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 stabilised - 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 stabilise 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 colonised 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 the 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 alclass="underline" 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.