The Sirian Experiments

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  We walked for several days through thick and pleasant forests. We did not hurry. I got the impression that this pace was for my benefit. So I could absorb—instruction. From her. From Nasar. From Canopus. I did not mind. I was in her, their, hands. Very different was my state of mind now from my angered self-esteem when I had had the chance to be with Canopus, in the person of Klorathy, in those faraway days of the unfortunate “events.” I was trying to listen. To adjust. But now, looking back, I see that I was trying over and over again in every way I knew to find out about Canopus itself, its organisations, its ways of managing itself, its planets—and while I did this Rhodia patiently returned the subject to Grakconkranpatl, to Shammat, and, several times, to the eighth man of those priests. It was not, I see now, that she repeated his name, which was Tafta, so that Tafta recurred through our talk, but that she kept bringing me to points and places where I had to think of him. He was strongly in my mind. I could feel his presence there. Just as, wrapped shivering in my stone cell, Nasar had rung in my mind, so that the name could not help but come to tongue, so, now, as we walked through those magnificent forests, the great snowy mountains at our backs, the feeling or sense of that man kept coming back. I found myself thinking of him, and what he was, when I recognised his particular and unique pulse in my mind: disturbing, harsh, yet nothing near the cold evil of the priests.

  And when she brought me back to this point, Tafta, the smiling, handsome, and enigmatic savage, it was always with the long dark stare of warning that I recognised.

  LELANOS

  We able to look down on Lelanos from a height—and what a difference from the other city! The same bluish-grey stone was used, but lightened with a glistening white quartz and thin bands of red, so that the place had a lively charm about it. As I moved about Lelanos in the days that followed, I often thought I had glimpsed a pattern or even several interlocking patterns in the way the buildings were set out, but I never grasped it wholly, and this was one of the things that I omitted to ask Rhodia, and then it was too late. At any rate, to view it from above, there was variation, and informality; there were no frowningly dominant buildings; no temples; no threat of stone, and rock, and earth being used to imprison or weight the tender—and so brief—flesh of Rohanda.

  And from what I had heard from Rhodia of its governance, there was nothing to fear from it.

  This was its history. On this site, a small plain ringed by low and friendly mountains, had been several tribes of creatures at that level where their physical needs ordered their lives, and these needs had not been given a religious or “higher purpose” recognition. In other words, they were considerably lower even than the Lombis before their culture was disturbed by our use of them. They fished, hunted, ate, mated, slept.

  Nasar caused himself to be born into a family that retained enough of the remnants of “an ancient and high knowledge,” as they put it, to see in this girl something superior. The family was a well-regarded one among a dwindling people living far to the north in the narrow peninsula that separated the Isolated Northern and Isolated Southern Continents—this land bridge, or channel, had often been under water, completely cutting off the Southern Continent, but the “events” had lifted it high above the ocean, and subsequent minor “events” had not succeeded in submerging it. There had flourished a Canopus-inspired culture that had degenerated, and these fast-vanishing people were all that remained. Their memories of the “ancient knowledge” were equated with female dominance, for a variety of reasons extraneous to this account. Rhodia was well treated, and when she told her parents of her needs, was given a company of the physically most striking young males and females of her people to go with her, and she travelled southwards looking for a place and race that would respond to her instruction.

  It was easy to imagine how these handsome visitors must have struck the tribes. Rhodia’s people were a tall, broad, red-brown type, with large dark eyes, and flowing luxuriant black hair. They had all the ease of manner and confidence of their past high culture. The tribes were of a slight, shorter kind, with dark brown skin, small black eyes, sparse coarse black locks. The new arrivals wore handsome coloured cotton clothes; the tribes wore skins. The “Gods” were able to instruct them in a thousand skills undreamed of by them, and to cut it short, within a couple of their generations, but while Rhodia's people were still youthful, there was large, expanding city that had been set up according to her instruction, but was governed by themselves. All the visitors but Rhodia had returned to their own people. Rhodia was considered, still, a “God,” but lived as they did, had married one of their males, and her children were not set apart in any way from the other citizens. Lelanos was governed like this.

  It was a democracy, elective. There was no written or formal constitution, since Rhodia had taught them that some of the worst tyrannies in Rohandan history had had “constitutions” and written laws with no purpose except to deceive the unfortunate victims and outside observers, There was no point in constitutions and frameworks of laws. If each child was taught what its inheritance was, both of rights due from it and to it, taught to watch its own behaviour and that of others, told that the proper and healthy functioning of this wonderful city depended on his or her vigilance—then law would thrive and renew itself. But the moment any child was left excluded from a full and feeling participation in the governance of its city, then she or he must become a threat and soon there would be decay and then a pulling down and a destruction.

  I was much interested in this because of what I, Sirius, had observed, and often: when we took over a planet and ordered its rule, we always imposed a constitution that seemed appropriate to us; and this was safeguarded by every sort of threat and punishment. But never had any rule imposed by us stayed for long the same, without falling into anarchy or rebellion.

  There were three safeguards used by Lelanos. The first was the governing body itself, which made the laws. This was elected by general suffrage, every person over the age of sixteen becoming eligible both to vote and to take office. Each officeholder had to lay bare his or her life to the examination of a body of citizens separately elected by the citizens. This was to prevent any individual from benefitting from office, and to see him or her dismissed at the first evidence of any falling away from high conduct. What these officeholders might not do included the use of servants—there were no slaves—who were treated in any slightest detail differently from members of their households; the improper use of sex by either male or female—that is, to dominate or degrade; and luxurious or greedy behavior. The individuals voted on to this Scrutiny, for so it was simply called, were considered the best and most honourable of all Lelannians, and to serve Scrutiny, the highest office.

  The second safeguard was an independent judiciary, to keep the laws made by the governing body. The members of this arm of the State, too, were continually watched by Scrutiny, and their behavior was expected to be as beyond reproach as that of the rulers.

  While it was not considered undesirable for an individual suited for the work to be reelected, even for the whole of a lifetime, onto either the governing body or the judiciary, the citizens who staffed Scrutiny were not allowed to serve more than one term of four years, though they might after retiring from Scrutiny serve either on the judiciary or the governing body.

  The third safeguard was a jealously kept law that the currency used to facilitate the exchange of goods should never be allowed to acquire a self-breeding value. That is, the coins used were only and always to be used as a means of exchange and nothing else. If any individual or group of individuals was to fall into debt, then no interest could be charged, and the debt itself must be abrogated at the end of seven years. Rhodia had caused to come into existence a body of instruction, framed as tales and songs, to enforce the message that if once “money” was allowed to become a commodity on its own account, then the downfall of Lelanos could be shortly expected, because she or he who charged “interest” would control the supply of goods and of
labour and a ruling class would become inevitable. The songs and stories were based on the histories of innumerable cities and cultures in Rohanda, the means of exchange had become king. Over and over again, so Rhodia said, Canopus had laid down laws and instruction forbidding the improper use of money and yet never had this been prevented for long. Shammat was too strong in these unfortunate ones who could never retain excellence.

  “And does this mean,” I enquired of Rhodia, “that Lelanos can be expected to fall away?” For, walking towards it, and then into its outer suburbs, I was struck with the manifest health and sanity of the place, the absence of poverty and deprivation, the real and inbred democracy that ruled here—for one may see its opposite in signs of servility, fear, deceitfulness.

  And Rhodia said only: “You will see for yourself.”

  She had a small house towards the centre of the place, in a group of them set around a small square. She lived there alone now, for her children had grown and left. The house had two small rooms on an upper floor and two on the ground floor. She had lived in it since the city was built, and had resisted all pressures on her by her children to move into a larger house—and when she told me this, her eyes met mine with a mordant amused glance I remembered from Koshi. Oh yes, I was being told quite enough to make me suspect that my arrival here was at point in the city’s fortunes before a fall, or decline: and in the next few days it seemed to me that Rhodia was doing everything to impress on me, not only the charm, the health, the good sense of this place, but, at the same time, what was wrong with it. And I could not help wondering why she did so…

  Looking back I see that everything conspired to put me into a high (or low!) but at least irrational and emotional condition. First of all, the contrast between this lovely civilised city with its horrible opposite across the mountains. Within a few days I had been taken from one to the other, and they illustrated extremes of what was possible on this planet: I had experienced, was still experiencing, within myself, these two extremes. And there had been the unhurried walk here, with Rhodia, or Nasar, and the way this presence—this Canopean reality—seemed to explore and challenge my deepest self. And there had been something else. I had traversed a zone of forest in no different from any other, but this in fact been the barrier zone between the Lelannian territory and that of Grakconkranpatl. For many centuries the evil and predatory city had been kept from attacking Lelanos because of rumours set afloat by Rhodia and then sedulously kept up that there was a zone or band of forest completely surrounding Lelanos that, if invaded or infringed, would result in the most savage reprisals.

  Lelanos was a villainous place—so the rumours went—feeding on flesh and blood, ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy that would lay in ruins any attacking city. Every kind of chance or even contrived incident or event was pressed into service to give credence to these tales. When I heard some of them on our way to Lelanos, from a terrified tribesman who had been fed all his life on stories of the cruelties of Lelanos, I felt my whole self powerfully affected. The shiverings and shudderings of the poor wretch as he described Lelanos the horrible showed how skilful had been the work of Rhodia and her associates. This propaganda work, and nothing else, had kept Lelanos safe. The clever and cunning priests of the city that really was wicked, using every kind of deceit themselves, had not been able to penetrate the disguise of Lelanos… and there was something as disturbing here as there had been in the sight of the band of thirty freed slaves who of all the innumerable slaves of Grakconkranpatl were the only ones able to free them by use of some inward recognition of reality, of the truth. Standing on a slender tower in magically charming Lelanos, looking out over forests where I had travelled, knowing what they were and how they were seen by those outside Lelannian borders—this was enough to set me shuddering in something not far off awe at the strange capacities for self-deception of the Rohandan mentality. And awe was not an emotion that I easily accommodated!

  No, I conclude now, but was not dispassionate enough to do so then, the sojourn in the cold dungeons, the deprivation of my protective devices, close contact with the Canopean—all this had unbalanced me. And still Shammat rang in my mind and pulled me towards it—towards Tafta, who was working on me powerfully, though I did not know it. I was beginning to react away from Rhodia. I found myself watching this strong old, or elderly, female, with her simple directness, her honesties, and I was seeing in them callousness, indifference to suffering, a refusal to use powers she certainly must have, as Canopus, to relieve the lot of these Rohandans.

  It is strange thing that I, Ambien II, after many long ages of a Colonial Service that supervised the continual and often—as we had to know—painful adjustment of innumerable species, cultures, social structures, the fates of myriads of individuals, could now suffer as I did over this one city. For never had a culture seemed more valuable to me than did Lelanos, never had one been felt by me as a more remarkable and precious accomplishment, set it was among so much barbarity and waste and decline. I found I was wrung continually with pity, an emotion I literally at first did not recognise for what it was, so strange was it.

  I would wander about the streets and avenues of this place, sometimes with Rhodia and sometimes by myself, and everything about these people hurt me. That they should have been brought to a such pitch of responsibility and civil awareness in such a short time… and from such unpromising material, merely a few barbarous tribes living only to keep alive… and that they should use each other with such alert and lively and free kindness… and that all this was the achievement of poor wretches who were so far gone with the Rohandan Degenerative Disease that hardly a whole or healthy specimen was to be seen among them… and that every one of them, almost from middle age, was struck as if with an invisible withering blast, leaving them enfeebled and bleached and shrunk… and that… and that… there was no end to the sights and sounds that could inspire me to pitying anger, to the need to protect and keep safe.

  Rhodia watched all this in me, and I knew she did, and I was by now in the grip of a resentment against her. Against Canopus. Yet I did, just occasionally, gain the most faint of insights into my condition and was able to match it with Nasar himself, in Koshi, wrung with conflict, and with the pain of this place, this unfortunate Rohanda. Or Shikasta.

  A great deal that I saw later was very far from me then. For instance, there was my casual, almost careless, approach to the priests’ dark city, allowing myself to so easily be taken prisoner. How to account for that? For never before, not on any planet, had I behaved in a comparable way. I saw after it was all over, and my subjection to Shammat was past, that there had been a softening and slackening all through me, long before my descent to Rohanda on this visit, and this was due to my low spirits and inner doubtings because of the work I was having to do, and for so long.

  And that was another thing: we might congratulate ourselves as we liked on the order and good sense on the planets we governed, with their minimum well-fed, well-cared-for populations, their willing submission to our rule, but it had been a very long time indeed, it had been long ages, since I had seen a culture anything like as lively as this Lelanos. No, something had gone out of our provenance, our Empire—I had known it, sensed it; but not until I had been brought here by Rhodia was I able to see what it was that had been lost. This place had some kind of vitality that we lacked. A deadness, a lack of inspiration was afflicting us, Sirius…

  And why had Rhodia brought me here at all? All she had to do to was to send me with guides back southwards to our Sirian stations.

  Yet here I was, with her, with Canopus, in this city. A city that had reached its perfection, and was about to sink… had begun to sink away from itself.

  And I could not stand the thought of it! I could not! I found that I wished to raise my voice and howl in protest, to cry out, to complain to—but to whom? Rhodia, the now willing and dutiful servant of Canopus?

  There was a morning when she and I sat together in one of the little rooms at
the top of her house. We had been taking a meal of fruit and bread. We were not talking: talk between us had become difficult.

  The sun came in through window openings in the brick walls, and lay in patterns on woven and coloured rugs. It was a scene of such simple friendliness and pleasantness.

  I was looking in hostility at Rhodia, knowing she knew it, and yet I could not prevent my critical feelings. She seemed to me stubborn. I was seeing in her, as she sat quietly on her cushions, hands folded in her lap, looking up into the blue of the Rohandan sky, a stubborn and difficult woman who was refusing me, or something, or some demand. I felt towards her at that moment as I had done with Nasar in Koshi, when he rebelled, or half rebelled, or struggled against his inner rebellion. And I was not able to tell myself that this time the case was opposite.

  She looked straight at me, with one of her full steady looks, and said: “Sirius, I am going to leave you.”

  “Well, then, you are going to leave me! And you will leave this poor place, too, abandon it to its fate.”

  “There is nothing that can be done to arrest the laws of Rohanda,” she said, “or indeed, the laws of the universe. They are worse here, that is all. We see them on Rohanda exaggerated and displayed, but there is never anything that can stay the same. You know that from your own Empire! Has there been a single culture you have established that has not changed and fallen away?”

  I looked into her eyes—I had to—and agreed that this was the case. But not with grace.

  “The best we can do is to set up something that approximates to the good, for a short time. This I have done in this city. And now it is time for me to go.”

  “You have finished your task for this visit?”

  “For this time it is done.”

  “I have to thank for rescuing me, Nasar.”