The Sirian Experiments. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ building the agricultural settlements on S.C. I, they had been supplied with simple foodstuffs, mostly cereals and vegetables. But these had been supplied and set before them and some had been cooked or processed – and they knew that prepared food was a ‘sign’ of captivity.

      In these two major ways, then, their advancement had been checked, and they were as naked as any animal in our Empire, and their food was as they gathered it or caught it. They had previously roasted their meat: now this was done only at feasts, as if it were too dangerous a thing for individuals to tempt fate with. To tempt ‘the skies’ with …

      Whereas previously they had lived in so many different ways, and quite casually and openly, unafraid of attackers, protected by their different associations, now they built rocky shelters for themselves, or leafy ones, always with great care – not for their comfort or warmth, but with one aim only: that they should not be easily visible. This was why our first attempts to locate them had been so frustrated.

      Constant movement and activity – great festivals of thousands of animals all dancing and singing; and, at the same time, a terror of being observed and overseen.

      The pleasant, easygoing, unsuspicious race of Planet 24 had become nervous, paranoid.

      One of the changes had been expected by us.

      Because of the disruption between males and females at the beginning, which took nearly five hundred years to disappear, the females had become the lawgivers, if not in fact, then in their view of themselves. The males were dominant in that they hunted, appointed sentinels and guards, saw themselves as protectors of the nation, but the women because of how they had been competed for at the beginning had all kinds of airs and graces, behaved as if mating were ‘a gift of themselves’: and there were courtship rituals where it had to appear as if males were fighting for a female who at last and after long hesitation then ‘chose’ one: and this even when the balances had been redressed and there was no competition for females. The females all had a rather bossy elder-sister manner, which was taught them by the mothers: this could even approach the regal, the gracious. These inevitable results of certain statistical facts do not cease to be risible because they are inevitable …

      But these poor animals aroused more pity than amusement among our technicians. We were approached by a delegation from them a few months after their acceptance by the Lombis. They all felt uncomfortable about what they were doing, which was to put into operation a plan that involved lying and deception. We had expected this delegation; the 2,000 Planet 22 technicians were being observed, in the same way as the Lombis were: it was necessary for us to find out if they were to be entrusted with taking the Lombis to Planet 25 and supervising them there when they expected to be returned home.

      It is our experience that if you put two species together, after initial hostility they will begin to absorb each other’s ways. If one is in a supervisory relation with the other, who are suffering hardship, then it is to be expected that a percentage of the first will sympathize with the second and make attempts to alleviate conditions – which result is often to be welcomed and encouraged – or to help efforts to escape. Under certain conditions even this second result is not always discouraged.

      While we were making plans for adding companies of supervisors from another planet, which had not had contact with the Lombis, to the personnel who would transfer and police the Lombis, we were selecting 22-ers for further training in the arts of long-term judgement and assessment, and were putting the following points to them.

      That conditions on Rohanda were better than on Planet 24.

      That conditions on 25, while not perfect, could not be described as bad.

      That it was no hardship to be a servant race – which admittedly was our plan for the Lombis – unless this race felt and resented their subjection, in which case the laws of our Empire made it inevitable that they would be advanced to a level they could sustain.

      It was true this whole experiment was based on an attempt to keep, just for once, a race on a subservient level; but surely the fact that we had to make it at all proved our past good record.

      Did they, the Planet 22 technicians, not think they might be sentimental instead of showing true benevolence – which always involved an overall view …

      To all this they respectfully but self-respectingly replied that they thought our arguments sophistry.

      There was no need for them to say any more than one thing, to bring forward more than one basic fact: the Lombis had been free, living where they had evolved, and had shown all the characteristics of such races. Now they had all the attributes of slaves.

      We inquired from them what they would like us to do. The reply was: to return the Lombis to their own planet.

      Even though their return would most certainly disrupt the lives of the Lombis there, who were quietly evolving at their own speed, and who had forgotten them – they had not preserved any memory of the abduction of what had been a very small proportion of their number? There was no doubt at all that if we suddenly set down on Planet 24 this now well-cohered and self-sufficing nation, there would be sudden and savage war.

      Was this really what they wanted us to do? If there had been wrong thinking on our part, then it was too late. Surely they could see this?

      They did see it.

      Of course, we knew what might happen: for in the circumstances it was to be expected. That we did nothing to forestall it was rooted in our improper attitudes to Canopus, and at the time we did not see anything wrong in these attitudes. Now, looking back – but if there is one thing I have learned, it is that it is not useful to say: If I knew then what I know now …

      I will come to the defection of the technicians in a moment.

      The Lombi festival during which our spaceships descended for the lift-off was a special one.

      The site was a favoured place between rivers. It was relatively high, with thickly growing trees surrounding a small plain. The animals came in during the preceding few days and settled themselves under the trees in their groups. Our technicians were with them. Mating was encouraged at these times. The techs did not refrain. We had not expected them to: a mixture of these two vigorous and promising stocks was part of our plan.

      The hunters brought in the animals for the feast, and the cooking trenches, with the spits over them, were arranged and tended by both males and females.

      The singing and dancing began as the sunlight went and the moon rose.

      First in groups around separate fires, and then in great revolving circles, these animals sang of their distant home and their longing for it; of their capture by the shining machines, of the place of imprisonment, where they had been confined in the ‘little prisons’ or in the shining prisons where everything was false; of their second capture, and their return to ‘true breath and breathing, to the green earth, to the green hills’; of their labours under a foreign sun building ‘prisons’ for invisible races whose presence they sensed, but whom they never saw; of their third capture by the shining machines, their being set down here ‘in this place where everything reminds us of our home but is not our home’, and of how – on a day that was still to come – the shining machines would come again, and take them home to ‘the place that knew them’.

      Throughout this night of festival, our techs were singing and dancing and feasting, too. Well mingled with the others, so that they were always individuals who had become accepted by a family or a group, and never even in pairs, let alone groups, that СКАЧАТЬ