Doris Lessing - Mara and Dann

"Like that crashed machine the pilgrims were singing their songs to... no Mara, let's go, I'm so sad I could."

They returned to their rooms, hoping not to meet their hosts. Again they were served a meal there, with the message that dear Mara and dear Dann should make up their minds, because time was passing.

That night Dann went off to his room, looking rueful, and embarrassed, and even closed the door between them; but Mara woke in the night to find him holding her, "What is it, Mara, what's wrong?" She had been calling out to him in her sleep. She had dreamed of peoples who emerged from a kind of mist, running and fighting, always fighting, always looking over their shoulders for enemies; and then one wave vanished and another appeared, dressed differently, of a different skin colour, white or brown or black or yellow, and they too ran, and were hunted, and disappeared, one after another; these long ago peoples had appeared and died out and... She wept and he comforted her, and in the morning he said he wanted to find Felix and ask him certain questions.

"I am sure those two are mad," she said.

"I suppose that depends on whether their plans succeed or not. If they do, then Felix and Felissa aren't mad."

And she said to him softly, "Dann, be careful. I am beginning to see that this dream of theirs can be a powerful poison."

He went to find Felix and she returned to the museums. What intricacies of invention, what cleverness, what seductive ways of living. She liked best some rooms calling themselves "A Day in the Life of." A woman's life in a little island called Britain, in the middle of the eleventh millennium, and then in the twelfth millennium. A family at the end of the twelfth millennium, in an enormous city in North Imrik. A farmer in northern Yerrup at the end of the twelfth millennium. That was the period the makers of these museums liked best because of the crescendo of inventiveness of that time. But the end of the story in every building was war, and the ways of war became crueller and more terrible. In a room in a building that had only machines of war, was a wall that listed the ways it was thought these ancient peoples would have ended their civilisations even if the ice had not arrived. War was one. She could not understand the weapons: they were so difficult and so complicated. And even when the explanations were clear enough to understand she could not believe what she was reading. Projectiles that could carry diseases designed to kill all the people in a country or city? What were these ancient peoples, that they could do such things? "Bombs" that could... She did not understand the explanations.

There was a recklessness about the ways they used their soil and their water.

"These were peoples who had no interest in the results of their actions. They killed out the animals. They poisoned the fish in the sea. They cut down forests, so that country after country, once forested, became desert or arid. They spoiled everything they touched. There was probably something wrong with their brains. There are many historians who believe that these ancients richly deserved the punishment of the Ice."

And in another room: "The machines they invented were ever more subtle and complex, using techniques that no one has matched since. These machines it is now believed destroyed their minds, or altered their thinking so they became crazed. While this process was going on they were hardly aware of what was happening, though a few did know and tried to warn the others."

Shabis had told her that the people alive now were the same as those so clever, but so stupid, ancient peoples, and in Mara's mind was a little picture of what she had found in the Tower: Dann near death, one man with his throat cut and another nearly dead. Dann had killed that man, but he did not remember it. And there was another picture: of Kulik, with that teeth-bared, ugly grin, and his murderous heart.

When she got back to her room one day, she found Felissa looking with distaste at her old brown snake, or shadow, garment.

"We don't have this in our collections," she said. "Will you give us this one?"

"But Felissa, your museums are collapsing, they are falling into ruins."

"Oh my dear, yes, but that is why we need you and Dann so badly. We could soon get everything back to how it was."

"Felissa, I have to say this: I do truly believe that you and Felix are living inside some kind of impossible dream."

"Oh no, dearest Mara, you are wrong. Felix and Dann are talking, and I'm so glad." She stroked Mara's arms, and then her face, and murmured, in her intimate, caressing way, "Dear, dear Mara." And then, brisk and busy, "Dear Princess, you are such a lovely girl, I would so like to see you in."

Spread over Mara's bed were gowns and robes that she had noticed hanging in the cupboard but, thinking they were Felissa's, had not touched them. She had walked through a hall full of clothes, from ancient times, but by then could not take in any more news from the past.

These clothes had been taken from the museum.

"Please, please, put this one on," entreated Felissa, and held up a sky-blue garment of shiny material that had a full skirt, and — this was something Mara had not seen or imagined — was tight about the hips and waist, and had bare shoulders and a bare back. "This was a dress they called a ball gown," said Felissa, "they danced in it."

"How is it these things haven't fallen apart from age?"

"Oh, these aren't the originals, of course not. They brought the originals here to Ifrik, when the ice began, to the museums they were making then, and as they faded and decayed they were always copied and replaced. Probably these are nothing like as wonderful as the originals, because we are not as wonderful as those old peoples."

"But we are as warlike," said Mara.

And now a quick, shrewd glance, far from the intimate, caressing style of her social self.

"Yes, warlike. I'm sorry to say that is true. But that is what dear Prince Shahmand — Dann — is discussing with my husband."

She held out the dress. Mara pulled off her robe and got the thing on somehow, but her waist was too thick for it and it gaped. She stood in front of a big glass that Felissa wheeled in from her own room and saw her-self — and fell on the bed laughing.

"But you look beautiful, Mara," Felissa fussed.

Mara took it off.

Now, to her amazement, Felissa removed her garments that were composed of so many veils and draperies of grey and white, and stood revealed in long pink drawers, and a kind of harness for her breasts. "Yes, these are from the museum too. But they are beginning to rot and we do not have the means to replace them so I thought I might as well have the benefit."

She took from the cupboard a pink gown, all laces and frills, and put it on. She paraded up and down, glancing at herself in the looking-glass, and then at Mara, smiling. Mara saw she did this often: these clothes were not really here for Mara, Felissa wanted Mara to admire her.

And she was a pretty old thing, or perhaps not so old, quite slim still, but her limbs were hardly. And Mara could not prevent herself looking at her own smooth, fine, silky limbs.

Mara sat there while the modes and fashions of hundreds of years paraded in front of her. She had not heard of fashions, until now, and found the idea of it amazing and even absurd. From time to time Felissa cooed, "Oh, do try this on, Mara, it would suit you." But that was not the point of this little scene.

Mara sat on, smiling, and thought that nothing more ridiculous had ever happened to her than to watch an elderly brown-skinned woman parading about in clothes made for thousands-of-years-ago women — white women, who clearly had a very different shape, for not one of Felissa's experiments closed at the waist. Mara imagined these clothes on Leta, and found that hard too. That great bundle of fair, shining hair — yes, that would suit some of these dresses.