The Sirian Experiments (28 page)

Then she abruptly stood straight and turned to go out. I said again that I was cold and again she did not respond.

Perhaps she was deaf. Or even dumb.

Although I believed there might be drugs in the food, I did not hesitate to eat and drink, and without any real concern for the results. This was partly because of the frigid slowness of my mental processes, but partly because of what I have already mentioned. My inbuilt unconquerable belief that I was
immune.
Not eligible for death!

Yet I was certainly able to consider, and even with an appreciation, that I was likely to be murdered in this ugly little city on this inferior little planet. It was a
fact
that I kept supplying to myself, as something that had to be taken in. But I could not.

Between my functioning being, the familiar mechanisms of Ambien II, senior official of Sirius, member of a race that did not expect to die, except by some quite fortuitous event, such as a meteorite striking a Space Traveller – between that state of consciousness, and the real urgent apprehension of the fact:
You may very well be murdered at any moment
, there was really no connection. I literally could not ‘take it in'. I wondered what it would feel like to ‘take it in' so that my whole organism knew, understood, was prepared. What would it be like to live, as these unfortunates did, not more than four hundred to eight hundred years, depending on their local conditions – no sooner born than ready to die? Did they feel it? Really
feel
their impermanence? Or was there something in the nature of the conditions of living on this planet that imposed a barrier between fact and its perception?

I pursued these thoughts, or rather, allowed them to float through my mind, or – perhaps even more accurately – observed them to take shape and pass, while I ingested foodstuffs that I hoped would soon warm me.

Soon there came in another female.

Once again I am faced with that problem of hindsight. The female was Rhodia. To try and put myself back into my state of mind before I knew who she was, without distortion, is not easy. But I can say accurately that at once I was saying to myself that she did not resemble the slave who had brought the food. She was dressed in the same clothes, long loose dark blue cloth trousers, and a tunic of the same, which was belted with leather, and hung with various keys. She was a wardress or jailer. She was larger in build than the other, and her red or red-brown skin was lightened by lack of sunlight, like the other. But I at once felt an ease in her presence, to the extent that I was warning myself: Be careful, it might be a trap. She
was not, as I was already seeing, of the same race. Or not of the same sub-race. Same in general style or pattern – skin colour, build, with the long black hair – she nevertheless had an aliveness that at once set her aside. She stood immediately in front of me, this handsome, alert female, and her large black eyes were full on mine. And remained there, as if expecting or requesting an exchange. I did smile at her, even while I was telling myself that it was the oldest trick in the world – the amiable jailer. She had over her arm a length of dark blue woollen cloth, and this she unfolded to display a warm cloak, in which I was thankful to muffle myself. Then she grasped me by the arm and assisted me to rise, knowing that I had become stiffened and lumpish. This firm confident touch was quite unlike the avid, brushing touch, like a snake's tongue, of the other inferior wardress. She walked me, gently enough, to the door, and then assisted me through it. By now my responses were blocked and confused. Everything in me that told me to like this creature was being chided and set aside by me. She felt this, for her hand fell away from my elbow and I stumbled on by myself along the low dark corridors, all straight, all lit by the same regular minor gleams of yellow light at long intervals, all of the same regular blocks of dark stone. Somewhere above me was the heavy sunlight of this region, were the great peaks capped with snow. But it was as hard to take in, to really believe that fact, as it was to believe that this woman might easily slide a knife into me.

After a long walk, turning with monotonous regularity at sharp angles from one corridor to another, the lights on the walls suddenly increased, there was softness under my feet – and I saw coloured rugs and carpets, and the walls had hangings on them. Abruptly, we stopped. Apparently facing a blank wall. She pressed down a lever that projected from the wall, and another great slab of stone slid silently back. I was in the entrance to a brightly lit room that had windows in it. This alone nearly overthrew me – being in ordinary daylight again. Seven tall men, in the black cloaks I had already seen, were seated behind a long wooden table. An eighth stood by a
window half turned away, looking out. Again, I have to disentangle what I later learned of the eighth man and what I felt then. Then, I saw at once he was not of the same race as that of Grakconkranpatl, nor of my wardress, who was standing just behind me. He reminded me of those Shammat pirates who had visited me such a long time ago, the shameless thieving ones. He was, however, taller than they. He was more finely built. His skin was pale brown, as theirs had been. His eyes were quick and brown. His hair was profuse, curly and reddish, worn long on the head, with a neat strong beard. He was the old Shammat type much refined. Compared to the seven, in their heavy black, with their brutish features, their long black eyes that conveyed coldness and deadness as much as they did avidity and lust for power, he seemed infinitely better, even reassuring. And it was as I stood there, my eyes turning for relief to this eighth man, that I heard a breath from behind me: ‘Sirius, be careful.' This sound floated into my mind, as if it came from not now and here but from Koshi, or from the spaces between the stars. I could not believe I was hearing it, and even thought I had imagined it … when I slightly turned my head, the woman was a few paces behind, and her face was immobile, even indifferent.

And I was still waiting there, in front of these coldly observant men, all eight of them, now that the one by the window had turned to stare, too. And as yet nothing had been said.

One of the men rose, came over to me, his cold gaze assessing my hair, my skin, my light brittle build, and whipped off the dark cloak, and, gripping my upper arm, pushed me forward closer to the seven so that I stood close against the table they sat along, one, two, three, four, five, six, all so alike, copies of each other, so little variation there was between them. And the seventh stood behind me, and lifted my hair in his large hands, so that he could feel it and show it to the others, and then lifted one of my arms, and then the other – both bare, now that the enveloping cloak lay discarded
on the floor. Then he slid the bracelets up and down my arms in a way that showed he wanted to take them from me, but, leaving them for the moment, he began to unhook the necklace of Canopean silver. I was surrounded by his cold unpleasant smell and I felt faint, but I said calmly:

‘If you take these things from me, it will be the worse for you.'

I saw the eyes of all six of these rulers – priests and tyrants – turn towards the one who lounged still at the window, showing his superiority to them and the scene by his affectation of half-indifference, sometimes watching what went on in the room, sometimes observing some events out of my sight on the central avenue that, presumably, was not now lined with the guards. He now glanced at them, and nodded very slightly – such a minimal gesture was this that I could easily have believed it had not occurred, were it not that it had its effect: the hands of the man who stood behind me no longer fumbled at the catch of the necklace.

Was this eighth man, then, the tyrant who called himself the High Priest? How otherwise was he in a position of supereminence?

Under my robe, I could feel the girdle of starstones, which was the third object given me for protection by Canopus, lying tightly around my waist, not a few inches from the covetous one behind me. I was conscious of the smooth clasp of the gold band around my left thigh, which was the fourth of the talismans.

If the priests had not summoned me to take these things, or to interrogate me, why then was I here? The thought strongest in me was that it was the eighth man who had demanded this confrontation. But why?

Again, I was standing there, no one speaking, the eighth man gazing apparently indifferently out of the window, six of them ranged one beside the other opposite me on the other side of the long narrow table, six pairs of black eyes staring at me. I do not remember any other species who has struck me with such unpleasantness as these did: if they had been simple
brutes – that is, a species still totally brutish, or one just lifting itself away from brutishness – they would have been more tolerable. But they were a long way from running about on four legs or tearing their food with their fangs. It was the end of a line of evolution I was seeing; one that had taken its path into this cruelty and narrow caste interest and was frozen there.

It came into me that there were two different interests at work here: those of the eighth man being different from the seven, but they did not know it.

One of the men got up, pushed down a lever that slid stone panels across the windows, extinguishing daylight, and I found myself standing in a beam of brilliant light that fell on me from above. All around me was quite black, and I stood illuminated. I knew then that this was a rehearsal for some ceremony: they wished to see how I would look to an assembly of, probably, slaves as well as the ruling caste, when I stood before them, bathed in light, in one of the temples, before the priests cut the heart out of my body.

A moment later, the stone window panels had slid open again, the light had been switched off, and I was being wrapped in the heavy cloak by the woman, and then taken back along the passages to my room.

There she left me, without other communication.

I sat alone in the awful silence, and now my mind was full of Nasar. I was reliving my exchanges with him before I left Koshi. So strong was my sense of him that when the door slab slid back and the same woman stood there, I was thinking still of Nasar, and it was with difficulty that I forced my mind to take her in. Again I was telling myself that one did not trust jailers, while I was contrasting this simple direct presence with the men I had been taken to stand before. The seven men – yet I was seeing the one at the window as apart from the others and as better than them, even while I remembered the whisper: Sirius, be careful. I looked into this woman's strong dark eyes, and she gazed straight back at me.

It was as if my mind was trying to open itself, to take in
something … but after a long silence, she put down on the stone bench a bundle, which I saw was bedding, and she said: ‘Try to sleep.' I believed I heard the word ‘Sirius', after that admonition, but she had gone. I lay down on the stone slab wrapped in heavy woven material, and lay awake, very far from sleep.

Now, looking back, I can see very clearly two strands, or factors, in my situation. One was the eighth man, he who reminded me of the Shammat thieves. And the other was Rhodia. The bad and the good. The two potentials in my situation. The two currents that are in every situation if one learns to recognize them!
Now
it is all very clear.

Then
I lay and thought of Nasar, and sometimes of Klorathy, and hardly at all of the eighth man.

In what I supposed to be the morning of a new day, the first slave came again, with food for me.

I sat wrapped to the chin in all the coverings there were, my hands around a bowl of hot meaty liquid, for warmth. My mind was ringing with Nasar! Nasar! – to the extent that I was beginning to judge myself mad. When the female Rhodia came in swiftly, and stood before me, I stammered out ‘Nasar' before I could stop myself, and then stared at her, as if expecting her to explain.

She kept her eyes on mine for a long interval, as she had done before, and then said, ‘You must give me your talismans, Sirius.'

I did not move, and she said: ‘When they come and ask for them, you will say that you have disintegrated them to keep them out of the wrong hands.'

‘I have no such skill,' I said. All this while our eyes were engaged, and my mind felt again as if it tried to enlarge, yet could not.

‘No, but there are those who have.'

‘And these – criminals know this?'

‘They know it.'

As I unwound the thick cloths around me, it was with the strongest of feelings of identity with this woman. The thought
that I did wrong to trust her was faint now. I held out my bared arms to her to slip off the heavy bracelets. I slid the band down off my thigh and gave it to her. I stood to unlatch the girdle of stones from my waist. I bent my head so that she could undo the necklace. These articles vanished into the voluminous folds of her clothing.

‘And now for a time you will be very weak,' she stated. ‘You are unarmed against Rohanda. You must guard yourself in every way. It will not be for long.'

Not knowing I was going to say this, I said: ‘This is a very strange place to find you in.'

And
she
said: ‘And it is a very foolish place to find
you
in, Sirius.'

I was breathing the name Nasar, again, as she reached the doorway, and she turned, swiftly, and said, ‘Yes.' And was gone.

I could feel the weakness of not being protected. My mind seemed to dim and fade. I sat quietly holding on to what she, or
he
, had promised, that it would not be long.

Soon two of the black-clothed men, tall knifelike men, came and said: ‘Give us the things!'

They were bending over me, their alien black eyes consuming me, and my senses weakened with the odour of them.

I said, as Nasar had told me to say: ‘I do not have them. I disintegrated them, so that they should not fall into wrong hands.'

At this their faces distorted, rage convulsed them, and their hands dragged off my coverings and were all over me, finding, nothing. They stood up, looking at each other – so alike they were, so dreadfully alike, it was as if individuality had been engineered out of them. Then, without looking at me, they strode out and the stone slab closed the entrance.