The Sirian Experiments

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  There she left me, without other communication.

  I sat alone in the awful silence, and now my mind was full of Nasar. I was reliving my exchanges with him before I left Koshi. So strong was my sense of him when the door slab slid back and the same woman stood there, I was thinking still of Nasar, and it was with difficulty that I forced my mind to take her in. Again I was telling myself that one did not trust jailors, while I was contrasting this simple direct presence with the men I had been taken to stand before. The seven men—yet I was seeing the one at the window as apart from the others and as better than them, even while I remembered the whisper: Sirius, be careful. I looked into this woman’s strong eyes, and she gazed straight back at me.

  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.

  What is that quality in an individual so strong, so independent of looks, sex, age, species—independent of the planet “he” or “she” or originates from—that enables one to walk into a completely dark room, where one had not expected anyone to be, and to stammer out—a name! It doesn’t matter what name! Nasar. Rhodia. Canopus.

  Yes, it has happened to me. More than once.

  But it has only to happen once for it to become impossible ever after to do more than salute an appearance, or the distinctions of a race or a sex, while recognising that other, deeper truth. I had known this unique and individual being as Nasar, the tormented man in Koshi. And so the associations of my brain made me want to name her “Nasar.” Had I met this being first as Rhodia, then other names would come just as reluctantly to my tongue.

  The light was growing stronger, and I kept my eyes on Rhodia, reaching out with my sight, as if there was some truth there I could not grasp. She was Nasar, and she was not; he was Rhodia, but he was not… whatever was there inside that female shape was deeply familiar to me. But beyond this puzzle something else. There was a bleached look to her, and she had a pallid and even repelling aspect at moments when the light fell more strongly at the angle of a passage. I wondered if she had been struck lightning, or had some disease… In the dungeons, and in the room with the eight men, I had not seen her clearly, either from the dimness of the light, or because of pressure from anxious thoughts.

  So disquieting did I find these glimpses of her that I tried to turn my attention from her, and instead reviewed what I knew about recent events so to make some kind of coherent picture.

  Rhodia’s main concern, when I was taken prisoner, was to make sure that the talismans should not fall into their hands: very evil use would been made of them. For, in spite of their efforts, Grakconkranpatl had not once managed to steal any of the articles that had, for this time, Canopean effect.

  Her second concern—and I was expected to understand and to agree with this order of priorities—was to get me away. She had caused the priests to believe that I had powers they would be wise to fear. They believed I had made the ornaments vanish by use of these powers. But they had not been of one mind, the group of Overlords, or Chief Priests, whom I had seen: they had almost decided to take me out of their city and leave me to make my way back to my own kind if I could—if I could. But I had actually been seen arriving “from the heavens.” They could not cause the memory of this to vanish from the minds of their enslaved peoples. So it had been given out that I was an enemy, drawn to the city and into their hands, by their cunning powers. Enemies were always publicly sacrificed. If I simply vanished, never to be seen again, this could weaken the powers of this caste, who ruled by fear. So in the end it had been decided to cut the heart from my breast, in the temple, had been always been done. But Rhodia had strengthened their doubts.

  When I was pushed up on to the plinth they were all apprehensive. There was a point in the ceremony when the priests shouted and sang to their “Gods” that they were the Dead, identifying themselves temporarily with the sacrificed ones who would almost immediately in fact be dead: the victims were in some ambiguous and rather unsatisfactory way—to a rational mind—the same as those murdered them. My call, Death to the Dead, condemned the entire priestly caste. Behind the idol was a stone that moved on levers, used for purposes of trickery and illusion in the ceremonies. As my threat momentarily froze the priests and then made them run from where I stood bathed in the unexpected green ray, Rhodia and her accomplices turned the stone, and pulled me down into the rooms underneath the temple proper. This was the most dangerous part of the escape, for of course those clever priests were not likely to remain confused for long. It was, for a few moments, speed that had to save us. There were passages under the buildings of the city, running everywhere below the tunnels used by the slaves. These were complicated, and none known to all of the priests: a tyranny is always self-divided, always a balance of competing interests.

  It was this that saved us, the jealous knowledge of mutually suspicious sects. But Rhodia had learned of every one of the passageways. As our band fled deeper and further, the guards of the priests were running parallel to us at times, or above us, and they might very well come on the right turning by accident and encountered us—but Rhodia knew of a very old and disused system of tunnels, made long ago by slaves who had tried to dig their way to safety and had been caught. Once we found the entrance to these we were safe.

  We found ourselves on the side of a high mountain, in a little cleft among rocks, screened by bushes. Far below us was the priests’ dark city. And I saw those poor slaves who had come with us fling themselves on the sun-fed earth and kiss it and weep. And when they lifted their faces, of that faded red-earth colour, to the sun, I fancied that I saw health come into that starved skin even as I watched. And as Rhodia watched, standing aside, waiting for them to be past their first convulsion of delight.

  She caught my questioning thought and said to me: “These are the slaves I was able to talk to, and who I was able to trust.”

  It was an obvious, a simple, thing to say. She could have said nothing else! Yet it struck me so painfully then, the strength, the inexorableness of the laws that govern us all. Down in the chilly dim prisons under the priests’ city, slaves who—some of them—could remember nothing else, having been born there, had been able to respond to some quality that they—recognised? remembered?—in a fellow slave who was better than they only in as much as she was able, so it must often seemed to them, to torment them, stand in authority over them… But they had seen, felt something in her, listened; and because of some—chance?—qualities in themselves, had been found reliable. Trustworthy. And so it was they who now kissed the earth on the free mountainside, and lifted their faces to the sun. For the first time in their lives, for some of them. It was a thought enough to chill the heart—my heart that, if it were not for Rhodia, would now have been lying in a pool of blood in the idol’s hollowed-out belly. And she knew what I was thinking and smiled. And for the first time I caught from her a physical memory of Nasar, and his derisive angers. It was Nasar, for that moment, sharing with me an appreciation of our grim necessities… so strongly there that I could have been back him at the top of the tall cone with the snow flying past.

  And then I saw her quelling the emotions of her charges, and urging them to their feet, and pointing out over the slopes of the mountains to the north. For they were to go one way into the forests, for safety, and she and I another. When they had gone off, some fifty or so, turning to smile and hold up their arms to her in thankfulness and farewell, she came to me and, rummaging in the folds of her garments again, produced the ornaments and told me to put them on. As I did so, first the band on my thigh, then the girdle of cool starstones, and then the bracelets, and lastly the necklace, it was as if my mind cleared, my thoughts steadied, and even a short moment after my old state of mind had been banished by the secret strengths of the ornaments, it seemed as dreadful and inconceivable a place or state of being as the dungeons of the city now seemed. I looked at Rhodia with clarity and steadiness of thought and saw her straight. Again, my thought was that she was suffering from some horrible disease, like a leprosy. She had a faded, drained look, as if she had been dusted with ashes. I not seen anythi
ng like it before. The face, the hands, what was visible of her arms and legs, were all dried up, and had a shrivelled look, as a corpse sometimes does. And the hair on her head, which by race was a vigorous glossy black, had white in it.

  She saw how I stared, and she said: “Sirius, you are looking at the physical aspect of the Shikastan Degenerative Disease.”

  “Rohanda has become so decadent?”

  “Now, by halfway through their lives, sometimes even sooner, they start to show signs of decay. This is a process that accelerates generation by generation. They have even forgotten that this is recent thing with them.”

  I could not at once recover from the horror of it. I was trying to imagine what it must be like for these unfortunates, trapped inside their enfeebled defective bodies, and I was wondering if it was not possible for Canopus, with their knowledge of the techniques of how to discard bodies at will, to aid the poor creatures.

  She sighed, and then gave her short characteristic Nasar-laugh. “There are other priorities. Believe me. We have other, and most urgent, things to do.”

  “Necessities,” I said, meaning to joke with her.

  And she acknowledged my intention with a smile, but said, “Yes, indeed, Sirius—necessities!”

  And on this familiar note we began our journey eastwards through the alleys and passes of the mountain chains along the coast. We went up and we went down, but it was without haste. We were not in danger, she said. This was because “our greatest danger is also our protection. On this occasion.” And when I pressed her to elucidate she gave me a long strong look from eyes that I saw had around their black pupils colourless edges, the tax of Rohandan age—a look that made me think of the whisper: Sirius, be careful!—which seemed to sound, now, all the time, somewhere in my deepest self. She said only: Your greatest danger. Yours, Sirius.” And would not say any more on the subject. Though she talked willingly and at length about the city we were going to.