Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

It was as if my mind was trying to open itself, to take in something… but after a long silence, she put down on the stone bench a bundle, which I saw was bedding, and she said: “Try to sleep.” I believed I heard the word “Sirius,” after that admonition, but she had gone. I lay down on the stone slab wrapped in heavy woven material, and lay awake, very far from sleep.

Now, looking back, I can see very clearly two strands, or factors, in my situation. One was the eighth man, he who reminded me of the Shammat thieves. The other was Rhodia. The bad and the good. The two potentials in my situation. The two currents that are in every situation if one learns to recognise them! Now it is all very clear.

Then I lay and thought of Nasar, and sometimes of Klorathy, and hardly at all of the eighth man.

In what I supposed to be the morning of a new day, the first slave came again with food for me.

I sat wrapped to the chin in all the coverings there were, my hands around a bowl of hot meaty liquid, for warmth. My mind was ringing with Nasar! Nasar!—to the extent that I was beginning to judge myself mad. When the female Rhodia came in swiftly, and stood before me, I stammered out “Nasar” before I could stop myself, and then stared at her, as if expecting her to explain.

She kept her eyes on mine for a long interval, as she had done before, and then said, “You must give me your talismans, Sirius.”

I did not move, and she said: “When they come and ask for them, you will say that you have disintegrated them to keep them out of the wrong hands.”

“I have no such skill,” I said. All this while our eyes were engaged, and my mind felt again as if it tried to enlarge, yet could not.

“No, but there are those who have.”

“And these—criminals know this?”

“They know it.”

As I unwound the thick cloths around me, it was with the strongest of feelings of identity with this woman. The thought that I did wrong to trust her was faint now. I held out my bared arms to her to slip off the bracelets. I slid the band down off my thigh and gave it to her. I stood to unlatch the girdle of stones from my waist. I bent my head so that she could undo the necklace. These articles vanished into the voluminous folds of her clothing.

“And now for a time you will be very weak,” she stated, “You are unarmed against Rohanda. You must guard yourself in every way. It not be for long.”

Not knowing I was going to say this, I said: “This is a very strange place to find you in.”

And she said: “And it is a foolish place to find you in, Sirius.”

I was breathing the name Nasar again, as she reached the doorway, and she turned, swiftly, and said, “Yes.” And was gone.

I could feel the weakness of not being protected. My mind seemed to dim and fade. I sat quietly holding onto what she, or he, had promised, that it would not be long.

Soon two of the black-clothed men, tall knifelike men, came and said: “Give us the things!” They were bending over me, their alien black eyes consuming me, and my senses weakened with the odour of them. I said, as Nasar had told me to say: “I do not have them. I disintegrated them, so that they should not fall into the wrong hands.”

At this their faces distorted, rage convulsed them, and their hands dragged off my coverings and were all over me, finding nothing. They stood up, looking at each other—so alike they were, so dreadfully alike, it was as if individuality had been engineered out of them. Then, without looking at me, they strode out and the stone slab closed the entrance.

Now, feeling my mind’s strength ebb away, I simply held on, held on.

When Rhodia, or Nasar, came in, she had a cup of some drink, which she made me take, and it did restore me a little.

Then she sat by me on the bench, and, rubbing my hands between hers, said: “You will have to do absolutely everything I say. When you find yourself lifted up on the sacrificial place, and a green light shines on you, call out, as if in invocation, ‘Death to the Dead…’ and then fling yourself backwards. You will be caught.” And she was already up and away to the door.

I whispered: “Canopus, why are you doing this?”

She said, low and hurried: “You saved me. Though you did not know from what degradations. So now it is my turn to save you.” And the door slid to.

I felt the weight of the cold dark misery of that place come down over me, and wondered how it must affect those who were not protected, as I had been, by my talismans. My mind kept darkening, as if it were full of mist that thickened, but then thinned again; and I was repeating to myself over and over what I had to do.

And it all happened quickly. Into my cell crowded the dark priests, any number of them, and I was hurried along corridors in a press of people and then up some steps, and was inside one of the temples. It was massed with slaves at the lower end, standing in ordered ranks and companies, each with their guards. I caught a glimpse of our poor Colony 9 animals, chained together, lifting their hairy faces and bewildered blue eyes at what they saw at our end of the temple. The black-clothed ones, males and females, were in their ranks on either side of a great reclining statue of stone. Where its belly should have been was a hole, and from it came the smell of stale blood. Oh, the smell of that place! That in itself was enough to quench any sense I retained.

Behind the evil statue—for its visage was horrible, an evil face above gross swollen limbs—was a high plinth. On to this I pushed, stood there swaying and faint. I saw before me the squat dark interior of this temple, with its stone gods, I saw the massed slaves, I saw the priestly caste who used and fed off them—all this bathed in a ruddy ugly light that suffused the place. A savage wailing began from the black-clothed ones. It was a hymn. I was holding on to my senses, but only just… I could imagine what it was they were seeing—a white wraith, or phantom, with its glittering fleece of hair, in a white wisp of a dress, on which red light flickered… and then the light on my hands turned green, there was a green glow where the blood glow had been. My mind told me that this was a signal. I fought for the words I had to cry out, at last they came to me—as I saw a knife raised in the hand of a priest aimed for my heart, I called out, “Death to the Dead… Death to the Dead…”

There was something else I had to do, and I could not remember. The knife still held above me, its blade glittering green. I jumped backwards off the plinth, fell into something that yielded and then gave way altogether. I heard a clang of stone on stone above me. There were people around me were and they were lifting me and carrying me. My part in this escape having been done, I slept or went into a trance.

And yet it was not a complete oblivion, for I was conscious of urgency, of flight along low dark passages, and of Rhodia’s voice. And I was talking to her, asking questions, which were answered, for as the dark in my mind lifted, and I began to see that we were coming out from deep underearth places into light, the information I had been given was making a clear enough picture.

Rhodia was not a native of the priest-ruled city, but of Lelanos, which was not very far from here. Not far, that is, in distance…

She had caused herself to be captured and made a slave. Her capacities had quickly raised her to a position of trusted wardress of captives who were to play a leading part in the sacrificial ceremonies. Many were the unfortunate ones whom she had guarded, cared for, and seen lifted up on the plinth above the blood-filled stone god. No, she had not been able to save any of these, not one of the important victims, though she had managed to spirit away a few, not many, of the lesser slaves. Her task had been to position herself ready for my capture, so that she could save me. She… she… I was making myself use this word, as I saw a dim light begin to fill the passages we fled along, and as I saw her, Rhodia, this strong, tall, handsome female, running along beside me where I was being carried in the arms of a male slave. I had to say she, think she —yet in my half-trance or sleep, in the almost complete dark of the deep earth, I had been able to feel only Nasar, his presence had been there around me.