The Sirian Experiments

An unpopular point of view, even now: until recently, impossible.

Until recently, I have been among those who would have made it impossible: this I must say now, and clearly: I am not claiming that I am one who has been preserving an individual (and seditious!) view of history in secrecy, because of an oppressive conformity in the official way of looking at things. Far from it. If there is, if there has been, a minority of individuals who have in fact maintained a view different from the official one, then these will have considered me as a bastion of orthodoxy. This is not an apology I am making. We all see truths when we can see them. When we do, it is always a temptation to consider those who have not yet seen them as quite intrinsically and obdurately stupid.

In throwing in my lot with this minority – if it exists – I am doing so in the expectation of strong criticism – but not, I hope, of worse.

I shall deal at once with what I consider to be the root of the problem: that long-ago war between Canopus and Sirius.

It ended in a Truce … the anniversary of which occasion we still celebrate. The beastliness and horror have been formalized in tales of heroic exploits that we teach our young. The fact is that Canopus won this war, and, at the moment when they might reasonably have been expected to humiliate us and to exact tribute and retribution, they summoned our – thoroughly defeated – leaders, returned to us our Colonized Planets, which they were in a position to retain for themselves, informed us that we must stay behind our own boundaries, offered us co-operation and friendship, and announced that this agreement would be described as a Truce, so that we would not suffer ignominy in the eyes of our fellow states and empires.

A very long time later, and quite recently, I asked my Canopean friend Klorathy, head of their Colonial Administration, what he and others like him now felt about this magnanimous and high-flown behaviour, in view of the fact that we, Sirius, had never given them credit for it, but on the contrary had done everything to expunge from our history books, and even – apparently – from our memories, any hint that Canopus had won that war and had then behaved as no empire has ever – to my knowledge – behaved anywhere. His reply was that ‘it was too early yet to say what the results would be and he preferred to withhold judgement’.

I record this typically Canopean remark. Without comment. Without comment at this place.

I said earlier that Canopus had not shown much interest in the results of our experiments on Rohanda, or on any other planet, for that matter.

Just as we did not understand their attitude at the end of the great war between us, so we did not, do not, understand their indifference to our work.

This is because they, in their own work, have gone so far beyond us. They have never had anything to learn from us. But we have consistently interpreted their attitude as one of dissimulation, believing them to be pretending indifference, out of pride, while secretly ferreting out any information they could, even sending spies into our territories and making use of our work without acknowledgement.

Our set of mind has been one that has consistently led us into wrong judgement.

Let us take an example. That the Conference was on Colony 10 and that it was from here the colonizers for Rohanda were chosen was merely a coincidence. Yet we were talking about the ‘cleverness’ of Canopus in making sure that we met these vigorous and formidable people, so that we would not be tempted to overrun our boundaries on Rohanda. And this belief of ours, crystallized at the Conference – I was one of those responsible, and am in a position to admit to the harm done – continued on into our sojourn on the planet, influencing us in all kinds of ways. But it was quite simply nonsense: we had suggested their Planet 10 ourselves. This is the kind of error suspicion leads us all into.

There are many more examples I could give, but I will deal with the two main factors, or themes, of this Conference: that is, as we were affected. We supplied to Canopus outlines of the experiments we proposed, but did not see then – were not prepared to see! – to what an extent these were to be conditioned by what Canopus proposed to do.

That was at the beginning of the 20,000 years during which we were to profit by Rohanda’s great time, under the influence of Canopus. It was not until later that Canopus decided to speed up her plan, because of her Planet 8, which was due to reach an untimely end because of unforeseen cosmic changes. Canopus was then thinking in terms of 50,000 and not 20,000 years, in which to advance the Colony 10 individuals to a certain level. She informed us that she planned two phases. First, a general heightening and consolidation of these Colony 10 volunteers up to a determined point. (That they were volunteers struck us then as laughable, though it was not long before we were employing the same policy, instead of conscripting.) This predetermined point – and we were offered full information and details – would be marked by what they called a ‘Lock’ – that is, a synchronization between Canopus and Rohanda that would bring the planet into harmony with their Empire as a whole. Harmony of a particular kind.

This, then, was the first theme, one unfamiliar to us at that time. Unfamiliar, I am going to risk saying, even now: for when we use words like harmony, good fellowship, cooperation – which we do plentifully and all the time in relation to our own Empire – we do not mean by them what Canopus means. At the Conference, being told that Canopus proposed to develop the Colony 10 volunteers, to stabilize them, to make use of their evolution to advance the Canopean Empire, what we understood from this was no more than the sort of development, stabilization, evolution, advance, that we associated with our own territories.

The second theme was how Canopus proposed to achieve these admirable results. For we were given – or offered, for we did not make use of this opportunity – all the information we wanted.

We did not accept because we were handicapped by being resentful, even though the general euphoria of the Conference succeeded in masking these unfortunate emotions. The northern areas were plentifully stocked with a certain species of primate. In parts these were already upright, using tools and weapons, with the beginnings of semipermanent settlement. This type of animal, at this level of evolution, is always of value, both for experiment and in training for simple tasks. There were none in Isolated Southern Continent II; and while there were some apes in Southern Continent I, they were at a low level of evolution, suitable for experiment, but of no use at all for work.

We saw Canopus ‘as usual’ grabbing the best of everything, for not once did we remind ourselves that there was no reason we should ever have been allowed on Rohanda at all. It was not we who had discovered this planet.

Canopus told us that certain rapid and desirable developments of the Colony 10 colonists would be because of a ‘symbiosis’ between them and the apes, and that the apes, too, would be benefited. We saw this ‘symbiosis’ in terms of a beneficial cultural exchange and, more specifically, as the superior immigrants being set free for higher tasks by using the apes as servants.

In short, the two main pieces of information, the bases on which the Canopean plan was predicated, were not understood by us at all. In spite of our being told everything. To emphasize this even more: now, looking back at the Conference, I can see that there was nothing not said, not made plain, not explained. But we misinterpreted what we were being told. And again, it is impossible not to ask, now, why Canopus set up the Conference in this way? To forestall reproaches of niggardliness? No! Knowing Canopus, this was not the reason. But they must have realized that we were not taking in what was being said, were understanding everything in our own way.

So why did they do it? It is only recently that I have had an answer to this question. The beginnings of an answer …

The end of the Conference was marked by all kinds of festivities and jollities. We were taken on trips to other Canopean colonies; invited, ‘if we were in that part of the Galaxy’, to visit them for as long as we liked – the usual courtesies.

Back on our Home Planet we Sirians lost no time. Planets in the healthy, vigorous conditon of Rohanda were – and are – rare. We of the Colonial Service were all delighted and full of optimism. Incidentally, it was at that Conference that Rohanda acquired its name. Perhaps this is not the place – it is too soon – to remark that when the planet suffered its cosmic reversal, and ceased to be so pleasant, even if it did not lose any of its fertility, Canopus at once jettisoned the name Rohanda, substituting another, Shikasta, ‘the broken or damaged one’, felt by us to be unnecessarily negative. This mixture of pedantry and poeticism is a characteristic of Canopus, and one that I have always found irritating.

Spacecraft had already thoroughly surveyed both Southern Continents, independently of Canopus. Our scientists had visited selected areas, and recommendations had been made. It was decided that Southern Continent I would be used mainly for agriculture. We had recently acquired our Colonized Planet 23 (C.P. 23) and had found it was well able to sustain large-scale settlement, provided it was supplied with food. This being part of the same solar system as Rohanda, and quite close, we had thought from the start of using one or other of the southern continents as an agricultural base. S.C. I was admirably equipped from the point of view of soil and climate. It was roughly divided into three zones, the middle one, equatorial, being too hot, but the other two, the southern part and the northern part, useful for a vast variety of plants. We introduced several grain plants from both our colonized planets and those of Canopus and developed some indigenous grasses to supply grains and also developed locally-originating tubers and leaf crops. I was not directly in charge of this enterprise. Those interested will find accounts of S.C. I’s twenty-thousand-year career as a food supplier for C.P. 23 in the appropriate documents. During this time, too, several laboratories were maintained on that continent, and a good deal of useful research accomplished. This was nearly all to do with agriculture and the use of indigenous and introduced animals. Our C.P. 23 flourished during this period. Its inhabitants originated on our Home Planet, all of first-class stock, carefully selected. None of their energies needed to be spent on feeding themselves, or on anxieties about their nurture; they had their attention free for mentation and intellectual activity. This twenty-thousand-year period was C.P. 23′s Golden Age, when it achieved the position of Planning Centre for the whole of our Empire. The fact that it was short-lived does not detract from this achievement.

I do not propose to say much more about the experiments on S.C. I. Nor shall I be giving full or even balanced accounts of our experiments on Isolated S.C. II. Details can be found under the appropriate headings.

I shall again say that the purpose of this record is to put forward a certain view of our relations with Canopus. There have been a thousand histories, formal and informal, of our experiments on Rohanda, but not one setting these in the Canopean context. This fact alone makes my point. What I say, therefore, about our researches will be chosen entirely from this point of view; and it must not be thought that the emphases given here would be those adequate from the point of view, let us say, of someone looking at the Rohanda experiments from a long-term view of their evolutionary usefulness. This particular epoch on Rohanda, short though it was, proved crucial in our relations with Canopus, both then and subsequently, and not only on that planet but generally. Which may lead us to ponder profitably on the implications of the fact that a short period of time, twenty thousand years, may turn out to be of more importance than epochs lasting millions of years; and that the small planet of a small and peripheral sun may have more influence than large and impressive-seeming constellations. I feel that this kind of speculation may throw light on the Canopean superiority to us in certain fields of endeavour.

In order to understand how our Colonial Service was thinking, it is necessary to sketch the situation in the Sirian Empire at that time.

Our technological development had reached a peak and had been established long enough for us to understand the problems it must bring. The chief one was this: there was nothing for billions upon billions of individuals to do. They had no purpose but to exist, and then die. That this would be a problem had not been foreseen. I shall at this point hazard the statement that it is usually the central, the main, consequences of a development that are not foreseen. What we had seen was the ending of drudgery, of unnecessary toil, of anxiety over the provision of the basic needs. All our efforts, the expenditures of energy of generations, had gone into this: double or two-branched advance: one aspect of it to do with the conquest of space; the other, with the devices that would set us all free from toil.

We did not foresee that these billions, not only on our Home Planet but also on our Colonized Planets, would fall victim to depression and despair. We had not understood that there is inherent in every creature of this Galaxy a need, an imperative, towards a continual striving, or self-transcendence, or purpose. To be told that there is nothing to do but consume, no work needed, nothing to achieve, is to receive a sentence of death. The hapless millions, offered by their triumphantly successful leaders plenty, leisure, freedom from want, from fear, from effort, showed every symptom of mass psychosis, ranging from random and purposeless violence to apparently causeless epidemics and widespread neurosis. This period, known as the Sirian Dark Age, does not lack its historians, and I shall concentrate on its aspects that are germane to our theme. One was a phenomenon that became known as ‘invented usefulness’. Once the cause of the general malaise had been understood, there were various solutions suggested, of which this was the first attempted: areas that had been relinquished to machines and technical devices were deliberately reclaimed. I will mention one example. Everything to do with the supply and demand of food, and household goods, had been mechanized so that the means in most general use everywhere in the Empire were vast depots, each one of which might supply a million inhabitants, needing no attendants at all. These were dismantled in favour of small suppliers, sometimes specialist suppliers, and the billions employed in this artificial industry were conspicuously happier than the idle masses. For a time. We had to take account of what is, so we know now, a law. This is that where the technology exists to accomplish a service or task or to supply a need, then if this is not used, because of humanitarian or other social reasons, there is no real or lasting satisfaction for the people involved in that sector. They all know, in the end, even if this realization is delayed – sometimes deliberately, and by themselves, in efforts of self-deception – that their labours, their lives, are without real purpose. And – in the end, if this is delayed – they fall victim to the same constellation of ills and general malaise. This is not to say that ‘invented usefulness’ was not plentifully used; that it is not sometimes, in controlled areas, still used. As therapy, for instance; I will shortly describe an experiment on these lines.

Another phenomenon of the Dark Age was named, derisively and with unconcealed resentment, ‘pastimes of the rich’. Few of our better-off citizens did not acquire for themselves land, where they farmed in the old style: ‘pastimes of the rich’ were mostly in the agricultural area. Innumerable people everywhere on our Colonized Planets left their leisure, their controlled and planned entertainments, and regressed to a long-distant past, with families working sometimes quite small plots of land, aiming at full self-sufficiency, but of course using the technical advances when this suited them. A favourite model was the ancient one of crops, animals, and workers as an interacting and mutually dependent unit. Such ‘farms’ might not trade at all, but consumed what was grown. Others did set up trade, not only with each other but sometimes even made links with the cities where their products were in great demand – again with the rich. I do not have to say that the resentment against these ‘drop-outs’ was due to envy. There was a time when it seemed as if there was not a male, female, neuter or child anywhere in our Empire who was not possessed with one idea: to get hold of some land, even by criminal means, and to retreat into primitive production. This period produced its literature, a rich one, which is not the least curious of our literary side products. This phenomenon, at its height, was not confined to parts, or areas, of planets, but whole planets were taken over, and sometimes even conquered, solely with this idea in view. Our Colonized Planets 19 and 22 were for several millennia agricultural paradises, with not a town to be seen and both consciously planned and developed to avoid the growth of villages larger than market-places for the exchange of goods. There were mass movements of mainly young people whose aim was only to reach either of these planets or to conquer a new one. These movements had all the characteristics of the ‘religions’ that afflicted Rohanda in its period of decline and degeneration. To ‘live simply’, to ‘get back to nature’, seemed to nearly everyone the solution to all our new problems. But this phase, too, passed, when it became evident that these artificial schemes, these expedients, did not succeed in stilling the inner drive towards transcendence, both social and personal. There are still such farms, such ideas, in existence, but they have long ago been understood by everyone as pathetic regressions.

It was by then clear to us all that we needed a drastic decrease in population. To state this is enough to raise the questions that then ravaged us all. Were we saying that the conditions of our existence in our Empire were to be governed entirely by economic factors? That the lives of our peoples should be judged solely by the levels of our technical achievements? Of course it goes without saying that when the question was put like this, the answer was that the numbers of populations, and their ways of living, had always been governed by economic factors: all that had happened was that famines, floods, diseases, had been replaced by the consequences of technical development. Nothing had changed: that was the argument. No need to torment ourselves now about questions about the purpose of life, the value of the individual, and so forth. Had we pondered and agonized over the results of natural disasters? Yes? Had this done any good? No? Then why were we now prepared to agonize and torment ourselves over equally uncontrollable factors?

But that was the nub of the thing. We had seen ourselves, in bringing our technical achievements to such a pitch, as being in control, as exercising choice. Our thinking had been governed by this one idea. That we had abandoned chaos, and random decimation; that we had advanced towards conscious and deliberate controls.

To say that we were deliberately choosing to reduce our populations, that this was a choice, was simply not true, no matter how judiciously and carefully we were doing it. We had been forced into this position by our economic growth that had gone naturally from step to step – upwards. As we had seen it.

This debate went on for a long time, throughout our Dark Age, in fact, and while we were actively reducing populations everywhere. And has gone on ever since, in one form or another.

Thus did our technological advances announce to ourselves, to other empires, to anybody interested, that what governed the coming into existence, or not, of an individual, was work. Or the lack of it. And where would that end? Were we to refuse life to more people than we had work for? Surely that was ludicrous, absurd. We needed agriculturalists – these could never, can never, be dispensed with. We needed technicians of all kinds to do with the production of synthetics and foodstuffs and household goods. We needed some craftsmen. And there was necessary a small governing and administrative class. On our Home Planet, it was estimated that we could do very well with half a million people. At our population peak, our Home Planet had two billion people.

Again, it had to be recognized and acknowledged that we were not in control of what we did, for we were forced into what we did. And that our social programming was always a matter of compromises, of adjustments, of balancing one force against another. We had a very small area of choice, if that word could honestly and accurately be used at all.

This realization affected some of our administrative people badly, resulting in depressions and psychological maladjustments of all kinds.

The populations everywhere, on every one of our planets, were drastically, but carefully reduced; while the philosophical aspects of the matter were left, temporarily, to the intellectuals.

There was a very long period while this was being done when there were blocs of vast numbers of people who had no occupation, and for whom occupation was made. This fact, too, is relevant to what follows.

Meanwhile, there were extraordinary and bizarre contradictions to be observed everywhere.

The idea of ourselves, not only on the Home Planet but everywhere, as people who had evolved beyond certain levels made it impossible for them to be asked to do some kinds of work.

I did not mention in the list of classes of work that had still to be done by people and not machines, some kinds of heavy manual labour, for which we had not found technical substitutes. Without using force, it was not possible to get any of our peoples to undertake these. In the early heady days of euphoria when we were so effortlessly and successfully – it seemed – surmounting every kind of technical obstacle, abolishing one by one the different classes of unpleasant and degrading work – so we called it – intensive propaganda had gone into adjusting and setting the minds of populations accordingly. When we reversed, or were prepared to adjust, our thinking, it was too late. It is easy for a skilled administrative class to change the ways of thinking of populations, but not easy to do it fast – not without all kinds of social upheaval. We found ourselves in the ludicrous situation where, with hundreds of millions of ‘surplus’ people, we did not know where to find enough ordinary labourers.

We had evolved beyond using force: Canopus had shown us this path long ago. (By this I mean the use of larger numbers of people, under duress, for tasks they found abhorrent or demeaning. This did not mean that we did not conscript for work that everyone agreed to find interesting – such as the Colonial Service.) It was not possible for us simply to round up the numbers we needed for mining, quarrying, building and so on, and then turn them into a prison population to do society’s dirty work.

In the preceding remarks to do with our condition during that time, I have not yet done more than mention the space drive, which was the greater part of our development – indeed, the motor that governed all our technical development.

Our crisis had its own built-in solution from the beginning. It was to increase our space fleets, our space personnel, our programme for the conquest of space. Our situation was not a static one, not self-limited. Though it certainly did have its limits: the war with Canopus was a result of this sudden restless drive outwards. The devastation caused, the vast numbers killed, certainly solved, or postponed, some problems. I am speaking now dispassionately, and without submission to sentimental considerations: it had not been our intention to use this way of reducing our surplus populations – but that was the result; not our intention to ruin whole planets, so that much labour would be needed to repair them – but that was what happened. These were the facts. But the inherent productivity and resources of our Empire were such that all this damage was soon and easily – looking at it from a long-term view – put right. The real lesson of this war was that we were not to be allowed to trespass on Canopean territory. Certain parts of the Galaxy were out of bounds. This meant that the planets available to us, at our then level of technical achievement, were limited: we had already conquered, or at least surveyed, them all. What was necessary was an expansion of our space technology so that greater areas of the Galaxy would become open to us. This is what happened; but this story does not concern us here: only the aspects of it that help to make clear the general situation then, which was, to sum up: a deep and indeed permanent and incurable crisis due to technical mastery, which could be alleviated only by a continuous expansion in space.

I have now said enough to set the background to our experiments on Rohanda – which of course was only one of the planets being used in this way.

There are very few biosociological experiments that are not the result of natural development; whether they are set up deliberately or merely monitored as they unfold. Our first on Rohanda was imposed on us by necessity throughout and came definitely into the category of those that are observed during changes imposed by extraneous pressures.

I am starting with the Lombis, not because it was the first experiment but because it had long-term effects on the planet.

THE LOMBI EXPERIMENT. SOME OTHERS (#u09462e05-4818-590f-ae7b-51d682aa4d7e)

Colonized Planet 23 needed to be made ready for the Thinkers … the reader may detect a note of derision in that phrase: but it is not my intention to detail social controversies of that long-past time: the criticisms of the institution of a planet devoted entirely to one function were certainly many, but these did not in any way affect it. It was a barren planet, waterless, all rock and sand and extinct volcanoes. Our activities there cannot be regarded as experiments, because we had long since perfected techniques for existing on such planets. We had to make structures that were self-contained, with their own climates and atmospheres. Once created, such societies needed very little maintenance. It was quite easy to grow food by hydroponic and other techniques, but these had proved to have their limitations. One was in the area of grains. There were other foodstuffs, too, that did not do well in these limited conditions. And it had been long established that while adequate for maintaining life, crops produced in water lacked an element that we only later isolated. But this subject can be studied under its headings. It had been decided that since C.P. 23 was close to Rohanda, which was so fertile, there was nothing to be gained by planning C.P. 23 to feed itself. The structures on C.P. 23 were therefore not as comprehensive and vast as they sometimes are on such planets; but they were large enough so that flying over it, the entire surface seemed to be covered by glistening silvery blisters: the domes of the controlled environment.