Shikasta by Doris Lessing Page A

city past, these were being hoarded, were already part of ritual. The storytellers were singing of the Gods who had taught them all they knew, and – for this had been fed into the tales at the beginning – would ‘come again’.
    When we got back to the Round City, meaning to walk outside the edge of the Stones, the vibrations had become so bad that we had to make a wide detour. For miles around, there was no life, no animals, no birds. And the vegetation was withering. The settlements we had left had been moved well out and away.
    The biggest change was that more children were being born than before. The safeguards had been forgotten: gone was the knowledge of who should give birth, who should mate, what type of person was a proper parent. The knowledges and uses of sex had been forgotten. And whereas previously an individual who died before the natural term of a thousand years was unlucky, it was clear that life-span was about to fluctuate. Some had died already, very young, inmiddle age, and many of the new babies had died.
    This was the situation all over Shikasta a year after the Lock had failed.
    At least, there were enough people living well away from the old cities to continue the species. And I knew that although for a time the cities would become more and more dangerous, after three or four hundred years (inadequate information made it impossible to be more definite), when the weather and the vegetation had done their work on the buildings and in the Stones, the cities would all become heaps of ruins, with no potency left in them for good or for harm.
    I come to the final phase of my mission.
    First of all I had to locate the rebel Giants. I now did have an idea of where they were, for when I was in the Hexagonal City to the north of the Great Mountains, I had seen from very far off a settlement where none was expected, and there were rumours about ghosts and devils ‘the size of trees.’
    Again, it was David I decided to take with me. To say that he understood what went on was true. To say that he did
not
understand – was true. I would sit and explain, over and over again. He listened, his eyes fixed on my face, his lips moving as he repeated to himself what I was saying. He would nod: yes, he had grasped it! But a few minutes later, when I might be saying something of the same kind, he was uncomfortable, threatened. Why was I saying that? and that? his troubled eyes asked of my face: What did I mean? His questions at such moments were as if I had never taught him anything at all. He was like one drugged or in shock. Yet it seemed that he did absorb information, for sometimes he would talk as if from a basis of shared knowledge: it was as if a part of him knew and remembered all I told him, but other parts had not heard a word! I have never before or since had so strongly that experience of being with a person and knowing that all the time there was certainly a part of that person in contact with you, something real and alive and listening – yet most of the time what one said did not reach that silent and invisible being, and what
he
said was not often said by the real part of him. It was as if someone stood there bound and gagged whilean inferior impersonator spoke for him.
    He mentioned, when I asked him to come travelling again with me, that he did not want to leave his youngest daughter. He had not ever mentioned this daughter. Where was she? Oh – with friends, he believed. But did he not see her? Was he not responsible for her? He seemed to want to please me, by eagerly nodding his head and producing some phrases to the effect that she was a good girl, and could look after herself. This was the first time I encountered what was to become a typical Shikastan indifference to their progeny.
    His daughter Sais was a large, light brown girl, with a mass of bronze tightly curled hair. Everything about her was wholesome and lively. She was not much more than a child, and indeed