The Sirian Experiments. Doris Lessing
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.
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, any 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.
But there was something about Canopus itself that … is the word attracted? me. No. Obsessed? No, there was too much else in my life to allow a one-sided preoccupation. I felt about Canopus that inward, brooding questioning, wondering, that one may sometimes feel about a person whose sources of action, of being, seem distant and other – as if understanding this being may open doors in oneself whose existence one does not do more than suspect. Yet they are there … one knows it … one cannot – may not? – open them … but other people have opened similar doors in themselves … they operate on altogether different – higher? – levels of themselves … if one understood how, one could come close not only to them but to that area of oneself that matches their higher otherness … so one broods, ponders, questions, sometimes for long ages, about some individual who – one is convinced – is only part-glimpsed, certainly only part-understood.
It will be seen that Klorathy for me was very much more than just himself.
Ambien I was to travel with me and I was glad of it, for he shared something of my feeling for Canopus.
Before going north, we descended at our old headquarters to see what possibilities there might be for future experiments. The discovery that concerns this account was a change in the colony of natives whom we had left on their hillside. We had expected a degeneration, but found something we had not expected and could not at first interpret. The natives had become two distinct species. Some had remained physically the same, though more quarrelsome, and divisive, no longer living in a large and easygoing tribe, but in small family groups, or as individuals, each defending patches of territory, hunting grounds, caves, or rough shelters. They had sunk away from proper building, the cultivation of crops, the use of animals. The other kind, living close, using the original stock and continually preying on them in every way, snatching from them their kills in the hunt and their females or their children whom they might eat or use as servants, had changed to a position between Modified Two and Modified Three. They were upright, but occasionally rested their weight on the knuckles of their long arms; they were tailless; they had fur on their heads and shoulders but were otherwise quite hairless, which gave them a sickeningly lewd and obscene look – and they seemed motivated by an avid cunning that was in everything they did. It was this characteristic that made Ambien I and I exclaim at the same moment: ‘Shammat!’