The Sirian Experiments. Doris Lessing

I was seeing with certain arrivals on our own Colonized Planets where our rule had become too harsh, and local officials needed to be checked.

      This low huddling of rough buildings, crowds of poorly dressed people, children who I could see were ill-nourished, and an assortment of canines (which I had to resist the temptation to stop and inspect, since on none of our planets had we tamed a similar species) soon terminated abruptly as I reached the circular base of one of the very tall cones, which soared up above me into the blue sky with its floating white clouds that I had so often longed to see again. But I did not feel familiar here. There was a sharp tang of difference, of the alien, that was affecting me sharply, causing in me emotions that I was expecting: instability of feeling was a concomitant of seasons – so Klorathy’s brief summary had warned me. And I felt, as I looked behind me into a sun that was sinking fast, and heard the cold winds creeping about among the hovels, a pang of melancholy that I did not like at all. Shaking it off, I plunged into the crowds. They were nearly all males. The figures shrouded like myself were presumably females. Even the female children were, after quite an early age, shrouded in this ugly black. I was conscious I was feeling indignation – this seemed to me a bad sign, and a most unwelcome sign of possible imbalance.

      I was now among crooked streets and lanes, all crammed with people. There were open shops and booths, eating places, and so much noise I felt dizzy from it. The silences of space, in which I had been immersed, had ill prepared me for this shouting, sometimes screaming and quarrelling mob. And now I was seeing females not shrouded up. On the contrary, they were almost naked, much painted, bejewelled, and offering themselves freely. This degeneration was worse than I had expected, though of course it is a result of poverty everywhere unless severely controlled by legislation … I realized I was straying through the crowds, as their pressure moved me, looking at everything, stopping to stare when I was able to hold my place in the press, and in every way behaving like a stranger. And in a moment I found my way blocked by a male, who stood firmly in front of me, obviously intending to keep me there. He was staring close into my eyes through the slit in my black sheet. I found him unpleasant. That is, specifically, there was something in him I was able to sense that was more than the alien, or the not-understood. He was of middle Rohandan height, a couple of spans taller than myself, broad and solid, and his skin, of a greyish colour, almost green, had the smooth cool appearance of stone. His eyes were opaque, oblong, without brows. He had no hair, as far as I could see, for he was wearing a square pull-on cap, ornamented with lumps of coloured stone, of a soft rich-looking material. His mouth was straight, almost to the ears, and only a slit. His clothing was a voluminous fur cloak. He put his arms akimbo, in a way that made me experience them as a fence or confinement, and stared closer and closer, the greenish eyes not blinking, and very intense. I realized he was trying to hypnotize me, and guarded myself. I was also noting something else: he wore heavy gold earrings of a certain pattern.

      Among the artefacts I had been instructed by Klorathy to use as a protection were these precise earrings – but to be worn at certain times and in combination with other practices.

      Earrings had been – and would be again – among the artefacts used in this manner. To ornament the ears can hardly be described as a rare thing; but I had long since concluded that the practice had originated in this way – and therefore must contain hazards.

      I had exactly similar earrings concealed in a bag I had under my wrap, with the other specified objects. I had got to the point of wondering how I could conceal these if this evil – for by now I knew he was that – person captured me or was in a position to have me examined, when he said: ‘Very well then! I shall remember you!’ and turned and vanished in the crowds. But he had spoken in basic Canopean, not in Sirian … altogether, I had been given a lot to think about. I concealed myself in a little porch and tried to decide how to proceed. The exhilaration that comes from having to pit one’s wits against strangeness persisted, but I knew I had to find shelter quickly. I had been instructed to go ‘to the top of the third cone’. And they were built together in a bunch! I was not going to risk my clumsy Canopean, and certainly not my Sirian, here: I left the porch and wandered among the odorous noisy throng, while the light left the sky, and flares were lit everywhere at angles of the streets and outside the eating places. This was a sad and to-be-pitied people, I could see, even more now the night had come, and they were taking their ease. They were drunken, often fighting, tense with deprivation, and the degraded females dominated everything, openly selling themselves, and retiring with their customers no further than into a doorway, or under a table. I had never seen anything like this scene, not anywhere. And still I did not know how to find the third cone. I tried to put myself back into that moment when I looked down from the spacecraft at the town, and had been able to notice, if there was one, a pattern in the cones – it could perhaps be said they were built in two very deep arcs that intersected: in which case I was near the third from the end of one of the arcs. I went inside, finding a cool pale interior: they used a very fine plaster, like a ceramic, to line their walls. A steep stairway spiralled inside the building: I went up and up, stopping continually to look out of narrow slitlike openings as the city opened below me, and the noisome hovels of the low town fell away, and the gardened suburbs, now shadowy and attractive with lights shining in the trees, came into view. Up and up … I thought that I would not easily make such a climb again, not that day – but when I reached the very top, I found a doorway that was curtained in thick dark red material, and on it a flake of writing ceramic that had on it the one word, in Sirian: Welcome.

      I pushed the curtain aside and entered a large room, the half of a round: the circular top of the tower was bisected to make two rooms by a wall of the same finely gleaming plaster. This room was furnished pleasantly enough with low couches and tables and piles of cushions, but what I was looking at, after my first assessing glance, was – Klorathy. But it wasn’t Klorathy.

      That moment impressed itself on me sharply, and remains with me now. I often revive it, for a re-examination, because of what I learned from it – and still do.

      It is not necessary for me to say again how intrigued I was, and had been, by Klorathy, how closely I attended to everything about him – what he said, how he said it. And so on … No matter how often I had been annoyed or checked, or disappointed, I had never ceased to know that if I could understand him and his ways I would understand … well, but that was after all the point! And this preoccupation with him had been bound up, inevitably, with his person, how he looked, spoke, certain tricks of manner. I had unconsciously deemed these Canopus