The Sirian Experiments - Doris Lessing

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about the Shammat ‘spies’, which Canopus claimed they had known nothing about. We did not believe this. But could not pursue it, for fear our own spying would come to light …

      It will be seen from these brief remarks that this was an uncomfortable, unsatisfactory conference. When it was dissolved, I could see nothing positive in it except my meeting with Klorathy, and since he was to stay on Colony 10 to assist the Giants in their painful period of waiting, and I was to return to Sirius, we had nothing much to hope for, at least immediately.

      Sirius had not abandoned the idea of using Rohanda for experiments. It was a question of finding ways of doing this without harm to ourselves. A joint committee Canopus/Sirius was set up at the conference for this purpose. Again I was assigned to Rohanda, at my request, and with instructions by Canopus – called by us and by them advice – on how to survive the new discordant Rohandan atmosphere. We were told that if we were to build settlements in exactly this way and that – measurements and proportions prescribed to the fraction of an R-unit – and wore such and such artefacts, and ate this and that (there were long lists of such prescriptions), then we might work on that unfortunate planet, at least for limited periods.

      To begin with, their advice was only partly, or halfheartedly, obeyed: bad results followed. We then took to an exact obedience. Success.

      This obedience was more remarkable than perhaps will seem now. At that time it would have been difficult to find anything good being said about Canopus anywhere in our territories. Our tone was one of indifference at best, but usually derision. We were spying on them everywhere and in every way. We did not hesitate to outdo them when we could, often quite childishly, and even illegally. Any who doubt this may find what I say confirmed in any common chronicle or memoir of that time: we were not ashamed of our behaviour. On the contrary. Yet we suspected Canopus of ill-feeling and delinquency towards us, and complained of it. At the same time, and while apparently having little respect for their prescriptions, for we mocked them when we thought this would earn us admiration, we nevertheless followed them, and to the point where the practices became second nature, and we were in danger of forgetting where they originated. Then we did forget – or most of us – and ‘the Rohandan Adjustment Technique’ was talked of as if it were a discovery of our own.

      For a long time, more than a hundred thousand years, we Sirians were more on Rohanda than Canopus was. So we believed then. It was because we told our spies to look for Canopean technicians by the same signs that we understood for our own necessities and behaviour. We did not know then that Canopus could come and go in any way than by spaceship – by ordinary physical transport. Did not know that Canopean technicians could exist on Rohanda – and on other planets – taking the outward physical shape of the inhabitants of any particular time and place.

      For long ages Canopean individuals were at work on Rohanda and we did not know it. Even now there are those who refuse to believe it.

      But a few of us who worked on Rohanda came to understand. And I will come to a fuller description of this, in its place.

      Meanwhile, my preoccupation with Canopus continued, and I was not by any means the only one. And this was for a specific and definite reason.

      It is necessary for me now to make a general statement about Sirian development – a summary of history from the end of our Dark Age until the present. It will be argued that it is not possible to sum up several hundred thousand years of an Empire’s history in a few words. Yet we all of us do this when describing others. For instance, how do we – and even our most lofty and respected historians – refer to Alikon, the long-lived culture that preceded our own on Sirius, before we became an Empire? ‘Alikon was a rigid and militaristic society, based on limited natural resources, whose ruling caste maintained power by the use of a repressive religion, keeping nine-tenths of the population as labourers, slaves, and servants. It ended because …’ That is how we describe ninety thousand S-years of what we always refer to as ‘prehistory’. To take another example. Colony 10 of the Canopean rule was once ‘Senjen, a natural paradise, a pacific, easygoing matriarchal society made possible by a pleasant climate and abundant vegetable and animal stocks’. Senjen lasted for two hundred thousand years before Canopus decided it needed improvement.

      No: the dispassionate, disinterested eye we use for other peoples, other histories, we do not easily turn on ourselves – past or present! Yet most societies – cultures – empires – can be described by an underlying fact or truth, and this is nearly always physical, geographical. Is it possible that our reluctance to regard ourselves as we do others is because we do not like to categorize our own existence as physical … merely physical?

      The Sirian Empire has been preoccupied by one basic physical fact and the questions caused thereby since its inception: technology: our technical achievements that no other empire has ever even approached … I write that statement without the benefit of ‘hindsight’. That is how we have seen it until very recently. It is because of how we define (and many of us still do) technology. The subtle, infinitely varied, hard-to-see technology of Canopus was invisible to us, and therefore for all these millennia, these long ages, we have counted ourselves as supreme.

      We now mark the end of our Dark Age at the point where ‘we got rid of our excess populations’. As I saw it expressed in a somewhat robustly worded history. At the point, then, when ‘population balanced necessity’. Ah yes, there are a hundred ways of putting our basic dilemma! And each one of these formulations, evasive or frank, can only mask something we have never come to terms with! To sum up our culture, then, as we so arbitrarily encapsulate others: ‘The Sirian Empire, with its fifty-three colonies, almost infinitely rich, well-endowed, fruitful, variegated, and with its exemplary technology, has never been able to decide how many people should be allowed to live in it.’

      There you have it. I touched on this before: how could I not? There is no way of even mentioning Sirius without bringing up this our basic, our burning, problem …

      The Dark Age over, we saw to it that our populations everywhere were reduced to the minimum level necessary for … for what? In our enthusiasm over our new concept, our new capacities of control, we set fairly arbitrary limits to population on our fifty-three colonies. Very low numbers were permitted to be.

      What happened to those teeming millions upon millions upon millions? Well, they were not exterminated. They were not ill treated. On the contrary, as I have hinted – to do more than lightly sketch these developments would come outside my scope – all kinds of special schemes and projects were set up to soften their tragic fate. They died, it is generally agreed now – now that so much time has passed and we can look at those days more calmly – of broken hearts, broken will. They died because they had no purpose, of illnesses, of epidemics that seemed to have other causes, and during mass outbreaks of madness. But they died. It took fifty thousand years of our bad – our very bad – time, but at the end of it, we were left with nearly empty planets, and everything open for us – ready for a magnificent new purpose, new plan.

      But, in fact, nothing had changed: we still did not know how to look at ourselves. Our technology was such that our entire Empire could be run with something like ten million people. That was what was needed. If to run our Empire was our purpose, and nothing else …

      I shall not go on. Some people will say I have already said enough about this; others that, if I were to pay proper and due respect to our terrible basic dilemma, I should devote not a few paragraphs but several volumes to it.

      Well, myriads of volumes and whole ages have been devoted to it – when our stage was, as it were, swept bare and empty, waiting for its appropriate dramas, what happened was that schools of philosophy sprang up everywhere, and nothing was heard but their debates, their arguments … What was our purpose? they inquired of themselves, of us, pursuing ‘the fundamental Sirian existential problem’.

      So violent, lowering, unpleasant, became these debates that it was made illegal

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