boosting this product of our genetic improvement had obviously to be postponed, but I suggest that when Shikasta has recovered from the fresh setback we should implement them.

It was clear that a general inundation from the skies was imminent. The cloud mass grew daily heavier and more dense.

I took the head of the new strain (Davidic-improved), and warned him to be ready to leave for higher ground, together with his family, and animals for breeding stock. He understood that I came from ‘somewhere else’ – as he put it. The legend of ‘Gods’ is well established. A measure of the new strain’s improved intelligence is their response to such information. I told him to warn all the inhabitants of that area. Those who would listen must be pressed into preparations for survival. Few could hear him: their genetic equipment made it impossible. This new emergency is in fact providing an unforeseen but useful means of separating the superior from the inferior. I shall be interested to discuss this with our envoys to the other threatened areas of Shikasta. It is my suggestion that the results of these discussions, which will provide invaluable information as to the mentality of the new Shikastan strain, should form the basis of a supplementary report.

Well before the inundation the Davidic tribe was on safe ground on a mountain. The deluge began at the same time all over Shikasta, as I have gathered from informal discussion among our envoys. In the area that is the subject of this report, the rain continued for nearly two months. Except for mountain peaks everything was inundated. The onset of the deluge was so fast that there was no time for escape to higher ground by either higher or lower animals. Nothing survived. Of course, as the waters drained to the oceans, their levels rose. The great inland seas all flooded and will remain greatly enlarged.

The psychological condition of the rescued strain was pitiable. It was necessary to make a ‘pact’ with them that this visitation of the Gods would not occur again. For their part, they must understand that the deluge was because of their falling away into wickedness and evil practices. They must always be ready to listen to instructions from us, their friends. These instructions would come, when necessary.

When the earth dried, they were told to return to their previous territories. They must live soberly, moderately, without oppressing each other, and as custodians of the animals, whom they must not harm and oppress. They might make animal sacrifices to the Gods, but not human sacrifices, and this must be done without cruelty to the animals. (It was unfortunately necessary to allow this: the Shammat perversion is too strong.) I left them with various artefacts, as instructed. I told them that these were to strengthen the bond between them and ‘somewhere else’.

I end this report with a personal request. If it is considered not unreasonable, I would prefer not to be assigned to Shikasta again.

ENVOY 159, TAUFIQ, reports:

Since my last visit, twenty-one cities have been established in the old flood areas. Five are large, with populations of a quarter of a million or more. Trade flourishes between the cities and as far as the eastern areas of the main landmass, its Northwest fringes, the northern parts of Southern Continent I, the Isolated Northern Continent.

The living is luxurious, wasteful, higher purposes forgotten, except for a few.

There has been racial mixing with the results of experiments from both southern continents. The merits, demerits, and general peculiarities of these crosses are analysed in the accompanying Report by the Mission of Population Analysts, Envoys 153, 154, 155.

The worst of the adverse factors is that there have been matings with Shammat stock, as a deliberate policy by Shammat to counteract our improvements as a result of genetic boosts before the inundation.

Shammat is not only constantly at work persuading Shikasta into the ways of Shammat, but is now informing these unfortunates that Shikasta is being defrauded by ‘the Gods’, who exploit them, of their rightful heritage, and that if certain practices are followed, the Shikastans will become ‘as Gods’.

This is now a popular belief everywhere. Revolts against us are being planned. These will take the form of mass attempts to ‘transcend’ themselves, by means suggested through Shammat spies. They congregate together for ‘higher practices’ – the vibrations of which are channelled off to Shammat. They perform mass slaughter of animals, as a ritual. They also practise spurious versions of the Art of the Stones, suggested by Shammat.

I support the recommendation of 153, 154, 155 to disrupt their speech centres.

Representatives from every region of Shikasta known to them are to gather in the Areas of the Cities to confer about ways to ‘become Gods’. Unknown to them, Shammat will preside.

ENVOY 160, TAUFIQ, reports:

The urgency of the situation again necessitated use of spacecraft. All six of us attended the conference, purporting to be delegates from the extreme Northwest fringes. As there were so many different types present, there were no difficulties. The recommended techniques were effective. As a result their communication systems malfunctioned, and eight main languages are now established on Shikasta. These will develop into hundreds, then thousands of languages and dialects because of the Shikastan Law of inevitable division, subdivision.

I again apply for transfer from Shikastan service into any other branch of the Colonial Service.

ENVOY 192, TAUFIQ, reports:

As a result of reports from our local agents that the Areas of the Cities are currently unsuitable for our purposes, investigations have been made into the Northwest fringes and the Extreme-east fringes. The Northwest fringes are sparsely populated due to the harshness of conditions and the impoverished landscape after the time of the ice. We established a few local agents to create and maintain enough stone patterns to keep our current stabilized. Similarly, in the Extreme east. But there climatic conditions are good and the soil rich, and the population increasing. We have built there a few small towns to Canopean pattern, chosen inhabitants of a suitable type to live in them, and placed stone and tree patterns in appropriate areas.

I visited the Areas of the Cities myself, and confirm that Shammat influence is so strong nothing can be expected there. I investigated in depth three of the cities and found not more than a hundred individuals who could respond in any way to Canopean vibrancies.

Your envoy points out – as have former ambassadors – that races which receive genetic prods, while on the one hand being strengthened towards usefulness and Canopus-contact, on the other are more prone than the average to become corrupted.

Nevertheless, since the contacts we have established in the Northwest fringe areas and the Extreme-east fringes will fall away from contact in 950 (their) years from now, it is recommended that further genetic addition be attempted on suitable candidates of Areas of the Cities in about four hundred years. This will allow time for the development of a new strengthened strain, but not enough time for this strain to be corrupted by Shammat. This is of course our usual optimistic forecast. I draw this comment to the attention of eugenists. ENVOYS 276 and 277, TAUFIQ and JOHOR, report: (Joint Mission.)

TAUFIQ:

I visited the Northwest fringes. Our staff, who set up the Stones, and instructed locals in the Art of the Stones, have all left, most to Planet 35, as instructed. A few went to the Areas of the Cities to instruct suitable candidates in maintaining contact.

In the Northwest fringes is a stable but sparse population of indigenous stock. They practise agriculture and herd-keeping, neither on a high level. Our staff decided against advanced-level instruction as this has so often in the past led to the opposite of what was intended: extremes of accumulation and the oppression of others. (See later remarks about the Extreme-east fringes.) The basic unit is the tribe. It is still a meagre and unaccommodating landscape. These are very hardy people. Limited mating took place between them and our staff: unprogrammed. Their women are attractive, in a robust way. The progeny may be expected to improve the stock unpredictably. The indigenous people are small, dark-haired, wiry. The introduced genes tend towards tall, extremely fair-skinned blue-eyed or grey-eyed types. (Planet 14.)

I visited the territories of the Extreme east. The accumulator villages have been abandoned, on instruction. They will soon be derelict. A few individuals were secretly visiting these sites for ‘sacred purposes’, history repeating itself. They have been warned. Our resident envoy has attempted threats and promises. These practices had already resulted in a deteriorating of the mentality. These remarks apply to the areas immediately adjacent to the accumulator villages.

Otherwise this is a vast civilization already advanced to level G. It is growing, and constantly taking in territory, including the Southeast fringe islands. There is a stable and effective agriculture. The cities are very much more than trade centres. There is an extensive ruling class, previously efficient and devoted to duty, now luxury-loving and effete. The entire civilization is shortly to be overrun by a vigorous, more primitive culture from the north, the northwest, and the desert lands where there is no trace at all of our old Mathematical Cities, nor the more recent cities that flourished before the ice. The effete culture will therefore be revitalized. A selection of individuals has been taught contact. These are merchants and farmers; none of the enfeebled governing class had the qualities. Arrangements have been made to ensure that these instructed individuals will be absent when the invasion takes place, and will return afterwards, to take up their allotted positions.

An earthquake recently completely devastated the chief east-fringe island. Nothing is left of any of the cities. There remains enough of the agriculture to restart a low level of culture.

I met the representatives of Sirius. They report success with their experiments. Southern Continent II has been particularly useful to them. The animals introduced there in the last experiment evolved rapidly and well, and were removed, all at once, by intensive space-lift, back to Planet 3.

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.

We renewed our instructions for safe and wise existence on Shikasta – moderation, abstention from luxury, plain living, care for others whom they must never exploit or oppress, the care for animals, and for the earth, and above all, a quiet attention to what is most needed from them, obedience. A readiness to hear our wishes.

And we told the most respected of the tribe, a male already old – in their terms – that in his veins ran the ‘blood of the Gods’, and his progeny would always remain close to the Gods, if they kept up the right ways.

We caused him to have two sons, both irradiated by Canopean vibrancies.

And we went back to the cities, to see if we could find any with enough individuals in them to make it possible to redeem them. None could be saved. In each were a few people who could hear us, and these we told to leave at once with any who would listen to them.

We returned to our old man among his flocks whose sons had by then been born, and told him that apart from his family, his tribe, and certain others, soon none would remain alive, for the cities would be destroyed, because of their wickedness. They had fallen victim to the enemies of the Lord, who at all times worked against the Lord to capture the hearts and minds of our creatures.

He pleaded with us.

Others of the few good people in the cities pleaded with us.

I do not wish to write further of this.

Having made sure of the safety of those who could be saved, we signalled to the space-fleet, and the cities were blasted into oblivion, all at the same time.

Deserts lie where these cities thrived.

The fertile, rich, teeming places, with the populous corrupt cities – all desert now, and the heat waves shimmer and sizzle, for there are no trees, no grass, no green.

And again I have seen all the animals rushing away, great herds of them, galloping and tossing their heads and crying out – running from the habitations of men.

History of Shikasta, VOL. 997, Period of the Public Cautioners. EXCERPTS FROM SUMMARY CHAPTER.

While we can date the end of this period exactly, to the year, it is not so easy to mark its beginning. For instance, do we class Taufiq and Johor as public warners? On every one of their visits they cautioned – or perhaps reminded is the better word – anybody who could hear what was being said to them. Visits of various sorts continued without intermission almost from the time of the retreat of the ice, and while most were ‘secret’ – meaning that the individuals contacted were not aware this person among them was from another star system – there was always, somewhere on Shikasta, an envoy or agent of some class or calibre at work quite openly, explaining, exhorting, reminding. So it can be said that Shikasta has always been provided with public advisers, except for a very short time indeed, 1,500 (their) years at the end.

But this volume covers that period from about a thousand years before the first destruction, the inundation, of the cities of the peculiarly well-favoured and advantaged area around and south of the Great Seas, until that date 1,500 years before the end. A close reading of the various available texts will make it clear why this time was considered by us as worth the continuous supply of our emissaries. It cannot be said that there had been a change of policy towards Shikasta – that can never, could not, be possible: our long-term policies remain intact. Nor can it be said that the general degeneration of the Shikastan stock or stocks was unforeseen. The difference between this period and others is rather in emphasis, in scale. When civilization after civilization, culture after culture, has had to be tolerated as long as was possible because of its low level of accomplishment (according to Canopean standards) and then either allowed to run down and vanish from the weight of its corruption, or be destroyed deliberately by us as a danger to the rest of Shikasta, to us, or to other Canopean colonies, when such a state of affairs has been reached, and on a large scale, over large parts of the central landmass, then this has to be thought of as different in kind and degree from one where sparse populations are widely spread, perhaps only just self-sufficient, where a single city whose main purpose was trade and not groups of cities in an imperial bond defined an area or areas, and where one or two of our agents could reach all the inhabitants of a large part of Shikasta simply by quite modest efforts in the course of a limited stay.

Over the many thousand years of the Period of the Exhorten or Cautioners we observe this series of events, constantly repeated:

It was observed by us, or reported to us, that the link between Canopus and Shikasta was weakening beyond safe levels.

This was followed by reports that a culture, a city, a tribe, or groups of individuals vital to our interests were falling away from what had been established as a bond.

It was urgently necessary to strengthen the link, the bond, by restoring selected individuals to suitable ways of life, thus regenerating and vitalizing areas, cultures, or cities.

We sent down a technician, or two, or several. It might happen that all but one or two would be working quietly, unknown to the populace.

This one would have to be born, through Zone Six, and bred in the ordinary way by suitable parents, in order that what was said by – usually – him could take effect.

A note on sexual choice. Of course developed individuals with us are androgynous, to put it into the nearest Shikastan terminology possible: we do not have emotional or physical or psychological characteristics that are considered as appertaining to one sex rather than another, as is normal on the more backward planets. There have been many of our envoys who have manifested as ‘female’, but since the time of the falling away of the Lock, before when males and females were equal everywhere on Shikasta and neither exploited the other, the females have been in subjection, and this has led to problems which on the whole are considered by our envoys as an unnecessary added difficulty to already difficult enough tasks. [See CHAPTER 9, this volume, ‘Manifestations of Envoys as Female for Local Cultural Purposes’.]

As our envoy or representative grew to maturity in the chosen culture, he, or she, would become notable for a certain level of perception and understanding demonstrated in conduct which was nearly always at odds with the local ideas and practices.

Those individuals who were drawn to our envoy, by liking, or – as often happened – first by antagonism overcome by a growth of understanding which became liking, formed a core or nucleus which could be used to strengthen and maintain the link, the bond.

In the earlier times, these individuals were often many, and could form quite strong subcultures of their own. Or, spread among whole populations, formed a strong enough yeast to raise the whole mass to standards of decent and wholesome living in conformity with the general needs of Canopus. Then, as time passed, because of the growth of populations everywhere, which meant always less of the substance-of-we-feeling to go around, and because of the always growing strength of Shammat, there were fewer and fewer individuals who could respond, or who, having responded initially, were able to maintain this response as a living and constantly renewed contact with us, with Canopus. In a city where the mass of the population had sunk to total self-interest, it was common that there might be one, or two, of our link-individuals, no more, desperately struggling to survive. Sometimes whole civilizations had none, had never had any, of this ‘yeast’; or, if our efforts had been successful in seeding a few, they were quickly driven out, or destroyed, or themselves succumbed from the weight of the pressures on them. Sometimes it was only in madhouses or as outcasts in the deserts that these valuable individuals could survive at all.

It has not been unknown for some of our own envoys, not more than a few, however, to fall victim of these pressures, either temporarily or permanently. In the latter case, they were subjected to long periods of rehabilitation on their return to Canopus, or sent to a suitable colonized planet to recover.

During the entire period under review, religions of any kind flourished. Those that concern us most here took their shape from the lives or verbal formulations of our envoys. This happened more often than not, and can be taken as a rule: every one of our public cautioners left behind a religion, or cult, and many of the unknown ones did, too.

These religions had two main aspects. The positive one, at their best: a stabilization of the culture, preventing the worst excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. The negative: a priesthood manipulating rules, regulations, with punitive inflexibility; sometimes allowing, or exacerbating, excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. These priesthoods distorted what was left of our envoys’ instruction, if it was understood by them at all, and created a self-perpetuating body of individuals totally identified with their invented ethics, rules, beliefs, and who were always the worst enemies of any envoys we sent.

These religions were a main difficulty in the way of maintaining Shikasta in our system.

They have often been willing agents of Shammat.

At no time during this period was it possible for an envoy to approach any part of Shikasta without having to outwit, stave off, or in some way make harmless, these representatives of ‘God’, ‘the Gods’, or whatever was the current formulation. Often our emissaries have been persecuted, or murdered, or worse – for everything of their instruction, vital and necessary to that particular place and time, was distorted. Very often the grip a ‘religion’ had on a culture, or even a whole continent, was so pervasive that our agents could make no impact there at all, but had to work elsewhere on Shikasta where conditions were less monolithic, perhaps even – according to current ideas – more primitive. Many times in the history of Shikasta our bond has been maintained by a culture or subculture considered contemptible by the ruling power, which was nearly always a combination of the military and a religion: the military using the priests, or the priests the military.

For long periods of the history of Shikasta we can sum up the real situation thus: that in such and such a place, a few hundred, or even a handful, of individuals, were able with immense difficulty to adapt their lives to Canopean requirements, and thus saved the future of Shikasta.

The longer this process continued, the harder it was for our agents to make their way through the meshes of the emotional and intellectual formulations originating from former visitors. Shikasta was an olla podrida of cults, beliefs, religions, creeds, convictions; there was no end to them, and each of our envoys had to take into account the fact that even before he, she, was dead, his instruction would have already taken flight into fantasy, or been hardened into dogma: each knew that this newly minted, fresh, flexible method, adapted for that particular phase, would, before he had finished his work, have been captured by the Shikastan Law, and become mechanical, useless. She, he, would be working against not only a thousand past frozen formulations, but his own … An envoy put it like this: it was as if he were running a race at the top of his speed, to keep ahead of his own words and actions springing up just behind him, and turning into enemies – what had been alive and functional a few minutes ago was already dead and used by the dead. By the representatives and captives of Shammat who, in this particular epoch, brought itself to a height of beastliness, of effective destructiveness, and almost entirely on what was channelled off from Shikasta. Shammat representatives were always on Shikasta, just as ours were. Shammat captured whole cultures, civilizations, so that they were never anything but out of our reach. Shammat was, from its own point of view, an entirely successful colonizer of Shikasta. But never entirely, never totally. This was not possible.

The major religions of the last days were all founded by Grade I emissaries. The last of these religions remained somewhat less riven and sectarian than the others. It was on its popular level a simple, emotional religion, and its basis was a scripture whose lowest reach of understanding – the level on which the religion was stabilized – was all threats and promises, for this was all that Shikastans by now could respond to. By then, very few of them could respond to anything, except in terms of personal gain, or loss. Or, if such individuals by prolonged and painstaking contact and instruction did learn that what was needed from her, him, was not on the level of gain or loss, then this had to be at a later stage, for the early stages of attraction to Canopean influences were always seen as everything was seen on Shikasta by then: something given, bestowed.

For Duty, in that last time, was all but forgotten. What Duty was, was not known. That something was Due, by them, was strange, inconceivable news they could not take in, absorb. They were set only for taking. Or for being given. They were all open mouths and hands held out for gifts – Shammat! All grab and grasp – Shammat! Shammat!

Whereas, in the early days of the post-disaster time, it had sometimes been enough for one of us to enter a village, a settlement, and sit down and talk to them of their past, of what they had been, of what they would one day become, but only through their own efforts and diligence – that they had dues to pay to Canopus who had bred them, would sustain them through their long dark time, was protecting them against Shammat, that they had in them a substance not Shikastan, and which would one day redeem them – told this, it was often enough, and they would set themselves to adapt to the current necessities.

But this became less and less what we could expect. Towards the end one of our agents would begin work knowing that it might take not a day, or a month, or a year, but perhaps all his life to stabilize a few individuals, so that they could listen.

Records, and reports and memoirs from our messengers show always harder and more painful effort put into less and less return.

Handfuls of individuals rescued from forgetfulness were the harvest for the efforts of dozens of our missionaries, of all grades, kinds, and degrees of experience on a dozen planets. These handfuls, these few, were enough to keep the link, the bond. But at what a cost!

How much has Shikasta cost Canopus, always!

How often have our envoys returned from a term of duty on Shikasta, amazed at what the link depended on; appalled at what they had seen.

It has to be recorded that more than once discussions have been held on whether Shikasta was worth the effort. A full-scale conference, involving all Canopus and our colonies, argued the question. There grew up a body of opinion, which remained a minority, that Shikasta should be jettisoned. This is why Shikasta is in a unique position among the colonized planets: service there is voluntary, except for those individuals who have been concerned with it from the beginning.

JOHOR reports:

This is the requested report on individuals who, if Taufiq had not been captured, would have been in very different situations, and on events that would have been differently aligned. I shall not always amplify, or sometimes even mention, the exact role that John Brent-Oxford might have played.

To contact them I entered Shikasta from Zone Six, at various points, but making use mostly of the Giants’ habitat.

INDIVIDUAL ONE

Although she was born in a country of ample skies and capacious landscapes, she was afflicted, and from her earliest years, with feelings of being confined. It seemed to her that she ought to be able to find within herself memories of some larger experience, deeper skies. But she did not possess these memories. The society around her seemed petty, piffling, to the point of caricature. As a child she could not believe that the adults were serious in the games they played. Everything done and said seemed a repetition, or a recycling, as if they were puppets in a play being staged over and over again. Afflicted by an enormous claustrophobia, she refused all the normal developments possible to her, and as soon as she was self-supporting left her family and that society. How she earned her living was of no importance to her. She went to another city in the same continent, but there everything seemed the same. Not only identical patterns of thought and behaviour, but the people she met tended to be friends or relatives of those she had left. She moved to another city, another – and then to a different continent. While there was a general conspiracy – so it seemed to her – to agree that this culture was different from the one she had left in ways meriting a thousand books and treatises political, psychological, economic, sociological, philosophical, and religious – on the contrary, to her it seemed the same. A different language, or languages. Slightly more generous in one way – how women were treated, for instance. Worse in another: children had a bad time of it. Animals respected here but not there – and so on. But the patterns of human bondage – which was how she saw it – did not seem to vary much. And, no matter where she travelled, she met no new people. This man encountered in an improbable situation – by chance in a laundrette or at a bus stop – would turn out to be a relation of an acquaintance in another city, or a friend of a family she had known as a child. She left again, choosing an ‘old’ society – which was how Shikastans would see it – more complex, textured, various, than those she had known. Again, differences were emphasized where she could see only resemblances. She earned her living as she could, in ways that could not bind her, would not marry, and had three abortions, because the men did not seem to her to be originally enough minted from the human stock to make their progeny worthwhile. And she could not meet new, different people. She understood she was in, or on, some invisible mesh or template, envisioned by her in bad black moods as a vast spider web, where all people and events were interconnected, and nothing she could do, ever, would free her. And never could she say anything of what she felt, for she would not be understood. What she saw, others did not. What she heard, they could not.

She was in a certain country in the Northwest fringes. It occurred to her that this move of hers, to this country, which had cost her, so she had imagined, a good deal of effort in the way of choosing right, this great self-transportation, had not been her will at all: it was her father’s. He had always wanted, so she now recalled, to live in this particular city, this country, and in a certain way. While she had not duplicated his dreamed-of way of life – for it had become obsolete – she was living a contemporary equivalence. Shortly after this discovery, she found herself outside a door in a street she had never been in before, to visit a doctor, and remembered that the address was one an aunt had lived in: she had written letters here from her home country.

She left again, for the extreme north of the Isolated Northern Continent. She was in a small town, which for most of the year was under snow. No one came there for pleasure. It was a working town, and she had a job in a shop that sold goods to trappers and what Indians still remained. She could not have found for herself a situation more at odds with anything her parents or her background might have foreseen for her. Then into the shop came a man she knew. He was a doctor last seen in her hometown, fifteen years before. They had been linked briefly by an impersonal pairing bond typical of that time.

She fled back to the Northwest fringes. She was in the heart of a great sprawling unshaped city of several million inhabitants and, getting off a bus on an impulse and entering a little restaurant for a cup of tea, she sensed something familiar. She was greeted by a girl working as a waitress: she was the sister of the doctor.

The world had finally snapped around her like a handcuff. She screamed, leaped up, broke crockery and overturned tables.

The police came. She was taken to hospital. About whether she was mad or not, the doctors could not agree; and the restaurant brought a charge against her. But the lawyer who would have been the right one for this task was not there. If he had been, the case could have reached far beyond its beginnings, and influenced events, people …

She was kept in hospital for longer than she felt was warranted, things dawdled and delayed. She was at last fined in court, which some kindly person paid for her. She was set free and felt that she was in a prison worse than any human being could devise.

If John (or Taufiq) had defended her, he would have been able to influence her to sit still at last and allow herself to see what it was that imprisoned her.

I arranged an alternative, a temporary attack of paralysis, diagnosed as hysterical.

Unable to take flight, she struggled inwardly for a time, and then, exactly as a cornered hawk sinks down among his fluffing and awkwardly extended feathers, bright eyes staring at her assailant, so she, too, learned to gaze steadily into what frightened her most.

INDIVIDUAL TWO

Standardization of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardized, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic – kindness to animals, for instance – but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition.

Ventriloquism was popular. A person with a bland and conforming appearance and personality developed a subsidiary personality and presented it as ventriloquist’s dummy. This other personality could be of their own species, or variations on the animal theme. A popular one was a canine, endearing in appearance, who was clever in methods of successful dishonesty. In every episode of his story this animal stole, lied, and cheated, was able always to cover up after a failure, to deceive and boast and flatter and manipulate. It was also inordinately greedy for food. This creature was no major criminal or monster, only a small-scale trickster and, if you accepted the premise, it was quite funny. Of course, it was possible to find it humorous at all only in times of almost total corruption.

Children were identified with these ‘unreal’ figures, which could never be taken for anything but dolls, or puppets, and which were particularly useful to take as secondary selves, simply because they did not demand the levels of self-criticism which would be demanded by creatures like themselves, who were ‘real’.

A certain group of children, much neglected by parents, who were all working, and who left them almost entirely to themselves, developed a private world in which each one of them was this puppet, the half-grown dog with a typically flattering name, Crafty Collie. These children lived more and more inside the world they had created, taking, like their exemplar, to small ways of trickery, cheating, and lying – this in a motivated, patterned way, for all they had to do every afternoon was to press a button in order to see a programme for their alternative selves to follow. They took to more intricate crimes. Soon they had a leader. She was female, a bright resourceful child of eleven years. She it was who kept them together, who made sure they watched the succeeding episodes of the ventriloquist’s dramas, and who translated into action the messages of Crafty Collie. This went on for three years, while the children became young adults, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Their crimes, at this time when nearly everybody engaged in some form of cheating or stealing, were not remarkable. They stole from shops, broke into houses, kept themselves supplied with money and goods. After every escapade, the group would gather in a ritual where what they had done was played out in terms of their pattern.

In the course of breaking into a house a murder was committed, almost accidentally, certainly without any sense of it mattering.

They were caught, and details of the cult were made public. Photographs of these young criminals, and of the room they used – in an empty house, decorated with pictures and models of Crafty Collie – were reproduced everywhere. When the doctors and psychiatrists examined the youngsters, it was found that their identification with the puppet was not affecting them more than half the time, for each had an ordinary personality, with its aims, beliefs, and standards, quite different from the other personality, which was a group one.

It was the girl who pointed out that only a month before Crafty Collie had been shown as tormenting and teasing a crazy old woman before knocking her down and leaving her apparently unconscious, reproved of course by his creator or other self, who always played the – ineffective – role of conscience to this secondary personality’s excesses. Or successes.

The whole gang was tried, in a way not used before at that particular time, in an exemplary way: for child crime had become so prevalent that people were becoming more afraid of children than they were of adults.

The girl was in a special position as self-confessed, or self-proclaimed leader, for she was proud of her role as mother of this gang.

If Taufiq had been where he ought to have been, his role was to defend these children as victims of indoctrination. Whether this indoctrination was deliberate on the part of the authorities, or the result of ignorance, was not, could not be – he would have argued – any concern of the children, who had to suffer the consequences. In other words Taufiq, John, would have inspired a public campaign to get an extraordinarily lax and indifferent public to recognize where, when, and how the most sophisticated indoctrinational methods ever devised were being used on a population captive to them.

Further, if Taufiq had been able to fit into these events, his particular personality would have influenced these young people in ways not otherwise attainable. All had been neglected, none had been given any exemplar of worth to identify with. He would have been able to direct them in ways that would lead to their eventually gaining enough inner freedom to make real choices about what their lives would be.

But now, what one individual could have accomplished must be spread among several. I arranged that a group of lawyers not previously inspired to work of public responsibility take this case: they could be expected to do something at least of what was needed. As for influencing the youngsters, I saw to it that each one would come into contact with those who could help them, to some extent: a child-care officer with certain characteristics, a warder – three were sent to prison – a doctor, social workers.

The task with these young people took much longer than I expected or had planned for. It was not the most successful of my endeavours. The girl was not able to recover from a sojourn in prison calculated only to harden and deform: she came out a real criminal, soon made an emotional transfer to one of the extreme political sects which flourished then, and was killed in an exploit that could be characterized as part terrorist and part for gain. She was not twenty years old. Her rehabilitation had therefore to be reserved until after her entry into Zone Six.

INDIVIDUAL THREE (Workers’ Leader)

A common type throughout the Century of Destruction in all parts of Shikasta, but the variation I am reporting on here was produced by the Northwest fringes and played a key part in the social structure. It was a stabilizing one, and that this was so was felt by many as a bitter paradox, since their ideological birth was nearly always in the philosophy of transforming society completely, quickly, and into a sort of ‘paradise’ not uninfluenced by the local ‘sacred’ literature.

This individual was born into the chaotic conditions intensified by World War I. There was a small class living in affluence, but the bulk of the population was in poverty. He was an infant, a child, and then a young adult, among people who never had enough to eat, were cold, ill-housed, and often out of work. Of his immediate family three died of illnesses due to malnutrition. His mother was worn out by work and ill-feeling before she was thirty.

He lived, from the moment he came to consciousness of his situation, and that was early, in a state of anguished incredulity about the hardships of the people around him. This undersized urchin would wander the streets, upheld through cold, hunger, and the bitterness of injustice by visions and dreams. Each man or woman or shrunken child he passed seemed to him to have a double, another alternate being … what could be, what could have been … He would gaze, exalted, into the face of one, and address him silently: ‘You poor exhausted thing, you could be anything, it is not your fault …’ He would watch his sister, a girl exhausted with anaemia who had been working since she was fourteen, with no hope for anything but a future as narrow as her mother’s, and he would be saying to her inwardly, ‘You don’t know what you are, what you could be’ – and it was as if he had put his arms around not only her, but the poor and the suffering everywhere. He cherished the twisted and the deformed with his gaze, he sustained the hungry and the desperate as he whispered, ‘You have it in you to be a marvel! Yes, you are a marvel and a wonder and you don’t know it!’ And he was making promises, fierce inward vows, to himself, and to them.

He simply could not believe that this extreme of deprivation was possible in a country – he saw the problem in terms of his own country, even his own town, for ‘the world’ to him was names in newspapers – that described itself as rich, and headed a world empire.

He was informed beyond most of his fellows, because his father was a workers’ representative, insofar as his hard life allowed him time and energy to be. There were books in his home, and ideas apart from those to do with the struggle to feed and clothe his family.

He was in the army five years, in World War II. His predominant emotion of marvelling incredulity that people could inflict such suffering on others, changed. He was no longer incredulous: as a soldier he travelled widely, and he saw the conditions of his upbringing everywhere. The war taught him to think in terms of Shikasta as a whole, and of interacting forces, at least to an extent: he was not able to encompass the dark-skinned in his compassion, not able to withstand the influences of his upbringing which had taught him to think of himself as superior. But he was also being affected, like everybody in or out of the army, by the general brutalizing, coarsening. He accepted things as ‘human nature’ which as a child he would have rejected. But he was full of purpose, dreaming of returning home to uplift others, rescuing, supporting, shielding them from realities which he felt himself able to withstand, though they could not.

When he got home from the army, he set himself actively to ‘speak for the working class’, as the phrase then went, and he very soon stood out among others.

The period immediately following World War II was bitter, impoverished, grey, colourless. The nations of the Northwest fringes had shattered themselves, physically and morally. [See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. SUMMARY CHAPTER.] The Isolated Northern Continent had strengthened itself and was supporting the nations of the Northwest fringes on condition they become subservient and obedient allies in the military bloc this continent dominated. Wealth flowed from the military bloc into the Northwest fringes, and about fifteen years after the end of World War II there was a sudden brief prosperity all over the area. That was a paradoxical thing, in a paradoxical time, and deeply demoralizing to populations already demoralized and lacking in purpose.

The system of economic production depended on consumption of every conceivable kind of goods by everyone – consumption of entirely unnecessary objects, food, drink, clothes, gadgets, devices. Every person in the Northwest fringes – as in the Isolated Northern Continent – was subjected, every moment of every day, through propaganda methods more powerful than any ever known before, to the need to buy, consume, waste, destroy, throw away – and this at a time when the globe as a whole was already short of goods of every kind and the majority of Shikasta’s people starved and went without.

The individual under consideration here was at the age of forty an influential person in a workers’ organization.

His role was to prevent the people he represented from being paid less than they could live on decently – this was a minimum goal; otherwise to get them ‘as large a slice of the cake as possible’; otherwise – but this aim had long since been secondary to the others – to overturn the economic system and substitute a workers’ rule. He often contrasted how he saw things now with how he had seen them when he was a child and streets, areas of streets, no, whole cities, hungered and dwindled. This spurt of quite spurious and baseless affluence so soon to end, was intoxicating. Suddenly everything seemed possible. Within reach were experiences, ways of living he had never dreamed of as available to people of his kind. Not ‘a decent living wage’, which slogan now seemed to him mean-spirited and cowardly, but as much as could be got. And this attitude was reinforced all the time, by everything around him. It was not that the working classes got anything like what the rich still got, but that millions were getting more than had seemed possible without some shocking overturn of society, or a revolution … in this atmosphere where there seemed no limit to what could be expected, there seemed no reason either why the workers of the nation should not exact retribution for the poverty of their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, for the humiliations of their own childhoods. Revenge was a motive, clear to everyone to see.

But it was not in the nature of things that the Age of Affluence could continue: and the reasons were not to be sought in local conditions but globally – so far our friend did understand. He was still one who examined events less narrowly than most. He remained solitary. He was referred to as ‘an odd man out’. Where groups of people are close, kept together by forces they combat by being defensive, the characteristics of individuals become affectionately regarded, are prized, made much of.

He was admired for standing for minority points of view. For being quiet, observant, reflective, often critical.

This was his role.

He had integrity.

He was proud of this, was still proud, but now saw that such words can acquire a double edge. He noted that people were very ready to congratulate him on this integrity of his. He had seen that people are willing to compliment others in the way these want to be complimented: an exacted flattery.

‘Integrity’ was his perquisite.

Not the only one. Many good things came his way because of this position of his, as representative of the workers. But why not? Nothing compared to what came the way of ‘his betters’ – as he had been expected as a child to call them, and had so stubbornly rebelled. And everyone did it. Did what? Nothing very much! Little crumbs and bits of this and that off the cake. What was the harm? For one thing, it could be said that these ‘perks’ were not for him, personally, at all, but were an honour paid to his position and therefore to the workers. He would brood, secretly, about bribery, where it began and where it ended. About flattery as a food that sustained – and bought? He seemed to be spending hours of his time in definitions, self-assessments, doubts.

Nearly fifty, his life two-thirds gone, his children grown up. His children dismayed him. They cared for nothing but their own good, their pleasure, their possessions, their comfort. Criticizing them, he told himself that this was no more than how parents always were with their children. (Rightly, he might utter obstinately to himself, but not to his wife, who thought him prickly and difficult.) He was also proud of them, because by an inevitable process that he understood perfectly, they were a step up on the class ladder from him in this infinitely class-divided society; just as their children, his grandchildren, could expect to be a step higher still – but he was proud with a part of himself that he despised. He was self-divided, delighted they made demands on life that he was not able to believe even now were his due, while it was at the cost of rising in a society which he despised as much as ever he did.

But, criticizing his children, he was criticizing, too, the younger members of his own union – an entire generation. This was dangerous because treachery and disloyalty threatened. But he could not banish his thoughts. The incredulity that had been the strongest emotion of his childhood returned, transformed. How was it possible that people could forget as they did, taking everything that came their way as their due – thieves, snatching what they could whenever they could (and everybody knew it, including themselves), but they were even proud of it, regarding this pilfering and skiving as a sort of cleverness on their part, a way of outdoing the world – they were all careless, heedless, thoughtless, unable to see that this time of ease and even wealth was due to some transitory shift in the international economic juggling. Yet these were the sons and daughters of people so bitterly afflicted that they had gone to bed hungry more often than not, and were so stunted in growth that in looking at a crowd of working people it was a simple thing to pick out grandparents, even parents, who were often dwarves compared to their progeny. The history of the lower classes in this country had always been one of dire poverty and deprivation. Had they forgotten it? How was it possible? How could all this be happening?

Meanwhile, he was busy, in a hundred ways, sitting on committees, arguing with employers, travelling and making speeches, attending conferences.

What exactly was it that he was doing?

Where did he stand now compared with his dreams for himself at the end of World War II?

He would find himself at a meeting, or a conference, with men and women, whom he had known sometimes since he was a child. He would observe, hoping he was unobserved, feeling himself increasingly a stranger to them.

All his life he had polished and perfected a certain practice: that of keeping bright and close certain memories of his childhood as a conscience, or gauge, to measure present events against. After the war, beginning his work on the committees, there was a memory that was strong and alive, and kept so by what he could see around him. A cousin had sold vegetables from a barrow on a pavement. His fight to survive had been dreadful, and had worn him out early. He stood by the barrow all hours of the day and evening, and in all weathers, coughing, shivering, just holding himself together. But it was that stance of his which stuck in the mind – that of a schoolboy who has been knocked down by bullies so many times he knows the effort of getting to his feet will result only in his being knocked down again. It was a swaggering bravado, and every gesture said, You can’t get me down, I’m a big man, I’m strong, I’m on top of circumstances … and so he swaggered there, the poor victim. Well, to the small boy who watched, it was terrible; and now, he was seeing all the same gestures, the bravado, in the people around him, and it was terrible again.

But came the times of ease, of ‘affluence’.

When he was a youth, he had a clear knowledge of those opposing him, ‘the class enemy’. Their characteristic was that they did not tell the truth. They lied. They cheated. When it was a question of defending their position, what they had, there was no trick or meanness they would not descend to. In any confrontation between them, those representatives of the ‘ruling classes’, and the men who spoke for the struggling millions, they presented the bland calm faces of accomplished liars, who were proud of that accomplishment. He had seen himself, as a youth, a fighter armed with truth and with the facts, against these armies of thieves and liars.

And now? He would watch a good-humoured, smiling affable man, presenting a case, and remember …

They were not victors, he and his kind, not in any way, they were the defeated still, for they had become like their ‘betters’. He, his kind, had been taken captive by everything they ought to hate, and had hated but had forgotten to hate. They had looked, earlier in their history, into the faces of their oppressors, who bullied and bluffed – and tricked; and had felt themselves superior, because they were honest, and stood on the truth. And now they, too, bluffed and bullied and tricked – just like everyone else of course. Who did not? Who did not lie and steal and filch, and take what he could grab? And so why should they be any different?

What he was thinking was a sort of treason.

Thinking like this, not wanting to think like this, being ashamed of himself, and then telling himself he was right, and should hold fast to these thoughts, he had a breakdown. He was given leave for a year by concerned – and relieved – colleagues. He had been for months now sitting silently through deliberations of various kinds and then coming out with something like: ‘But shouldn’t we get back to first principles?’ Or: ‘Why do we tolerate so much thieving and crookedness?’ Or: ‘Yes, but that isn’t true, is it?’ – and with a wrung face and the hot dry eyes of sleeplessness.

He went home to his wife, who was out all day working at a job which he thought was unnecessary and degrading to her. She worked because she said she couldn’t make ends meet, but he told her that he earned enough to live in a way their respective parents would have thought luxury. Why shouldn’t she make something of herself, something serious! What, for instance?

Well, she could go to night classes. Or learn some real skill. Like what? And what for?

Or she could start some association for improving the position of women?

But she continued to earn money in order to fill the house with furniture he thought of as pretentious. She could never stop replacing clothes and curtains, or stocking freezers with enough food to feed great families.

He went off on a long walking trip, by himself, visiting old friends, some of them not seen for years. They had become possessed, it seemed to him, as happened in fairy tales, by some kind of evil spirit, for he could not find anything in them of what they had been. Or what he had thought they were?

Tramping, wandering, alone, he kept returning to himself as a boy, when everyone he saw seemed to him only a shadow of what was possible, for he could see so clearly their potential self, what they ought to be, could be, would be … or had he imagined all that?

He went to visit a sister, not the one whom he had cherished, and comforted silently in his thoughts, for the dreadfulness of her life, for she had died of tuberculosis; but another, much younger than himself. He found a woman who was tired. That was her characteristic. She ministered to her husband, a pleasant enough man who seemed tired and silent, too, and who did not seem to care for her much beyond what she provided for him. They both went to bed early. She talked a good deal to her cats. The daughter had gone to Australia with her family. She was worried about a carpet she felt should be replaced, but was finding the whole thing more than she could face, the disturbance of it, the getting rid of the old one, the workmen coming in and out. She could not talk of much else. Apart from the war, which she remembered with fondness because of ‘everyone being so kind to each other’.

When he got home from an extensive walking tour, he told his wife he was going to sue himself.

‘You are going to what?’

‘I am going to put myself on trial.’

‘You have gone crazy, you have,’ said she, quite accurately, of course, departing to tell friends and colleagues that he had not yet got over whatever it was that ‘was eating him’.

He appeared at a meeting of his union and informed them that he was going to put himself on trial, ‘on behalf of us all’, and invited their cooperation.

They indulged him.

But he could not find anyone to take his case.

At that time exemplary trials of every kind were not uncommon. A group of people would set up a trial of some process or institution that seemed to them inadequate or dishonest.

What our friend wanted was to set up a trial where his youthful self prosecuted his middle-aged self, asking what had happened to the ideals, the vision, the ability to see individuals as infinitely capable of development, the hatred of pettiness and evasion, the hatred above all of lies, and double talk, the deceits of the conference tables and committees, the public announcements, the public face.

He wanted that burning, fiery, hungry, marvellous young man to stand up in public and expose and shred to pieces the awful dishonest smiling tool and puppet that he had become.

He went from lawyer to lawyer. Individuals. Then organizations. There were a thousand small political groupings, with different aims, or at least formulations.

The big political parties, the big trade unions, all the organs of government had become so enormous, so cumbersome, so ridden with bureaucracy, that nothing could get done except through the continually forming and re-forming pressure groups: it was government by pressure group, administration by pressure group, for government could not initiate, it could only respond. But all these groups, sometimes admirable for their purpose, had ideologies and allegiances, and not one was prepared to take on this odd and freakish case, and not one saw that incorruptible, truthful young man as he did. They indulged him. Or, again and again, he saw that he was about to find himself on some platform defending partisan causes. He was going from group to group engaged in interminable and usually acrimonious discussions, arguments, definitions: at first he was prepared to see the acrimony as a sign of inner strength, ‘integrity’, but then could no longer. He wondered if what he admired in himself, when young, had been no more than intolerance, the energy that is the result of identification with a limited objective?

It was not long before he had a heart attack, and then another, and died.

If Taufiq had been there, the case would have been perfectly adapted to his capacities.

He would not have permitted this ‘trial’ to be freakish, or silly, or self-advertising. It would have captured the imaginations of a generation, focusing inner quests and doubts; have led above all to a deeper understanding by young people of the rapid shifts and changes in the recent past, which to them seemed so distant.

INDIVIDUAL FOUR (Terrorist Type 3)

[For a list of the different types of terrorists produced during this period, See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III.]

This young woman was known to her colleagues, and to the world in her brief moment of exposure, as The Brand.

She had spent her childhood in concentration camps, where her parents died. If there were members of her family still alive, she made no attempt to trace them. She was given a home by foster parents with whom she was obedient, correct – a shadow. They were not real to her. Only people who had been in the camps were real to her. With them she maintained contact. They were her friends, because they shared a knowledge of ‘what the world is really like’. She was part-Jewish, but did not identify with any aspect of being Jewish. As soon as she was grown up, pressures came on her to be normal. To these she responded by calling herself The Brand. She had refused to remove the tattoo of the camps. Now she had shirts, sweaters, with her brand on them, in black. In bed with her ‘lovers’ – where she challenged the world in the cold indifferent way that was her style – she would take the fingers of the man or woman (she was bisexual) and smile as she placed them on the brand on her forearm.

She sought out, more and more, people who had been in concentration camps, refugee camps, prisons. Several times she slipped through frontiers to enter camps, prisons: these exploits were ‘impossible’. Daring the ‘impossible’ she was alive, as she never was otherwise. She prepared more difficult exploits for herself. She even lived as a member of a corrective prison in a certain Northwest fringe country for a year. The inmates saw her as engaged in some political task, but she was testing herself. For what? But her ‘historical role’ had not yet been ‘minted by history’: her vocabulary consisted entirely of political slogans or clichés, mostly of the left, together with concentration camp and prison jargon. At that stage she did not see herself with a definite future. She had no home of her own, but moved from one flat to another in a dozen cities of the Northwest fringes. These were owned by people like herself, some of whom had ordinary jobs, or got money illegally in one way or another. Money did not matter to her. She always wore trousers, and a shirt or sweater, and if these did not have on them her brand, she wore it on a silver bracelet.

She was a stocky plain girl, with nothing remarkable about her; but people would find themselves watching her, uneasy because of this coldly observant presence. She was always in command of herself, and hostile, unless when with her other selves, the products of the camps. Then she was affectionate, in a clumsy childish way. But only one other person knew the full details of her exploits among the camps and prisons. This was a man called ‘X’.

When terrorist groups sprang up everywhere, most of them of younger people than she, The Brand was not far from a legend. People saw this as a danger, ‘exhibitionism’, and kept clear of her; but in that network of flats, houses, where these people moved, she had always just left, or would soon be there, someone knew her, she had helped somebody. One man, respected among them, who was about to start, correctly and formally, a group of whom he would be ‘leader’ – though the word was understood differently among them – refused to talk about her, but allowed it to be understood that she was more skilled and brave than anyone he had known. He insisted that she should be asked to be a member of his group: insisted against opposition.

He had said she was a mistress of disguise.

She came to a flat one afternoon in an industrial city in the north of the Northwest fringes. It was a bitter cold day, snowing, a freezing wind. Four people in their twenties, two men, two women, saw this woman enter: blond, sunburned, a little overfed, in a fur coat that was vulgar and expensive, with the good-humoured easy smile of the indulged and sheltered of this world. This middle-class woman sat down fussily, guarding her handbag that had cost a fortune but was a bit shabby, in the way people do who care for their possessions. Her audience burst out laughing. She became an elder sister to them, an infinitely clever comrade, who had always done, and with success, more difficult things than any of them had dreamed of. This circle of outlaws was her family, and would have to be till death, for they could never leave such a circle and return to ordinary life – a condition that was not desirable or understandable to any of them. Her self-challenges, her feats, were disclosed by her, discussed, and all kinds of practical lessons drawn from them.

This was one of the more successful of the terrorist groups. It operated for more than ten years before The Brand was caught, with eight others. Their goals were always the same: an extremely difficult and dangerous feat that needed resources of skill, bravery, cunning. They were all people who had to have danger to feel alive at all. They were ‘left-wing’ socialists of a sort. But discussions of a ‘line’, the variations of dogma, were never important to them. When they exchanged the phrases of the international left-wing vocabulary, it was without passion.

They did not court, or crave, publicity, but used it.

Most of their engagements with danger were anonymous and did not reach newspapers and television.

They blackmailed an international business corporation or individual, for money. Large sums of money would find their way to refugee organizations, prisoners escaping or in hiding, or to the ‘network’. Young people in refugee camps would find themselves mysteriously supported into universities or training of some kind. Flats and houses were set up in this country or that, sometimes across the world, for the use of the ‘network’. Organizations similar to theirs, temporarily in difficulties, would be helped. They also blackmailed and kidnapped, for information. They wanted details of how this business worked, the linkages and bonds of that multinational firm. They wanted information about secret military installations – and got it. They acquired materials to make various types of bomb, weapon, and supplied other groups with them. If any one of these young people had been asked why she or he did not use these talents ‘for the common good’ the reply would have been ‘But I do already!’ for they saw themselves as an alternative world government.

When they were caught, it was by chance; and this is not the place to describe how.

The Brand, and her associates, were in prison, all with multiple charges against them. Murders had been committed, but not for the pleasure of murder. The pleasure –