Doris Lessing - The Sirian Experiments

I informed the Four that I was again visiting Rohanda but they made no comment. Not knowing what I was supposed to be doing, I instructed my Space Traveller to hover over the Isolated Northern Continent, at the highest altitude possible for observation. I was not alone. The skies were full not only of craft originating on Rohanda, but of the observational machines of Canopus, Shammat, and the three neighboring planets. A Canopean Crystal, Shammat Wasps, and ten of the Darters evolved by the three planets: they often shared their technology.

I was looking down at the continent, in an idle nonfocussed way, remembering the other guises and transformations I had seen it in, when the Canopean Crystal floated down and lay in the air in front of me. It was in its most usual shape, a cone, and it hung point down among the charming clouds of that atmosphere, with the blue of the atmosphere beyond, it was most attractive, and I was admiring it when it moved off, slowly, and I followed. I did not understand this lesson, which I assumed it was, but only watched, and enjoyed—as always—the aesthetic bonuses of this planet. The Crystal became a tetrahedron—the three facets of it I could see reflecting the landscape of these blue and white skies—then a globe. A glistening ball rolled and danced among the clouds. I was laughing with the pleasure of it, and even clapping my hands and applauding… it elongated and became like a drop of liquid at the moment when it falls from a point. But it was lying horizontally, the thin end in front of us.

This exquisite drop of crystalline glitter was thus because of the pressures of the atmosphere, it was adjusting itself to the flow of the jet stream, we were being sped along by the air rivers, and the Crystal had become a long transparent streak. My craft was almost in the end of the streak, and for a few moments we seemed almost to intermingle, and what delicious thoughts sang through my mind as we saw the rivers and mountains and deserts of the landmass beneath through what seemed like liquefied light. My guide was changing again, was showing how it had to change, and flow, and adapt itself, for all the movements and alterations of the atmosphere we were submerged in like liquid moulded this Globe, or Rod, or Streak, or Fringe… How many shapes it assumed, this enchanting guide of mine, as we followed the flowing streams of the upper airs of Rohanda—how it evolved and adapted and shone!—but then dulled, so it seemed as if a lump of dullish lead lay there, sullen in a chilly and yellow light, but then lost its grey and took in a sparkle and a glisten again, and seemed to frolic and to play, and yet again became serious and stern, with an edge of hardness in it, all the time a flowing and an answering, and an astonishment, but then, my mind lost in contemplation of this Crystal that seemed to have become no more than a visible expression of the currents, I saw that it had stopped, and had become the shape of a drop that points down. Its narrow end was directing my attention below. What was it I was supposed to be noticing?

I hovered there near the monitoring Crystal and saw again how the edges of the continent were being pressed and squeezed up into its mountain folds, how the deserts lay and spread, how the great forests of other times had gone, and realised that I was seeing something extraordinary. A grid had been stamped over the whole continent. It was a mesh of absolutely regular rectangles. I was seeing a map, a chart, of a certain way of thinking… this was a way of thought, a set of mind, made visible. It was the mind of the Northwest fringes, the mind of the white conquerors. Over the variety and change and differentiation of the continent, over the flows and movement and changes of the earth—as vigorous as that of the air above, though in a different dimension of time—was this stamp of rigidity. Cities, towns, the larger mountains, the deserts, interrupted it: but over rivers and hills and marshes and plains lay the grid, this inflexible pattern.

It was a pattern of ownership, a multiplication of the basic unit of the possession of land. I had not noticed it before: previous visits of surveillance from this height had been before the new conquerors had inflicted their ways of thought on everything: I had seen how the growth and unfolding of the material of the continent displayed itself in surface contours, and in the disposition of its waters and its vegetation. But now, between me and the language of growth and change was this imperious stamp. This pattern. This grid. This print. This mint.

Now I knew what it was Canopus had wanted me to see, and I looked towards the Crystal, for some kind of directive. I would have liked to leave, and to be allowed to take my attention from this depressing and miserable map—the mind of Shammat. But still it hovered there, silent, changing its shape at every moment, demonstrating the possibilities of a fluid communication… and then it was lifting up and away, was a great drop of glittering water from the depths of space, and it hung there, this infinitely various and variable and flowing thing, this creation of the Canopean mind, it spoke to me, it sang to me, it sent messages of hope, of the eternal renewal of everything, and then it elongated itself, and ebbed up and fled back to its station high above Rohanda, where it was a mote in sunlight, a memory of itself.

And so I was alone again. I wondered if I had seen all that I was meant to sec, and if I should now return home. I thought of how I would speak to the Four of the messages I had been given, and of how they might receive it… but then reflected that I had not seen the western coasts of this continent during this present phase of Rohanda, and I directed my Traveller accordingly.

I was set down at the top of an immensely tall building in a large city. From there I could see the deserts and mountains inland, and the ocean on the other side. Beneath me the city itself was hardly visible, for it was filled with a poisonous smoke, and the buildings emerged from the fumes like islands from water.

I deliberately curtailed this survey since I knew I was being invaded by emotions not felt by me since my sojourn in Lelanos: these were because of the contrast between what these animals had made of their technical achievements and what they in fact were doing. But it is a story unfortunately not rare in our annals; and I will simply state that this was my state of mind—dangerous to my equilibrium. I left the top of the building and went down into a room in the heart of the building, a public room, constructed in such a way that it could only adversely affect the mental processes. In it was a machine for the transmission of “news.” Visual transmission, and consisting only of brutalities and savageries of various kinds.

Of the real situation of the planet nothing was being coherently said: there were glimpses, references, all kinds of half-truths, but never the full picture.

Then I saw Tafta. On the screen of the machine was Tafta, and he was on a platform in a hall that was full of people. He was superficially different in appearance from how I had last seen him as the black-clothed, war-inciting priest. His physical being had not much changed. He glistened with health, was rather fleshy, and he emanated a calm, self-satisfied conceit. His garb was that now worn everywhere over the planet, as if it had been ordered by a dictator—but these animals have never been able to relinquish uniforms. He wore blue very tight trousers of a thick material, which emphasized his sexuality, and a tight singlet.

He was resting one buttock on the edge of a table, swung one leg, and smiled easily and confidently down at his audience.

Tafta was now one of the senior technicians of the continent, and his task was to answer questions put by this disquieted and indeed frankly terrified gathering. He was a world figure, as an apologist for current technology. For some years he had enjoyed a reputation as an intrepid critic of governmental and global policies to do with the uses of technology, and had written several works of fiction, of that category where social possibilities of the day were given expression in a popular form. This type of fiction was both challenging and useful, in that it gave the populace opportunities to examine potentialities of technological discoveries; but anodyne, because the mere fact that sometimes appalling developments had been displayed in print at all seemed to reassure the citizens that they could not happen.