The Sirian Experiments

by Doris Lessing

  Shortly after that, Canopus convened a conference, again on Colony 10. Rohanda was only one of the items on the agenda. At the time it did not seem more important than the others.

  It has always seemed to me that this question of ‘hindsight’ is not to be solved!

  What I see now, looking back, is not what I experienced then, but are we to cancel our former, and more immature, ways of viewing things? As if they did not matter, had no effect? – but of course not.

  Among the many interests Canopus and Sirius had in common at that time one stood out. The Colony 10 Giants, returned to their own planet and waiting for new work to be allotted to them, had suffered. Now twice the size of their former compatriots and evolved beyond them, they could not settle in their old ways, nor was Planet 10 able to accept them easily. Superiority is never easily tolerated.

  There was no planet among the Canopean colonies that could usefully welcome the Giants. Not immediately. Having learned of the Giants’ capacities, and believing of them that they could make – almost overnight, evolutionarily speaking – civilized races out of apes, we wished Canopus to ‘lend’ us the Giants in order that they might teach our specialized colonists ‘their tricks’. Yes, that is how we talked. There is no point in blushing for it now. Canopus steadily, kindly, gently, resisted us. It was not possible, they said. We saw in the refusal niggardliness; saw in it reluctance to help Sirius to advance beyond Canopus – saw in it everything but what was there. Formal application had been made to Canopus for this ‘loan’ and it was the main item on the agenda, and the chief topic of all the informal discussions during the conference. There was ill-feeling on our side. Resentment. As usual.

  The general atmosphere of the conference was low and dispirited. Canopus had been shaken by the Rohanda failure, and was made miserable, as they freely confessed, because of the fate of the unfortunate Planet 8, which they now could not save and which, even as the conference took place, was being abandoned, with loss of life and potentiality. And we Sirians were low, too, because of Rohanda. I cannot in fact remember a conference that had so little of the energy that comes from success; though of course it did not lack purpose and determination for the future.

  For me personally the conference was important because it was there I first saw Klorathy, who led their team. It was he who supplied the occasion with what vitality it could aspire to. I liked him at once. He was – and is – a vigorous, abrasive, sardonic being who can always be counted on to alleviate the torpors and languors that attend even the best conferences. We were attracted, told each other so, in the way of course appropriate to our life-stages: both of us had our breeding-bond phases behind us. Ambien I also liked him, and we all three looked forward to many pleasant and useful encounters.

  It was Klorathy who had to carry the burden of refusing us the Giants, and I recall his patience as he over and over repeated: But, you see, it is not possible … while we didn’t see.

  I can do no better than to get down the main points of the agenda as it related to Rohanda, in order to illustrate points of view then and now.

  1 The Canopean-Rohandan Lock had failed – the basic fact.

  2 That degeneration of various kinds must be expected – which we had already experienced.

  3 That Canopus intended to maintain their link with Rohanda, some sort of skeleton staff, in order to maintain the flow at a steady minimum level.

  4 As far as could be seen, the cosmic alignments that had caused this Disaster would not reverse for several hundred thousand years, after which there would be no reason Rohanda could not revert to its flowering flourishing healthy condition.

  5 That (and this was to them – to Canopus – the most important factor in this summing up) Shammat of Puttiora had discovered the nature of the Canopus-Rohandan bond, and was tapping strength from it. And was already waxing fat and prosperous on it.

  I can only say that, reading these words now, and remembering what I saw in them then, I have to marvel at my blindness.

  Again, resentment was partly the cause. And also fear: There was much talk about the Shammat ‘spies’, which Canopus claimed they had known nothing about. We did not believe this. But could not pursue it, for fear our own spying would come to light …

  It will be seen from these brief remarks that this was an uncomfortable, unsatisfactory conference. When it was dissolved, I could see nothing positive in it except my meeting with Klorathy, and since he was to stay on Colony 10 to assist the Giants in their painful period of waiting, and I was to return to Sirius, we had nothing much to hope for, at least immediately.

  Sirius had not abandoned the idea of using Rohanda for experiments. It was a question of finding ways of doing this without harm to ourselves. A joint committee Canopus/Sirius was set up at the conference for this purpose. Again I was assigned to Rohanda, at my request, and with instructions by Canopus – called by us and by them advice – on how to survive the new discordant Rohandan atmosphere. We were told that if we were to build settlements in exactly this way and that – measurements and proportions prescribed to the fraction of an R-unit – and wore such and such artefacts, and ate this and that (there were long lists of such prescriptions), then we might work on that unfortunate planet, at least for limited periods.

  To begin with, their advice was only partly, or halfheartedly, obeyed: bad results followed. We then took to an exact obedience. Success.

  This obedience was more remarkable than perhaps will seem now. At that time it would have been difficult to find anything good being said about Canopus anywhere in our territories. Our tone was one of indifference at best, but usually derision. We were spying on them everywhere and in every way. We did not hesitate to outdo them when we could, often quite childishly, and even illegally. Any who doubt this may find what I say confirmed in any common chronicle or memoir of that time: we were not ashamed of our behaviour. On the contrary. Yet we suspected Canopus of ill-feeling and delinquency towards us, and complained of it. At the same time, and while apparently having little respect for their prescriptions, for we mocked them when we thought this would earn us admiration, we nevertheless followed them, and to the point where the practices became second nature, and we were in danger of forgetting where they originated. Then we did forget – or most of us – and ‘the Rohandan Adjustment Technique’ was talked of as if it were a discovery of our own.

  For a long time, more than a hundred thousand years, we Sirians were more on Rohanda than Canopus was. So we believed then. It was because we told our spies to look for Canopean technicians by the same signs that we understood for our own necessities and behaviour. We did not know then that Canopus could come and go in any way than by spaceship – by ordinary physical transport. Did not know that Canopean technicians could exist on Rohanda – and on other planets – taking the outward physical shape of the inhabitants of any particular time and place.

  For long ages Canopean individuals were at work on Rohanda and we did not know it. Even now there are those who refuse to believe it.

  But a few of us who worked on Rohanda came to understand. And I will come to a fuller description of this, in its place.

  Meanwhile, my preoccupation with Canopus continued, and I was not by any means the only one. And this was for a specific and definite reason.

  THE SITUATION IN THE SIRIAN EMPIRE

  It is necessary for me now to make a general statement about Sirian development – a summary of history from the end of our Dark Age until the present. It will be argued that it is not possible to sum up several hundred thousand years of an Empire’s history in a few words. Yet we all of us do this when describing others. For instance, how do we – and even our most lofty and respected historians – refer to Alikon, the long-lived culture that preceded our own on Sirius, before we became an Empire? ‘Alikon was a rigid and militaristic society, based on limited natural resources, whose ruling caste maintained power by the use of a repressive religion, keeping nine-tenths of the population as labourers, slaves
, and servants. It ended because …’ That is how we describe ninety thousand S-years of what we always refer to as ‘prehistory’. To take another example. Colony 10 of the Canopean rule was once ‘Senjen, a natural paradise, a pacific, easygoing matriarchal society made possible by a pleasant climate and abundant vegetable and animal stocks’. Senjen lasted for two hundred thousand years before Canopus decided it needed improvement.

  No: the dispassionate, disinterested eye we use for other peoples, other histories, we do not easily turn on ourselves – past or present! Yet most societies – cultures – empires – can be described by an underlying fact or truth, and this is nearly always physical, geographical. Is it possible that our reluctance to regard ourselves as we do others is because we do not like to categorize our own existence as physical … merely physical?

  The Sirian Empire has been preoccupied by one basic physical fact and the questions caused thereby since its inception: technology: our technical achievements that no other empire has ever even approached … I write that statement without the benefit of ‘hindsight’. That is how we have seen it until very recently. It is because of how we define (and many of us still do) technology. The subtle, infinitely varied, hard-to-see technology of Canopus was invisible to us, and therefore for all these millennia, these long ages, we have counted ourselves as supreme.

  We now mark the end of our Dark Age at the point where ‘we got rid of our excess populations’. As I saw it expressed in a somewhat robustly worded history. At the point, then, when ‘population balanced necessity’. Ah yes, there are a hundred ways of putting our basic dilemma! And each one of these formulations, evasive or frank, can only mask something we have never come to terms with! To sum up our culture, then, as we so arbitrarily encapsulate others: ‘The Sirian Empire, with its fifty-three colonies, almost infinitely rich, well-endowed, fruitful, variegated, and with its exemplary technology, has never been able to decide how many people should be allowed to live in it.’

  There you have it. I touched on this before: how could I not? There is no way of even mentioning Sirius without bringing up this our basic, our burning, problem …

  The Dark Age over, we saw to it that our populations everywhere were reduced to the minimum level necessary for … for what? In our enthusiasm over our new concept, our new capacities of control, we set fairly arbitrary limits to population on our fifty-three colonies. Very low numbers were permitted to be.

  What happened to those teeming millions upon millions upon millions? Well, they were not exterminated. They were not ill treated. On the contrary, as I have hinted – to do more than lightly sketch these developments would come outside my scope – all kinds of special schemes and projects were set up to soften their tragic fate. They died, it is generally agreed now – now that so much time has passed and we can look at those days more calmly – of broken hearts, broken will. They died because they had no purpose, of illnesses, of epidemics that seemed to have other causes, and during mass outbreaks of madness. But they died. It took fifty thousand years of our bad – our very bad – time, but at the end of it, we were left with nearly empty planets, and everything open for us – ready for a magnificent new purpose, new plan.

  But, in fact, nothing had changed: we still did not know how to look at ourselves. Our technology was such that our entire Empire could be run with something like ten million people. That was what was needed. If to run our Empire was our purpose, and nothing else …

  I shall not go on. Some people will say I have already said enough about this; others that, if I were to pay proper and due respect to our terrible basic dilemma, I should devote not a few paragraphs but several volumes to it.

  Well, myriads of volumes and whole ages have been devoted to it – when our stage was, as it were, swept bare and empty, waiting for its appropriate dramas, what happened was that schools of philosophy sprang up everywhere, and nothing was heard but their debates, their arguments … What was our purpose? they inquired of themselves, of us, pursuing ‘the fundamental Sirian existential problem’.

  So violent, lowering, unpleasant, became these debates that it was made illegal to even mention this ‘existential problem’ – and that epoch lasted for millennia. Of course, there were all kinds of underground movements and subversive sects devoted to ‘maintaining knowledge of the truth’.

  Then, as these became so powerful and influential they could not be ignored, public expression of our inward preoccupation was made legal again. At one time several of our planets were set aside as universities and colleges, for the sole purpose of discussions of our existential problems. This is how ‘the Thinkers’ of 23 originated.

  Meanwhile, sometimes our populations grew larger and sometimes smaller, and these fluctuations did not relate to how many individuals were needed in order to operate our technologies, but according to how tides of opinion flowed … if we wanted to, we could have crammed our planets with billions of genera, species, races – as they once had been. When we wanted, they could be left empty. We could – and did – maintain some planets, for special purposes, at very high levels of population and leave others virtually unpopulated.

  While all these variations on our basic problem were attempted, our space drive had been stabilized. We had discovered that no matter how forcefully we swept out into space, gathering in suitable planets as we found them, incorporating them into our general plan, we took our problems – or rather, our problem – with us. What did we need all these new colonies for? What was their purpose? If they had special conditions of climate, then we could tell ourselves they were useful – for something or other; if they had new minerals, or large deposits of those already known to us – they were used. But suppose we went on acquiring colonies and reached the number of a hundred … a thousand … what then?

  As our philosophers asked, and argued.

  We, the administrators, had been watching Canopus: she was not acquiring ever more colonies. She was stabilized on what she had. She had far fewer than we … she was developing and advancing them … But that was not how we saw it then: I have to record that we despised Canopus, that great neighbour of ours, our competitor, our rival, for being satisfied with such a low level of material development and acquisition.

  I now return to our preoccupation with Canopus.

  CANOPUS-SIRIUS. KLORATHY

  At the time of the ending of our Dark Age, which was not long after the Rohandan Disaster, Canopus had as large a population as we – proportional to the fact they had fewer planets. That was one fact: and they showed no disquiet at all about it. Yet their technology, though apparently inferior to ours, was certainly near enough to ours to pose the questions that beset us? When we raised these questions, our ‘existential problem’, they were simply not interested. But at the time we saw this – as usual – as an example of their deviousness. When they were asked how they adjusted their population levels, the reply always was: ‘according to need’ or ‘according to necessity’, and it was a very long time – only recently – that we were able to hear ‘according to the Need. According to the Necessity’.

  Sirius knew far less about Canopus – and this on a purely material level – than Canopus did about us. I had noticed this long before: mentioning any one of our planets, Canopus always seemed informed about it: and we accordingly admired their espionage system.

  We were always waiting for the time when we could catch one of their spies and say: ‘Look, you have broken your agreement, now we demand information in return.’ But we never did catch any of their spies. For the good reason that they did not have any.

  And when we asked for information, it was given, and we did not trust in it … did not believe what we were told.

  Shortly after the Conference on Colony 10, the one to consider the results of the Catastrophe, I was called by my Head of Department and was asked to develop my relationship with Klorathy: our liking for each other had been noted.

  I was of course not reluctant. I did not have then, nor have now, a
ny feeling that it is wrong to use a personal relationship in this way. I am a Sirian. This is what I am first and foremost. I am proud to be a public servant of Sirius. If there were ever to come a moment of conflict between my duty to Sirius, to our Colonial Service, and my personal feelings, I should never hesitate. But why should there be conflict? I have always put first what I conceive to be the real interests, long-term interests, of Sirius. And of course I took it for granted that Klorathy must have been approached by his superiors, about me – and about Ambien I as well.

  I was asked to return to Rohanda, where Klorathy was shortly to pay a visit: so we had been informed by them. The fact that we had been informed told us that Klorathy was allotted the same role as I had been: we could regard ourselves as spies if we wished.

  My whole nature was involved in my preparations for this meeting with Klorathy. I cannot separate the ‘personal’ from the public aspects of myself here – not easily. There are times in one’s life when it seems as if everything that happens streams together, each event, or person, or even an overheard remark becoming an aspect of a whole – a confluence whose sources go back into the past, reach forward into the future. Personally, there was a gap in my life because a boon-companion had recently died. Death is not something we think much about, we of the superior Sirian mother-stock, since we do not expect to die except from accident or a rare disease. But this old friend had been struck by a meteorite travelling on the Inter-Planetary Service. While we saw each other rarely, since his service was on C.P. 3, we were in a rare balance of sympathies and even knowing that the other was there was a support to both. I frankly hoped that Klorathy might take the place of this boon-friend. Not least because he was from Canopus: there had been cases of real friendship between Sirians and Canopeans, but they were legendary: heroic tales were made of them and used to support in our youngsters the comparatively new idea that Canopus was an ally, not to be seen only as an old enemy.