Читать книгу The Sirian Experiments - Doris Lessing - Страница 11

At the time of the ending of our Dark Age, which was not long after the Rohandan Disaster, Canopus had as large a population as we – proportional to the fact they had fewer planets. That was one fact: and they showed no disquiet at all about it. Yet their technology, though apparently inferior to ours, was certainly near enough to ours to pose the questions that beset us? When we raised these questions, our ‘existential problem’, they were simply not interested. But at the time we saw this – as usual – as an example of their deviousness. When they were asked how they adjusted their population levels, the reply always was: ‘according to need’ or ‘according to necessity’, and it was a very long time – only recently – that we were able to hear ‘according to the Need. According to the Necessity’.

Sirius knew far less about Canopus – and this on a purely material level – than Canopus did about us. I had noticed this long before: mentioning any one of our planets, Canopus always seemed informed about it: and we accordingly admired their espionage system.

We were always waiting for the time when we could catch one of their spies and say: ‘Look, you have broken your agreement, now we demand information in return.’ But we never did catch any of their spies. For the good reason that they did not have any.

And when we asked for information, it was given, and we did not trust in it … did not believe what we were told.

Shortly after the Conference on Colony 10, the one to consider the results of the Catastrophe, I was called by my Head of Department and was asked to develop my relationship with Klorathy: our liking for each other had been noted.

I was of course not reluctant. I did not have then, nor have now, any feeling that it is wrong to use a personal relationship in this way. I am a Sirian. This is what I am first and foremost. I am proud to be a public servant of Sirius. If there were ever to come a moment of conflict between my duty to Sirius, to our Colonial Service, and my personal feelings, I should never hesitate. But why should there be conflict? I have always put first what I conceive to be the real interests, long-term interests, of Sirius. And of course I took it for granted that Klorathy must have been approached by his superiors, about me – and about Ambien I as well.

I was asked to return to Rohanda, where Klorathy was shortly to pay a visit: so we had been informed by them. The fact that we had been informed told us that Klorathy was allotted the same role as I had been: we could regard ourselves as spies if we wished.

My whole nature was involved in my preparations for this meeting with Klorathy. I cannot separate the ‘personal’ from the public aspects of myself here – not easily. There are times in one’s life when it seems as if everything that happens streams together, each event, or person, or even an overheard remark becoming an aspect of a whole – a confluence whose sources go back into the past, reach forward into the future. Personally, there was a gap in my life because a boon-companion had recently died. Death is not something we think much about, we of the superior Sirian mother-stock, since we do not expect to die except from accident or a rare disease. But this old friend had been struck by a meteorite travelling on the Inter-Planetary Service. While we saw each other rarely, since his service was on C.P. 3, we were in a rare balance of sympathies and even knowing that the other was there was a support to both. I frankly hoped that Klorathy might take the place of this boon-friend. Not least because he was from Canopus: there had been cases of real friendship between Sirians and Canopeans, but they were legendary: heroic tales were made of them and used to support in our youngsters the comparatively new idea that Canopus was an ally, not to be seen only as an old enemy.

But there was something about Canopus itself that … is the word attracted? me. No. Obsessed? No, there was too much else in my life to allow a one-sided preoccupation. I felt about Canopus that inward, brooding questioning, wondering, that one may sometimes feel about a person whose sources of action, of being, seem distant and other – as if understanding this being may open doors in oneself whose existence one does not do more than suspect. Yet they are there … one knows it … one cannot – may not? – open them … but other people have opened similar doors in themselves … they operate on altogether different – higher? – levels of themselves … if one understood how, one could come close not only to them but to that area of oneself that matches their higher otherness … so one broods, ponders, questions, sometimes for long ages, about some individual who – one is convinced – is only part-glimpsed, certainly only part-understood.

It will be seen that Klorathy for me was very much more than just himself.

Ambien I was to travel with me and I was glad of it, for he shared something of my feeling for Canopus.

Before going north, we descended at our old headquarters to see what possibilities there might be for future experiments. The discovery that concerns this account was a change in the colony of natives whom we had left on their hillside. We had expected a degeneration, but found something we had not expected and could not at first interpret. The natives had become two distinct species. Some had remained physically the same, though more quarrelsome, and divisive, no longer living in a large and easygoing tribe, but in small family groups, or as individuals, each defending patches of territory, hunting grounds, caves, or rough shelters. They had sunk away from proper building, the cultivation of crops, the use of animals. The other kind, living close, using the original stock and continually preying on them in every way, snatching from them their kills in the hunt and their females or their children whom they might eat or use as servants, had changed to a position between Modified Two and Modified Three. They were upright, but occasionally rested their weight on the knuckles of their long arms; they were tailless; they had fur on their heads and shoulders but were otherwise quite hairless, which gave them a sickeningly lewd and obscene look – and they seemed motivated by an avid cunning that was in everything they did. It was this characteristic that made Ambien I and I exclaim at the same moment: ‘Shammat!’ – what had happened was that the Shammat spies had mated with the natives and this was the result. It seemed to us that we were unlikely to see the remnant of the poor natives again, belligerent and suspicious though they had become; the new stock was banded together in a large obviously efficient tribe, superior in intelligence and in strength. The old natives had a look about them that we knew only too well: the subdued, paranoid, almost furtive air of a species that would soon die out from discouragement.

We took note that this new stock could be used by us, possibly, in our experiments and flew north. Passing over the isthmus that joins the Isolated Northern Continent with the Isolated Southern Continent, we saw that the land-bridge had sunk, leaving a gap of 50 or so R-miles. Sometimes this bridge was there, at some epochs, and at others not, and we were able to deduce that the gap had been there for a long time, because the new stocks on the Northern Continent had not infiltrated southwards.

We met Klorathy as arranged on a high plateau of raw red rock and sand, the result of recent earthquakes, overlooking lower fertile plains untouched by the quakes. Our aircraft came down side by side on the burning desert: we conversed by radio, and together flew off into the shelter of a high wooded mountain. The three of us conducted our first conference under a large shade tree, sharing a meal. It was a most pleasant occasion. We were all quite frankly examining each other to see if our impressions on Colony 10 had been accurate. As for myself, I was more than happy. Klorathy in himself was as lively and attractive as I remembered, but there was the additional bonus always felt in meeting with the superior ones of our Galaxy. After all, so much of one’s time is spent with the lower races, and as interesting as the work is, as likeable as these races often are, to meet one’s equals is something to be looked forward to.

Klorathy was a typical Canopean Mother Planet Type I: very tall, lightly built, strong, a light bronze in colour, his eyes a darker bronze, he was not dissimilar from my Ambien I. And I was conscious that my own physical difference from them both was felt by them as an agreeable contrast.

We still did not know why we had been invited to this meeting – both Ambiens (as we often humorously refer to ourselves) had been speculating. I for one had been thinking most of all about the mathematical cities of the pre-Disaster phase. I had even been wondering if we hadn’t imagined all that – to the extent of asking Ambien I again and again to repeat to me what he had seen of them. But he reiterated that he had never seen anything like those cities ever, anywhere. Yet on the Canopean Mother Planet they had nothing so advanced. I had asked Klorathy about this at the last conference, and he had replied that there was ‘no need’ for this type of city or building on Canopus itself. I had believed him. When with Klorathy, one had to know he did not lie. When away from him, it was a different matter, and I had been wondering why he had lied. Together again, sitting with him there under the light fragrant shade of the tree, on soft spicy grasses, I had only to look at him to know that if he said that on Canopus (the Mother Planet) they had such and such a city, then it was true. He had described these to me, and they did not sound so dissimilar from those on Sirius. Agreeable, genial cities, planted with all kinds of attractive and useful trees and shrubs, they are places where one experiences well-being. But they are not built as those round, or starlike or hexagonal – and so forth – cities of the old Rohanda.

‘Why not? Why not, Klorathy?’

‘It’s like this, Ambien II: cities, buildings – the situations of cities and buildings on any planet – are designed according to need.’

Well, obviously – was what I was thinking.

I was disappointed, and felt cheated. I felt worse than that. I had not really, before actually meeting Klorathy, stopped to consider the effect it would have on our being together, that I could not say anything about what was so strongly in my mind then – the horrible new race, or stock, of beast-men on Isolated S.C. II. We had not told Canopus that we had had visits from Shammat, or that we had stolen without telling them some of ‘their’ Natives, or that C.P. 22 technicians had escaped with some Lombis and had settled not far from here, or that we had so often and so thoroughly conducted espionage in their territories, or that Shammat had done the same … it seemed to me, sitting there in that delightful picnic spot, as if instead of being open and generously available to this new friend, as one has to be in friendship, my mind had bars around it: keep off, keep off … and there were moments when I could hardly bear to look into that open and unsuspicious countenance. And yet I have to record that I was also feeling something like: You think you are so clever, you Canopeans, but you have no idea what’s in my mind, for all that!

No, there was not going to be any easy companionship between us, not really. Or not yet.

Soon we found out why Sirius had been invited to send representatives … when we heard, we could hardly believe it, yet what we had expected was not easy to say.

The remnant of the degenerating Giant race had proliferated and spread everywhere – over this continent as well. They were now half the size they had been, about our size – eight to nine R-feet tall, and were not as long-lived. They had retained little memory of their great past – not much beyond knowledge of the uses of fire for cooking and warmth and some elementary craftwork. They did not grow plants for food, but gathered them wild; and they hunted. From north to south of the Isolated Northern Continent they lived in large, closely organized tribes who did not war with each other, since there was plenty of territory and apparently infinite stocks of animals. The two tribes near here, near this spot, were called Hoppe and Navahi, and it was Klorathy’s mission to visit them and … I missed some of what he was saying, at this point. For I could not tell him the origin of these two names, and I was afraid even of looking at Ambien I. When I was able to hear again, he was talking about some dwarves that lived in these mountains, and in other mountain chains, too, over the continent, and he was to visit these, for Canopus would like to know more about them. And assumed that Sirius would as well. I can only say that I recognized in this a sort of shorthand for much more … for how much more I will not say at this point: certainly it turned out very differently from what I then imagined.

Klorathy was wanting us to go with him into the mountain habitations of the dwarves. This would involve danger, since they had been hounded by the Hoppes and Navahis, and while he was known by them we would have to win their trust. He was taking it absolutely for granted that we would be ready for this: and Ambien I most certainly was, for he liked challenge. As for me, I did not want any association with what were bound to be no more than squalid little half-animals – but I assented.