The Sirian Experiments

by Doris Lessing

  After a long walk, turning with monotonous regularity at sharp angles from one corridor to another, the lights on the walls suddenly increased, there was softness under my feet – and I saw coloured rugs and carpets, and the walls had hangings on them. Abruptly, we stopped. Apparently facing a blank wall. She pressed down a lever that projected from the wall, and another great slab of stone slid silently back. I was in the entrance to a brightly lit room that had windows in it. This alone nearly overthrew me – being in ordinary daylight again. Seven tall men, in the black cloaks I had already seen, were seated behind a long wooden table. An eighth stood by a window half turned away, looking out. Again, I have to disentangle what I later learned of the eighth man and what I felt then. Then, I saw at once he was not of the same race as that of Grakconkranpatl, nor of my wardress, who was standing just behind me. He reminded me of those Shammat pirates who had visited me such a long time ago, the shameless thieving ones. He was, however, taller than they. He was more finely built. His skin was pale brown, as theirs had been. His eyes were quick and brown. His hair was profuse, curly and reddish, worn long on the head, with a neat strong beard. He was the old Shammat type much refined. Compared to the seven, in their heavy black, with their brutish features, their long black eyes that conveyed coldness and deadness as much as they did avidity and lust for power, he seemed infinitely better, even reassuring. And it was as I stood there, my eyes turning for relief to this eighth man, that I heard a breath from behind me: ‘Sirius, be careful.’ This sound floated into my mind, as if it came from not now and here but from Koshi, or from the spaces between the stars. I could not believe I was hearing it, and even thought I had imagined it … when I slightly turned my head, the woman was a few paces behind, and her face was immobile, even indifferent.

  And I was still waiting there, in front of these coldly observant men, all eight of them, now that the one by the window had turned to stare, too. And as yet nothing had been said.

  One of the men rose, came over to me, his cold gaze assessing my hair, my skin, my light brittle build, and whipped off the dark cloak, and, gripping my upper arm, pushed me forward closer to the seven so that I stood close against the table they sat along, one, two, three, four, five, six, all so alike, copies of each other, so little variation there was between them. And the seventh stood behind me, and lifted my hair in his large hands, so that he could feel it and show it to the others, and then lifted one of my arms, and then the other – both bare, now that the enveloping cloak lay discarded on the floor. Then he slid the bracelets up and down my arms in a way that showed he wanted to take them from me, but, leaving them for the moment, he began to unhook the necklace of Canopean silver. I was surrounded by his cold unpleasant smell and I felt faint, but I said calmly:

  ‘If you take these things from me, it will be the worse for you.’

  I saw the eyes of all six of these rulers – priests and tyrants – turn towards the one who lounged still at the window, showing his superiority to them and the scene by his affectation of half-indifference, sometimes watching what went on in the room, sometimes observing some events out of my sight on the central avenue that, presumably, was not now lined with the guards. He now glanced at them, and nodded very slightly – such a minimal gesture was this that I could easily have believed it had not occurred, were it not that it had its effect: the hands of the man who stood behind me no longer fumbled at the catch of the necklace.

  Was this eighth man, then, the tyrant who called himself the High Priest? How otherwise was he in a position of supereminence?

  Under my robe, I could feel the girdle of starstones, which was the third object given me for protection by Canopus, lying tightly around my waist, not a few inches from the covetous one behind me. I was conscious of the smooth clasp of the gold band around my left thigh, which was the fourth of the talismans.

  If the priests had not summoned me to take these things, or to interrogate me, why then was I here? The thought strongest in me was that it was the eighth man who had demanded this confrontation. But why?

  Again, I was standing there, no one speaking, the eighth man gazing apparently indifferently out of the window, six of them ranged one beside the other opposite me on the other side of the long narrow table, six pairs of black eyes staring at me. I do not remember any other species who has struck me with such unpleasantness as these did: if they had been simple brutes – that is, a species still totally brutish, or one just lifting itself away from brutishness – they would have been more tolerable. But they were a long way from running about on four legs or tearing their food with their fangs. It was the end of a line of evolution I was seeing; one that had taken its path into this cruelty and narrow caste interest and was frozen there.

  It came into me that there were two different interests at work here: those of the eighth man being different from the seven, but they did not know it.

  One of the men got up, pushed down a lever that slid stone panels across the windows, extinguishing daylight, and I found myself standing in a beam of brilliant light that fell on me from above. All around me was quite black, and I stood illuminated. I knew then that this was a rehearsal for some ceremony: they wished to see how I would look to an assembly of, probably, slaves as well as the ruling caste, when I stood before them, bathed in light, in one of the temples, before the priests cut the heart out of my body.

  A moment later, the stone window panels had slid open again, the light had been switched off, and I was being wrapped in the heavy cloak by the woman, and then taken back along the passages to my room.

  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 that 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 jailers, 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 dark 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. And 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 recognize 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 heavy 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 will 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 very 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 on to 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 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 was pushed, and 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 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 was 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 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’ 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 recognizing 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 was 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 by 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 as to make some kind of coherent picture.

  Rhodia’s main concern, when I was taken prisoner, was to
make sure that the Canopean talismans should not fall into their hands: very evil use would have been made of them. For, in spite of all 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 in 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 as I could – if I could. But I had actually been seen arriving ‘from the heavens’. They could not cause the memory of this event 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 had simply vanished, never to be seen again, this could only 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, as had always been done. But Rhodia had strengthened their doubts.