The Sirian Experiments. Doris Lessing
Ambien I, with whom I was once again working, but our Empire was less tolerant then than it is now – or so I believe and hope – and the kind of social optimism that inspired me was classed in some quarters as ‘shallow irresponsibility’ and ‘sociological selfishness’. This may be the right place to remark that I had long since learned that if one is entertaining unpopular ideas, one has only to keep quiet and wait for the invisible wheels to turn that will bring those ideas back as the last word in intelligent and forward-looking thinking.
Meanwhile, I got on with my work. It happened that I was in that part of the Galaxy where the transplanted Lombis were on Colonized Planet 25. I had not thought of them from the old time to this; but I made a detour from curiosity. It could be said that the whole Lombi experiment had been inutile. They had been carefully preserved from any contact with more evolved races, except for very rare reconnaissance trips by Colony 22 personnel to see if it were possible to keep a certain pristine social innocence that might be of use in ‘opening up’ new planets. Yet we had nevertheless ceased to colonize new planets in the total – may I say reckless? – way that had distinguished our policies up till then: we acquired a new possession only after long and careful assessment. Our interest in the Lombis continued to the extent that we wished to monitor the possible development of evidence of a craving for ‘higher things’. From the spacecraft I made contact home to ask permission to make a small experiment of my own: it would not have been given me if the Lombis had not virtually been written off as useful material.
We had sent no technicians there for over a thousand S-years. Their life-spans had remained at roughly two hundred R-years. This meant that as individuals they could have no memory at all of visitations ‘from the skies’.
I ordered a rapid survey of Planet 25 sunside and nightside, at maximum speed so that we would not be observed as more than a meteorite – we were not visible at all on sunside when moving – and then, having chosen a populous area, hovered in full view for some hours, while crowds collected.
I made as impressive a descent from the aircraft as could be devised. Unfortunately I had no formal wear with me on this working trip, but I devised a long cloak of some white insulation material, and made the most of my not exactly profuse yellow hair – it is not that I have ever wanted to be more hairy or furred than I am, but the yellow or gold-haired species always evoke awe, because of our rarity. I floated to earth from the spacecraft, and saw a multitude of the poor beasts fall to their faces before me with a deep and sorrowful groan, which did touch me, I confess, accustomed as I am to the awe so easily evoked in uncivilized races.
I had prepared all kinds of suitably vague replies to possible questions, but found that once I had said I had ‘come from the skies’ and was their friend, that was enough: awe is a great inhibitor of intelligent questioning.
They remembered – or their ceremonies and songs and tales did – ‘the shining ones’, and what dread they still kept from the old time on the other planets, I stilled by the most solemn promises that I would not take any of them away with me when I left.
And what was it they were so afraid of being taken away from? The reply to that is ironical … is sad … is a comment on more than just the situation of the Lombis … my so long, my so very long career in the Service furnishes me with several similar situations …
But first a general comment on their customs and mores.
They had not evolved much; any more than had the parent stock on Planet 24.
The prohibitions against covering themselves, and eating cooked and prepared food had not vanished, but had reversed; it was now for their ceremonies that they had to be naked and eat raw meat and roots and fruit. The lived as before in various types of crude shelter, hut or cave; they hunted; they wore skins; they used fire. Their basic unit was the family and not the tribe: this seemed to be retarding them. At least, as I travelled about that planet, which was adequately endowed with plant and animal life, though meagre compared to other planets – Rohanda, for instance – I was comparing these animals with the savages of the high plateaux whom Klorathy had thought it worthwhile to instruct: and such was the contrast that I was wondering for the first time if the superiority of those others was due to something innate, a superiority of a different kind and classification to those we Sirians could use, and which Klorathy and officials on his level would be able to measure? The point was that the Lombis had no capacity for development, or seemed not to have.
I was examining these short, squat, half-furred creatures, with their immensely powerful shoulders and arms, living in their groups of three, or four – up to seven or eight, but no more – each group jealously suspicious of its patch of hunting ground, its wild fruit trees, its sources of roots and vegetables, able to mingle with other groups only on ritual occasions when they all crowded together – and remembered with admiration things that I had scorned. Where were the customs that can make even hundreds of individuals a mutually supporting and culturally expanding unit? Where the intricate ceremonial dances? The finely worked garments with their fringes, their ornamentation, the delicately used feathers? The necklaces of carved bones and stones? The instruction of the young through tales and apprenticeship? The specialization of individuals, according to innate talent, into storytellers, craftsmen, hunters, singers? Where was … but I could see nothing here anything like the skills and knowledge of the Navahis and Hoppes.
Now I come to what was painful and pitiful in their situation. How often as I travel from one of our Colonized Planets to another am I forced to remember the natural advantages of Rohanda, with her close and shining moon, her nightside that is crammed with brilliant star clusters?
This planet was a dark one, by nature and position. No moon here. The Lombis must have had somewhere in their gene-memory the knowledge that nights could be lit with infinite variation from a star hanging so close it seemed like a creature, a living being – and changing from a full and bright disc to the tiniest of yellow cracks one had to peer towards and watch for … The Lombis had known what it was to wait for that moment when a sun seems to slide away into dark – and then up flash the stars, giving light when a moon is temporarily absent.
Not only was there no moon, but the nightside looked out into an almost empty sky – black upon black. In one or two places there was a faint sprinkling of light, stars far beyond our Galaxy, more like a slight greying of the night. And their sun was small and distant compared with the rumbustious Rohandan sun from which one may have to shelter, even now when it is further away than it was.
The Lombis’ ‘shining ones’ were now these infinitely faint and nearly invisible stars. Their old festivals of the full moon took place once a year, when a vast windy plain became filled with groups of these animals who travelled long distances to be there – and they stood in their family groups, lifting their flat sorrowful faces up to their black night, and sang of ‘shining ones’.
And their sun was a ‘shining one’, too, but their worship of it was ambiguous and double, as if it was an impostor, or tried to claim more than was due.
When our spaceship descended, a crystal and sparkling globe that evoked from them memories or half-memories buried in them by their environment, it was as if an original primal light had suddenly appeared to them. Oh, those black stuffy nights … those interminable unaltering nights, that seemed to settle on the nightside with the sun’s disappearance like a physical oppression. A complete black, a heavy black, where a fire burning outside a cave or inside a leafy shelter seemed to hold back a felt and tangible pressure of darkness. I have never experienced anything like night on Planet 25. Never been on a planet where nothing could be done after sunset. In the daytime the Lombis ran about, and attended to their sustenance, but at night they gathered with the first sign of the sun’s going into their groups and pressed together around their little fires, cowering and waiting for that moment when a rock, or a leaf, would emerge greyly from the thick black and tell them that once again they had survived the extinction of the light.
I left as soon as I could, making a dramatic exit from the planet, which they took on their faces, thanking me for my gracious appearance to them and my love for them. Yet I had promised nothing, told them nothing, given nothing: so easy it is to be ‘a high shining thing’!