Shikasta Read Free Page B

what of us?’
    I had passed through. Well away from them, I looked back. The crowd there wailed and lamented and swayed about under the force of their grief. But Ben took a step forward from them. And another. I pointed across the plain, andwatched him take a painful step forward. He was going to try. He was on his way over that vast, painful plain. I heard them singing as I went on:
    Eye of God,
    Watching me,
    Pay my fee,
    Set me free,
    Here I am,
    Waiting here,
    Save me, God,
    Save me, Lord
… on, and on, and on.
    Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless, I ran across the plain, feeling the dust thick and soft underfoot. I remembered the grasses and bushes and rivers of my last visit, while I stepped across dry channels and used dry riverbeds as roads. Crickets and cicadas, the shimmer of hot light on rock – this would be desert very soon. And I thought of what I must face when I at last was able to enter Shikasta.
    Sitting on an outcrop of low stone I saw a figure that was familiar, and I approached a female shape drooping in sorrow and lassitude so deep she did not move as I approached. I stood over her and saw it was Rilla, who on my last visit had been with the crowds at the Eastern Gate.
    I greeted her, she lifted her face, and I saw it set in dry, obdurate woe.
    â€˜I know what you are going to say,’ said she.
    â€˜Ben is trying again,’ I said. But when I looked back I could not see him: only the dust hanging reddish in the air, and the dry broken grasses. She looked with me, passively.
    â€˜He is there,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’
    â€˜It is no use,’ she said. ‘I have tried so often.’
    â€˜Are you going to sit here for the rest of time?’
    She did not answer, but resumed her post, looking down, motionless. She seemed to herself a static weight, empty; to me she was like a whirlpool of danger. I could see myself, thinned and part transparent, could feel myself sway and lean– towards her, into her locked violences.
    â€˜Rilla,’ I said, ‘I have work to do.’
    â€˜Of course,’ said she. ‘When do you ever say anything different?’
    â€˜Go and find Ben,’ I said.
    I walked on. Long afterwards I looked around – I did not dare before, for fear I would turn and run back to her. Oh, I had known her, I had known her well. I knew what qualities were shut up there, prisoners of her despair. She was not looking at me. She had turned her head and was gazing out into the hazy plains where Ben was.
    I left her.
    I had lost my way. Memories of the last time were not helping me, could not – everything had changed. I was looking for the abode of the Giants. I did not want to see them, because of the degeneration I knew I would find. But they were the quickest way to Taufiq. Taufiq’s condition, as captive of the Enemy, must be – could be no other – an excess of self-esteem, pride,
silliness.
I could contact Taufiq through the equivalent qualities here. The Giants, then … I had to!
    Far away across the deserts were towering peaks of rock, bare black rock, like clusters of fists held into a blood-red sky. Purple clouds, unmoving, thick, heavy. Beneath them drifts of sand hanging in the air like armies of locusts. A still, moribund world. My long spidery shadow lay behind me almost to the horizon, following me black and menacing, an enemy. Shadows lay across the sands to my feet from the peaks. Deep tormenting shadows, full of memories … one of them bulged, moved, separated itself … out came a troop of Giants, and at the first sight of them I felt the movement of the heart like a leaking of strength that means sorrow.
    This was the magnificence I remembered? These?
    They were tall, their forms were something of what they had been, but they had lost strength and substance. A company of lean, lean-to, shambling ghosts, their movements awkward, their faces empty