Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

“I think not,” I said smiling, as pleasantly as I could… and I heard rather than saw the Puttiorans mutter to each other—or rather vibrate together, a twanging sound added to the whining repetition of the music that was working on my nerves as much as the general atmosphere.

“Her name is Elylé,” said Nasar abruptly. “This is her house. And we are all her guests—aren’t we?—your guests or your captives?” and he laughed, flinging back his head pouring down the fiery intoxicant.

“Her willing captives,” said a dark smiling lisping youth, who had about him every sign of the spoiled rich. He rose from heaps of cushions and sat by Elylé’s chair, and, grasping her hand with a rough painful movement, began planting kisses up and down the forearm. She hardly moved, did not look at him—but at Nasar, who had gone pale.

“Nasar,” said she, in her soft beguiling voice, “is not as willing a captive as you,” and she looked at Nasar, with a laugh, challenging him— willing him. I saw there a truly dreadful struggle in him. He was being drawn forward by her seductiveness, her frank and open invitation, and at the same time he was fighting in himself to resist her. Everyone in the room watched the struggle. And what happened at last was that he gave a great gasp, leaned forward from his seat, lifted her white arm, and having gazed it with shudder that shook every part of him, kissed the hand, but negligently, and even clumsily—so did the conflict in him manifest itself. He sank back in his seat, staring in front of him, then took another great gulp from his goblet.

He said harshly: “This desiccated bureaucrat of a Sirian is shocked by us.”

There was an indrawn breath and from the Puttiorans a louder thrumming. I could not laugh this off.

I said, “It is very clear that Nasar is not himself.” This was certainly obvious to everyone and saved me.

The cringing youth at Elylé’s knees, his mouth on her forearm, now lifted his face to lisp: “We all want to know what that material is your dress is made of—fair Sirian!” He felt his daring, for he glanced up at the woman to see how she would take it—she frowned and withdrew her arm. “My dress is made of Canopean crepe,” I said.

“That is certainly true,” confirmed Nasar: he was breathing harshly, and his eyes seemed fixed on the beautiful woman and the youth who, snubbed, was literally grovelling on the floor, his curly head on her nearly bare feet. And I could see it was all he could do to stop himself from doing the same.

“Can I feel it?” asked a girl sitting near me. She wore a blue glittering skirt, but her breasts were bare, except for a pattern of jewels over the nipples. Her black hair hung down to her waist, she was dark skinned, dark eyed, very slight. There were no two individuals alike in this room: the genetic mix was very wide.

She got up, and bent to finger my dress. It was cut full, but was sleeveless—not so dissimilar from their style as to be a comment on it, but the fabric was one I had not previously been familiar with myself, rather like a fluent and supple metal. Glistening white, impossible to crease, it flowed through the fingers as you attempted to fold or settle it, and if it had not been so ample I would have been embarrassed, because where it did touch the flesh, it showed its contours—in my case, as Nasar had said, certainly “desiccated”; and it was a measure of how the atmosphere of this rich perverse villa and its emotive music affected me that I was full of wild regret that this was so, and that I was not like Elylé, whose very presence fascinated and drew and stung.

As this girl fingered my skirt, in a moment half a dozen others had crowded forward, handling first the stuff of the gown, and then their hands straying over my armlets and touching my head where the circlet gleamed. “What’s this material?” they were murmuring, and asking each other, as if I were not there! As if I were some kind of dummy on which these things were displayed… And then I felt the weight of the circlet lift from my hair and I was just in time to put up my hand to stop the thief from slipping it off. I was being pressed down in my seat by the weight of thieving hands and fingers.

Past a cluster of heads bent all around me, I could see Elylé sitting in her chair, longing to come forward and handle me with the rest, but her pride forbade it. Nasar had turned his head sharply, and was staring too at the scene, and I could see he was alarmed for me… And I certainly was in great danger.

I stood up, and dislodged the greedy ones, so that they fell, and lay about on the floor laughing foolishly, drunk and helpless.

“Perhaps you could take off your bracelets and your headband,” said Elylé, “and let us see them. I for one would love to see them closely.” As she said this the tones of that indolent voice struck into me, so that I felt them in my senses as a pang, a song.

“No,” I said, “I shall not do that.” She looked at Nasar—and this look’s command I was able to feel in myself.

He sighed at the strength of the pressure on him: sweat started out on his face—and he said to me in a hurried voice: “Yes, take them off…” And he added, “This is a command.”

I cannot describe, even now, how this affected me. It was a command from Canopus: this, despite everything, was what it was. And from a man who was in appearance, even in manner—or some of the time—Klorathy, who I had been thinking of as one might open doors for me, say to me what I longed to hear… and when he said, “This is a command,” I was struck silent. What I was thinking was I had been warned of this moment! That he had known of it … or of something like it that must present itself. I was thinking, as I remembered Klorathy, his presence, his manner, what he was, that no matter how I suffered—and I was suffering in every particle of myself—I must resist.

“I have already said that you are not yourself,” I said coldly. “Canopeans do not command Canopeans.”

“But perhaps they do command Sirians,” said Elylé and laughed her fat low laugh.

“Perhaps they do,” I said, “but I don’t know about that. What I do know is this: these things that I wear are not ornaments. And those who use them wrongly will suffer.”

Again I heard, or felt, Nasar struggle with himself. The sombre, sullen struggle went on, and his breathing sounded against the low fluttering vibration of the three Puttiorans, who had crowded up to me and stood close enough to snatch off what I wore—if they dared. And they still did not dare, and that was what gave me courage to go on. For I was reasoning as I stood there, my mind working as fast it had ever done, that Nasar himself must have given warnings, even as he had weakly parted with these things as ornaments…

“Is that not so, Nasar,” I said, forcing him with my will to turn and look at me. He sat upright, his hands loosely held around his goblet—which was trembling, because he trembled. He looked at Elylé, who was smiling at him—and yet there was fear in her smile.

“Yes, it is so,” he muttered at length.

And now there was a long pause, the scene again seemed to freeze, as it had when I entered. I stood quiet, empty, my will on Nasar. The three Puttiorans, the grey-green stonelike men, with their dull eyes, and their fluttering humming lips, had turned to look at Nasar, and they were waiting for him to make a sign … it was a sign that had been agreed upon before I entered this place. I understood a great deal in that moment.

And again the moment stretched itself… and I looked, at my ease, from one face to the next… first the beautiful Elylé, Adalantaland’s fallen daughter, and the besotted youth who had returned to slaver over her hand, and the others on the floor, silly and sprawling, and the almost naked servants, who were watching, with the mask-faces of servants everywhere and at all times—and what I was seeing struck me into an inner acknowledgement of something. These faces for that moment were all vacant, yet this was because within themselves they had been attacked by an inner questioning: they were lost, vague, dissatisfied, restless—they gripped their fingers against their palms or bit their lips; their eyes roamed everywhere, they sighed, they twisted themselves, and they sat staring emptily.