Читать книгу The Sirian Experiments - Doris Lessing - Страница 10

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’.

Then, as these became so powerful and influential they could not be ignored, public expression of our inward preoccupation was made legal again. At one time several of our planets were set aside as universities and colleges, for the sole purpose of discussions of our existential problems. This is how ‘the Thinkers’ of 23 originated.

Meanwhile, sometimes our populations grew larger and sometimes smaller, and these fluctuations did not relate to how many individuals were needed in order to operate our technologies, but according to how tides of opinion flowed … if we wanted to, we could have crammed our planets with billions of genera, species, races – as they once had been. When we wanted, they could be left empty. We could – and did – maintain some planets, for special purposes, at very high levels of population and leave others virtually unpopulated.

While all these variations on our basic problem were attempted, our space drive had been stabilized. We had discovered that no matter how forcefully we swept out into space, gathering in suitable planets as we found them, incorporating them into our general plan, we took our problems – or rather, our problem – with us. What did we need all these new colonies for? What was their purpose? If they had special conditions of climate, then we could tell ourselves they were useful – for something or other; if they had new minerals, or large deposits of those already known to us – they were used. But suppose we went on acquiring colonies and reached the number of a hundred … a thousand … what then?

As our philosophers asked, and argued.

We, the administrators, had been watching Canopus: she was not acquiring ever more colonies. She was stabilized on what she had. She had far fewer than we … she was developing and advancing them … But that was not how we saw it then: I have to record that we despised Canopus, that great neighbour of ours, our competitor, our rival, for being satisfied with such a low level of material development and acquisition.

I now return to our preoccupation with Canopus.