The Sirian Experiments

by Doris Lessing

  The success of this experiment influenced how we set up our stations on the Rohandan moon.

  A necessary word about my state of mind. I remained on Rohanda for a considerable time after my experience as a captive. I recognized that I had been in an unhealthy and dangerous emotional condition. I knew that this was not a new thing: its origin was due to the situation of Sirius itself. I felt that I should do something about it, change myself in some way – at least not remain as I had been: capable of such foolhardiness and almost cynical indifference. But time did not seem to improve me. Discussions with Ambien I led to no more than assurances of mutual support, and declarations that we understood each other’s metaphysical situation: for my mood was not confined to myself, and the briefest of exploratory conversations with others of our Service revealed how general the unease had become.

  What slowly hardened in me was a feeling of resentment, or at least puzzlement, over the behaviour of Rhodia, or Nasar. Why had I been led into such temptation? For what purpose? I had succumbed, had freed myself – or, rather, had recognized in myself the implanted reminders of Canopus, which were the means by which I saw my situation and could free myself. But what had it all been for?

  And this thought, or emotion, was directly linked to, fed by, an astonishment, a sick angry disbelief that Shammat – was so paltry! Who was, what was, this power that held Rohanda in thrall? Tafta was an insignificantly nasty half-animal who had acquired some minor capacities that allowed him petty tricks. He was not more than crafty and cunning. Evil I had seen in the cruel priesthood. What relation did Tafta have to these evil ones? Had he created them or merely tolerated and used them? Could the progeny of an unpleasant, mildly disgusting, unimportant nastiness become so much worse than its progenitors? What I was feeling became – as it crystallized out so that I could look at it – something like this: if Nasar had arranged for me to become tempted by something really wicked, like the dark priests, a total and thoroughgoing beastliness, I might have found some point in that! But to have succumbed to Tafta was humiliating. Yes – it was my pride that was speaking; and I was even half aware of it. What it amounted to was that I was annoyed with Canopus for not arranging for me a more profound evil! They had rated me low because of matching me with such a petty wickedness. I felt insulted! And yet my reason told me that I had been proved not to rate any greater nastiness than Tafta! After all, I had succumbed, even though briefly. I had not been immune to petty nastiness and ambition. Yet I could not imagine myself ever wanting anything the priesthood of Grakconkranpatl could offer me: nor feeling anything but revulsion for them … Was I then to understand, from my weakening towards Tafta, that the beginnings of an immersion in evil must always start with something easy, paltry, seemingly unimportant? Was this what Canopus had been teaching me?

  All these thoughts, and many others on these lines, conflicted in me and at length I found it all too much, and I shut a door on them. Enough. I had been proved to be gullible and feeble. I knew it. I was not going to deny it. I flew away from Rohanda, with a dissatisfaction in me I was not equipped to handle.

  This dwindled into a dry sorrow, which was not very far from the ‘existential malady’, or so I found, when subjecting it to my dispassionate judgement.

  I was away from Rohanda for some time.

  The experiments being undertaken there, less biosociological than strictly scientific, laboratory stuff, did not interest me much. I followed the progress of only one. The atmosphere of Rohanda is 80 per cent nitrogen. Yet its mammals subsist on less than 20 per cent oxygen. The idea was to breed an animal capable of living on nitrogen, or at least a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. Many and ingenious were the experiments, which had to end because all of isolated S.C. II was overrun by an empire ruled by Grakconkranpatl and Lelanos. This was an uneasy alliance. Alliances between two partners equal in strength and with much the same aim in my experience have to be unstable. They last only when one is in a generously tutelary relationship with the other. Our history is in point. Lelanos had become as horrible a place as the other. The Lelannians mated freely with the race of dark priests, whose main feature had been a heavy uniformity of ugliness, and this match had produced a type of very strong, but more flexible and varied people, who adopted the ‘religious’ practices of their former enemies and terrorized the entire continent. The new cross dominated Grakconkranpatl and used the former priestly caste as slaves. Thus had the new state of affairs come into being where the two cities had become allied in evil.

  But I was not disposed to concern myself much with Rohanda. Affairs elsewhere in our Empire seemed more important. When I got a message from Canopus, inviting me to a discussion ‘on the present situation in Rohanda, with particular attention to the Isolated Southern Continent II’, I at first ignored this order. For it was one. I then was sent a message signed by Klorathy, of whom I had never ceased to think, who was always at the back of my mind, even when I was much occupied elsewhere. What he said was that ‘the present situation in the continents under your control is disadvantageously affecting all of Rohanda’.

  Now, I was quite aware that both the Southern Continents were populated by warring, savage, degenerated tribes. But when we had wanted the use of these two continents for – mostly – experimental purposes, it was not in my mind that our responsibilities should also be altruistic. I saw no reason why Sirius should not simply leave Rohanda altogether. Canopus was welcome to both Southern Continents. Nor did my reports indicate that the state of affairs in the northern hemisphere was much to the credit of Canopus. If our uses of Rohanda could not be described as having led to an improvement of the place, then the same had to be said about Canopus.

  So I saw things then.

  I was reluctant to accede to Klorathy’s invitation, because it was to discuss a squalid and unsatisfactory planet full of brutes who could be relied upon for only one thing – to kill each other on one pretext or another at the first opportunity.

  If Klorathy had sent me an invitation to visit him on Canopus – yes. Or to discuss other planets that concerned us – yes.

  I was disappointed. I felt as if I had been waiting, perhaps only half-consciously, for the development of an unfulfilled friendship, and then been offered a participation in a dreary task that by definition could not succeed. I sent a message to Canopus that I could not meet Klorathy, ‘though I might be able to find time later’. There was no satisfaction for me in this gesture. I felt only an intensification of my aridity. But a task that I knew I would find difficult and absorbing was waiting for me at the end of the Galaxy. As I prepared to leave, I was again summoned to a top-level conference. It concerned Rohanda, or rather, her moon. It had of course been known to us that Shammat was established on this small and unpleasant planet. Now it appeared there were new developments. I appointed someone to represent me at this conference, turned my mind away from Rohanda – and found that as I went about my preparations for leaving, possibly for a long time, it was as if, again, my ears were being filled with an insinuating memory. Sirius, I heard, Sirius, Sirius … and I could not free myself of it. Waves of this insidious whispering came up in me, so that I could hear nothing else, and ebbed, leaving a silence that I knew was waiting to be filled with Sirius, Sirius. In Nasar’s voice. In Rhodia’s. And in Klorathy’s. And in voices I had never heard but knew I would. I stubbornly ignored this call, or tried to, making my mind dwell on problems distant and different from Rohanda’s and found that no matter what I did, the whispering grew, so that I would find myself standing quite still, some task forgotten, listening.

  THE LELANNIAN EXPERIMENTS

  I told the Department that my mission must be postponed. I sent a message to Klorathy that I was going to Rohanda, and ordered the Space Traveller to set me down near our old station. We had maintained this post, though it had several times fallen into disuse, and twice been destroyed by earthquakes. It was repaired partly through sentiment: I had been so usefully happy there. Now I promised myself a short s
pace of freedom and thought, in solitude, for Klorathy would need time to reach me. For one thing, he would have to inquire from my Home Planet where on Rohanda he could find me … so far had I forgotten what one might expect of Canopean abilities!

  I walked by myself up to the little group of buildings among low foothills, the towering ranges of the western mountains at my back, a good way to the south from where I had done the same, going towards Lelanos, and as I approached thought they did not look uninhabited. Had the Lelannian tyrants then taken this Sirian station for themselves? If so, if they had lost all fear of Sirius, then they had fallen very far away from any sort of understanding. I was preparing in my mind how to deal with an emergency if I found one, as I entered the first one of the buildings, an airy set of rooms similar to those I had once, so pleasantly, lived in: it would be easy, for instance, to summon the Space Traveller, which was already stationed just above me, and visible as a silvery glitter.

  There was someone sitting, back to the light, across the room. I knew at once that it was Klorathy. Though, of course, it was technically impossible that he should have got here in the time since my message went out. This meant that he had known I would be here, in this place, well before the message did go out, and even before I had decided myself … I was absorbing this as I went towards him saying: ‘This is Sirius.’

  ‘I am an uninvited visitor, I know,’ said he; and I left the remark unanswered, meaning him to feel that I was making a point. And went to sit where I could see him clearly. I had not seen him since the experience on their Colony 11. It is of course a not uncommon thing to see, on this or that planet, within the Canopean aegis or within ours, an individual one recognizes, so that one goes forward to say: ‘Greetings, Klorathy,’ or Nasar, or whoever it might be. But then one sees it as a type one has recognized, a species, a kind – and what then looks back from inside this known shape is an individual quite strange to one. It has always been, to me, a disturbing business, to be with this shape, which is that of a remembered friend or associate: and to match gestures, glances, mannerisms, that are so close to those that are, in memory, the property of this or that person. What absolutely individual and unmatchable entity is it that is not here? And, conversely, this other experience: when one encounters the species, type, shape, equipped with roughly similar manners and ways, and it is the remembered individual. This was Klorathy. I had known it was he, the moment I saw him, a shape against the light, all his features invisible. Yet this was not the identical Klorathy. He had chosen to inhabit a physical equipment almost the same as his last. Presumably it was useful, being strong, healthy, and – I deduced – a good all-purpose type that would adapt easily to any planet and species without too much remark. For instance, he would not be likely to choose my physical type, which in fact always calls forth remark, and often uneasiness, if not worse, except on my own originating planet.

  I had long been considering the Canopean ways of rejuvenation and re-issue. I have given a good deal of my time to this problem since. And I want to make the point at this time and place that I consider we, Sirius, would do well to master these other techniques.

  There is nothing we do not know about substitution and prosthetics. We replace parts of the body as fast as they wear out. I do not think there is an organ or a tissue in me that was Ambien II in pre-Disaster time, let alone even what the Canopeans call the First Time. There is nothing left even of what made up my being when I was whirled about the skies during the ‘events’. Even the ichor in my veins has been replaced many times. But these transplants and transfusions are costly in time and patience. Yes, I know that the argument will be, as usual, that a vast quantity of admirable technicians would be put out of work; that many skills and techniques would become redundant. But this is a question that falls under the heading of the existential problem, question, or dilemma. If we have answered that, in all other fields, by always accepting advances in knowledge even at the cost of falling populations, as classes of work become obsolete, then it is consistent for us to consider whether we should adopt the Canopean ways of self-perpetuation. How simple to ‘die’ – and to take on new physical equipment. After all, it is not even necessary to go through the tedious business of having to endure infancy and childhood – they have learned to bypass all that. How pettifogging and even pedantic the Canopean attitude to outworn physical equipment makes ours look! We patch and replace, and transplant, and preserve – they throw an inefficient body aside and step into a new one without fuss, sentimentality, or regret.

  Klorathy had inhabited three different bodies since I had seen him last. And he told me that Nasar was at that time down in our Southern Continent I as a very small brown male, a hunter, bringing a species up to a new height of knowledge about its position in relation to ‘The Great Spirit’. Which was the formulation suitable for that place.

  Klorathy told me this in a way that meant it was a rebuke – a rebuke to us, for our negligence. We had no stations on that continent then.

  And so we two engaged in, if not conflict, at least disagreement, and from the very first moment.

  I was with Klorathy for fifty R-years; and I will sum up the essence of our being together thus: that he was there to bring me to a new view of the Sirian usage of the planet, a new view of ourselves altogether. And he was prepared to go to a great trouble … from the start I was wondering what sort of importance Canopus could possibly be attributing to it all, to designate Klorathy, one of their senior Colonial officials, to my tutelage for such a long time. Of course I did not fool myself that this was an individual matter. No, it was Canopus and Sirius – as always. But I recognized that I was in a familiar position. Nasar … Klorathy … or whatever names they might be choosing to use, whatever shapes they wore, when with me, were – I had to accept it – instructors.

  And Klorathy sat there patiently with me in that pleasant airy room, where we looked out together over landscapes I almost was able to match with what I remembered – and talked.

  When I had lived here during the best time, in the days when I thought of Rohanda almost as my home, what I saw from the foothills was savannah, a pleasant, lightly-treed country broken by valleys and plains of grass. All was different now: it was rain forest. Climatic changes of a dramatic kind had caused vast rivers to flow, and their many tributaries ran through enormous trees, which made a canopy of foliage it was not possible to see through. We looked at vast expanses of leaves, leaves, always leaves, the tops of trees that shimmered and moved under a heavy and uncomfortable sun. It was not at all the bracing and invigorating place of my memories.

  There was nothing now in this continent pleasant to hear about. Klorathy was making certain that I did hear, and, as I have said, with the intention of making me feel it all as a responsibility. I shall never forget how, through those days of preparation – as he clearly saw it – I was held there by him, held by his determination, that I should not be allowed to escape anything of the truth. Sometimes, evading the necessity of looking at him, I gazed out into the hot steamy perspectives of green that were so often drenched by sultry rains: but otherwise I sat regarding him, Klorathy, taking in and wondering at the authority of this person who never demanded, never enforced, but who had only to be there, be present, be himself, to make of what he said a claim and something that had to be attended to.

  The situation through the continent was this. While the Lelannians had become a tyranny that controlled the old Lelannian and Grakconkranpatl territories that, because of their position, also controlled the long isthmus that joined the Southern Continent to the Isolated Northern Continent, acting as a barrier to the movement of peoples, every where else was evolving a fairly uniform species made from the escapees and mutants from our – by now – very numerous experiments, crossed with that kind of borderline semi-ape that is so often the predominant animal on certain types of planet. This cross was not dissimilar to the Lelanos type before it had degenerated. In appearance they were a lithe, slightly built, tallish pe
ople with the common ranges of colour from light-brown to almost black, long straight black hair, black eyes. They were hunters, and gathered plants from the forests. That their genes, which held memories of origins in other places where agriculture was understood, had not spoken in them here was not surprising: this was a sparse population, with no need to grow food. They were in strict harmony with their surroundings, at that stage where no act, or intention, or thought, could be outside the mental and emotional frames of reference forming their ‘religion’. The Great Spirit, here, as Nasar was teaching on the other Southern Continent, was in everything they did: they lived within the sacramental, or – as I attempted to joke with Klorathy – according to the Necessity. Our relations were not easy. (I see now that this had to be so, representing as we did, and do – I must insist – Empires on such different levels.) But we did joke, were able to use this ease between ourselves. Klorathy evidently could not see my, admittedly, minor and perhaps clumsy jests as worth more than the slightest of smiles; yes, said he, these people indeed lived within the ordinance of the Necessity. Or rather, had done, before they had been overrun by the Lelannians. They were now slaves and servants from the extreme south of the continent to the isthmus. Everywhere they worked mines and plantations, or provided the meat for the ritual murders of the Lelannian religion. They were also material for experiment. This surprised me, and I had to sit and hear, and at very great length and in detail, of the development of the master race into technicians who saw the animals that surrounded them as controllable and malleable and available for their purposes not only socially, that is, within the limits of sociological malleability, which after all was a viewpoint that as such, and in itself, I could hardly criticize, since we – Sirius – had always seen this as the foundation of Empire, the basis of good government. But they had gone further, used any living being they ruled, on any level, as the stuff for experiments of a most brutal nature. No, although I did have my uncomfortable moments listening to Klorathy describe the practice of these overlords, I could say to myself that never had we, had Sirius, done unnecessary, or cruel experiments. Of course, experimentation of the physical, as distinct from the biosociological kind, is necessary and so permitted. But after all, it is always done, with us, within the limits of our necessity, even if this is sometimes only a local need … so I fatuously argued with myself as I sat listening to Klorathy, during these conversations that I was already seeing as a preparation. A deliberate, calculated preparation for what was to come. Oh, Canopus never did, never has done, anything that has not been calculated, foreseen, measured, and this down to the last detail, even when the plan is such a long-term one that … I have to state here again that we – meaning Sirius, and I say this knowing the criticism I risk – are not able to comprehend the Canopean understanding of what may be long term, or long foreseen. Yes, I am saying this. I am stating it. I am insisting on it … If I may not do this, then my attempt in writing this record, or report, is without use.