The Sirian Experiments

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  I wondered if the upheavals and tumultuousness had affected my senses… my ability to judge… even my mind. Yet I held on fast to my first impression, as one does to some idea, quite stubbornly and sometimes it seems almost at random, to steady one in a time of upheaval. I was holding on obstinately to the fact that the Rohandan sun had changed… was smaller. I was able even to reach out—unclearly and uncertainly—towards the truth, that Rohanda had been driven, or sucked, or pulled, further from her mother-sun by this cosmic accident she had suffered, and I was with one part of my mind working out the possible results of this. Meanwhile, I was standing by my little crystal bubble on a high mountain that was still “normal” in that it had trees and vegetation on it, though everything leaned about or lay crashed on the earth. I have no idea exactly where this mountain was. I was looking out over a plain where the earth been convulsed about, because there were cracks in it, some miles in length, and sometimes miles across, and there were volcanoes and rivers of mingled lava and water opening new beds for themselves. I could hardly breathe for the sulphurous smell. And I had a queer dreamlike vision that lasted only a few moments, of herds of animals—some of which I had never seen, so strange and new to me that I could not believe in them… these were running across the plain between the cracks and the spouting geysers and volcanoes, crying out and screaming and trumpeting and raging, and the multitudinous herds poured around the base of the mountain and vanished, and I was left wondering if I had seen them, just I was wondering if I had been in that snow, had seen the whole globe blotted out by snow… and even as I thought about the snow, again it fell—I saw that everywhere in front of me was instantly covered by thick wads of blue and green and yellow ice, which came to the foot of the mountain I on, and began pressing and squeezing up the sides, with a groaning and shrieking that echoed the sounds of the unfortunate animals who had fled past a few moments before. And again I was blotted out in thicknesses of snow, that almost at once swallowed up the space bubble so that I only just had time to climb into it pull over the closure panel. And here I was, not in the dark, for the lights were working, but inside the dark weight of a snowstorm, and silence. Now that it was silent, I understood what an assault my ears had suffered. I again—what? Slept? Blacked out? Went mad enough that I have no memory of it? And again I can give no idea of how long I was in there. Within the blizzard. Inside—not terror—for that had gone, been driven away by immensities of everything, but a suspension of any ordinary and reliable understanding.

  When I was myself again and believed that the snow had stopped falling, and burrowed my way out of the bubble, and leaned on it, holding fast as one does to a solid place in water, because I was as it were floating in loose airy snow, I looked out over an all-white landscape, under a sky that was a light clear fresh blue, lit by the new, more distant, more yellow sun. I seemed to be clear in my mind, and functioning… I pushed enough snow off the bubble to free it, tried the instruments, found everything in order, and took off into this new air, which was so sharp and clean again, yet with a metallic tang to it, and flew interminably over white, white, a dazzlingly correct and uniform white, where all hollows and valleys had been obliterated, only peaks that of bare, scraped rock. But one had a clotted or furred look, as if encrusted with insects of vast size; when I examined it, I saw a multitude of every imaginable variety of animal, large and small, all in the attitudes of immediate death. They had been frozen in an instant where they taken had refuge from the floods, or the surging ice packs, or the oceans of snow. But on other peaks that I past at eye level there were trees still upright, their branches loaded with frozen birds. And in one place I saw a glittering plume rising into the air just in front of me, and, as I came near to it, found it was a geyser that had been frozen so fast it was hanging there with fishes and beasts of the sea solid in it. It sent out a high twanging noise, and snapped and crumpled and fell in a heap on to the white snowy billows below.

  The great ocean where the islands had been was not frozen. I saw it then as I have seen it ever since. I was flying across the northerly part, and underneath me was water, where Adalantaland had been, as if it had never been. It was not that there were no islands left anywhere in those seas but that now they were clustered or fringed around the coasts of the Isolated Northern Continent on one side and the main landmass on the other—these being the Northwest fringes that later played such a part in Rohandan history.

  I wondered that the ocean was not frozen. And even as I flew across the last of the waters before reaching land, I saw ahead of me that the snows were melting there—had already melted in some places, leaving floods and lakes and muddy expanses everywhere. By the time I did reach the mainland, and was flying into it, the snows had all dissolved in water… I was flying over a scene of mud and water and new rivers. I could not land anywhere, but went straight across the continent looking down at a soaked and watery scene whose changes I was not able to assess because I not been that way before. When I reached the opposite coast, on another vast ocean, I was able to see that pressures of some awful intensity had squeezed higher the mountain ranges that run from extreme north to extreme south of the isolated continents—if one were to imagine these continents shaped in some soft substance, like clay or sand, but on a tiny scale, as on a child’s teaching tray, and then pressure applied by some force right down one side of them, so that they buckle up and make high ridges and long mountain chains separated by narrow gorges and highlands, so had those two great continents been affected, and I had to postulate all kinds of pressuring forces deep inside the substance of Rohanda, under the ocean; and the visible signs of these were in the vast waters muddied and full of weed, and crowding jagged icebergs, and a metallic or sulphurous smell.

  I floated southwards along these tortured mountains seeing how forests and rock and rivers had been heaved up and down and toppled and spread everywhere until I reached the south of the Northern Continent turned sharply inland to seek out Klorathy and the other Ambien. Again, I was not familiar with the terrain, but could see that, while everything had been soaked, so that lakes and sprawling rivers stained brown with earth lay everywhere, and the landscape was all mud, all water, all swamp and fen and marsh, yet there were expanses of forests that had not been overturned and mountains that seemed intact, if shaken. And in fact it turned out that the southern continents, partly and patchily frozen and soaked and shaken and squeezed, had come off much better than the northern areas, and had not been entirely devastated. I travelled on in clouds of steam that whisked up past my bubble and made turbulence that tossed and spun me, so that I felt as sick as I had done in the tempests of the great disaster, and all the blue Rohandan skies were coiling and churning with cloud. This had been a high, dry, sharp-aired landscape, and it would shortly become so again—yet I descended to where I had left the others through baths of warm steam. They were still there. On a wet muddy plain surrounded by the mountains of the dwarves were the tents and huts of the tribes, and splashing through mud and shallow lakes, the savages were dancing: were propitiating their deity, the earth, their mother, their source, their provenance, their protector, who had unexpectedly become enraged and shown her rage. And so they danced and danced—and continued to dance on, through the days and the nights. When I joined Klorathy, he was exactly where I had left him, seated in the open of his tent, apparently unoccupied, watching the dance of his protégés. And Ambien was near him.

  We told each other our experiences: mine more dramatic than theirs: they had briefly been visited by tempests of snow, which been dissipated almost at once by floods of rain, the earth had shaken and had growled and creaked, some of the mountainsides had fallen and there would be new riverbeds running off the plateau to the oceans.

  We pieced together, among us, the following succession of events: The planet had turned over, had been topsy-turvy for some hours, and then righted itself—but not to its old position: Klorathy’s instruments, more sensitive than ours, told him that the axis of the earth w
as at an angle now and this would mean that as this angled globe revolved about its sun, there would no longer be evenness and regularity in its dispositions of heat and cold, but there would be changes and seasons that we could not yet do more than speculate about. The planet was slightly further away from its sun, too—the Rohandan year would be minimally longer. Many kinds of animals were extinct. The level of the oceans had sharply dropped, because the ice masses of both poles were much enlarged and could be expected to further increase. Cities that had been swallowed by the waters before in previous sudden changes would be visible again… islands that had vanished under the waves might even be visible, glimmering there in shallower seas… and perhaps poor Adalantaland, that vanished happy place, might ring its bells close enough under the surface for voyagers to hear them on quiet days and nights—so we talked, even then, when we were surrounded by mud and flying clouds of steam, and the catastrophe was already receding into the past, becoming another of the sudden reversals of Rohandan condition. But when I used the word “catastrophe” of what had just happened—a not, after all, inconsiderable happening—Klorathy corrected me, saying that the Catastrophe, or, to use the absolutely accurate and correct word, Disaster, meaning an unfortunate alignment of the stars and their forces, could properly be applied to a real misfortune, a true evolutionary setback, namely, the failure of the Lock. I have already hinted at my impatience with Canopean pedantry. As I saw it. As I sometimes even now cannot help seeing it.

  I remember my meek enquiry, which was I am afraid all impertinence, to the effect that some might consider recent events to merit that word, and remember Klorathy’s smiling, but firm, reply that: “if one did not use the exact and correct words, then one’s thinking would soon become unclear and confused. The recent events…”—I remember I smiled sarcastically at this little word, “events”—“…did not in any fundamental way alter the nature of Rohanda, whereas the failure of the Lock, and the Shammat delinquency, had affected the planet and would continue to affect it. That a catastrophe, a disaster. This was unfortunate.” And he kept the pressure of his bronze or amber gaze on me, making me accept it.

  Which I did. But I was raging with emotion. I thought him cold and dispassionate. I was thinking that being able to view the devastation of a whole planet with such accurate detachment was not likely to he warmly responsive to a close personal relationship: at the time, that my own personal concerns were being intruded by me did not strike me as shameful, though it does now. I have already said that “hindsight” is not the most comfortable of possible views of oneself or of events. The mention of Shammat affected me—I knew of course that it was all guilt. But while I was clear in my mind that our Sirian delinquencies and deceptions that I could not confess to had caused barriers between me and Klorathy, my emotions expressed this in anger and a growing irritation with Klorathy, even a dislike…

  I left him and went to my own tent, which was set on a high rock, damp but at least not saturated, and sat there by myself, looking down on the weird scene—the savages dancing and singing, on and on, in the splashing brown water and the mud, illuminated by a moon that appeared fitfully among the tumultuous clouds, and vanished amid the mists and fogs. Ambien I came to talk to me. He was conciliatory and gentle, for he knew how I raged and suffered.

  He had wanted very much to leave, before the events that we were not to call a catastrophe. He had become bored with the inactivity of it all. The life of the savages went on, hunting, and curing hides, and eating their stews and their dried meat, and making clothes and ornamenting them. And Klorathy stayed where he. He did not lecture or admonish them. What had happened was that the head man came to Klorathy one evening and sat down and finally asked if he had visited the dwarves, and if there was anything he could tell them—the savages. And Klorathy answered saying that had he indeed visited the little people and that in his view… explaining how he saw things. And then the head man went off and conferred, and days went past, and then he returned and asked again, formally, sitting on the ground near Klorathy, having exchanged courtesies, if Klorathy believed the dwarves could be trusted to keep agreements if they were made—for in the past, so he said, the dwarves had been treacherous and had spilled out of their underground fastnesses and slain the tribes, both men and animals… and Klorathy answered this too, patiently.

  What was happening, Ambien I said, was that Klorathy did not make any attempt to communicate what he thought until he was asked a direct question—or until something was said that was in fact a question though it was masked as a comment. And Ambien I then went to Klorathy and enquired if this was indeed a practice of Canopus: and whether Klorathy expected to stay there, living on as he did, with savages, until they asked the right questions… and if this was Klorathy’s expectation, then why did he expect the savages to ask the right questions?

  To which Klorathy replied that they would come and ask the necessary questions in their own good time.

  And why?

  “Because I am here…” was Klorathy’s reply, which irritated Ambien I. Understandably. I felt irritated to the point of fury even listening to this report.

  Anyway, Ambien I had wanted to go, but could not, since I had the Sirian transport with me. He had in fact gone off to visit the dwarves again, by himself, another colony of them—a foolhardy thing, which had nearly cost him his life. He had been rescued by the intervention of Klorathy, who had only said, however, that “Sirians as yet lacked a sense of the appropriate.”

  Then had begun the “events” that were not to be described as more than that.

  At last, I had arrived back, and he, Ambien I, could not express how he felt when he saw the glistening bubble descend through that grey steam, because he had believed me to be dead. And of course it was “a miracle” that I had survived—to use a term from our earlier epochs.

  We stayed together that night, in emotional and intellectual intimacy, unwilling to separate, after such a threat that we might never have been together again at all.

  We decided to leave Klorathy.

  First, having pondered over what Ambien I had said about questions, how they had to be asked, I went to Klorathy and asked bluntly and directly about the Colony 10 colonists, and why we, Sirius, could not use them.

  He was sitting at his tent door. I sat near him. We were both on heaps of damp skins… but the clouds of steam were less, the earth was drying, the thundering and trickling and running of the waters already had quietened. It was possible to believe soon these regions would again be dry and high and healthy.

  “I have already told you,” said Klorathy, “that these colonists would not be appropriate. Do you understand? Not appropriate for Sirians, for the Sirian circumstances.”

  “Why not?"

  He was silent for a while, as if reflecting inwardly. Then he said, “You ask me, over and over again, the same kind of question.”

  “Why don’t you answer me?”

  Then he did something that made me impatient. He went into his tent and came out with some objects—the same things Ambien I and I had been supplied to maintain our balance on this difficult planet.

  I at first believed that because of the recent “events,” certain changes in our practice were necessary, and I readied myself to take in instruction, since I knew that exactness was necessary here, and that it would not do for me to overlook even the smallest detail. (I had told him—and heard his dismayed patient sigh about Adalantaland falling off in this respect, how they had not maintained the care needed to make these practices work.)

  I watched what he did. Certain kinds of stone, of substance, some colours, shapes, were laid before him and handled and ordered. But I was watching very carefully and saw that he made no changes in the ritual I had been using.

  “So nothing has had to be changed?” I asked, knowing my voice was rough and antagonistic. “Not even the recent events, and the distancing of the earth from its sun and all the other differences, are going to necessitate changes in what we
have to do?”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet. Though perhaps later, when we have monitored the exact differences. In climate, for instance. And of course the magnetic forces will he affected…”