The Sirian Experiments (33 page)

And because, of course, Canopus, inexplicably, allowed them to survive – but this was deep waters for me, and I was far off understanding.

I said to this little upstart that I would take myself back to my lodgings and he did not stop me. It was because he did not care. He had got what he wanted – to be ruler of Lelanos.

Well, I could tell myself that if he was a tyrant who would bring the place to ruin very fast, then this was no more than Lelanos would do for itself, could not prevent itself doing. I had hastened an inevitability, that was all.

I left him there lolling in the graceful council chamber, ruler of Lelanos, among his savages, whom he had been to fetch the day before from where they had been feasting and roistering in the forests, not daring to enter the city – I left them, and went to my lodgings, where I sat up and thought, and thought, through the night.

The low and sibilant song of
Sirius, Sirius, be careful
, was very strong, and it drowned out other thoughts, until I bade the song be quiet, for it had a valedictory sound. And it was quiet, for I had no need of it now that I was restored to myself. Except for my shame. My incredulous shame … how easy it had been after all, for Shammat to win me over. And with such slight powers at his disposal! No more than a minimal use of intuition, as in the case of my first capture, constant brooding about Canopus, envy of Canopus, hatred of Canopus, had brought to Shammat some of the least and most lowly of Canopean skills. How easy, then, to flatter me, by speaking through my weaknesses. How easy to take me over. And now it was all done with, I could hardly believe it had happened and that I had succumbed – yet I had to believe it, and, by extension know that I could easily be lost again, and that I might easily have not recovered my own good sense this time – for if it had not been for the low sweet song of Sirius, Sirius, set into me by
Rhodia, by Nasar, by Canopus, to remind me of what I was, I might easily be lolling there with Shammat now, ready to tyrannize poor Lelanos.

When the morning came, I walked out of my lodgings into the empty street and away from the city. I reasoned that Shammat would be drunk this morning, and in any case he would not care. He could use the legend of the white goddess, or priests from afar, or any such formulation, to strengthen his claims to power there. For as long as it lasted. Why should he come after me? He might know, using the pitiful little powers he did possess, where I was, approximately, in the forests to the south of the city, but did he want an unwilling captive, one who would not grace his rule, but must be drugged, or beaten into submission? Sirius willing was one thing. Sirius sullen and subversive could do nothing to help him. Besides, he was afraid of – not me, but Canopus. Shammat might control this planet – Canopus admitted this. But Shammat controlled it only within limits Canopus set. Drunk with power, with inglorious confidence, as Tafta might be, he could not choose to challenge retribution.

He had gambled to his limits when he had told the dark priests I would be an easy capture. He had wanted two things. One, to take from me the ornaments that he knew had some sort of talismanic power – Shammat with or without Puttiora were always trying to get their hands on the articles powerful at any given time. But he also expected to be able to use the situation, for he had been waiting, having partially gained the confidence of the priestly caste, to gain total power over them, and to rule Grakconkranpatl. He knew that Canopus was somewhere close, for he could sense the strength there, but he never guessed it was Rhodia the wardress who watched and knew everything he did. And when the priests, afraid of me, afraid that one faction might use me to strengthen its position and win power over the others, decided to sacrifice me, and he sensed that Rhodia – or someone – would rescue me, he did not give the alarm, for he was a gambler by nature, always ready to see where any new twist in a situation would lead him.

He would not follow me. I knew this, having thought it out carefully all through the long night.

And so I walked steadily south, by myself, and had many pleasant solitary days, and even some adventures (which I have published elsewhere, for the entertainment of our young people), and at last I reached one of our outposts, from which I could send a message for an aircraft to come and fetch me.

And so ended my descent into Shammat-nature. Ended, at least, outwardly. But inwardly it was a different matter. It is not possible to become a subject of Shammat, even temporarily, without being affected, profoundly, and for a long time, in every fibre of oneself.

When I reached our headquarters for the supervision of the Colony 9 animals, I spent a short time restoring my inner balances. I was viewing my recent psychological overthrow with amazement as well as apprehension for a possible recurrence. When I thought of the woman Rhodia it was with admiration, a feeling that I was able to take refuge in the thought of that strength of hers – or his! And I now could think with abhorrence of Tafta, whom I had even liked, for a while.

It had to be decided what was to be done with the slave city, Grakconkranpatl. I thought long and hard about this. Easy enough to blast the whole place out of existence. But there was no way of preventing another just as bad coming into being. And looking at it from the overall view (which after all it was my responsibility to do), these indigenous cultures – if it was accurate to call cultures native when the origin of their genes lay so far from Rohanda, in such distant planets – were useful to us. Some of them provided social laboratories without any effort on our part. I decided only to rescue our 2,000 captives, and sent five cargo planes, with ten armed craft for support. These flew back and forth over Grakconkranpatl for a sufficient time, and then the cargo planes descended at the prison farms where the animals were working in chains. The 2,000 were returned to the settlement in the high peaks. It was felt that their sojourn in the lower areas, and then a reintroduction
to the harsh conditions, would strengthen them and further their adaptability. And so it turned out.

As the future of these animals does not concern this narrative further, I will summarize. The controlled explosions on Planet 3 (1) did not affect its atmosphere in the way it had been hoped. The crawling plant-animals were destroyed, however. This did not seem to be likely to change the planet's atmosphere in any way, but some of our biologists complained that we had destroyed a unique and irreplaceable species. The usual arguments took place: ‘You cannot make an omelette, etc' against the ‘Storehouse of nature'. An amount of oxygen was locked up in the soil and rocks of the planet; we did now know how much. Thermonuclear explosions with a different intent took place. The oxygen content of the atmosphere did significantly increase. We shipped the Planet 9 animals from their high, oxygen-starved station in the mountains to the low oxygen-starved air of Planet 9. About half succumbed, but this was felt to be better than expected. We introduced at the same time a large quantity of different kinds of vegetation at the lichen level, and marsh plants, and types of seaweed – all with the idea of adding to the oxygen. A fuller account of this experiment will be found in the appropriate place. The planet, in fact, did slowly come to life, and within five hundred S-years was in a condition to allow the exploitation of minerals. But it was and is a chilly, phlegmatic planet, where everything is slow moving, small, dank. It was interesting to see what happened to the Planet 9 type. They became smaller; their fur became more like scales, or lichens; they laid eggs that they carried in a pouch under their tails until they hatched; and they were amphibious. They became useless for physical work of any kind. Their function remains slowly to increase the oxygen content. The exploitation of the planet has to be carried out by technicians and labourers who work in strictly controlled conditions for short periods.

The success of this experiment influenced how we set up our stations on the Rohandan moon.

A necessary word about my state of mind. I remained on
Rohanda for a considerable time after my experience as a captive. I recognized that I had been in an unhealthy and dangerous emotional condition. I knew that this was not a new thing: its origin was due to the situation of Sirius itself. I felt that I should do something about it, change myself in some way – at least not remain as I had been: capable of such foolhardiness and almost cynical indifference. But time did not seem to improve me. Discussions with Ambien I led to no more than assurances of mutual support, and declarations that we understood each other's metaphysical situation: for my mood was not confined to myself, and the briefest of exploratory conversations with others of our Service revealed how general the unease had become.

What slowly hardened in me was a feeling of resentment, or at least puzzlement, over the behaviour of Rhodia, or Nasar.
Why
had I been led into such temptation? For what purpose? I had succumbed, had freed myself – or, rather, had recognized in myself the implanted reminders of Canopus, which were the means by which I saw my situation and could free myself. But what had it all been for?

And this thought, or emotion, was directly linked to, fed by, an astonishment, a sick angry disbelief that Shammat – was so paltry!
Who
was,
what
was, this power that held Rohanda in thrall? Tafta was an insignificantly nasty half-animal who had acquired some minor capacities that allowed him petty tricks. He was not more than crafty and cunning. Evil I
had
seen in the cruel priesthood. What relation did Tafta have to these evil ones? Had he created them or merely tolerated and used them? Could the progeny of an unpleasant, mildly disgusting, unimportant nastiness become so much worse than its progenitors? What I was feeling became – as it crystallized out so that I could look at it – something like this: if Nasar had arranged for me to become tempted by something really wicked, like the dark priests, a total and thoroughgoing beastliness, I might have found some point in that! But to have succumbed to Tafta was humiliating. Yes – it was my pride that was speaking; and I was even half aware of it. What it amounted
to was that I was annoyed with Canopus for not arranging for me a more profound evil! They had rated me low because of matching me with such a petty wickedness. I felt insulted! And yet my reason told me that I had been proved not to rate any greater nastiness than Tafta! After all, I had succumbed, even though briefly. I had not been immune to petty nastiness and ambition. Yet I could not imagine myself ever wanting anything the priesthood of Grakconkranpatl could offer me: nor feeling anything but revulsion for them … Was I then to understand, from my weakening towards Tafta, that the beginnings of an immersion in evil must always start with something easy, paltry, seemingly unimportant? Was this what Canopus had been teaching me?

All these thoughts, and many others on these lines, conflicted in me and at length I found it all too much, and I shut a door on them. Enough. I had been proved to be gullible and feeble. I knew it. I was not going to deny it. I flew away from Rohanda, with a dissatisfaction in me I was not equipped to handle.

This dwindled into a dry sorrow, which was not very far from the ‘existential malady', or so I found, when subjecting it to my dispassionate judgement.

I was away from Rohanda for some time.

The experiments being undertaken there, less biosociological than strictly scientific, laboratory stuff, did not interest me much. I followed the progress of only one. The atmosphere of Rohanda is 80 per cent nitrogen. Yet its mammals subsist on less than 20 per cent oxygen. The idea was to breed an animal capable of living on nitrogen, or at least a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. Many and ingenious were the experiments, which had to end because all of isolated S.C. II was overrun by an empire ruled by Grakconkranpatl and Lelanos. This was an uneasy alliance. Alliances between two partners equal in strength and with much the same aim in my experience have to be unstable. They last only when one is in a generously tutelary relationship with the other. Our history is in point. Lelanos had become as horrible a place as the other. The Lelannians
mated freely with the race of dark priests, whose main feature had been a heavy uniformity of ugliness, and this match had produced a type of very strong, but more flexible and varied people, who adopted the ‘religious' practices of their former enemies and terrorized the entire continent. The new cross dominated Grakconkranpatl and used the former priestly caste as slaves. Thus had the new state of affairs come into being where the two cities had become allied in evil.

But I was not disposed to concern myself much with Rohanda. Affairs elsewhere in our Empire seemed more important. When I got a message from Canopus, inviting me to a discussion ‘on the present situation in Rohanda, with particular attention to the Isolated Southern Continent II', I at first ignored this order. For it was one. I then was sent a message signed by Klorathy, of whom I had never ceased to think, who was always at the back of my mind, even when I was much occupied elsewhere. What he said was that ‘the present situation in the continents under your control is disadvantageously affecting all of Rohanda'.

Now, I was quite aware that both the Southern Continents were populated by warring, savage, degenerated tribes. But when we had wanted the use of these two continents for – mostly – experimental purposes, it was not in my mind that our responsibilities should also be altruistic. I saw no reason why Sirius should not simply leave Rohanda altogether. Canopus was welcome to both Southern Continents. Nor did my reports indicate that the state of affairs in the northern hemisphere was much to the credit of Canopus. If our uses of Rohanda could not be described as having led to an improvement of the place, then the same had to be said about Canopus.

So I saw things then.

I was reluctant to accede to Klorathy's invitation, because it was to discuss a squalid and unsatisfactory planet full of brutes who could be relied upon for only one thing – to kill each other on one pretext or another at the first opportunity.