The Sirian Experiments

by Doris Lessing

  When I was pushed up on to the plinth they were all apprehensive. There was a point in the ceremony when the priests shouted and sang to their ‘Gods’ that they were the Dead, identifying themselves temporarily with the sacrificed ones who would almost immediately in fact be dead: the victims were in some ambiguous and rather unsatisfactory way – to a rational mind – the same as those who murdered them. My call, Death to the Dead, condemned the entire priestly caste. Behind the idol was a stone that moved on levers, used for purposes of trickery and illusion in the ceremonies. As my threat momentarily froze the priests and then made them run away from where I stood bathed in the unexpected green ray, Rhodia and her accomplices turned the stone, and pulled me down into the rooms underneath the temple proper. This was the most dangerous part of the escape, for of course those clever priests were not likely to remain confused for long. It was, for a few moments, speed that had to save us. There were passages under the buildings of the city, running everywhere below the tunnels used by the slaves. These were complicated, and none known to all of the priests: a tyranny is always self-divided, always a balance of competing interests. It was this that saved us, the jealous knowledge of mutually suspicious sects. But Rhodia had learned every one of the passageways. As our band fled deeper and further, the guards of the priests were running parallel to us at times, or above us, and they might very well have come on the right turning by accident and encountered us – but Rhodia knew of a very old and disused system of tunnels, made long ago by slaves who had tried to dig their way to safety and had been caught. Once we had found the entrance to these we were safe.

  We found ourselves on the side of a high mountain, in a little cleft among rocks, screened by bushes. Far below us was the priests’ dark city. And I saw those poor slaves who had come with us fling themselves on the sun-fed earth and kiss it and weep. And when they lifted their faces, of that faded red-earth colour, to the sun, I fancied that I saw health come into that starved skin even as I watched. And as Rhodia watched, standing aside, waiting for them to be past their first convulsion of delight.

  She caught my questioning thought and said to me: ‘These are the slaves I was able to talk to, and who I was able to trust.’

  It was an obvious, a simple, thing to say. She could have said nothing else! Yet it struck me so painfully then, the strength, the inexorableness of the laws that govern us all. Down in the chilly dim prisons under the priests’ city, slaves who – some of them – could remember nothing else, having been born there, had been able to respond to some quality that they – recognized? remembered? – in a fellow slave who was better than they only in as much as she was able, so it must often have seemed to them, to torment them, stand in authority over them … But they had seen, felt something in her, listened; and because of some – chance? – qualities in themselves, had been found reliable. Trustworthy. And so it was they who now kissed the earth on the free mountainside, and lifted their pale faces to the sun. For the first time in their lives, for some of them. It was a thought enough to chill the heart – my heart, that, if it were not for Rhodia, would now have been lying in a pool of blood in the idol’s hollowed-out belly. And she knew what I was thinking and smiled. And for the first time I caught from her a physical memory of Nasar, and his derisive angers. It was Nasar, for that moment, sharing with me an appreciation of our grim necessities … so strongly there that I could have been back with him at the top of the tall cone with the snow flying past.

  And then I saw her quelling the emotions of her charges, and urging them to their feet, and pointing out over the slopes of the mountains to the north. For they were to go one way into the forests, for safety, and she and I another. When they had gone off, some fifty or so, turning to smile and hold up their arms to her in thankfulness and farewell, she came to me and, rummaging in the folds of her garments again, produced the ornaments and told me to put them on. As I did so, first the band on my thigh, and then the girdle of cool starstones, and then the bracelets, and lastly the necklace, it was as if my mind cleared, my thoughts steadied, and even a short moment after my old state of mind had been banished by the secret strengths of the ornaments, it seemed as dreadful and inconceivable a place or state of being as the dungeons of the city now seemed. I looked at Rhodia with clarity and steadiness of thought and saw her straight. Again, my thought was that she was suffering from some horrible disease, like a leprosy. She had a faded, drained look, as if she had been dusted with ashes. I had not seen anything like it before. The face, the hands, what was visible of her arms and legs, were all dried up, and had a shrivelled look, as a corpse sometimes does. And the hair on her head, which by race was a vigorous glossy black, had white in it.

  She saw how I stared, and she said: ‘Sirius, you are looking at the physical aspect of the Shikastan Degenerative Disease.’

  ‘Rohanda has become so decadent?’

  ‘Now, by halfway through their lives, and sometimes even sooner, they start to show signs of decay. This is a process that accelerates generation by generation. They have even forgotten that this is a recent thing with them.’

  I could not at once recover from the horror of it. I was trying to imagine what it must be like for these unfortunates, trapped inside their enfeebled defective bodies, and I was wondering if it were not possible for Canopus, with their knowledge of the techniques of how to discard bodies at will, to aid the poor creatures.

  And she sighed, and then gave her short characteristic Nasar-laugh. ‘There are other priorities. Believe me. We have other, and most urgent, things to do.’

  ‘Necessities,’ I said, meaning to joke with her.

  And she acknowledged my intention with a smile, but said, ‘Yes, indeed, Sirius – necessities!’

  And on this familiar note we began our journey eastwards through the valleys and passes of the mountain chains along the coast. We went up and we went down, but it was without haste. We were not in danger, she said. This was because ‘our greatest danger is also our protection. On this occasion.’ And when I pressed her to elucidate she gave me a long strong look from eyes that I saw had around their black pupils colourless edges, the tax of Rohandan age – a look that made me think of the whisper: Sirius, be careful! – which seemed to sound, now, all the time, somewhere in my deepest self. She said only: ‘Your greatest danger. Yours, Sirius.’ And would not say any more on that subject. Though she talked willingly and at length about the city we were going to.

  We walked for several days through thick and pleasant forests. We did not hurry. I got the impression that this pace was for my benefit. So that I could absorb – instruction. From her. From Nasar. From Canopus. I did not mind. I was in her, their, hands. Very different was my state of mind now from my angered self-esteem when I had had the chance to be with Canopus, in the person of Klorathy, in those faraway days of the unfortunate ‘events’. I was trying to listen. To adjust. But now, looking back, I see that I was trying over and over again and in every way I knew to find out about Canopus itself, its organizations, its ways of managing itself, its planets – and while I did this Rhodia patiently returned the subject to Grakconkranpatl, to Shammat, and, several times, to the eighth man of those priests. It was not, I see now, that she repeated his name, which was Tafta, so that Tafta recurred through our talk, but that she kept bringing me to points and places where I had to think of him. He was strongly in my mind. I could feel his presence there. Just as, wrapped shivering in my stone cell, Nasar had rung in my mind, so that the name could not help but come to my tongue, so, now, as we walked through those magnificent forests, the great snowy mountains at our backs, the feeling or sense of that man kept coming back. I found myself thinking of him, and what he was, when I recognized his particular and unique pulse in my mind: disturbing, harsh, yet nothing near the cold evil of the priests.

  And when she brought me back to this point, Tafta, the smiling, handsome, and enigmatic savage, it was always with the long dark stare of warning that I recognized.

 
; LELANOS

  We were able to look down on Lelanos from a height – and what a difference from the other city! The same bluish-grey stone was used, but lightened with a glistening white quartz and thin bands of red, so that the place had a lively charm about it. As I moved about Lelanos in the days that followed, I often thought I had glimpsed a pattern or even several interlocking patterns in the way the buildings were set out,but I never grasped it wholly, and this was one of the things that I omitted to ask Rhodia, and then it was too late. At any rate, to view it from above, there was variation, and informality; there were no frowningly dominant buildings; no temples; no threat of stone, and rock, and earth being used to imprison or weight the tender – and so brief – flesh of Rohanda.

  And from what I had heard from Rhodia of its governance, there was nothing to fear from it.

  This was its history. On this site, a small plain ringed by low and friendly mountains, had been several tribes of creatures at that level where their physical needs ordered their lives, and these needs had not been given a religious or ‘higher purpose’ recognition. In other words, they were considerably lower even than the Lombis before their culture was disturbed by our use of them. They fished, hunted, ate, mated, slept.

  Nasar caused himself to be born into a family that retained enough of the remnants of ‘an ancient and high knowledge’, as they put it, to see in this girl something superior. The family was a well-regarded one among a dwindling people living far to the north in the narrow peninsula that separated the Isolated Northern and Isolated Southern Continents – this land bridge, or channel, had often been under water, completely cutting off the Southern Continent, but the ‘events’ had lifted it high above the ocean, and subsequent minor ‘events’ had not succeeded in submerging it. There had flourished a Canopus-inspired culture that had degenerated, and these fast-vanishing people were all that remained. Their memories of the ‘ancient knowledge’ were equated with female dominance, for a variety of reasons extraneous to this account. Rhodia was well treated, and when she told her parents of her needs, was given a company of the physically most striking young males and females of her people to go with her, and she travelled southwards looking for a place and race that would respond to her instruction.

  It was easy to imagine how these handsome visitors must have struck the tribes. Rhodia’s people were a tall, broad, red-brown type, with large dark eyes, and flowing luxuriant black hair. They had all the ease of manner and confidence of their past high culture. The tribes were of a slight, shorter kind, with a dark brown skin, small black eyes, sparse coarse black locks. The new arrivals wore handsome coloured cotton clothes; the tribes wore skins. The ‘Gods’ were able to instruct them in a thousand skills undreamed of by them, and to cut it short, within a couple of their generations, but while Rhodia’s people were still youthful, there was a large, expanding city that had been set up according to her instruction, but was governed by themselves. All the visitors but Rhodia had returned to their own people. Rhodia was considered, still, a ‘God’, but lived as they did, had married one of their males, and her children were not set apart in any way from the other citizens.

  Lelanos was governed like this.

  It was a democracy, elective. There was no written or formal constitution, since Rhodia had taught them that some of the worst tyrannies in Rohandan history had had ‘constitutions’ and written laws with no purpose except to deceive the unfortunate victims and outside observers. There was no point in constitutions and frameworks of laws. If each child was taught what its inheritance was, both of rights due from it and to it, taught to watch its own behaviour and that of others, told that the proper and healthy functioning of this wonderful city depended on his or her vigilance – then law would thrive and renew itself. But the moment any child was left excluded from a full and feeling participation in the governance of its city, then she or he must become a threat and soon there would be decay and then a pulling down and a destruction.

  I was much interested in this, because of what I, Sirius, had observed, and often: when we took over a planet and ordered its rule, we always imposed a constitution that seemed appropriate to us; and this was safeguarded by every sort of threat and punishment. But never had any rule imposed by us stayed for long the same, without falling into anarchy or rebellion.

  There were three safeguards used by Lelanos. The first was the governing body itself, which made the laws. This was elected by general suffrage, every person over the age of sixteen becoming eligible both to vote and to take office. Each officeholder had to lay bare his or her life to the examination of a body of citizens separately elected by the citizens. This scrutiny was to prevent any individual benefiting from office, and to see him or her dismissed at the first evidence of any falling away from high conduct. What these officeholders might not do included the use of servants – there were no slaves – who were treated in any slightest detail differently from members of their own households; the improper use of sex by either male or female – that is, to dominate or degrade; and luxurious or greedy behaviour. The individuals voted on to this Scrutiny, for so it was simply called, were considered the best and most honourable of all Lelannians, and to serve Scrutiny was the highest office.

  The second safeguard was an independent judiciary, to keep the laws made by the governing body. The members of this arm of the State, too, were continually watched by Scrutiny, and their behaviour was expected to be as beyond reproach as that of the rulers.

  While it was not considered undesirable for an individual suited for the work to be re-elected, even for the whole of a lifetime, on to either the governing body or the judiciary, the citizens who staffed Scrutiny were not allowed to serve more than one term of four years, though they might after retiring be allowed to acquire a self-breeding value. That is, the coins used were only and always to be used as a means of exchange and nothing else. If any individual or body of individuals were to fall into debt, then no interest could be charged, and the debt itself must be abrogated at the end of seven years. Rhodia had caused to come into existence a body of instruction, framed as tales and songs, to enforce the message that if once ‘money’ was allowed to become a commodity on its own account, then the downfall of Lelanos could be shortly expected, because she or he who charged ‘interest’ would shortly control the supply of goods and of labour and a ruling class would become inevitable. The songs and stories were based on the histories of innumerable cities and cultures in Rohanda, where the means of exchange had become king. Over and over again, so Rhodia said, Canopus had laid down laws and instruction forbidding the improper use of money, and yet never had this been prevented for long. Shammat was too strong in these unfortunate ones who could never retain excellence.

  ‘And does this mean,’ I inquired of Rhodia, ‘that Lelanos can be expected to fall away?’ For, walking towards it, and then into its outer suburbs, I was struck with the manifest health and sanity of the place, the absence of poverty and deprivation, the real and inbred democracy that ruled here – for one may very easily see its opposite in any place, in signs of servility, fear, deceitfulness.

  And Rhodia said only: ‘You will see for yourself.’

  She had a small house towards the centre of the place, in a group of them set around a small square. She lived there alone now, for her children had grown and left. The house had two small rooms on an upper floor and two on the ground floor. She had lived in it since the city was built, and had resisted all pressures on her by her children to move into a larger house – and when she told me this, her eyes met mine with a mordant amused glance I remembered from Koshi. Oh yes, I was being told quite enough to make me suspect that my arrival here was at a point in the city’s fortunes before a fall, or decline: and in the next few days it seemed to me that Rhodia was doing everything to impress on me, not only the charm, the health, the good sense of this place, but, at the same time, what was wrong with it. And I could not help wondering why she did …

  Looking back I see
that everything conspired to put me into a high (or low!) but at least irrational and emotional condition. First of all, the contrast between this lovely civilized city with its horrible opposite across the mountains. Within a few days I had been taken from one to the other, and they illustrated extremes of what was possible on this planet: I had experienced, was still experiencing, within myself, these two extremes. And there had been the unhurried walk here, with Rhodia, or Nasar, and the way this presence – this Canopean reality – seemed to explore and challenge my deepest self. And there had been something else. I had traversed a zone of forest in no way different from any other, but this had in fact been the barrier zone between the Lelannian territory and that of Grakconkranpatl. For many centuries the evil and predatory city had been kept from attacking Lelanos because of rumours set afloat by Rhodia and then sedulously kept up that there was a zone or band of forest completely surrounding Lelanos that, if invaded or infringed, would result in the most savage reprisals. Lelanos was a villainous place – so the rumours went – feeding on flesh and blood, ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy that would lay in ruins any attacking city. Every kind of chance or even contrived incident or event was pressed into service to give credence to these tales. When I heard some of them on our way to Lelanos, from a terrified tribesman who had been fed all his life on stories of the cruelties of Lelanos, I felt my whole self powerfully affected. The shiverings and shudderings of the poor wretch as he described Lelanos the horrible showed how skilful had been the work of Rhodia and her associates. This propaganda work, and nothing else, had kept Lelanos safe. The clever and cunning priests of the city that really was wicked, using every kind of deceit themselves, had been able to penetrate the disguise of Lelanos … and there was something as disturbing here as there had been in the sight of the band of thirty freed slaves who of all the innumerable slaves of Grakconkranpatl were the only ones able to free themselves by use of some inward recognition of reality, of the truth. Standing on a slender tower in magically charming Lelanos, looking out over forests where I had travelled, knowing what they were and how they were seen by those outside Lelannian borders – this was enough to set me shuddering in something not far off awe at the strange capacities for self-deception of the Rohandan mentality. And awe was not an emotion that I easily accommodated!