The Sirian Experiments

by Doris Lessing

  However, I pushed them away and instructed the crew to hover in the fast-invisible mode over Koshi itself.

  I always like to examine a city in this way before actually entering it: one may often see at a glance its condition and probable future.

  The first thing to be seen here was that it had experienced recent growth, that it bulged and spread out to the west in large suburbs of shining white villas and gardens. These covered more ground than the old city, which was earth coloured, and composed of densely crammed buildings from which rose tall cone-shaped towers. In other words, there was a disparity between the rich and the poor – a punishable disparity, to my mind. Gardens of an ornamental kind spread around the western suburbs. Market gardens lay to the south. To the east, the poor mud-coloured dwellings ended in the shabby-looking semidesert. This great city on its eminence in the plain had lost its vegetation almost entirely. The expanses of browns and yellows that surrounded it had little smears of green in some places, but dust clouds hung over the many roads and paths that ran into the city from all directions. I did not need to know more, and gave the order to set me down on the edge of one of the roads, which we could see were not frequented.

  When this was done I experienced the usual exhilaration as I saw the spacecraft disappear like a soap bubble and I was alone and dependent on myself. Also, this was Rohanda, a planet with which I could not help but feel bonded. And I was already able to examine evidences of the ‘seasons’ that were now part of Rohanda’s nature: a cold wind blew hard on my back from the north, off ice and snow fields around the pole, so much more extensive than they had been. And the cold would intensify shortly, for it would be the time of the R-year when the northern hemisphere would be revolving on its tilt away from its sun. I was looking forward to experiencing the approaches to a ‘winter’, something new for me.

  There was no one on this road I had chosen. It was a minor road, unpaved, not much more than a dirt track, though straight and well ditched. Looking ahead at Koshi all I could see of the rich suburbs were a mass of trees in which I knew the houses were disposed. But the poor part of the town rose high, in a pattern of shapes I had not seen anywhere. Very tall and narrow conical buildings, twenty-one of them, all dun coloured and rather like certain ant heaps I had seen in my time on Isolated Southern Continent I, were crammed together, in a small space, looking as if their bases touched – yet already I could see low habitations, as if crumbling ant heap filled what space there was between the cones. I judged these tall buildings to be ten or eleven storeys high, and wondered at the reasons for building so tall when there was all the space any system of government could possibly need – unless this was the reason: tall tightly populated buildings are easily policed and supervised. So I speculated as I walked firmly in, keeping my eyes open for other travellers, for I wore my usual garb, basic Sirian, and carried over my arm a large piece of cloth that I had been advised I must envelop myself in as a female. I did see a group of individuals approaching, and wrapped myself completely in the black cloak, allowing only my eyes freedom. They were all men – that was the first obvious fact. Probably traders. And of a very varied genetic mix. I fancied I was able to see in them the high moulded cheekbones and wide-set eyes of the old giants, as well as the sturdy set of the natives, but this group of twenty or so were quite extraordinarily mixed, of several skin tones, and with grey and green eyes as well as the more familiar brown. They wore loose trousers, and baggy but belted tunics. I had seen variations on this theme so often, and in so many places, I was able to guess that these were not of the upper class who with quite remarkable uniformity everywhere in the Galaxy choose garments that are unsuitable for physical labour and for easy and unconfined movement: galactic nature is very much the same everywhere. But as I was thinking this, I remembered the garments of the Canopeans, which contradicted this rule.

  There were no gardens on this side of the city. The road or track began to be bordered with many shacks and hovels, mostly of timber, and there were swarms of people, none of whom seemed to take any notice of me at all, neither offering greetings nor expecting any. Yet they all, like the travelling group of males, examined me closely and acutely, their eyes obviously skilled at getting a great deal of information in a curtailed glance: I knew that the inhabitants of this city were afraid, and compared what I was seeing with certain arrivals on our own Colonized Planets where our rule had become too harsh, and local officials needed to be checked.

  This low huddling of rough buildings, crowds of poorly dressed people, children who I could see were ill-nourished, and an assortment of canines (which I had to resist the temptation to stop and inspect, since on none of our planets had we tamed a similar species) soon terminated abruptly as I reached the circular base of one of the very tall cones, which soared up above me into the blue sky with its floating white clouds that I had so often longed to see again. But I did not feel familiar here. There was a sharp tang of difference, of the alien, that was affecting me sharply, causing in me emotions that I was expecting: instability of feeling was a concomitant of seasons – so Klorathy’s brief summary had warned me. And I felt, as I looked behind me into a sun that was sinking fast, and heard the cold winds creeping about among the hovels, a pang of melancholy that I did not like at all. Shaking it off, I plunged into the crowds. They were nearly all males. The figures shrouded like myself were presumably females. Even the female children were, after quite an early age, shrouded in this ugly black. I was conscious I was feeling indignation – this seemed to me a bad sign, and a most unwelcome sign of possible imbalance.

  I was now among crooked streets and lanes, all crammed with people. There were open shops and booths, eating places, and so much noise I felt dizzy from it. The silences of space, in which I had been immersed, had ill prepared me for this shouting, sometimes screaming and quarrelling mob. And now I was seeing females not shrouded up. On the contrary, they were almost naked, much painted, bejewelled, and offering themselves freely. This degeneration was worse than I had expected, though of course it is a result of poverty everywhere unless severely controlled by legislation … I realized I was straying through the crowds, as their pressure moved me, looking at everything, stopping to stare when I was able to hold my place in the press, and in every way behaving like a stranger. And in a moment I found my way blocked by a male, who stood firmly in front of me, obviously intending to keep me there. He was staring close into my eyes through the slit in my black sheet. I found him unpleasant. That is, specifically, there was something in him I was able to sense that was more than the alien, or the not-understood. He was of middle Rohandan height, a couple of spans taller than myself, broad and solid, and his skin, of a greyish colour, almost green, had the smooth cool appearance of stone. His eyes were opaque, oblong, without brows. He had no hair, as far as I could see, for he was wearing a square pull-on cap, ornamented with lumps of coloured stone, of a soft rich-looking material. His mouth was straight, almost to the ears, and only a slit. His clothing was a voluminous fur cloak. He put his arms akimbo, in a way that made me experience them as a fence or confinement, and stared closer and closer, the greenish eyes not blinking, and very intense. I realized he was trying to hypnotize me, and guarded myself. I was also noting something else: he wore heavy gold earrings of a certain pattern.

  Among the artefacts I had been instructed by Klorathy to use as a protection were these precise earrings – but to be worn at certain times and in combination with other practices.

  Earrings had been – and would be again – among the artefacts used in this manner. To ornament the ears can hardly be described as a rare thing; but I had long since concluded that the practice had originated in this way – and therefore must contain hazards.

  I had exactly similar earrings concealed in a bag I had under my wrap, with the other specified objects. I had got to the point of wondering how I could conceal these if this evil – for by now I knew he was that – person captured me or was in a position to have me examined,
when he said: ‘Very well then! I shall remember you!’ and turned and vanished in the crowds. But he had spoken in basic Canopean, not in Sirian … altogether, I had been given a lot to think about. I concealed myself in a little porch and tried to decide how to proceed. The exhilaration that comes from having to pit one’s wits against strangeness persisted, but I knew I had to find shelter quickly. I had been instructed to go ‘to the top of the third cone’. And they were built together in a bunch! I was not going to risk my clumsy Canopean, and certainly not my Sirian, here: I left the porch and wandered among the odorous noisy throng, while the light left the sky, and flares were lit everywhere at angles of the streets and outside the eating places. This was a sad and to-be-pitied people, I could see, even more now the night had come, and they were taking their ease. They were drunken, often fighting, tense with deprivation, and the degraded females dominated everything, openly selling themselves, and retiring with their customers no further than into a doorway, or under a table. I had never seen anything like this scene, not anywhere. And still I did not know how to find the third cone. I tried to put myself back into that moment when I looked down from the spacecraft at the town, and had been able to notice, if there was one, a pattern in the cones – it could perhaps be said they were built in two very deep arcs that intersected: in which case I was near the third from the end of one of the arcs. I went inside, finding a cool pale interior: they used a very fine plaster, like a ceramic, to line their walls. A steep stairway spiralled inside the building: I went up and up, stopping continually to look out of narrow slitlike openings as the city opened below me, and the noisome hovels of the low town fell away, and the gardened suburbs, now shadowy and attractive with lights shining in the trees, came into view. Up and up … I thought that I would not easily make such a climb again, not that day – but when I reached the very top, I found a doorway that was curtained in thick dark red material, and on it a flake of writing ceramic that had on it the one word, in Sirian: Welcome.

  I pushed the curtain aside and entered a large room, the half of a round: the circular top of the tower was bisected to make two rooms by a wall of the same finely gleaming plaster. This room was furnished pleasantly enough with low couches and tables and piles of cushions, but what I was looking at, after my first assessing glance, was – Klorathy. But it wasn’t Klorathy.

  That moment impressed itself on me sharply, and remains with me now. I often revive it, for a re-examination, because of what I learned from it – and still do.

  It is not necessary for me to say again how intrigued I was, and had been, by Klorathy, how closely I attended to everything about him – what he said, how he said it. And so on … No matter how often I had been annoyed or checked, or disappointed, I had never ceased to know that if I could understand him and his ways I would understand … well, but that was after all the point! And this preoccupation with him had been bound up, inevitably, with his person, how he looked, spoke, certain tricks of manner. I had unconsciously deemed these Canopus, associated a superior, and at the present time out of my reach, way of being with Klorathy’s physical presence. His personality …

  Yet in front of me was a man not Klorathy, who looked very like him, and whose smile and nod as he greeted me were familiar.

  ‘I am Nasar,’ he said. ‘Klorathy told me you were coming, and asked me to see you have everything you want.’

  I was quite stunned. Believing he could have no idea why, I disposed myself comfortably on a low pile of cushions and accepted some wine.

  What I have to say here, so as to make it unmistakably clear, is that I felt more than the dislocation that comes from misdirected and thwarted expectations. I was feeling a different kind of letdown. It was a warning, and a strong one. This was not because of how Nasar looked or how he behaved – his courtesy was complete. But warnings were flashing through me.

  And I suppressed them!

  This was because of my awe of Canopus. Of everything Canopus stood for.

  And yet all the time my after-all highly trained eyes were noting all kinds of discrepancies – seeing what I should be seeing, and then setting it all aside.

  As I play back that scene, so as to examine it, there was everything there that I needed to prevent and save me from so much puzzlement and confusion.

  There was a particular smile that appeared on the man’s face, very briefly – only a flicker – of recklesness … carelessness. He had a way of suddenly letting out – and often inappropriately to what was being said or done – a short laugh, as if he were astonished at himself, and yet proposed to stand by what he found. He had a general air or manner that was familiar to me, for I had had often to deal with it – yet I chose not to put a name to it then.

  So much for my perspicacity – or rather, for my readiness to use it.

  We were not together for long. He showed me how to get food, if I wanted it, from the floor below, which was a foodshop for the building, opened a low door into the room next door, just like this one, which I was to use as a sleeping and private place – and having made his apologies, was ready to leave.

  I was tired, but stimulated, and had hoped for more talk, or in lieu of that, to go out again into the teeming streets below. But he said that before I went out I must decide what role I was to play.

  ‘In this charming place,’ said he, ‘there are three roles for a woman. One is to be a whore. One, the wife of a high official, or at least a trader or merchant. Or you may be a servant or working woman of some kind. You would not choose, I am sure, the first.’ The way he said this had a laugh behind it that I simply did not know how to take. ‘The second is out of your reach – for you are not here with a permit or passport and must conceal yourself. Therefore, I can only suggest that you pose as my servant. This would be entirely within the customs and mores of Koshi. What you wear indoors does not matter, though if someone arrives unexpectedly you must cover yourself up absolutely, but wear appropriate clothes underneath in case you are searched.’ He nodded at a chest and left. I found in it a plain blue skirt, baggy blue trousers, a long tunic. And that was the last I saw of Nasar for several days.

  What had I expected?

  That I should spend time with Klorathy, that he would instruct me, and would explain … all that I could not work out for myself, but felt continually on the edge of discovering.

  I did not go out, but observed the town from my high vantage point, and from windows at many levels in the building. In the foodshop below, I excited notice. It was staffed by women wearing the same clothes as I did, short skirt over trousers, and the loose tunic; their hair tied in cloth. My unbound fair hair interested them: I was from the far Northwest, they said, and assumed I was a descendant of the survivors of the ‘events’, which they referred to as ‘The Great Punishment’. Some, Adalantalanders had escaped somehow, had made their way east, and had helped to settle these great cities of the far eastern plains. They had a reputation for beauty, for wisdom – they were priestesses and shamanesses; and no fair or blue-eyed child could be born anywhere without being called ‘child of the lost islands of the great oceans of the west’. But I was no true daughter of Adalantaland – I was too thin, my locks were too sparse, and my eyes were not sea blue. But my earrings, which I wore at certain hours of certain days, announced my true lineage, so these serving women knew: and they told everybody that the merchant on the top floor had as his serving maid a slave from the Northwest fringes. This I did not want, and wrapped my head thereafter so my ‘magic’ earrings did not show, and tried to be inconspicuous, and took at one time as much food as was practical up the stairs so as to keep my visits few, though I wanted very much to talk with these cheerful slaves. For that is what they were. The females of this culture were truly enslaved, in that they did not know they were. They had never questioned that males should run everything, make laws, decide who should marry and how, and dispose of the futures of children. The dispossession of the true role of females had taken place so long ago they did not know
it had ever happened. Their reverence for the old Adalantaland was all that remained to them of a real inkling of what females could do and be. And that had become ‘magic’, and ‘witchcraft’. Their highest ambition and possibility was to marry a man in a good position: or to give birth to sons who would prove themselves. I longed to study the warps and distortions in the female psyche that this displacement of their true function had caused: I wanted to study them in depth and in such a way that I could return home with a contribution to our Studies in Perverted Psychology. But first things first.

  I kept myself private and retired to the windows where I could look north and see – so I fancied – the white beginnings of the icecaps, and south to great mountains where the snows lay again. It was getting colder daily, and I wrapped myself in my black cloth for the sake of warmth, and sat many hours quietly, thinking of the questions I was going to ask … Klorathy? Well, then, Nasar.

  There were specific and definite things I wanted to know. It seemed to me that long ages had gone into my wanting to know them, that this wanting had fed a need that now could not any longer be put off.

  And I imagined what would happen, how I would frame questions, how they would be answered, in all kinds of ways. And imagined, too, how they would not be answered, for I was already set to expect checks and delays.

  One evening, when I had sat a long time in a window opening gazing over the rich suburbs and wondering who were the rich and powerful ones of this culture, and able – not all that inaccurately either – to picture them because of their victims and subjects I had seen in the streets, from the windows, and in the persons of the women downstairs in the foodshops; when I had watched in myself the melancholies and sadness that went with this ‘season’ of the rapidly darkening days, so that there was less light in any day than there was night; when I had repeated in myself over and over again what I wanted to know, so that I could ask sensibly and well – in came Nasar, unexpectedly, and flung himself down on a low seat, opening a package of food he had brought from the shop below, and eating rapidly and in a way that I had never seen in Klorathy. He unceremoniously thrust a lump of some sweet stuff towards me and said: ‘Have some,’ and wiped his mouth roughly and lolled back, his hands locked behind his head, staring up and out at the sky that showed through the windows high in the ceilings. It was a cool sky, and clouds fled past. I was utterly overthrown again, because he was so similar to Klorathy.