The Sirian Experiments

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 very 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 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 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 slightly—such a minimal gesture was this that I could easily have believed it had not occurred, was 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 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 that 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 from ru

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 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 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 jailors, 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 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. 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 recognise 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 begi

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.