The Sirian Experiments - Doris Lessing

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tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us, as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.

      It has been said that everything man is capable of imagining has its counterpart somewhere else, in a different level of reality. All our literatures, the sacred books, myths, legends – the records of the human race – tell of great struggles between good and evil. This struggle is reflected down to the level of the detective story, the Western, the romantic novel. It would be hard to find a tale or a song or a play that does not reflect this battle.

      But, what battle? Where? When? Between what Forces?

      No, no, I do not ‘believe’ that there is a planet called Shammat full of low-grade space pirates, and that it sucks substance from this poor planet of ours; nor that we are the scene of conflicts between those great empires Canopus and Sirius.

      But could it not be an indication of something or other that Canopus and Sirius have played such a part in ancient cosmologies?

      What do our ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reflect?

      I would not be at all surprised to find out that this earth had been used for the purposes of experiment by more advanced creatures … that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t guess and that there might have been a science in the past which we have forgotten … that we may be enslaved in ways we know nothing about, befriended in ways we know nothing about … that our personal feelings about our situation in time, seldom in accordance with fact, so that we are always taken by surprise by ‘ageing’, may be an indication of a different lifespan, in the past – but that this past, in biological terms, is quite recent, and so we have not come to terms with it psychologically … that artefacts of all kinds might have had (perhaps do have) functions we do not suspect … that the human race has a future planned for it more glorious than we can now imagine … that …

      I do not ‘believe’ that there are aliens on our moon – but why not?

      As for UFOs, we may hardly disbelieve in what is so plentifully vouched for by so many sound, responsible, sensible people, scientific and secular.

      As for …

      In this particular book I have created a female bureaucrat who is dry, just, dutiful, efficient, deluded about her own nature. A skilled administrator, she is; a social scientist. I could like Ambien II better than I do. Some of her preoccupations are of course mine. The chief one is the nature of the group mind, the collective minds we are all part of, though we are seldom prepared to acknowledge this. We see ourselves as autonomous creatures, our minds our own, our beliefs freely chosen, our ideas individual and unique … with billions and billions and billions of us on this planet, we are still prepared to believe that each of us is unique, or that if all the others are mere dots in a swarm, then at least I am this self-determined thing, my mind my own. Very odd this is, and it seems to me odder and odder. How do we get this notion of ourselves?

      It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.

      Where do they come from?

      I would so like it if reviewers and readers could see this series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, as a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities.

      What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks.

      But we can’t all be physicists.

       SIRIUS-CANOPUS. BACKGROUND

      This is Ambien II, of the Five.

      I have undertaken to write an account of our experiments on Rohanda, known to Canopus in this epoch as Shikasta.

      I shall employ the time divisions commonly used, and agreed on between ourselves and Canopus. (1) The period up to the first burst of radiation from Andar. (2) That between the first and second bursts of radiation – again from Andar. (3) From the second irradiation to the failure of the Canopus-Rohanda Lock, known as the Catastrophe. This third period is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age. (4) The period of subsequent decline. This account of mine will deal mainly with (4).

      I shall not do more than mention the experiments before the first radiation, which are fully documented under Lower Zoology. During (1) Rohanda was damp, marshy, warm, with shallow seas hardly to be distinguished from swamp, and deep oceans kept turbid by volcanic activity. There was a little dry land. On this were a few land animals, but there were numerous varieties of water lizards, and many fishes. Some of these were unknown on other Colonized Planets, and on our Mother Planet, and we made successful transfers of several species. We also introduced on to Rohanda species from elsewhere, to see what would happen to them. All our experiments during (1) were modest, and did not differ from similar experiments in other parts of our Empire.

      (2) The first burst of radiation from Andar was not expected. Both Canopus and ourselves were taken by surprise. We had kept a watch on the planet ever since the war between us that ended our hostilities. Because of the new situation we boosted our surveillance. The irradiation had the effect of abolishing some genera overnight, and of speeding evolution. The planet remained wet, swampy, steamy, cloudy, with the slow enervating airs that accompany these conditions. Yet new genera and species seemed to explode into life and existing ones rapidly changed. Within no more than a million R-years there were not only many varieties of fish and reptile, but there were species that flew, and insects – both of these formerly unknown. The place teemed with life. It also soon became clear we were to expect a period of the gigantic. The lizards in particular showed this trend: there were many kinds of them, and some were a hundred times, and even more, their former size. The vegetation became huge and rank. Land and water were both infested with enormous animals of all kinds.

      Throughout these times Canopus and ourselves conferred, when it seemed to either or both that this was necessary. Sometimes we, and sometimes Canopus, initiated discussions.

      We always supplied Canopus with reports on our proceedings on the planet, but they did not at that time show much interest. This very important point will be gone into later. Canopus supplied us with reports, but we did not put much effort into studying them. Again, I emphasize that this is an important point, as will later become plain.

      Canopus maintained a monitoring station during (2). We did initiate some experiments in various places over Rohanda, but these were mostly to do with sudden, not to say violent, growth; and since the planet itself was so generously supplying us with observation materials, we did not intrude ourselves very much. It was not a popular place with any of our scientists. Our Planet 13 once had a similar swampy and miasmic climate, and we already had considerable data.

      For something like two hundred million R-years this state of affairs continued. Just as the previous, pre-irradiation characteristics seemed to be stable, if not permanent, so, now, did it seem that this watery pestilential place full of gigantic and savage animals would remain as it was. There then occurred, and again unexpectedly, the second burst of radiation.

      The effects were again dramatic.

      There was every kind of cataclysm and upheaval. Land sank beneath the water and became ocean bed; new land appeared from the seas, and for the first time there was high terrain and even mountains. Volcanic activity had never been absent, since the crust covering the still molten core was so thin, but now land and water were continuously convulsed. The mantle of cloud that had sometimes kept the whole planet in warm gloom for weeks at a time was rent tumultuously with storms and winds.

      All the large species were destroyed.

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