“But Ambien, is this not always true, everywhere, to an extent at least?”
“Yes, it is. For instance, if a Sirian were to be told that our Empire is run by a Dictatorship of Five, he would run or call the doctors.”
“I am not talking about that, Ambien—and I don’t like how you put it. If we are dictators, then when have there been rulers so responsive to the needs of their subjects… so compassionate… so concerned for the general good… Very well, you look impatient, you look as if I am quite ridiculous—we all of us recognise that we no longer think as one. You have your own views… but I was not talking of any specific problem we may have. I was suggesting that what can be taken in by an ordinary individual is always behind the facts.”
“It is a question of degree. But are generalities useful at this point? This dangerous and crucial point? Very well then, let me put it like this. When what the populace believes falls too far behind what is really going on, then rulers do well to be afraid. It is because a mind, individual or collective, can be regarded as a machine. From this point of view. Feed in information too fast and it jams. This jam manifests in rage—riots, uprisings, rebellions.”
“Which we are seeing now throughout our Empire. All kinds of new ideas fight for acceptance.”
“But how many more are there that are not yet seen at all? But you don’t want to talk about the particular. Very well then, though in my view we—you—are making a mistake. We ought to be talking about the Sirian situation. And about our situation. We ought to be thinking of ways our populations can be told: you Sirians, you, the Sirian Empire, have been ruled by an Oligarchy of Five, and this fact does not fit in at all with what you have been taught… oh very well then, let us stick to Rohanda. I shall make a very general observation. We all know that the central fact in a situation is often, and in fact most usually, the one that is not seen. We may say even that there is always a tendency to look for distant or complicated explanations for something that is simple or at hand. I shall say that as a result of watching the mental processes on Rohanda, I have concluded that they do not understand an extremely simple and basic fact. It is that every person everywhere sees itself, thinks of itself, as a unique and extraordinary individual, and never suspects to what an extent it is a tiny unit that can exist only as part of a whole.”
“And that is a really new idea for you, Ambien? Ambien of the Five?”
“Wholes. A whole. It is not possible for an individual to think differently from the whole he or she is part of… no, wait. Let us take an example from Rohanda. There is a large ocean vessel of new and advanced design. It is struck by a lump of floating ice and sinks, though it has been advertised as unsinkable. They appoint a committee of experts—individuals, that is, of the highest probity and public admiration, with the longest and most efficient training possible in that field. This committee produces a report that whitewashes everyone concerned. But this same report, studied only a few years later strikes a new generation as either mendacious or incompetent… well?”
“You occupy your mind with the minuscule! It isn’t we expect of you!”
“It seems to me that the minuscule, the petty, the humble example is exactly where we can study best this particular problem. What happened in the interval between the first report and the reassessment of it?”
“Change of viewpoint.”
“Exactly. An assortment of individuals, identically trained, all members of a certain class, dame together on a problem. They were members of a group mind—together concentrated into a smaller one of the same kind. They produced a report that could not have been different, since they could not think differently. Not then. That is why one generation swears black, and the next white.”
“But you, Ambien, are surely proof that a group mind is hardly inviolable—or permanent!”
“Ah, but here is another mechanism… what we are seeing are only mechanisms, machineries, that is all… let us consider these group minds… these little individuals making up wholes. Sets of ideas making up a whole can be very large, for instance, when they are occupying a national area, and millions will go to war for opinions that may very well be different or even opposite only a decade later—and die in their millions. Each is part of this vast group mind and cannot think differently, not without risking madness, or exile, or…”
Here there was a moment of consciousness, discomfort, sorrow—which I dissipated at once by going on.
“Yes, you said I have been at odds with you and for a long time, and that this fact proves I am wrong. But what is the mechanism, the machinery, that creates a group, a whole, and then develops a dissident member—develops thoughts that are different from those of the whole?”
“Perhaps this individual may been suborned? Influenced by some alien and unfriendly power?”
“If we are going to allow ourselves to think like that, then—”
“Then what, Ambien? Tell me. Tell us. We are ready to understand, don’t you believe that?”
“It is a mechanism for social change. After a time… and it can be a very long time indeed; or after only a short time… as we see now on Rohanda, where everything is speeded up and sets of ideas that have been considered unchallengeable can be dispersed almost overnight—after a period of time, short or long, during which the group mind has held these sacred and right ideas, it is challenged. Often by an extremely small deviance of opinion. It is characteristic of these group minds, these wholes, to describe an individual thinking only slightly differently as quite remarkably and even dangerously different. Yet this difference may very shortly seem ludicrously minor…”
“And so we all hope, Ambien.”
“But there is a question here, it torments me, for we do not know how to answer it. This deviant individual in this group—he or she has been unquestioningly and happily and conformingly part of this group, and then new ideas creep in. Where do they come from?”
“Well, obviously, from new social developments.”
“Thank you. Oh, thank you so much! That’s settled then, and we need think no more about it! May I go on? When such a deviant individual becomes too uncomfortable for the group mind to tolerate, various things can happen. Commonly, expulsion. Labelled seditious, mad, and in any case wrongheaded, he or she is thrown out… yes, yes, we all agree that in our case this would be a pity. Talking generally though, this individual may start an opposing group having attracted enough people with similar ideas—no, I am not threatening you. Can we not talk about this with less personal reference? Can we not? Yes, indeed, I concerned about our ancient association, indeed I am anxious for my personal safety—but can you not believe that brooding about these questions I am still Ambien II, who has with you administered an Empire for so long? This deviant individual may influence others of this group, this mind, to think differently, when the entity will split into two—and I do not expect this to happen in this case. No. What has caused me to think differently from you has affected, I believe, only myself… no? We shall see! No, I am not threatening! How can it be a threat? We are not in control of these processes. We like to think we are. But they control us. You like that thought! We of the Five don’t like to think that all this long time we have never been more than straws in a current… but may I go on to suggest another possibility for this deviant and so irritating individual? If he or she is not expelled, or does not expel herself, but remains, contemplating her position, then a certain train of thought is inevitable. She has been part of a group mind, thinking the same thoughts as her peers. But now her mind holds other ideas. Of what whole is she now a part? Of what invisible whole? It is surely not without interest to speculate, when feeling isolated, apparently alone, on the other little items or atoms who with her are making up this other whole… this line of thought doesn’t interest you? And yet surely I have been seeing indications that it does, it interests you very much—and in fact perhaps your speculations in this realm are why you are here, visiting me, just as the others have done… did yo
u not know that the others have all been? Odd, that! Once we would all have known, we did all know what the others did, and thought. What is happening to us? We don’t know! That is the point! Are we going to be like the Rohandans, quite happy to use social machinery without being prepared to examine the mechanisms that rule them? Are we quarrelling? Does our disagreement have to be seen as such a threat?”
“We not hostile to you, Ambien. You must not think that we are. Not to you personally.”
“When have we ever seen our relations with each other as personal? Well, I am delighted to have your personal good wishes, of course.”
“I must go. Can we send you anything? Do you need anything?”
“I am not ill! I am not, as far as I am aware, under arrest? But thank you, no, I don’t need anything, and I have occupation enough with what I am thinking. I think day and night about group minds and how they work. Do you realise that one may present a fact as hard and bright and precious as allyrium to a group of individuals forming a group mind, one that is already set in a different way, and they cannot see it. Literally. Cannot take it in. Do you understand the implications of that? Do you? Well, thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. Thank you.”
During this period I had not heard from Klorathy, nor had there been any official communication between Canopus and Sirius. When the other members of the Five had concluded their visits to me, a message arrived addressed personally to me. “Perhaps you would consider taking a visit to the Isolated Northern Continent.”
The Four had seen this, and had directed it on: normally a message for an individual of the Five is not intercepted.
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 glim
pses, 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.
The Sirian Experiments Page 33