Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

I took hold of both his arms, and said to him: “Very well, I have just understood… you have gone bad, you have gone wrong… I know the symptoms—yes, it has taken me long enough to see it… but come back, come back, Nasar… please. I demand it. You must. In the name of Canopus.” Well, he came back up the stairs with me, the long climb of them, and when he was at the top he was ill and frightened. He had lost the inner power that for good or bad had sustained him in his encounters with me. He trembled, pale under his dark copper skin.

“What happened?” I kept asking.

I asked, and I pressed, and it was very late in the night, and the snow, a pale presence, filled the windows, and at last he said this: “Lady, I have been on this planet for twenty-five thousand years. Since before Adalantaland. It was I who taught that island and the peoples around it. I was here before the change of earth’s axis and the birth of the seasons. It was I who taught—other cities and cultures you know nothing of. I have been here, here, here. Klorathy my brother has come and gone… there are those who visit, they come, they warn, they set the stones, they make the lines, they order, they align—and they go again if they are recalled to home, but I, I am a permanent official. And in my case they have made a mistake. Do you understand? I have gone very bad, as you say, Ambien the II or the III or the 97th. You come and go, too, I suppose? A sojourn on this planet and a little holiday on that? But I been in this hellhole for… ages, ages, long ages…” He muttered, and he swung his head, and he puckered up his face and sighed, and then leaped up and ran out of the door so fast I could not catch him.

It was a day and an hour when I had to perform the regulatory observances. I set out the objects on the rugs of the floor, arranged colours as they should go, put garments on myself in a certain way, adjusted my earrings, and observed the hour exactly, standing quietly there alone at the top of the great tower, enclosed in the snow’s white hush… it was very difficult. I knew by the resistance of the time and the substance about me that I was contending with a great deal: many times had I performed these rituals, since the failure of the Lock, had performed them on this or that continent, and in several different manners, but never had I felt as if I, or the substance of something felt through me, was pushing against a resistance experienced as—evil. Felt as a heavy, dead weight. But stuck to my purpose, thinking of Klorathy, and that he had asked me here. Why? For what purpose?

I had just finished what I had been instructed to do, when the curtains of the door were yanked back, and the man I had seen on my first evening stood there.

“Canopus,” he said. “You are on sufferance here and that does not allow you to kill our officials.”

What I was feeling as I stood up to face him surprised me: it was exactly the same tone or taste as what I felt when with Nasar. There was no mistaking that sensation, a resonance. I had told myself that Nasar had gone bad: but I had not gone on to understand what it might mean that he had been captured by Shammat, was Shammat.

I said nothing, but stood before him in my slight white robes, the luminous metal circlets on my upper arms, the metal band on my head of the same softly shining silvery gold, a metal foreign to Sirius, which I did not know, and my heavy golden earrings.

As he took in what I was wearing, his dull stonelike eyes stared, and he involuntarily took several steps forward. He was still wearing the golden earrings.

I was preserving a distancing and detached manner, while I attended to a large variety of thoughts and sensations. Speculations about Nasar continued. I was also thinking that this official ought never to have seen me thus accoutred and that he was at this moment fixing my image in his mind so as later to copy what he could. I noted, too, that he had not observed the patterns of colours, nor the scents, nor the stringed instrument on which I had been making the necessary sounds. I was right in thinking that he would be bound to believe these some sort of “female entertainment” and of no use to him. I was thinking that I did not believe the official punished by Nasar was in fact dead: more probably he was stunned. No authority of even ordinary sense uses greater methods of punishment or deterrent than are necessary. I was also concluding that my having to pretend to be Nasar’s servant could not be for the benefit of the Shammat surveillance, but was not to disturb the populace. More than all this, I was trying to decide how to behave in a way that would control him.

Before I could move he had again advanced, and now stood immediately in front of me, arms akimbo, legs apart. Seen thus, I had every opportunity for a full scan of this species, enabling me on my return to furnish the biologists with ample details. The most remarkable feature was the wide slit of a mouth, connected, I judged, not with alimentation, but with voice production: when he spoke next, I was able to see, as I not when crushed in the street, that this slit seemed to vibrate, and the sounds came from his mid-torso. The way he spoke was resonant, giving a fuzzy sound to the words.

“Ornaments of this kind are not permitted in this city!”

And as his stone eyes seemed to swallow the artifacts, so that I was enveloped in a glitter of cupidity, I felt he was again trying some rather crude technique of hypnotism. But there was more to it: he was testing me, trying to elicit from me some kind of show of authority—was that it? Something he had been accustomed to find in Nasar? At any rate, I felt his triumph—and then, in myself, a weakness of fear because of this triumph in him. I knew that I had failed in some test he had applied.

My mind was racing. I turned from him casually, and moved away, my back to him, stood a few moments glancing out of the window, then sat down on a low chair. There are few places in the Galaxy where superiors do not sit, while supplicants or inferiors stand. As I sat, an idea flashed into my mind unrelated to the present situation—very clear my thoughts were, because of the aligning practices just concluded, and because of this situation of danger.

“How long has it been,” I enquired, “since this city was allowed to spoil its original design?” For I had understood that this city, as it had been designed, had consisted solely of the conical towers, in a certain alignment—probably interlocking arcs—and that the huddle of poor buildings around their bases, and the spreading suburbs, were a dereliction of an original purpose. Memories of what I had been told of the ancient mathematical cities, speculations that were never far from my mind as to what their function was—these were in my mind, and my distance from this situation and this stone slab of a man was genuine.

His response was immediate: sullen, and this meant a genuine annoyance, cunning—which alerted me to say: “There will one day be an end to your cupidities and your despoilings.”

He stood still. Very still. The heavy eyes seemed to glow. What I had said, not idly, but certainly not with any crushing intention, had made him remember past—warnings? Threats?

I remained where I sat, watching him. In my mind two were models of behaviour—one was Nasar, and everything that I felt was needed by this situation dismissed him. The other was Klorathy, who I understood as I thought of him would not regard this little servant of even the most horrible power with anything but—at the most—a detached dislike. So I said mildly, even with humour: “As for your colleague, he is of course not dead. He will recover, if he has not already…” and I rose again, as if dismissing him, and returned to the window, for I wanted to look around at these spiring towers with my new ideas in mind, and to imagine this city as it had been. For what purpose?