The Sirian Experiments

‘What do you mean, Klorathy? – when you talk of Shammat-nature?’ – and as I asked the question I thought of those avid greedy faces, those glittering avaricious eyes. ‘A savage is a savage. A civilized race behaves like one.’ At which he smiled, sadly, and in a way that did not encourage me to press him.

What Klorathy hoped to achieve by this present excursion into the realm of the dwarves was first of all to encourage them, saying that Canopus was doing what it could. Secondly, he said he would now go out to meet with the Hoppes and the Navahis and put it to them that to harry these excellent craftsmen of the mountains was folly – better rather to become allies with them, to trade, and to stand together with them against the vicious children of Shammat who were the enemies of both, the enemies of everyone. Therefore, Klorathy asked them – sitting again in the vast cavern under its canopy of twinkling lights, on the warm white sand that the dwarves carried from the outside rivers to make clean shining floors for themselves – leaning forward into the low and immediate light of the electric handlamps: be patient. When – if – the tribesmen come offering treaties and trade, then see if ways cannot be found to do this without laying themselves open to traps and treason. For his part, he, Klorathy, pledged himself to do what he could. And so we left that deeply hidden and fantastic realm, with its race of earthy craftsmen, being escorted into the outer air and the blue skies towards which the dwarves lifted their longing and exiled eyes before fleeing away into the earth again.

Now we had to make contact with the tribesmen.

Their lookouts soon saw us as we walked across the rocky and raw landscape, with no aim except to be captured. Which we were, and taken to their camp. This was the usual functional unit of the Modified Two stage. Their skills were less than those of the dwarves, so soon to be extinct. They hunted, and lived on the results of their hunting, and had developed a close harmonious bond with the terrain on which they lived. In which they had their being, as they – as their religion – saw it.

They did us no harm, because they recognized in us something of the stuff of certain legends – all about Canopus. Always of that Empire, never of ours. I drew the attention of my colleagues in the Service when I returned home to the fact that even in territories close to our allotted portion of Rohanda, which might be expected to owe some sort of allegiance to us, to Sirius, it was to Canopus that their higher allegiances were pledged, were given. Why was this? Surely there was a fault here in our presentation of ourselves?

These Hoppes recognized us – all three – as ‘from there’, meaning Canopus. So it was as honorary Canopeans that we were welcomed into the camp, and then as guests at a festival that lasted thirty R-days, and nights, which Klorathy obviously much enjoyed. I cannot say that I did. But I recognized even then that the ability to become part of – I was going to say ‘to sink oneself into’, but refrained, because of the invisible moral pressure of Canopus – an unfamiliar scene, a foreign race, even one considered (perhaps out of ignorance) inferior, is one to be admired, commended, and even emulated, if possible. I did try to behave as Klorathy did and as Ambien I was doing, as far as he was able. Klorathy feasted and even danced with them, told stories, in their tongue – and yet was able never to be less than Canopus.

And when the feasting was over, I was expecting something on these lines: that Klorathy would say to them: I have some news for you, some suggestions to make, now is the time for us to confer seriously and solemnly and at length, please make arrangements for a formal occasion at which this may be done.

But nothing of the sort happened. Klorathy, in the tent they had allotted to him, and we two Ambiens, in our tents, simply went on as we were, taking part in the life of the tribe.

And now I have to record something that I most bitterly regret, for it set back my understanding for a very long time. Millennia. Long ages. I missed an opportunity then. I shall simply say it, and leave the subject.

I was impatient and restless. I found these Hoppe savages interesting enough and I would have stood it all – the lack of privacy, the flesh food, the casualness and indifference to dirt, the thousand and one taboos and proscriptions of their religion – if I had known the ordeal would have a term. The other Ambien advised patience. I did not listen to him but went to Klorathy and demanded how long he proposed to ‘waste his time on these semibrutes’. His reply was: ‘As long as it is necessary.’

I consulted with Ambien I, who said he would stay with Klorathy, if ‘Klorathy would put up with him’ – a humility that annoyed me – and I took our surveillance craft, leaving him dependent on Klorathy for transport, and flew up northwards by myself.

This was the first time a Sirian had openly travelled into Canopean territory. Klorathy made no attempt to stop me, or discourage me. Yet he did say, quietly, just before I left: ‘Be careful.’ ‘Of what, Klorathy?’ ‘All I know is that our instruments seem to indicate some sort of magnetic disturbance – in my view it would be wiser to stay in the centre of a continent rather than anywhere at sea level.’ I thanked him for the warning.

ADALANTALAND (#u09462e05-4818-590f-ae7b-51d682aa4d7e)

Millennia had passed since I travelled this way with Ambien I. From the height I was flying, the terrain mostly showed little signs of change, but there were areas sometimes several minutes flying time across (I was in a Space Conqueror Type III, long since obsolete) where below me was nothing but savagely torn and tumbled rock, stumps of trees, overthrown or shaken mountains. I remembered that the cities of the middle seas, which I had flown over with Ambien, had been shaken into ruin and wondered if this was in fact a particularly seismic time on this always precarious planet. Flying over the areas of islands and broken waters that had been, and would be again, the great empty ocean separating the Isolated Northern Continent and the central landmass, I thought I saw that some islands were quite new, as if they had just been upthrust from the ocean bed. The island that had been covered by that marvellous city surrounded by its great ships had been under the ocean and risen out of it again. It had some rather poor villages on it now. But I wanted to see that area of great inland seas again, and I flew over and around it seeing everywhere near the rocky sunlit shores, ruins and collapsed buildings, some gleaming up from under the waters. But the region of these seas was rich and fruitful and would soon again put forth cities, as it had done so often before. It was, however, discouraging to see how transient things were and must always be on this planet, and I fell into a state of mind unusual for me, of the generalized discouragement known by us Sirians as ‘existential problem melancholia’. For what I felt was nothing more than the emotional expression of our philosophic dilemmas: what were the purposes of plannings, our manipulations, our mastery of nature? I was in the grip of a vision – as I hung there in my little bubble of a spacecraft, looking down at that magically beautiful place (for Rohanda was always that), the brilliant blue seas like great irregular gems in their setting of warm reddish soil – of impermanence, as if this little glimpse of a small part of a small planet was an encapsulation of the whole Galaxy that always, despite its illusions of great stretches of time where nothing much changed, nevertheless did change, always, and it was not possible to grasp a sense of it as lasting or of anything as permanently valuable … I hovered above that lovely but desolating scene for as long as I could bear it and then directed myself northwards again to Adalantaland, for I wanted to see what a peaceful realm run by women would be like on Rohanda in its time of rapid degeneration. Analyses of Adalantaland are plentifully available in our libraries, so I shall confine myself only to my present purposes.

It was a large island among several on the edge of the main landmass. While the middle areas of Rohanda at that time could be described as too hot for comfort, the northern and southern parts were equable and warm and very fruitful. It was a peaceful culture, rather indolent perhaps, and hedonistic, but democratic, and the line of women who were its rulers governed by ‘the grace of Canopus’, which were a set of precepts engraved on stones and set up everywhere over the island. There were three main rules, the first saying that Canopus was the invisible but powerful lawgiver of Rohanda and would punish transgressions of its Rule; the second that no individual should consider herself better than another, nor should any individual enslave or use another in a degrading way; the third that no person should take more from the general stock of food and goods than was absolutely necessary. There were many subdivisions of these precepts. I moved freely over this well-governed and pacific land, and found these laws were known by everyone and on the whole kept, though the third was perhaps rather freely interpreted. I was told that the Mothers had other, secret, laws given them 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 ‘EVENTS’ (#u09462e05-4818-590f-ae7b-51d682aa4d7e)

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 was being spun about so that I could not see steadily. Yet I was able to make out the coastlands of the main landmass, and the islands, one of which was Adalantaland. My mind was clear only in flashes – as if lightning lit a landscape and then left it dark. This is why I had no coherent idea then of what was happening. Moments of intense clarity, when I was able to work out that Rohanda had turned over on itself, as a globe in a decelerating spin may wobble over – an understanding that this need no more affect the tiny inhabitants on its surface than the microbes of a child’s ball know that they are in violent and agitated movement as the ball is flung from hand to hand and bounced here and there, but continue complacently with their little lives – calculations of how this reversal of the planet might affect it … all this went on in my mind in those moments of brilliant thought, when that mind in fact worked at a level I have not known since, in between periods of black extinction.

I had no idea how long this thing went on, and can only say now that it was for some hours – so our astronomers have calculated. Suddenly – and again I have to emphasize that this word cannot in any way convey the feeling that the event happened in an order of time not Rohandan – I was back in sunlight. The scene below did not change – that is, not for a long moment. And then all at once, flick! just like that, Adalantaland vanished beneath the sea, and a whirlpool formed where it had been. My eyes drawn to that place, darkened in grief for the loss of those people, were nevertheless aware that all around the periphery of my vision islands were vanishing, leaving their spins of water, or land was rising up – and sometimes islands would plunge under the waters and then almost at once rise up again, seeming to be settled there stable and permanent, and then, flick! they disappeared. When I was able to withdraw my immediate grief from Adalantaland, to gain a wider view, I was able to see all over the great ocean the islands that studded it had gone. And have not come back again since … and that is when the Isolated Northern Continent became permanently isolated. Though of course I am using that word relatively: often enough I have flown from one end of that enormous expanse of waters, with its few and clustered islands, and remembered those other times, and thought how at any moment those old islands may rise again, bare, water-scoured, to begin their slow process of weathering into fruitfulness and plenty. Not only islands were vanishing or appearing – everywhere the earth of the mainland was bulging up and buckling, and the waters were rocking and spouting and sloshing about as they do when someone jumps heavily into a water pool. There was a foul mineral smell. The scene grew wilder as I watched – as I intermittently watched, for I was being spun about and I could see only in flashes. Spouts of water miles high rose into the air and crashed thunderously, land spurted upwards like water, clouds formed in the skies in a swift massing process that seemed impossible – and then poured down at once in rain. Suddenly everything below was whitened: the rain had fallen as snow, and I was in a blizzard being whirled about in shrieking winds. And yet, immediately afterwards, the white had all gone, warm rains had washed the snow away from the heaving spurting boiling surfaces of the globe, and I saw that the ice of the pole had gone, and where it had been was a spinning whirlpool – and then the spin of the water was slower, was hardly there, a crust was forming over it, and the white of the ice cover gleamed again, and spread, was rapidly growing. Again I was in a thick snowstorm that seemed to be weighing down my little bubble. I felt that I was sinking down, was being pressed down, and then again – and with that same unimaginable suddenness – a wind arose from somewhere and carried me violently off. Of course none of my instruments was working, nor had worked since the start of this violent re-orientation of Rohanda. I did not know where I was being sucked or pulled, but felt that it was not any longer in a vortex or spin but was direct, in a straight line. And I was always inside the thick swirl of snow that was like no snow I had ever seen anywhere or on any planet. I knew I was being steadily pressed down by it and readied myself for a crash. Now that I was able to be more calm, because of this long steady drive onwards inside the storm, without sudden twists or dizzyings, I was able to hear again: beyond the dreadful hush of the snowfall and the howl of the wind that drove me were the multitudinous sounds of the earth itself, groaning and shrieking, moaning and grinding … this went on for some time, and yet, even as it did, there were sudden spaces or moments within this time when the opposite happened. I mean that I suddenly found myself in sun and wetness, clouds of steam arising everywhere and not a trace of snow to be seen anywhere under me: a water world, with spouts of water flung up to the height of my craft, lower now than it was, far too close to the earth, and in that space of – a few minutes? seconds? – I was able to direct my craft upwards, away from the heave and churn of the muddy steamy land under me. And then the snow descended again and the cold was intense and frightful. I lost consciousness, I think, or at least if I did not, the awfulness of the strain has blocked out my memory. For what I remember next is that I had come to rest, and the crystal shell of my little space bubble was hot and glittery with sun. I was beyond rational thought, or decision, and I opened it and stepped out – risking death from a change of atmosphere, though I certainly did not think of that. The sun was what struck me at first. It had a different look to it. Seemed smaller … yet not much. Seemed cooler … but was that possible? I wondered if I had been tossed off Rohanda altogether and had arrived on another planet. I wondered if the upheavals and tumultuousness had affected my senses … my ability to judge … even my mind. Yet I held on fast to my first impression, as one does to some idea, quite stubbornly and sometimes it seems almost at random, to steady one in a time of upheaval. I was holding on obstinately to the fact that the Rohandan sun had changed … was smaller. I was able even to reach out – unclearly and uncertainly – towards the truth, that Rohanda had been driven, or sucked, or pulled, further away from her mother-sun by this cosmic accident she had suffered, and I was with one part of my mind working out the possible results of this. Meanwhile, I was standing by my little crystal bubble on a high mountain that was still ‘normal’ in that it had trees and vegetation on it, though everything leaned about or lay crashed on the earth. I have no idea exactly where this mountain was. I was looking out over a plain where the earth had been convulsed about, because there were cracks in it, some many miles in length, and sometimes miles across, and there were volcanoes and rivers of mingled lava and water opening new beds for themselves. I could hardly breathe for the sulphurous smell. And I had a queer dreamlike vision that lasted only a few moments, of herds of animals – some of which I had never seen, so strange and new to me that I could not believe in them … these were running across the plain between the cracks and the spouting geysers and volcanoes, crying out and screaming and trumpeting and raging, and the multitudinous herds poured around the base of the mountain and vanished, and I was left wondering if I had seen them, just as I was wondering if I had been in that snow, had seen the whole globe blotted out by snow … and even as I thought about the snow, again it fell – I saw that everywhere in front of me was instantly covered by thick wads of blue and green and yellow ice, which came to the foot of the mountain I was on, and began pressing and squeezing up the sides, with a groaning and a shrieking that echoed the sounds of the unfortunate animals who had fled past a few moments before. And again I was blotted out in thicknesses of snow, that almost at once swallowed up the space bubble so that I only just had time to climb into it and pull over the closure panel. And here I was, not in the dark, for the lights were working, but inside the dark weight of a snowstorm, and silence. Now that it was silent, I understood what an assault my ears had suffered. And I again – what? Slept? Blacked out? Went mad enough that I have no memory of it? And again I can give no idea of how long I was in there. Within the blizzard. Inside – not terror – for that had gone, been driven away by immensities of everything, but a suspension of any ordinary and reliable understanding.

When I was myself again and believed that the snow had stopped falling, and burrowed my way out of the bubble, and leaned on it, holding fast as one does to a solid place in water, because I was as it were floating in loose airy snow, I looked out over an all-white landscape, under a sky that was a light clear fresh blue, lit by the new, more distant, more yellow sun. I seemed to be clear in my mind, and functioning … I pushed enough snow off the bubble to free it, tried the instruments, found everything in order, and took off into this new air, which was so sharp and clean again, yet with a metallic tang to it, and flew interminably over white, white, a dazzlingly correct and uniform white, where all hollows and valleys had been obliterated, leaving only peaks that were of bare, scraped rock. But one had a clotted or furred look, as if encrusted with insects of a vast size; when I examined it, I saw a multitude of animals, every imaginable variety of animal, large and small, all in the attitudes of immediate death. They had been frozen in an instant where they had taken refuge from the floods, or the surging ice packs, or the oceans of snow. But on other peaks that I flew past at eye level, there were trees still upright, their branches loaded with frozen birds. And in one place I saw a glittering plume rising into the air just in front of me, and as I came near to it, found it was a geyser that had been frozen so fast it was hanging there with fishes and beasts of the sea solid in it. It sent out a high twanging noise, and snapped and crumpled and fell in a heap on to the white snowy billows below.

The great ocean where the islands had been was not frozen. I saw it then as I have seen it ever since. I was flying across the northerly part, and underneath me was water, where Adalantaland had been, as if it had never been. It was not that there were no islands left anywhere in those seas but that now they were clustered or fringed around the coasts of the Isolated Northern Continent on one side and the main landmass on the other – these last being the Northwest fringes that later played such a part in late Rohandan history.

I wondered that the ocean was not frozen. And even as I flew across the last of the waters before reaching land, I saw ahead of me that the snows were melting there – had already melted in some places, leaving floods and lakes and muddy expanses everywhere. By the time I did reach the mainland, and was flying into it, the snows had all dissolved in water … I was flying over a scene of mud and water and new rivers. I could not land anywhere, but went straight across the continent looking down at a soaked and watery scene whose changes I was not able to assess because I had not been that way before. When I reached the opposite coast, on another vast ocean, I was able to see that pressures of some awful intensity had squeezed higher the mountain ranges that run from extreme north to extreme south of the two isolated continents – if one were to imagine these continents shaped in some soft substance, like clay or sand, but on a tiny scale, as on a child’s teaching tray, and then pressure applied by some force right down one side of them, so that they buckle up and make high ridges and long mountain chains separated by narrow gorges and highlands, so had those two great continents been affected, and I had to postulate all kinds of pressuring forces deep inside the substance of Rohanda, under the ocean; and the visible signs of these were in the vast waters muddied and full of weed, and crowding jagged icebergs, and a metallic or sulphurous smell. I floated southwards along these tortured mountains seeing how forests and rock and rivers had been heaved up and down and toppled and spread everywhere until I reached the south of the Northern Continent and turned sharply inland to seek out Klorathy and the other Ambien. Again, I was not familiar with the terrain, but could see that, while everything had been soaked, so that lakes and sprawling rivers stained brown with earth lay everywhere, and the landscape was all mud, all earthy water, all swamp and fen and marsh, yet there were expanses of forests that had not been overturned and mountains that seemed intact, if shaken. And in fact it turned out that the southern continents, partly and patchily frozen and soaked and shaken and squeezed, had come off much better than the northern areas, and had not been entirely devastated. I travelled on in clouds of steam and spun me, so past my bubble and made turbulence that tossed and spun me, so that I felt as sick as I had done in the tempests of the great disaster, and all the blue Rohandan skies were coiling and churning with cloud. This had been a high, dry, sharp-aired landscape, and it would shortly become so again – yet I descended to where I had left the others through baths of warm steam. They were still there. On a wet muddy plain surrounded by the mountains of the dwarves were the tents and huts of the tribes, and splashing through mud and shallow lakes, the savages were dancing: were propitiating their deity, the earth, their mother, their source, their provenance, their protector, who had unexpectedly become enraged and shown her rage. And so they danced and danced – and continued to dance on, through the days and the nights. When I joined Klorathy, he was exactly where I had left him, seated in the open doorway of his tent, apparently unoccupied, watching the dance of his protégés. And Ambien was near him.

We told each other our experiences: mine more dramatic than theirs: they had been briefly visited by tempests of snow, which had been dissipated almost at once by floods of rain, the earth had shaken and had growled and creaked, some of the mountainsides had fallen and there would be new riverbeds running off the plateau to the oceans.

We pieced together, among us, the following succession of events. The planet had turned over, had been topsy-turvy for some hours, and then righted itself – but not to its old position: Klorathy’s instrument, more sensitive than ours, told him that the axis of the earth was at an angle now, and this would mean that as this angled globe revolved about its sun, there would no longer be evenness and regularity in its dispositions of heat and cold, but there would be changes and seasons that we could not yet do more than speculate about. The planet was slightly further away from its sun, too – the Rohandan year would be minimally longer. Many kinds of animals were extinct. The level of the oceans had sharply dropped, because the ice masses of both poles were much enlarged and could be expected to increase. Cities that had been swallowed by the waters before in previous sudden changes would be visible again … islands that had vanished under the waves might even be visible, glimmering there in shallower seas … and perhaps poor Adalantaland, that vanished happy place, might ring its many bells close enough under the surface for voyagers to hear them on quiet days and nights – so we talked, even then, when we were surrounded by mud and swamp and flying clouds of steam, and the catastrophe was already receding into the past, becoming yet another of the sudden reversals of Rohandan condition. But when I used the word ‘catastrophe’ of what had just happened – a not, after all, inconsiderable happening – Klorathy corrected me, saying that the Catastrophe, or, to use the absolutely accurate and correct word, Disaster, meaning an unfortunate alignment of the stars and their forces, could only properly be applied to a real misfortune, a true evolutionary setback, namely, the failure of the Lock. I have already hinted at my impatience with Canopean pedantry. As I saw it. As I sometimes even now cannot help seeing it.

I remember my meek inquiry, which was I am afraid all impertinence, to the effect that some might consider recent events catastrophe enough to merit that word, and remember Klorathy’s smiling, but firm, reply that: ‘if one did not use the exact and correct words then one’s thinking would soon become unclear and confused. The recent events …’ – I remember I smiled sarcastically at this little word, ‘events’ – ‘… did not in any fundamental way alter the nature of Rohanda. Whereas the failure of the Lock, and the Shammat delinquency, had affected the planet and would continue to affect it. That was a catastrophe, a disaster. This was unfortunate.’ And he kept the pressure of his bronze or amber gaze on me, making me accept it.

Which I did. But I was raging with emotion. I thought him cold and dispassionate. I was thinking that a being able to view the devastation of the whole planet with such accurate detachment was not likely to be warmly responsive to a close personal relationship: at the time, that my own personal concerns were being intruded by me did not strike me as shameful, though it does now. I have already said that ‘hindsight’ is not the most comfortable of possible views of oneself or of events. The mention of Shammat affected me – I knew of course that it was all guilt. But while I was clear in my mind that our Sirian delinquencies and deceptions that I could not confess to had caused barriers between me and Klorathy, my emotions expressed this in anger and a growing irritation with Klorathy, even a dislike …

I left him and went to my own tent, which was set on a high rock, damp but at least not saturated, and sat there by myself, looking down on the weird scene – the savages dancing and singing, on and on, in the splashing brown water and the mud, illuminated by a moon that appeared fitfully among the tumultuous clouds, and vanished amid the mists and fogs. Ambien I came to talk to me. He was conciliatory and gentle, for he knew how I raged and suffered.

He had wanted very much to leave, before the events that we were not to call a catastrophe. He had become bored with the inactivity of it all. The life of the savages went on, hunting, and curing hides, and eating their stews and their dried meat, and making clothes and ornamenting them. And Klorathy stayed where he was. He did not lecture or admonish them. What had happened was that the head man came to Klorathy one evening and sat down and finally asked Klorathy if he had visited the dwarves, and if there was anything that he could tell them – the savages. And Klorathy answered saying that he had indeed visited the little people and that in his view … explaining how he saw things. And then the head man went off and conferred, and days went past, and then he returned and asked again, formally, sitting on the ground near Klorathy, having exchanged courtesies, if Klorathy believed the dwarves could be trusted to keep agreements if they were made – for in the past, so he said, the dwarves had been treacherous and had spilled out of their underground fastnesses and slain the tribes, both men and animals … and Klorathy answered this, too, patiently.

What was happening, Ambien I said, was that Klorathy did not make any attempt to communicate what he thought until he was asked a direct question – or until something was said that was in fact a question though it was masked as a comment. And Ambien I then went to Klorathy and inquired if this was indeed a practice of Canopus: and whether Klorathy expected to stay there, living on as he did, with these savages, until they asked the right questions … and if this was Klorathy’s expectation, then why did he expect the savages to ask the right questions?

To which Klorathy replied that they would come and ask the necessary questions in their own good time.

And why?

‘Because I am here …’ was Klorathy’s reply, which irritated Ambien I. Understandably. I felt irritated to the point of fury even listening to this report.

Anyway, Ambien I had wanted to go, but could not, since I had the Sirian transport with me. He had in fact gone off to visit the dwarves again, by himself, another colony of them – a foolhardy thing, which had nearly cost him his life. He had been rescued by the intervention of Klorathy, who had only said, however, that ‘Sirians as yet lacked a sense of the appropriate’.

Then had begun the ‘events’ that were not to be described as more than that.

At last, I had arrived back, and he, Ambien I, could not express how he had felt when he saw the glistening bubble descend through all that grey steam, because he had believed me to be dead. And of course it was ‘a miracle’ that I had survived – to use a term from our earlier epochs.

We stayed together that night, in emotional and intellectual intimacy, unwilling to separate, after such a threat that we might never have been together again at all.

We decided to leave Klorathy.

First, having pondered over what Ambien I had said about questions, how they had to be asked, I went to Klorathy and asked bluntly and directly about the Colony 10 colonists, and why we, Sirius, could not have them.

He was sitting at his tent door. I sat near him. We were both on heaps of damp skins … but the clouds of steam were less, the earth was drying, the thundering and trickling and running of the waters already had quietened. It was possible to believe that soon these regions would again be dry and high and healthy.