Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

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 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 while 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 hoped that Klorathy might take the place of this boonfriend. 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 something about Canopus itself that… is the word attracted? me. No. Obsessed? No, there was too much else in my life to allow 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… 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 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 degeneration, but found something we had not expected and could not at first interpret. The natives had become two distinct species. Some remained the same, though more quarrelsome, and divisive, no longer living in a large and easygoing tribe, but in small family groups, or individuals, each defending patches of territory, hunting grounds, caves, or rough shelters. They had sunk 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!” What had happened was that the Shammat spies had mated with the natives and this was the result. It seemed to us that we were unlikely to see the remnant of the poor natives again, belligerent and suspicious though they had become; the stock banded together in a large, obviously efficient tribe, superior in intelligence and in strength. The old natives had a look about them that we knew only too well: the subdued, almost furtive look of species would who soon die out from discouragement.

We took note that this new stock could be used us, possibly, in our experiments, and flew north. Passing over the isthmus that joins the Isolated Northern Continent with the Isolated Southern Continent, we saw that the land-bridge had sunk, leaving a gap of 50 or so R-miles. Sometimes this bridge was there, at some epochs, and at others not, and we were to deduce that the gap had been there for a long time, because the stocks on the Northern Continent had not infiltrated southwards.

We met Klorathy as arranged on a high plateau of red rock and sand, the result of recent earthquakes, overlooking lower fertile plains untouched by the quakes. Our aircraft came down side by side on the burning desert: we conversed by radio, and together flew off into the shelter of a high wooded mountain. The three of us conducted our first conference under a large shade tree, sharing a meal. It was a most pleasant occasion. We were all quite frankly examining each other to see if our impressions on Colony 10 been accurate. As for myself, I was more than happy. Klorathy in himself was as lively and attractive as I remembered, but there was the additional bonus always felt in meeting with the superior ones of our Galaxy. After all, so much of one’s time is spent with the lower races, and as interesting as the work is, as likable as these races often are, to meet one’s equals is something to be looked forward to.

Klorathy was typical of Canopean Mother Planet Type I: very tall, lightly built, strong, light bronze in colour, his eyes darker bronze, he was not dissimilar from my Ambien I. And I was conscious that my own physical difference from them both was felt by them to be an agreeable contrast.

We still did not know why we had been invited to this meeting—both Ambiens (as we often humorously refer to ourselves) had been speculating. I for one had been thinking most of all about the mathematical cities of the pre-Disaster phase. I had even been wondering if we hadn’t imagined all that—to the extent of asking Ambien I again and again to repeat to me what he had seen of them. But he reiterated that he had never seen anything like those cities ever, anywhere. Yet on the Canopean Mother Planet they had nothing so advanced. I had asked Klorathy about this at the last conference, and he had replied that there was “no need” for this of city or building on Canopus itself. I had believed him. When with Klorathy, one had to know he did not lie. When away from him, it was a different matter, and I had been wondering why he had lied. Together again, sitting with him there under the light fragrant shade of the tree, on soft spicy grasses, I had only to look at him to know that if he said that on Canopus (the Mother Planet) they had such and such city, then it was true. He had described these to me, and they did not sound so dissimilar from those on Sirius. Agreeable, genial cities, planted with all kinds of attractive and useful trees and shrubs, they are places one experiences well-being. But they are not built as those round, or starlike or hexagonal—and so forth—cities of the old Rohanda.