Shikasta by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

the Natives could not rid themselves of thinking as Divine, was according to Need.
    Each city, then, was a perfect artefact, with nothing in it uncontrolled: considered, with its inhabitants, as a functioning whole. For it was found that some temperaments would be best suited, and would contribute most, in a Round City, or a Triangle, and so on. And there had even evolved a science of being able to distinguish, in very early childhood, where an individual needed to live. And here was the source of that ‘unhappiness’ which must be the lot, to one extent or another, of every inhabitant of our galaxy, for it was by no means always so that every member of a family would be suitable for the same city. And even lovers – if I may use a word for a relationship which is not one present Shikastans would recognize – might find that they should part, and did so, for everybody accepted that their very existence depended on voluntary submission to the great Whole, and that this submission, this obedience, was not serfdom or slavery – states that had never existed on the planet, and which they knew nothing of – but the source of their health, and their future and their progress.
    By now the two races lived together, there was no separation between them in that way, though they did not intermarry. This was physically not possible. The Giants had not grown more than was reported by the last mission: they were about eighteen feet in height. And the Natives were half that. But in the meantime, the Giants had become much varied in colour and in facial and bodily type. Some were as black, a glossy shining black, as the first immigrants. Others were all shades of lively warm brown. There were some withvery pale faces, and their eyes were sometimes of a blue which when it first appeared caused unease and even abhorrence. The Natives were also of all shades of colour, and their head hair could be of any colour from black to chestnut. The Giants had evolved some head hair, probably from climatic pressure, but it was sparse, and short, contrasting with the Natives’ profuse locks. The blue-eyed Giants might have colourless, or light yellow hair, but this was considered a misfortune.
    Sex had different intensities for the two races. The Giants, living four thousand or five thousand years, bred once, or twice, or not at all in a lifetime. (And carried their young for a long time, four or five years.) The female Giants, when not breeding or caring for children, did the same work as the males, and this was for most of their lives. The work was mostly mental, the continuous, devotional task of keeping the proper levels of transmission between the planet and Canopus. Sex with the Giants was not a strong drive as the Natives would understand it. The powers of sex, the attractions, the repulsions, the ebbs and flows, were transmuted into higher forces except when actually in use for propagation.
    The Natives were being encouraged to breed. They lived now for about a thousand years, but the planet could sustain, with ease, a larger population. It was never envisaged that there would be more than about twenty million, building up slowly over the next few thousand years: nothing had ever been planned in the nature of a sudden increase. There would be a careful, controlled building of new, well-sited cities, and there was no shortage of places suitable for the Necessity. Natives who chose to, and were considered suitable by general consent, might have several progeny in the first hundred years of their lives. After that, while sex continued as a pleasure and a balancing force, the breeding mechanisms became inoperative, and they entered a long, energetic, vigorous middle age. The Degenerative Disease, as we define it, did not yet exist; degenerative diseases of the physical sort that later were common had not come into existence. BothGiants and Natives died of accidents, of course, but otherwise not unless through the very rare