Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

The four black-robed ones closed in on me, and I was hustled by them into the midst of the priests. I could not then be seen from outside that group. I saw the harsh angry faces, reddish-bronze, with dense black eyes, bending down all around me. I was moved off by them into the low entrance of the temple. There was a smell of stale blood. The blood of this planet is a thick unstable substance, and its smell speaks of its animality. It was dark in the temple, except for flames high up near the unseen roof. I was hustled along passages, and then more and longer dark passages that were cold and musty—I was in the lower part of these great blocklike buildings, perhaps even being pushed along from one to another, and then another. We passed slaves, poor pallid creatures, who stared in terror at my guards and shrank away into some side passage. These corridors were lit at very long intervals with feeble lights on the walls. This was the underworld of the slaves. I was at last thrust into a cold and dimly lit place and left.

Alone. I was surrounded by cold blue-grey stone. It was not a small room, but was oppressive, because of its dimensions. I will here say that while Sirius even then was familiar with ideas to do with the relations between the dimensions of buildings and the psychological state of their inhabitants, we had—dare I say have? —not approached the understanding of Canopus in the field. It was a place designed to crush, belittle, depress. (These dimensions were in common use through all the levels of the buildings, even those in use by the ruling class. When I found this I concluded that this culture had been Canopus-inspired and had then degenerated under the influence of Shammat.) The walls were of large slabs of squared stone. So was the floor. The ceiling was made to look the same, as it was faced with stone. The door was a single slab of stone, moving in a groove on invisible weights. There was no window. Two small oil lamps stood on a cube of stone that was the only table. A stone bench or ledge ran along one wall. This bluish-grey stone did not reflect the light. It was not stuffy: there was air coming from somewhere.

There was nothing in this room, or tomb, to soften or reassure. I decided therefore that my captors intended to threaten or even torture, and that I had been put here to lower my resistance.

I sat on the bench. as comfortably as I and entered into reflection on situation. First of all, and most important for the overall situation of Sirius, the exact timing of my arrival had been known: I had been expected. This meant a much closer acquaintance with our activities on this continent that we had known. One had always to expect some sort of espionage or at least a local curiosity enough to supply a certain amount of information, but the manner of my reception showed something well beyond this. No matter how I mentally surveyed my companions, our local staff, the members of our internal and external air forces, I could not find anyone to suspect. There was another thought that kept presenting itself: who was it that had always seemed to know what our movements and plans were? Canopus! Was I to believe that Canopus had supplied this nasty little kingdom with information us? No, that was out of the question. Yet, here, in this area of possibility, was something that could not be dismissed… I set it aside and considered my own present situation.

If it been planned simply to kill me, to remove me as a threat, then this could have been done as I landed, or soon after, without this obedient populace knowing anything about it. The fact that I had been received by the entire priesthood—the upper class of this culture—and their guards meant that I was to be sacrificed publicly, probably as the central and even sole figure of an imposing ceremony.

I was beginning to feel very cold inside my prison. This, too, was not a sensation I could remember feeling—not to this degree. I noted my thoughts were slowing; my mental reactions were becoming as stiff as my limbs. There was an absolute silence here under this weight of stone.

If they were so well informed about our movements and intentions, why was there any need to interrogate me?… It was at this point I noted that my thinking was becoming too inefficient to continue and so I switched it off. Soon afterwards, the great stone slab slid sideways in its grooves and a female entered. She was a slave. The reddish skin colour of this face was paler in her because of her long sojourn within these stone prisons. She was shorter and lighter in build than those great strong specimens, the ruling caste and their guards. But her face had the same brutality and I could see in her dulled brutish eyes that she would kill me at a word. She had brought in some dishes and jugs that contained quite an adequate meal. I told her I was very cold. She stared, and did not seem to hear. She came swiftly to me, her black eyes not on my face but all over me, as if they were curious hands. And then her hands were all over me and I thought she going to take my protective necklace and bracelets. I could see that she was afraid of this exploration of my person, but could not resist it. Her face showed an uneasiness not far off terror, and her eyes kept flickering towards the open doorway. Yet she felt my hair, ran thick fingers up and down my arm, and then bent to peer right into my face, and my eyes: this was the oddest sensation, because it was the colour of my eyes, that fascinated her, the shape of my face, and I might been inanimate for all the interest she had in my intrinsic self, in anything my eyes might have been saying to her.

Then she abruptly stood straight and turned to go out. I said again that I was cold and again she did not respond.

Perhaps she was deaf. Or even dumb.

Although I believed there might be drugs in the food, I did not hesitate to eat and drink, and without any real concern for the results. This was partly because of the frigid slowness of my mental processes, but partly because of what I have already mentioned, my inbuilt unconquerable belief that I was immune . Not eligible for death!

Yet I was certainly able to consider, and even with an appreciation, that I was likely to be murdered in this ugly little city on this inferior little planet. It was a fact that I kept supplying to myself, as something that had to be taken in. But I could not.

Between my functioning being, the familiar mechanisms of Ambien II, senior official of Sirius, member of a race that did not expect to die, except by some quite fortuitous event—such as a meteorite striking a Space Traveller—between that state of consciousness, and the real urgent apprehension of the fact: You may very well be murdered at any moment, there was really no connection. I literally could not “take it in.” I wondered what it would feel like to “take it in” so that my whole organism knew, understood, was prepared. What would it be like to live, as these unfortunates did, not more than four hundred to eight hundred years, depending on their local conditions—no sooner born than ready to die? Did they feel it? Really feel their impermanence? Or was there something in the nature of the conditions of living on this planet that imposed a barrier between fact and its perception?

I pursued these thoughts, or rather, allowed them to float through my mind, or—perhaps even more accurately—observed them take shape and pass, while I ingested foodstuffs that I hoped would soon warm me.

Soon there came in another female. Once again I am faced with that problem of hindsight. The female was Rhodia. To try and put myself back into my state of mind before I knew who she was, without distortion, is not easy.

But I can say accurately that at once I was saying to myself that she did not resemble the slave who had brought the food. She was dressed in the same clothes, long loose dark blue cloth trousers, and a tunic of the same, which was belted with leather, and hung with various keys. She was a wardress or jailor. She was larger in build than the other, and her red or red-brown skin was lightened by lack of sunlight, like the other. But I at once felt at ease in her presence, to the extent that I warning myself: Be careful, it might be a trap. She was not, as I was already seeing, of the same race. Or not of the same sub-race. Same in general style or pattern—skin colour, build, the long hair—she nevertheless had an aliveness that at once set her aside.