The Sirian Experiments

And that was another thing: we might congratulate ourselves as we liked on the order and good sense on the planets we governed, with their minimum well-fed, well-cared-for populations, their willing submission to our rule, but it had been a very long time indeed, it had been long ages, since I had seen a culture anything like as lively as this Lelanos. No, something had gone out of our provenance, our Empire—I had known it, sensed it; but not until I had been brought here by Rhodia was I able to see what it was that had been lost. This place had some kind of vitality that we lacked. A deadness, a lack of inspiration was afflicting us, Sirius…

And why had Rhodia brought me here at all? All she had to do to was to send me with guides back southwards to our Sirian stations.

Yet here I was, with her, with Canopus, in this city. A city that had reached its perfection, and was about to sink… had begun to sink away from itself.

And I could not stand the thought of it! I could not! I found that I wished to raise my voice and howl in protest, to cry out, to complain to—but to whom? Rhodia, the now willing and dutiful servant of Canopus?

There was a morning when she and I sat together in one of the little rooms at the top of her house. We had been taking a meal of fruit and bread. We were not talking: talk between us had become difficult.

The sun came in through window openings in the brick walls, and lay in patterns on woven and coloured rugs. It was a scene of such simple friendliness and pleasantness.

I was looking in hostility at Rhodia, knowing she knew it, and yet I could not prevent my critical feelings. She seemed to me stubborn. I was seeing in her, as she sat quietly on her cushions, hands folded in her lap, looking up into the blue of the Rohandan sky, a stubborn and difficult woman who was refusing me, or something, or some demand. I felt towards her at that moment as I had done with Nasar in Koshi, when he rebelled, or half rebelled, or struggled against his i

She looked straight at me, with one of her full steady looks, and said: “Sirius, I am going to leave you.”

“Well, then, you are going to leave me! And you will leave this poor place, too, abandon it to its fate.”

“There is nothing that can be done to arrest the laws of Rohanda,” she said, “or indeed, the laws of the universe. They are worse here, that is all. We see them on Rohanda exaggerated and displayed, but there is never anything that can stay the same. You know that from your own Empire! Has there been a single culture you have established that has not changed and fallen away?”

I looked into her eyes—I had to—and agreed that this was the case. But not with grace.

“The best we can do is to set up something that approximates to the good, for a short time. This I have done in this city. And now it is time for me to go.”

“You have finished your task for this visit?”

“For this time it is done.”

“I have to thank for rescuing me, Nasar.”

“As you did me.”

She stood up. I saw she was weary, holding herself up only with an effort.

“You’ll be glad to go,” I said, sullen.

“I am always glad to go,” she said, on the old grim note. “Yes, I shall never, I sometimes believe, come to terms with it—the striving and striving to make the good and honest thing, and then—and so soon, so terribly soon, it is done, it is finished, it has become its own opposite.”

I saw her face ravaged, for a moment, with pain. Then it was clear again, patient. She contemplated some future I was trying to guess at.

“Be careful, Sirius,” she said. “You are in very great danger.”

“Why did you lead me into it?" I was angry, and resentful.

“You have to know it," she said. “You are a stubborn one, Sirius. You are not of those who can be told a thing, and absorb it.”

“Well,” I said, sarcastically, “tell me, do you have hopes of my surviving this danger?”

She turned her face full towards me, and smiled.

“If not this time, then another,” she said, and this struck me again with the idea of her callousness, her indifference.

And she responded to this in me with: “Sirius, rebellion is of no use, you know. That is what you are now—rebellion, the essence and heart of no, no, no. But against what are you rebelling? Have you asked yourself? When you run about this city gazing at its people as victims and the abandoned—who is it that has abandoned them and what is it that governs their good and their evil? To rebel against an Empire—Sirius, you punish that quickly enough, do you not?” she held my eyes with hers, insistent, till I nodded, “Yes, you do, and very harshly! There is little pity in you, Sirius, for those who rise up against you. But when you, or I, rebel, protesting against what rules us all, and must rule us all, no one imprisons us, or kills us in the name of order and authority. Yet order and authority there are. We are subject to the Necessity, Sirius, always and everywhere. Are you thinking, as you sit there sulking and angry and bitter at what you see as the waste of it all, that you may change the Necessity itself? By your little cries and complaints? Well? What did you say to me when I was biting my hands and howling like an animal, in Koshi? Do you not recognise a disobedient servant when you see one?”

As she spoke, into the stillness of the morning, there came a sound of shouting, and distant anger. This was something I had heard often enough on other planets, and often, too, on this one, but I had not believed it possible I might hear it here.

“Yes,” said Rhodia. “When a place, or a person, begins to fall away, to descend from itself, to degenerate, then it is a quick business. It is inherent in this planet, in the states of mind it engenders, that we tend to see things, patterns of events, conditions, in terms of balances of force and energy that are already past and done. The high time of Lelanos is done with, Sirius. And be careful. Fare well. We shall meet soon enough. We shall meet again here, on Shikasta, the unfortunate one… unfortunately, we shall meet…” and she accompanied this last “unfortunately” with the ironic smile that oddly enough comforted me and made me laugh.

She went out of the room, and down the little stair. Outside a throng of people rushed past, with weapons of all kinds, screaming, shouting, raging. I heard “Death to the Tyrants, death to Rhodia, death to the Oligarchy…” And as I stood looking down, I saw Rhodia walk out from the door of her house into the mob. They screamed abuse as they saw her, surrounded her, struck her down, and rushed on, leaving her dead on the su

Such was the disorder in the city that her burial was a matter of throwing her with the other victims of the riots into a communal grave. And it was how, I felt sure, she would have wanted it. I wished I were not there. I had no protection here now, I was known as her associate, and it was impossible to disguise my appearance. But soon Rhodia’s death had affected me into a state of noncaring, indifference: thus I was pulled down further from my proper levels of thought and responsibility. I walked a great about Lelanos; and for me it was a ritual of mourning. Not for Rhodia, or Nasar but for a perfect thing. I could not tire of what I saw. Each city, anywhere, has its unique note, and that of Lelanos was unexpectedness and variety gained by ingenious use of its materials. There was its setting, a wide plain or plateau ringed with mountains but not closely enough to oppress. The plain was not flat, but full of change and uneve