The Sirian Experiments - Doris Lessing

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admittedly was our plan for the Lombis – unless this race felt and resented their subjection, in which case the laws of our Empire made it inevitable that they would be advanced to a level they could sustain.

      It was true this whole experiment was based on an attempt to keep, just for once, a race on a subservient level; but surely the fact that we had to make it at all proved our past good record.

      Did they, the Planet 22 technicians, not think they might be sentimental instead of showing true benevolence – which always involved an overall view …

      To all this they respectfully but self-respectingly replied that they thought our arguments sophistry.

      There was no need for them to say any more than one thing, to bring forward more than one basic fact: the Lombis had been free, living where they had evolved, and had shown all the characteristics of such races. Now they had all the attributes of slaves.

      We inquired from them what they would like us to do. The reply was: to return the Lombis to their own planet.

      Even though their return would most certainly disrupt the lives of the Lombis there, who were quietly evolving at their own speed, and who had forgotten them – they had not preserved any memory of the abduction of what had been a very small proportion of their number? There was no doubt at all that if we suddenly set down on Planet 24 this now well-cohered and self-sufficing nation, there would be sudden and savage war.

      Was this really what they wanted us to do? If there had been wrong thinking on our part, then it was too late. Surely they could see this?

      They did see it.

      Of course, we knew what might happen: for in the circumstances it was to be expected. That we did nothing to forestall it was rooted in our improper attitudes to Canopus, and at the time we did not see anything wrong in these attitudes. Now, looking back – but if there is one thing I have learned, it is that it is not useful to say: If I knew then what I know now …

      I will come to the defection of the technicians in a moment.

      The Lombi festival during which our spaceships descended for the lift-off was a special one.

      The site was a favoured place between rivers. It was relatively high, with thickly growing trees surrounding a small plain. The animals came in during the preceding few days and settled themselves under the trees in their groups. Our technicians were with them. Mating was encouraged at these times. The techs did not refrain. We had not expected them to: a mixture of these two vigorous and promising stocks was part of our plan.

      The hunters brought in the animals for the feast, and the cooking trenches, with the spits over them, were arranged and tended by both males and females.

      The singing and dancing began as the sunlight went and the moon rose.

      First in groups around separate fires, and then in great revolving circles, these animals sang of their distant home and their longing for it; of their capture by the shining machines, of the place of imprisonment, where they had been confined in the ‘little prisons’ or in the shining prisons where everything was false; of their second capture, and their return to ‘true breath and breathing, to the green earth, to the green hills’; of their labours under a foreign sun building ‘prisons’ for invisible races whose presence they sensed, but whom they never saw; of their third capture by the shining machines, their being set down here ‘in this place where everything reminds us of our home but is not our home’, and of how – on a day that was still to come – the shining machines would come again, and take them home to ‘the place that knew them’.

      Throughout this night of festival, our techs were singing and dancing and feasting, too. Well mingled with the others, so that they were always individuals who had become accepted by a family or a group, and never even in pairs, let alone groups, that could seem a challenge, these little yellow people, hairless though they were, did not seem so very different from that vast company of short, squat, brown, very strong apelike creatures bounding and prancing and wailing under the full moon.

      I myself saw them from the ‘shining machine’ that had picked me up from our headquarters, and was taking me back to our Home Planet where it would drop me off for a spell of leave.

      I looked down on thousands of faces lifted in supplication to the skies, on thousands of raised arms, palms held outwards in a manner I had observed on so many planets! I was looking at a manifestation of the need for ‘higher things’ – and thought that we had not foreseen how this innate and unconquerable need would develop in this way, with these creatures, safely channelled into nostalgia for ‘home’, for ‘visitors from the skies’, and so on.

      They were singing about the shining machines as these descended. Drugged and entranced by a night of mass dancing and singing, they trooped willingly on to the spacecraft and were lifted off to C.P. 25. Their future development does not concern this history; but I shall describe a later visit I paid them.

      Not all of them were there at that feasting place that night.

      About 10,000 had been set down on Isolated S.C. II. And about 10,000 were taken off again. Yet their numbers had slightly increased, in spite of the inevitable deaths due to adaptation to the unfamiliar, if so beautiful, terrain. The technicians had of course known that the spaceships were to arrive and when. Some of the more disaffected had enticed away a few Lombis before the feast, telling them the shining ones were certainly coming, but they would be evil and would take them to a bad place. We lost 9 technicians, and about 500 Lombis. We did not mind this. What we had wished to forestall was that any of them should stay in that area which we wanted to use for other controlled experiments – as far as such experiments can be controlled. We had therefore informed the technicians that all that terrain was to be used in a trial of certain diseases, so that they would move well away, with the Lombis. We had done something else, too. Having carefully observed the more rebellious of the technicians, we had chosen two of them, told them we knew they intended to stay behind when the spaceships came, said we did not mind this, nor intended to stop them. But we would like them to undertake a task for us, for Sirius, who was after all – and would remain – their master, their friend, Sirius who had raised them from an animal status not in any way higher or better than the Lombis. We did not want promises from them; we were not promising them anything; we were not threatening them – but if it became possible for them to accomplish a certain task, then we would be grateful, and they would be playing a great part in our plans. The names of these technicians were Navah and Hoppe.

      When the planet was shared out between us, many things were left unsaid, were implicit. One was that we would inform each other of what we did. This had always been done – within limits on our side, due to suspicion; and within limits on theirs because we could not understand Canopus. Another was that we would not interfere with each other. Canopus has not interfered with us. This I aver, from my position as one who can state this categorically. They have behaved throughout honourably. I use this word advisedly, in this place.

      When Canopus ‘gives her word’, she keeps it. This concept, which is foreign to us – again I must insist on this, as part of this history, which is being written as factually as I can make it – is one of several similar concepts, part of a general way of looking at things. If something is said by them, then it is the truth. If Canopus ‘gives its word’, then this is kept, always, regardless of the inconvenience (and sometimes worse) to the themselves. If Canopus ‘promises’, then this is done. If Canopus offers aid, then this is the very best that can be given at that time in those circumstances. Canopus is always and absolutely to be relied on. I state this because it is the truth, and knowing full well the sort of reaction I may expect from certain of our historians.

      We do not, many of us, understand this now; and we certainly had no idea of it then.

      In short, we all believed that Canopus would try to trick us, as we intended to trick them. Not

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