Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

Again the minutest flicker of indecision, and then his swagger was back. He smiled. This handsome coarse brute smiled, and strengthened the cocky thrust of his shoulders. And I was looking at this stage of the creature’s evolution, holding in my mind the stages of what he had been, and crying out to Canopus in my mind, Why, why why do you allow it?

“It must be a long time since you were on Rohanda,” he said. “It is mine, from end to end.”

“No, Tafta, it is not. And you will see that it is not.”

He let out a guffaw, which was even indulgent, as if I were an inferior in mentality. This was the change in him: and, looking at him, seeing this in him, I glanced around at his company and the same in them. It was conceit. They were all thickened and stupefied by it. Their intoxication was of many strands, and conceit was as strong as their greed.

I walked away from them back to the small eminence on which I had been before, and stayed watching as they put themselves and their loot into their boats and rowed themselves out to their winged vessel. Oh, yes, it was aesthetically very pleasing, this galleon of theirs: I had not before seen sailing craft at this precise stage of technology. And the scene was beautiful, as the light faded, leaving the dark acres of the ocean, crisping with light from a thin slice of moon. The Rohandan moon, which was my next assignment.

Having made sure the poor wretches at their stakes were in fact dead and having called to the mules and horses to follow me from off the beaches into the forests where they could find food and water, I took off for the planet’s planet.

Since I had been there last, there had been considerable changes. The Shammat stake was still the largest and had been spreading rapidly. Mining operations were predominant. Everywhere the crawlers could be seen at work in the craters, and new craters were visible. That was on the surface: underground, we knew, every kind of technological operation was in progress. But we, Sirius, had placed ourselves all around the perimeter of the Shammat area in an arc on one side: Canopus had done the same on the other. Our crawlers were plentiful, some of them the largest we had, five or six miles in diameter. We were mining; and we proposed to make use of what we produced: but let me put it this way: I have never seen in one of our operations so great a proportion of visible effect to what was actually produced. And Canopus had placed vast domes, and manned them and armed them. Shammat was therefore contained, and knew it.

Visible, too, were the observational towers of the three planets, and the pylons used by one of them to anchor their aircraft. The moon was now furiously active, but the inhabitants of Rohanda were only just beginning to develop instruments capable of seeing this.

I made sure that our policy of friendly co-operation among the three planets was being maintained, and paid a short visit to each station myself.

After consultation with the Canopean station, I ordered a Demonstration, first class, over the surface of the whole planet. It was interesting to me, underlining certain developments, that it was so long since we had had to use any such show of force, that our Mother Planet was hard put to it to raise enough craft and personnel of the required kind. But at length thirty-seven Battalions of our largest and most impressive machines, built for precisely this purpose, appeared all at once from space, hovered everywhere over the surface of this moon, swept repeatedly around it, hovered again, and departed in clouds of luminosity especially developed for this kind of effect. Yet, remembering Tafta, this new unreal confidence of his, I found doubts in myself. And I dubious, too, about my reaction when I returned home. Which I then did, getting there not long after the return of the special Battalions.

The Four called me to a meeting.

The personnel were now returning as their tours of duty were completed, from the Southern Continents, and what they were reporting of their experiences had caused a furore prognosticated by these experienced ones. Never had our Mother Planet imagined anything like the pointless, barbarous treatment of the peoples of these continents by the invading ones, the Northwest fringers. They had not believed such cruelty could be…

I shall now take the liberty of making a short observation. It is that a certain law clearly to be observed on Rohanda is not exactly unknown elsewhere. There, a geographical area, or nation, would criticise another for faults it committed itself. To such lengths was this tendency developed in the last period of Rohanda that this planet, at this time, has become the exemplar for us, and descriptions may be found plentifully in our technical literature. But for my own part I must say I have never been more amazed as when observing full-scale, all-global conferences on Rohanda, where all the nations hurled accusations at each other for practices that they were apparently incapable of seeing in themselves.

My colleagues and I were facing first-class crisis—not immediately evident as one, but with the potentialities of social ferment that could affect everything.

And my request for the thirty-seven Battalions, and the resulting re-organisation and rapid re-training, had not gone unobserved by our people.

What was Rohanda, why was she of such importance to us, that so much disturbance was being allowed on her account?

We, the Five, sat together, now Four and One, as on the last occasion, and they wanted to know if I had seen Klorathy again. I said I had not, and that that was not the point. But how could I expect them to understand what had taken me so long?

They waited, regarding me with an expectation not untinged with anxiety. They were feeling, even if they had not formulated this, that their destinies, Sirian destinies, were in other hands. That this had always been so, they did not suspect. Nor could I easily think along these lines, even now.

They were waiting for me to say something as simple as “I believe this Canopean bond will benefit us in such and such a way.”

At last, they demanded, having heard of the developments on the Rohandan moon, if I proposed to send a report to Klorathy. This was because they wished to read it and to assess our relationship from it. I said I did not believe a report was indicated yet.

This ended our meeting. I can see now their faces, turned as one towards me, and feel their fretfulness, their distrust. I don’t blame them: I have never done that! In their places I would have been, I have done, the same.

I was summoned back to the Rohandan moon. Fighting had broken out in the Shammat territory: civil war on Shammat was being reflected here. It was ground fighting. All over their territory were explosions that made new craters where their underground dwellings and factories had been; and wrecked crawlers, their limbs torn off, sprawled over the workings of the old craters. That the factions had not yet dared to make an aerial attack seemed to us a sign that they had not entirely lost a sense of their position. We took no chances; another show of our strength was arranged over their battlefields so that they would not be tempted to forget our presence, and that of Canopus. The details of this war do not concern this narrative.

On Rohanda was a similar state of affairs. That planet was now into its Century of Destruction, with the first of its global wars. Most of the fighting took place in the Northwest fringes, where the nations tried to destroy other over the question of who to control—mainly—Southern Continent I. This combined the maximum of nastiness with a maximum of rhetoric. It was a disgusting war. I caught glimpses of Tafta. Even more inflated with self-esteem than he been when I had seen him last, he was at work inflaming national passions, as a “man of God,” the term given to the exemplars of the local religions. First on one side, and then on the other, he announced God’s support for whatever policy of mass destruction was being implemented. I shall not easily forget his evil unctuousness, his face all inflamed with sincerity, as he urged on the poor wretches who died or were wounded and crippled in multitudes.