The Sirian Experiments

I will not waste time describing our encounters with these Shammatans. There were many, because they would not take our ‘no’ as final. They lacked inner discrimination as to other people’s intentions. What they wanted was this. They had heard of our experiments with deliberately breeding first-quality colonizers. They knew everything about these, so we had to come to terms with knowing that their spying on us had been as intensive as ours on Canopean territory. Shammat wanted to ‘take off our hands’ some of our surplus females. There were very few on that horrible planet of theirs. Those they had were not ‘able to match demand’. I cannot exaggerate the crudity of their thought, and their talk.

While we continued to refuse, for of course there was no question of submitting any peoples under our care to such criminal savages, and while they continued to arrive day after day at our door, as if we had not discussed everything already, a pretty clear and unwelcome picture of their activities was forming in our minds.

Shammat had been on Rohanda for some time, both sending down spaceships, though not often, and fostering a small colony that continually kept spies at work among the Canopean settlements. This was the explanation of the easy reception of our first emissaries: our visits had by no means been the first received by the Giants and the natives. Whatever it was Shammat had wanted, they had not been given it. Our visitors were cunning and evasive, but not able to hide what they felt and thought. They were angry, no, murderous, because of blocks and checks received from Canopus. And it wasn’t – from Canopus – females they had wanted, but something else. What this was we did not know, nor did we find out – for millennia, millennia! And we did not find out because we did not know the nature of Canopus, any more than Shammat did. But Shammat had suspected, had wanted, had tried to get – like Sirius. And Shammat succeeded where we failed. I am making this statement, here and now, without concealment – though certainly not without trepidation, nor without anticipating criticism – that Shammat the barbarous, the criminal, the horrible, that planet that for so long we cannot remember the beginnings of it has been a synonym for everything disgusting and to be despised: it was Shammat who found out something at least of the Canopean secrets. Enough to steal a little. And we, Sirius, the civilized, the highly developed have not found out.

To return to smaller matters. We of course wanted to know why these pirates had not simply stolen females from Canopus, since a spacecraft had been stolen – if not more than one. We could only conclude that Shammat was afraid of Canopus, and afraid of us, too: believing that punishment would more likely follow theft of people than theft of things. Rightly. But there was more to it than that. These Shammatans, returning day after day, climbing up the road to our fortress headquarters, did so for the same reason we were so ready to listen to them: they wanted to find out what we were doing.

We asked them at one point why they had not simply kidnapped some of the indigenous natives – at this point we had to suffer conniving glances and grimaces, as fellow criminals – but saw that they wanted not the unevolved unregenerate stock but the new improved stock, and members of this they were afraid of stealing, since they were all in the new fine cities, where the Giants lived, too. They were quite remarkably shamefaced and shifty about this, and itching with greed. Why had they not stolen some members of our other species – both failed and successful – who had, at various times, populated the Southern Continents? But again, it was the same: all these different types and kinds and stocks and strains were not good enough. Not good enough for these nasty thieves of Shammatans, sitting there in their red jackets – Canopean ex-colonial uniform of centuries back; in their green pantaloons – Puttioran fashion, long outdated; their hide shoes made from some unfortunate animals somewhere. No, they wanted the best. Their eyes were fevered as they talked of the fine, handsome, healthy females in the glorious cities up north. And they talked lip-lickingly of ‘those females on Canopus – they’ve got yellow hair and blue eyes, so we hear …’ (This was untrue.) And all this while they ate me up with their eyes. I could see that their fingers itched to feel my hair and poke at my pale skin.

Shortly after these nasty visitors took themselves off – back to the northern areas, not to Shammat – we discovered that the females who had volunteered for breeding service had also been visited by Shammat. To the extent that some of the progeny were Shammatan. There had been plots to escape, with Shammatan help. These had failed. But it was now important to watch for Shammat characteristics among the new race of colonizers that we had been so proud of. Later still we had again to modify our conclusions. Some of the breeding females had in fact escaped. Their places had been taken by Shammatan substitutes. The escaped ones had gone to Shammat, taking a good supply of the very best Sirian genes with them. Some of these females had originated in our C.P. 7 of fair-haired, blue-eyed stock – Planet 7 was the birthplace of my mother. They had proved very popular on Shammat, and new suppliers were being demanded …

I now come to the end of this phase on Rohanda.

About ten thousand years after the Canopus-Rohanda ‘Lock’, we were summoned to an urgent conference. Canopus had to announce disaster. Unexpected cosmic changes … failure of the ‘Lock’ … total write-off of the poor planet for whose sake Rohandan development had been speeded up … degeneration and dislocation of Rohanda inevitable.

We were told to expect random and wild mutations and changes of every kind among our experimental species; advised to limit our attempts until these changes could be monitored and understood.

I have to admit that at first we believed this was a feint, a ploy. Particularly as we did not receive reports of any increased activity in the north – for instance, no increase in visits by their spacecraft. But then, their visits had always been few, and this had reinforced our belief that the ‘contacts’ they were always hinting at were to do with communications.

We heard that a single emissary had arrived and was stationed in a circular city in a region where there were many inland seas. This was Johor, an official then of junior rank. Soon after that, our spies reported that spacecraft had taken off nearly the entire complement of Giants from the north, though a few had escaped. Our spies then submitted reports that seemed contradictory, vague, even foolish – we understood that Canopus had not exaggerated the ill-effects that would be expected. We recalled our spies, though a few never returned at all, and shipped out the remaining experimental subjects. After only a few years, these were showing signs of a decrease in life-span and of a tendency towards rapid reversal to barbarism – but this particular phase of Rohanda is so well documented under Social Pathology that I shall not linger over it: it has become, after all, the classic case of sudden evolutionary reversal.

Our most urgent question was C.P. 23, which had been established as our Think-Planet – if I may be forgiven the flippancy at such a serious point in my story. It was completely dependent on supplies from Southern Continent I. We decided not to make alterations in our agricultural stations. It was necessary to increase our police establishment almost at once, for it was discovered that workers previously quite reliable had taken to pilfering, and then, slowly, to various kinds of criminality. Still we maintained our agriculture. Then something unexpected: waves of invaders from the area of the inland seas came sweeping down, destroying first the more northerly agricultural stations, but then penetrating further and further south. Who were these rapacious ones? None other than the natives brought to such a high pitch of civic and personal responsibility by Canopus. What it amounted to was that we would have to maintain armies right across the top of Southern Continent I. Full-scale and urgent conferences were held on the Sirian Mother Planet itself. Our military resources were already stretched to their limit by the unrest on many of our Colonized Planets. We had no alternative but to withdraw from Rohanda. Other arrangements were going to have to be made for C.P. 23: its brief but glorious career was concluded, and the Thinkers were transferred elsewhere.

I went on a last survey of S.C. I, just before the end. Everywhere over this noble continent, similar to S.C. II, but even larger and more various, were our agricultural areas. Each little group of buildings was surrounded by vast fields over which our servicing and surveillant machines hovered, glittering in the sunlight: green and yellow and umber fields, and brightly coloured craft. The shining rivers … the infinitely variegated greens of the plantations … the irrigation canals … enormous transparent structures of hydroponics, and for general research … I cannot pretend that I enjoyed that final trip. Even then they were dismantling the stations, while the enormous craft of our Inter-Colony Heavy Transport Fleet were landing and taking off, loaded with these structures, and with the last of our crops. I flew over some stations that had already been evacuated. Our policy to disrupt the landscape as little as possible had succeeded. Nothing was left to be seen but some hastily harvested fields, that would shortly be reclaimed by jungle and forest, and some belts of introduced trees that were already Rohandan. The millennia of our occupation would soon have left no traces.

I was not feeling myself, and Ambien I was not well either. We put this down to disappointment at this check of our plans. Then all our team confessed to general malaise and low spirits. It became evident that our mental powers were being affected. There was nothing for it: I gave the order for us all to leave Rohanda.

Shortly after that, Canopus convened a conference, again on Colony 10. Rohanda was only one of the items on the agenda. At the time it did not seem more important than the others.

It has always seemed to me that this question of ‘hindsight’ is not to be solved!

What I see now, looking back, is not what I experienced then, but are we to cancel our former, and more immature, ways of viewing things? As if they did not matter, had no effect? – but of course not.

Among the many interests Canopus and Sirius had in common at that time one stood out. The Colony 10 Giants, returned to their own planet and waiting for new work to be allotted to them, had suffered. Now twice the size of their former compatriots and evolved beyond them, they could not settle in their old ways, nor was Planet 10 able to accept them easily. Superiority is never easily tolerated.

There was no planet among the Canopean colonies that could usefully welcome the Giants. Not immediately. Having learned of the Giants’ capacities, and believing of them that they could make – almost overnight, evolutionarily speaking – civilized races out of apes, we wished Canopus to ‘lend’ us the Giants in order that they might teach our specialized colonists ‘their tricks’. Yes, that is how we talked. There is no point in blushing for it now. Canopus steadily, kindly, gently, resisted us. It was not possible, they said. We saw in the refusal niggardliness; saw in it reluctance to help Sirius to advance beyond Canopus – saw in it everything but what was there. Formal application had been made to Canopus for this ‘loan’ and it was the main item on the agenda, and the chief topic of all the informal discussions during the conference. There was ill-feeling on our side. Resentment. As usual.

The general atmosphere of the conference was low and dispirited. Canopus had been shaken by the Rohanda failure, and was made miserable, as they freely confessed, because of the fate of the unfortunate Planet 8, which they now could not save and which, even as the conference took place, was being abandoned, with loss of life and potentiality. And we Sirians were low, too, because of Rohanda. I cannot in fact remember a conference that had so little of the energy that comes from success; though of course it did not lack purpose and determination for the future.

For me personally the conference was important because it was there I first saw Klorathy, who led their team. It was he who supplied the occasion with what vitality it could aspire to. I liked him at once. He was – and is – a vigorous, abrasive, sardonic being who can always be counted on to alleviate the torpors and languors that attend even the best conferences. We were attracted, told each other so, in the way of course appropriate to our life-stages: both of us had our breeding-bond phases behind us. Ambien I also liked him, and we all three looked forward to many pleasant and useful encounters.

It was Klorathy who had to carry the burden of refusing us the Giants, and I recall his patience as he over and over repeated: But, you see, it is not possible … while we didn’t see.

I can do no better than to get down the main points of the agenda as it related to Rohanda, in order to illustrate points of view then and now.

1 The Canopean-Rohandan Lock had failed – the basic fact.

2 That degeneration of various kinds must be expected – which we had already experienced.

3 That Canopus intended to maintain their link with Rohanda, some sort of skeleton staff, in order to maintain the flow at a steady minimum level.

4 As far as could be seen, the cosmic alignments that had caused this Disaster would not reverse for several hundred thousand years, after which there would be no reason Rohanda could not revert to its flowering flourishing healthy condition.

5 That (and this was to them – to Canopus – the most important factor in this summing up) Shammat of Puttiora had discovered the nature of the Canopus-Rohandan bond, and was tapping strength from it. And was already waxing fat and prosperous on it.

I can only say that, reading these words now, and remembering what I saw in them then, I have to marvel at my blindness.

Again, resentment was partly the cause. And also fear: There was much talk 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.

THE SITUATION IN THE SIRIAN EMPIRE (#u09462e05-4818-590f-ae7b-51d682aa4d7e)

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 to even mention this ‘existential problem’ – and that epoch lasted for millennia. Of course, there were all kinds of underground movements and subversive sects devoted to ‘maintaining knowledge of the truth’.