The Sirian Experiments - Doris Lessing

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direct by ‘those from the stars’. I was not considered as emanating from ‘the stars’. It happened that in physical type I was not far off from the Adalantaland general type: they were mostly fair-haired people, pale-skinned, with eyes often blue, and on the whole tending towards a large build, and plenty of flesh. My height and thinness caused much concern for my general health. I spent time with the currently reigning Queen, or Mother, who lived no better than her subjects, nor was in any way set up over them. The focus of my special curiosity was one that could not be shared with them. I wanted to know how it was that this realm managed to be so well ordered, lacking crime and public irresponsibility, when these qualities were not to be expected of Rohanda in this time of a general falling-off. The beautiful and generous and genial Queen, or Mother, of course did not realize that this paradise of hers – for she and her subjects saw their land as one, and knew they were much envied by more barbarous races – was not an apex of a long growth from a low culture to a high one, but was nothing but a shadow of former greatness that lay on the other side of that Catastrophe, the failure of the Lock. There were hints in old legends of a disaster of some sort, and many to do with the ‘Gods’ who were watching over them and ‘would come again’. They had come in the time of this Queen’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. From the description I recognized Klorathy. He had given fresh precepts, somewhat at an angle to those used previously; had – also – rebuked, and had strengthened in them their purpose towards the maintenance of their fair and smiling land.

      And the secret laws? The Queen was not at all reluctant to share these with me; the only reason, she said, that they were not given out to everyone, and written up on the public stones, was that they were so precise and pernickety – yes, I recognized Canopus here! – ordinary people, preoccupied as they had to be with ordinary life, could not be expected to bother with them.

      These precepts were the same as those given to us Sirians by Canopus, used by us and already considered as Sirian, at least to the extent that it was hard to remember their Canopean origin. I even remember a feeling of affront and annoyance at hearing the Queen describe the things as from Canopus, remember chiding myself for this absurdity.

      The Queen took time and trouble to explain these regulations, which were all to do with what substances would protect and guard, how to use them, the times to use them, the exact disposition of artefacts and how and when, certain types of place to avoid and others to seek out … and so on. There is no point in listing them, for they were not always the same, but changed, and we had been told how to change them and in accordance with what cosmic and local factors.

      But I noted that in what the Queen was telling me were inaccuracies. Slight divergencies from prescription. It was a disturbing experience for me to sit quietly listening while this competent and friendly lady explained to me the conduct that must be followed on Adalantaland to preserve health, sanity, and correct thinking, when I was using these same laws of conduct myself … but using them not exactly in the same manner. My observances were more likely to be correct, since I had only just left Klorathy, who checked them with me. Yet he had told me not to alter this Queen’s practices; had not mentioned them. So I said nothing.

      The Queen wanted to know what part of Rohanda I came from, and I spoke to her of the Southern Continents, of which she had heard. In fact her mariners had visited the coasts of both – this interested me, of course, and from what she said, it seemed that these coasts had been explored by them. But recently she had forbidden voyages far afield: there was disquiet and alarm abroad, had I not felt it? People had not spoken to me of their fears and forebodings? Well, if not, that was because I was a foreigner and it would be discourteous to spread such unhappy states of mind. But as for her, the Queen, and the other Mothers who governed this land, they felt that indeed there was reason to fear. Had I not heard of the great earthquakes that had swallowed whole cities down southwards? Of storms and tempests where normally the climate was equable … So she talked, her great blue eyes, which reminded me of the seas I had been hovering over only a few R-days before, roaming restlessly about, worried, full of trouble … and I was experiencing a lesson in the relative, for she was in fear for her culture, her beautiful land, while I had recently been contemplating the destruction of planets, cities, cultures, realms – and flying over large tracts of earthquake-devastated landscape in a frame of mind not far off that used for contemplating the overthrow of termite-queendom, or the extinction of a type of animal for some reason or other.

      I left Adalantaland regretfully and travelled slowly to the coast where I had left my space bubble, not wanting to leave this realm of such lush and full fields, such orchards and gardens, so many orderly and well-kept towns – and not wanting to say goodbye either to these handsome people. I was thinking, as I went, about their third precept, that they must not take more than they could use, for it seemed to me to go to the heart of the Sirian dilemma … who should use what and how much and when and what for? Above all what for!

      The scene that I saw when I looked down from my space bubble, and the thoughts in my mind then are very clear to me: it is because after the ‘events’, as soon as I knew that everything I had surveyed was chaos and desolation, I took pains to retrieve my mental picture of it all so that it was clear in my mind, ready for instant recall.

      I could see a great deal: below me the fair and smiling islands of those blessed latitudes … on one hand the great ocean that spread to the Isolated Northern Continent, with its unstable family of islands, now all visible and alive … to the north, the little patch of ice and snow whose very existence showed the sensitive and exact nature of Rohanda’s relation with her sun … southwards the coasts of the main landmass stretched – at first balmy and delightful, then rocky and parched – to the burning regions of the middle latitudes … and inland from these coasts, the vastness of the mainland itself, where I had never been, though Ambien I had. I longed to see them. Such forests and jungles were there! – so he said: he had darted back and forth across and about in his spacecraft and even so advantaged had found it impossible to easily mark the bounds of these forests. The beasts in the forests! – such a multitude of them and such a variety of species, some of them even now unknown to us. And beyond the forests, on great plateaux lying under blue and crystal skies, the cities that Ambien I spoke of. These were not the mathematical cities of the Great Time, but were remarkable and amazing places, often with systems of government unknown to us, some of them benign and comfortable to live in, and some tyrannous and very wicked. There they lay, a day’s easy journey in my little craft, and it seemed that Canopus did not mind my travels in their dispensation, and so there was nothing to stop my going there at once … nothing except my state of mind, which was most unpleasant, and every moment getting worse.

      I did not know what was happening to me. We have all of us experienced those shadows from the future we call ‘premonitions’. I was not unfamiliar with them. It seemed as if I was inside a black stuffy room or invisible prison, where it was hard even to draw breath, and from where I looked down on those brilliant scenes of sea and land that seemed to baffle and reject my sight, because of my state of mind. I kept thinking of Klorathy’s warning … just as the thought formed that his warnings were filling me with something I had only just recognized as terror, it happened …

      What happened?

      I have been asked often enough by our historians, delighted that just for once they had an actual eyewitness to such an event. And I always find this first moment hard.

      There was an absolute stillness that seemed to freeze all of the scene below me. The air chilled – all at once, and instantaneously. I looked wildly around into the skies around me, with their Rohandan clouds and vast blue spaces – and could see nothing. Yet I was stilled, checked, silenced in all my being.

      Suddenly – only that is not the word for the instantaneous nature of this happening – I was in total darkness, with the stars swinging about around me. I was in starlight. And now the stillness had been succeeded by a hissing roar. I looked down to see if the scene under me had also been vanished away, and saw that I was in movement – my craft

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