Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

As they looked, it seemed as if rays of light dazzled around her. Their ideas of deity did not include an illuminated female figure, and they were only temporarily stayed. They were riding steadily nearer, and higher, and soon, as the gates of the city swung back on a signal from the Queen, they saw the city itself, in its gardens and orchards and fantastic variety, a scene of plenty and deliciousness that had never failed to inflame these men—whose measures of worth were all related to the hardships and endurance of their symbiotic relationship with their herds—into a rage to destroy and afflict. Yet as they looked, every tree and flower seemed to dazzle with light that was like a million minute rainbows. The woman on the high wall, the gardens, the buildings, all shone and dazzled, and from the watching horsemen there rose a deep and anguished groan. Their leader shouted to them that they were faced with demons; and the massed horsemen in their close leather tunics and trousers and caps, emanating a smell of sweaty skins—their own and their beasts—sent up, too, the smell of fear as they jostled back down the pass again, in the shades of the evening.

Sending back fearful glances they saw high above them the red sandstone walls, and the woman there, motionless, surrounded by a dazzle of light.

They made a camp at the foot of the escarpment, and their cooking fires seemed to burn with otherworldly lights. But then their fear became anger, and, after that, derision. These were not cowards, these men. They could not remember ever staying their hands before. Besides, not all had seen the enchanted city in its halo of iridescence. Even those who had now doubted what they had seen. Their General Ghonkez maintained steadily—as his troops, who were not accustomed to subservience and blind obedience, but only to following orders whose sense they could understand, and who increasingly shouted criticisms at him—that they had done well to wait there through the night until the morning came and they could again ride up the pass and face the city in the plain light of day.

When these horsemen again jostled up the pass to the city, it in a mood of savage anger against their general. The gates of the city were still open. They rode inside the walls like avenging devils and found only what they had seen in a hundred other places—an intricate and rich comfortable web of streets and markets and gardens, which they felt they had to obliterate. No radiant mists of light surrounded what saw and they burned and destroyed as they rode. But there were very few living creatures. A dog sitting at the door of his empty house. Cats sunning themselves on sills in dwellings where humans had gone. An old man or an old woman who said they would stay behind, since their days had been lived through and it was enough. These the horsemen killed.

And when reached the reached the palace, they found Queen Sha’zvin standing alone in her rooms and they killed her. They then turned on their General Ghonkez and slew him, so that we two lay side by side, in our deaths, as the palace burned down around us.

Meanwhile, Nasar had led away long columns of people out of the eastern gates of the city. Not all had had time to leave and these were killed. And then, suddenly, and out of season, a blizzard descended, and the horsemen were stopped. They knew blizzards and cold from the terrible winters of their northern plains. But they understood nothing of the treacherous snowdrifts and the ice masses and the murderous winds of the mountains. They rode away down into the plains to wait until better weather, so that they could chase the refugees into their high fastnesses and kill them all. For they had sworn to leave no one alive in all the lands they raided. But the winter came and blocked the way. Thousands of the fleeing ones died of cold and deprivation but most did reach the high sheltered valleys. When spring came and the snows of the passes melted and the way was open for horsemen, they did not come. There were rumours of an enchantment and of dangers from demons. Their killing of their general had put a curse on them—so it was said. And they had heard that none of the refugees had survived their ordeals in the snow.

But among those who did survive were enough with the skills and knowledge of their destroyed civilisation to instruct others. Those who came to be instructed were the descendants of these same horsemen.

And that was how I, Ambien II , and Klorathy, and Nasar, together with others who have not been mentioned, took our roles in this drama. And this was not the only one. In other sequences of events, at that time of the cruel horsemen, did we three play our parts, altering enough of the pattern to save a few here, preserve a city there, and keep safe men and women equipped with the knowledge of the sciences of matching the ebbs and flows of the currents of life with invisible needs and imperatives. These were scientists. Real scientists, armoured by their subtle knowledge against all the wiles and machinations of Shammat.

Klorathy and I sat together in the Sirian moon station. I had just rescued him from slow death in prison. Nasar had made me captive to save me from being executed, and had secretly released me. I had been one of the raiding horsemen. Klorathy was a deposed judge. Nasar was a female slave from the heart of Southern Continent I, who had risen to be the manager of a large household belonging to an indolent and tyrannical princeling.

A monitor showed that above us on the moon’s surface it was night, and very cold. Rohanda was hidden from us, being between us and the sun.

Klorathy clapped his hands, and on to the blank wall came a map of Rohanda—the continents and oceans laid flat. Klorathy went to stand beside it. With his finger he outlined that part of the main landmass that had been afflicted by the horsemen. Holding me with his eyes he outlined it again—slowly. I knew he wanted me to understand: that all those centuries of invasion and destruction were being contained within the shape his finger had traced. And he expected me to make, too, comparisons with Sirius, our vast Empire.

“Very well,” I said.

“The horsemen have terrorised this part of Rohanda for centuries, and the fear of them is imprinted in the innermost nature of the peoples of this region. Yet soon they will have been absorbed into what remains of the peoples they conquered. And civilisations will rise and fall, rise and fall—until quite soon, a race will come into being—here.” And he ran his finger down the edge of the great landmass. “Here, in the Northwest fringes, in these islands, in this little space, a race is being formed even now. It will overrun the whole world, but all the world, not just the central part of it, as with the horsemen of the plains. This race will destroy everything. The creed of this white race will be: if it is there, it belongs to us. If I want it I must have it. If what I see is different from myself then it must be punished or wiped out. Anything that is not me is primitive and bad… and this creed they will teach to the whole of Shikasta.”

“All? The whole world?”

“Very nearly.”

“Shammat being their tutor?”

“Shammat being their nature. Do you want to see what will happen?” And he stretched out his hand to make a gesture that would summon the stream of pictures, the moving vision, that had showed me the wave after wave of the Mongol threat.

“No, no, no—or not yet.” And I covered my eyes.

He returned quietly to his seat near me.

“You want our help?”

“Yes. And you need our help.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”

I could hear through the earthy walls of this shelter the grinding and shuddering of machinery: Shammat at work in a crater not far away.

“When I go back home now, I shall say only that I have chosen to spend my leave here. I shall not be questioned about this choice: but my reputation for eccentricity will be added to. I, Sirius, shall not be able to say one word to Sirius of what I have experienced with you…”