The Sirian Experiments

THE SIRIAN EXPERIMENTS. The Report by Ambien II, of the Five

by Doris Lessing

First published in 1980

The reception of Shikasta and, to a lesser extent, of The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, suggests that I should say something in the way of clarification… if I have created a cosmology then it is only for literary purposes! Once upon a time, when I was young, I believed things easily, both religious and political; now I believe less and less. But I wonder about more… I think it likely that our view of ourselves as a species on this planet now is inaccurate, and will strike those who come after us as inadequate as the world view of let’s say, the inhabitants of Guinea seems to us. That our current view of ourselves as a species is wrong. That we know very little about what is going on. That a great deal of is going on is not told to ordinary citizens, but remains the of property of small castes and juntas. I wonder and I speculate about all kinds of ideas that our education deems absurd—as of course do most of the inhabitants of this globe. If I were a physicist there would be no trouble at all! They can talk nonchalantly about black holes swallowing stars, black holes that we might learn to use as mechanisms for achieving time-and-space warps, sliding through them by way of mathematical legerdemain to find ourselves in realms where the laws of our universe do not apply. They nonchalantly suggest parallel universes, universes that lie intermeshed with ours but invisible to us, universes where time runs backwards, or that mirror ours.

I do not think it surprising that the most frequently quoted words at this time, seen everywhere, seem to be J. B. S. Haldane’s “Now my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

The reason, as we all know, why readers yearn to “believe” cosmologies and tidy systems of thought is that we live in dreadful and marvelous times where the certainties of yesterday dissolve as we live. But I don’t want to be judged as adding to a confusion of embattled certainties.

Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it? We “make things up.” This is our trade.

I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their system to ours, to ask if our sun behaving cruelly to us, as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.

It has been said that everything man is capable of imagining has its counterpart somewhere else, in a different level of reality. All our literatures, the sacred books, myths, legends—the records of the human race—tell of great struggles between good and evil. This struggle is reflected down to the level of the detective story, the Western, the romantic novel. It would be hard to find a tale or a song or a play that does not reflect this battle.

But, what battle? Where? When? Between what Forces?

No, no, I do not that there is a planet called Shammat full of low-grade space pirates, and that it sucks substance from this poor planet of ours; nor that we are the scene of conflicts between those great empires Canopus and Sirius.

But could it not be an indication of something or other that Canopus and Sirius have played such a part in ancient cosmologies?

What do our ideas of “good” and “bad” reflect?

I would not be at all surprised to find out that this earth had been used for the purposes of experiment by more advanced creatures… that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t guess and that there might have been a science in the past which we have forgotten… that we may be enslaved in ways we know nothing about, befriended in ways we know nothing about… that our personal feelings about our situation in time, seldom in accordance with fact, so that we are always taken by surprise by “aging,” may be an indication of a different lifespan, in the past—but that this past, in biological terms, is quite recent, and so we have not come to terms with it psychologically… that artifacts of all kinds might have had (perhaps do have) functions we do not suspect… that the human race has a future planned for it more glorious than we can now imagine… that…

I do not “believe” that there are aliens on our moon—but why not?

As for UFOs, we may hardly disbelieve in what is so plentifully vouched for so plentifully by sound, responsible, sensible people, scientific and secular.

As for…

In this particular book I have created a female bureaucrat is who is dry, just, dutiful, efficient, deluded about her own nature. A skilled administrator she is; a social scientist. I could like Ambien II better than I do. Some of her preoccupations are of course mine. The chief one is the nature of the group mind, the collective minds we are all part of, though we are seldom prepared to acknowledge this. We see ourselves as autonomous creatures, our minds our own, our beliefs freely chosen, our ideas individual and unique… with billions and billions and billions of us on this planet, we are still prepared to believe that each of us is unique, or that if all the others are mere dots in a then at least I am this self-determined thing, my mind my own. Very odd this is, and it seems to me odder and odder. How do we get this notion of ourselves?

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.

Where do they come from?

I would so like it if reviewers and readers could see this series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, as a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities.

What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks.

But we can’t all be physicists.

This is Ambien II, of the Five.

I have undertaken to write an account of our experiments on Rohanda, known to Canopus in this epoch as Shikasta.

I shall employ the time divisions commonly used, and agreed on between ourselves and Canopus. (1) The period up to the first burst of radiation from Andar. (2) That between the first and second bursts of radiation—again from Andar. (3) From the second irradiation to the failure of the Canopus-Rohanda Lock, known as the Catastrophe. This third period is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age. (4) The period of subsequent decline. This account of mine will deal mainly with (4).

I shall not do more than mention the experiments before the first radiation, which are fully documented under Lower Zoology. During (1) Rohanda was damp, marshy, warm, with shallow seas hardly to be distinguished from swamp, and deep oceans kept turbid by volcanic activity. There was a little dry land. On this were a few land animals, but there were numerous varieties of water lizards, and many fishes. Some of these were unknown on other Colonised Planets, and on our Mother Planet, and we made successful transfers of several species. We also introduced onto Rohanda species from elsewhere, to see what would happen to them. All our experiments during (1) were modest, and did not differ from similar experiments in other parts of our Empire.

(2) The first burst of radiation from Andar was not expected. Both Canopus and ourselves were taken by surprise. We had kept a watch on the planet since the war between us that ended our hostilities. Because of the new situation we boosted our surveillance. The irradiation had the effect of abolishing some genera overnight, and of speeding evolution. The planet remained wet, steamy, cloudy, with the slow enervating airs that accompany these conditions. Yet new genera and species seemed to explode into life and existing ones rapidly changed. Within no more than a million R-years there were not only many varieties of fish and reptile, but there were species that flew, and insects—both of these formerly unknown. The place teemed with life. It also soon became clear we were to expect a period of the gigantic. The lizards in particular showed this trend: there were many kinds of them, some were a hundred times, and even more, their former size. The vegetation became huge and rank. Land and water were both infested with enormous animals of all kinds.

Throughout these times Canopus and ourselves conferred, when it seemed to either or both that this was necessary. Sometimes we, sometimes Canopus, initiated discussions.

We always supplied Canopus with reports on our proceedings on the planet, but they did not at that time show much interest. This important point will be gone into later. Canopus supplied us with reports, but we did not put much effort into studying them. Again, I emphasise that this is an important point, as will later become plain.

Canopus maintained a monitoring station during (2). We did initiate some experiments in various places over Rohanda, but these were mostly to do with sudden, not to say violent, growth; and since the planet itself was so generously supplying us with observation materials, we did not intrude ourselves much. It was not a popular place with any of our scientists. Our Planet 13 once had similar swampy and miasmic climate, and we already had considerable data.

For something like two hundred million R-years this state of affairs continued. Just as the previous, pre-irradiation characteristics seemed to be stable, if not permanent, so, now, did it seem that this pestilential place full of gigantic and savage animals would remain as it was. There then occurred, unexpectedly, the second burst of radiation.

The effects were again dramatic.

There was every kind of cataclysm and upheaval. Land sank beneath the water and became ocean bed; new land appeared from the seas, and for the first time there was high terrain and mountains. Volcanic activity had never been absent, since the crust covering the still molten core was so thin, but now land and water were continuously convulsed. The mantle of cloud that had Sometimes kept the whole planet in warm gloom for weeks at a time was rent tumultuously with storms and winds.

All the large species were destroyed. The great lizards were no more to be seen, and the forests of giant ferns were laid flat by the violent winds and rain.

There was a sudden cooling. When the convulsions lessened, and ceased, the planet was left transformed. In a very short time, much of the water was massed around the poles in the form of ice and snow. Some swampy areas remained but now earth and oceans were separated, and there were areas of dry land. That was of course long before the planet’s axis had been knocked out of the vertical: before the “seasons” that contributed so much to its instability. The poles were cold. The area around the middle was hot. In between were zones of predictable and steadily temperate climate.

This was period (3), from which both Canopus and ourselves hoped so much, when conditions were as perfect as can be expected on any planet—and which was to last rather less than twenty thousand R-years.

It was at the beginning of this new period (3) that Canopus invited us to a joint Conference. This Conference was held, not on our Planet, nor on theirs, but on their Colony 10, convenient for us both. The mood of the Conference was one of confidence and optimism.

This is the place, I think, to say more about our relations with our eminent friend and rival.

I shall begin with this statement: that Canopus pioneered certain sciences, and in the opinion at least of some is still ahead of us.

In my view the duty of a historian is to tell the truth as far as possible… no, this remark is not meant as provocation, though in the prevailing climate of opinion everywhere through our Empire, there are many who will see it as such.

For too long our historians refused to accept the simple truth, that Canopus was the first to explore and develop the skills associated with what we all now call Forced Evolution. (I do not propose to enter here into discussion with those—I am afraid still quite numerous—people who believe that nature ought to be left to itself.) It was Canopus who began to look at species—or whole planets—from the point of view of how their evolution could be modified, or hastened. We learned this from them. That is the truth. We were pupils in their school. Willing—and not unworthy—pupils; willing and generous teachers.

That is why, when it came to sharing out Rohanda between us, we got the less attractive share. This was what fitted our position in relation to Canopus.

The critical reader will already be asking: Why this praise of Canopus when as we all know the story of Rohanda was one—to put it baldly—of disaster?

If Canopus was at fault, then so were we, Sirius. At that Conference on their Planet 10, we all assumed that if Rohanda had—to our certain knowledge—experienced very long periods of stability, two of them, both lasting many millions of R-years, then we might safely expect that this new period would similarly last millions of years. Why should we not? There are factors, which we all agree to call “cosmic,” over which we have no control, and which may not be foreseen. All evolutionary engineering is subject to these chances. If we did not permit ourselves to begin any development on a newly discovered planet, or one that has become suitable for development and use, because of the threat of cosmic alteration or disaster, then nothing at all would ever be achieved.

Canopus, like ourselves, has experienced disappointment—and worse—in their career as colonisers. Rohanda was not the only failure. I am calling it a failure, though I know they do not—but it is no secret that I have been generally known throughout my career as belonging to that body of opinion that finds Canopus sentimental. Sometimes to the point of folly. What else can we call attitudes that are often uneconomic, counter-productive, wasteful of administrative effort?

What else? Well, I have learned that there are different ways of looking at things; though I do not yet share these viewpoints. That is, I hope, for the future… meanwhile, I am saying that judged from the immediate and practical view, Rohanda was not only a failure but perhaps their worst; and yet this was not at all or in any way their fault. And why should some of us be so ready to ascribe blame to Canopus, when we were, equally with her, ready to use Rohanda for as long as was possible—for millions of R-years, as we then thought was likely to be the case?

The disposition of the land and seas was roughly, very roughly, the same as it is now. There is a central mass of land fringed with promontories, peninsulas, islands. Around it is a vast ocean, with islands, some of them large. There are two continents, separated from the main landmass, and joined by an isthmus which has sometimes been submerged, and these are now referred to as the Isolated Northern Continent and the Isolated Southern Continent. Between the central landmass and the Isolated Northern Continent, looking west with their north pole at North, have been at various times, according to the rise and fall of the ocean levels, many islands, one of them at least enormous. But sometimes there has been only an almost islandless ocean.

Projecting southwards from the central landmass, of which its northern areas form a part, is another southern continent, now called Southern Continent I. (The Isolated Southern Continent is Southern Continent II. ) Southern Continent I has sometimes been considered by geographers as part of the main landmass, since its northern parts been so influenced by the easy migrations to and from every part of the main landmass. But the southern parts have on the whole had such a different history that they are more usually classed a different and separate continent. We, Sirius, were allotted in the share-out of Rohanda the southern continents, including the northern areas of S.C. I, and any islands large and small in the oceans that we felt inclined to make use of.

More has to be said about the Conference itself.

It was considered a success. Remarkably so. Even though it was only one of very many conferences and discussions about the situations of a large number of Colonised Planets whose problems, in one or another, we shared, everybody taking part felt that it marked a new level in co-operation. And the further it receded into the past, the more we all able to see it had been extraordinary, and this not because of the unexpectedly fortuitous new epoch on Rohanda. Committees, conferences, discussions followed one after another through the millennia: it was to that particular one, on Colony 10, we were always referring back, as if there had been some particular and unrepeatable spring of life and vigour there we had not been able to approach again. I am now going to say, with equal emphasis and confidence, that the Conference was a failure.

What Sirius understood of the resolutions, the agreements, the verbal formulations, was not the same as the understandings of Canopus. This was not evident then. It did not even begin to be evident for a very long time. It is not seen now, except by a small number of us Sirians.

By now it will have become clear, I think, that this report of mine is an attempt at a re-interpretation of history, from a certain point of view.

An unpopular point of view, even now: until recently, impossible.

Until recently, I have been among those who would have made it impossible: this I must say now, and clearly: I am not claiming that I am one who has been preserving an individual (and seditious!) view of history in secrecy, because of an oppressive conformity in the official way of looking at things. Far from it. If there is, if there has been, a minority of individuals who have in fact maintained a view different from the official one, then these will have considered me as a bastion of orthodoxy. This is not an apology I am making. We all see truths when we can see them. When we do, it is always a temptation to consider those who have not yet seen them as quite intrinsically and obdurately stupid.

In throwing in my lot with this minority—if it exists—I am doing so in the expectation of strong criticism—but not, I hope, of worse.

I shall deal once with what I consider to be the root of the problem: that long-ago war between Canopus and Sirius.

It ended in a Truce… the anniversary of which occasion we still celebrate. The beastliness and horror have been formalised in tales of heroic exploits that we teach our young. The fact is that Canopus won this war, and, at the moment when they might reasonably have been expected to humiliate us and to exact tribute and retribution, they summoned our thoroughly defeated leaders, returned to us our Colonised Planets, which they were in position to retain for themselves, informed us that we must stay behind our boundaries, offered us co-operation and friendship, and announced that this agreement would be described as a Truce, so that we not suffer ignominy in the eyes of our fellow states and empires.

A very long time later, and quite recently, I asked my Canopean friend Klorathy, head of their Colonial Administration, what he and others like him now felt about this magnanimous and high-flown behaviour, in view of the fact that we, Sirius, had never given them credit for it, but on the contrary had done everything to expunge from our books, and even—apparently—from our memories, any hint that Canopus had won that war and had then behaved as no empire has ever—to my knowledge—behaved anywhere. His was that “it was too early yet to say what the results would be and he preferred to withhold judgement.”

I record this typically Canopean remark. Without comment. Without comment at this place.

I said earlier that Canopus had not shown much interest in the results of our experiments on Rohanda, or on any other planet, for that matter.

Just as we did not understand their attitude at the end of the great war between us, so we did not, do not, understand their indifference to our work.

This is because they, in their own work, have gone so far beyond us. They never had anything to learn from us. But we have consistently interpreted their attitude as one of dissimulation, believing them to be pretending indifference, out of pride, while secretly ferreting out any information they could, even sending spies into our territories and making use of our work without acknowledgement.

Our set of mind has been one that has consistently led us into wrong judgement.

Let us take an example. That the Conference was on Colony 10 and that it was from here the colonisers for Rohanda were chosen was merely a coincidence. Yet we were all talking about the “cleverness” of Canopus in making sure that we met these vigorous and formidable people, so that we would not be tempted to overrun our boundaries on Rohanda. And this belief of ours, crystallised at the Conference—I was one of those responsible, and am in a position to admit to the harm done—continued on into our sojourn on the planet, influencing us in all kinds of ways. But it was quite simply nonsense: we had suggested their Planet 10 ourselves. This is the kind of error suspicion leads us all into.

There are many more examples I could give, but I will deal with the two main factors, or themes, of this Conference: that is, as we were affected. We supplied to Canopus outlines of the experiments proposed, but did not see then—were not prepared to see!—to what an extent these were to be conditioned by what Canopus proposed to do.

That was at the beginning of the 20,000 years during which we were to profit by Rohanda’s great time, under the influence of Canopus. It was not until later that Canopus decided to speed up her plan, because of her Planet 8, which was due to reach an untimely end because of unforeseen cosmic changes. Canopus was then thinking in terms of 50,000 and not 20,000 years, in which to advance the Colony 10 individuals to a certain level. She informed us that she planned two phases. First, a general heightening and consolidation of these Colony 10 volunteers up to a determined point. (That they were volunteers struck us then as laughable, though it was not long before we were employing the same policy, instead of conscripting.) This predetermined point—and we were offered full information and details—would be marked by what they called a “Lock”—that is, a synchronisation between Canopus and Rohanda that would bring the planet into harmony with their Empire as a whole. Harmony of a particular kind.

This, then, was the first theme, one unfamiliar to us at that time. Unfamiliar, I am going to risk saying, even now: for when we use words like harmony, good fellowship, co-operation—which we do plentifully and all the time in relation to our Empire—we do not mean by them what Canopus means. At the Conference, being told Canopus proposed to develop the Colony 10 volunteers, to stabilise them, to make use of their evolution to advance the Canopean Empire, what we understood from this was no more than the sort of development, stabilisation, evolution, advance, that we associated with our own territories.

The second theme was how Canopus proposed to achieve these admirable results. For we were given—or offered, for we did not make use of this opportunity—the information we wanted.

We did not accept because we were handicapped by being resentful, even though the general euphoria of the Conference succeeded in masking these unfortunate emotions. The northern areas were plentifully stocked with certain species of primate. In these were upright, using tools and weapons, with the beginnings of semi-permanent settlement. This type of animal, at this level of evolution, is always of value, both for experiment and in training for simple tasks. There were none in Isolated Southern Continent II; and while there were some apes in Southern Continent I, they were at a low level of evolution, suitable for experiment, but of no use at for work.

We saw Canopus “as usual” grabbing the best of everything, for not once did remind ourselves that there no reason we should ever have been allowed on Rohanda at all. It was not we who had discovered this planet.

Canopus told us that certain rapid and desirable developments of the Colony 10 colonists would be because of a “symbiosis” between them and the apes, and that the apes, too, would be benefited. We saw this “symbiosis” in terms of beneficial cultural exchange and, more specifically, as the superior immigrants being set free for higher tasks by using the apes as servants.

In short, the two main pieces of information, the bases on which the Canopean plan was predicted, were not understood by us at all. In spite of our being told everything. To emphasize this even more: now, looking back at the Conference, I can see that there was nothing not said, not made plain, not explained. But we misinterpreted what we being told. And again, it is impossible not to ask, now, why Canopus set up the Conference in this way? To forestall reproaches of niggardliness? No! Knowing Canopus, this not the reason. But they must have realised that we were not taking in what being said, were understanding everything in our own way.

So why did they do it? It is only recently that I have had an answer to this question. The beginnings of an answer… The end of the Conference was marked by all kinds of festivities and jollities. We were taken on trips to other colonies; invited, “if we were in that part of the Galaxy,” to visit them for as long as we liked—the usual courtesies.

Back on our Home Planet we Sirians lost no time. Planets in the healthy, vigorous condition of Rohanda were—and are—rare. We of the Colonial Service were all delighted and full of optimism. Incidentally, it was at that Conference that Rohanda acquired its name. Perhaps this is not the place—it is too soon—to remark that when the planet suffered its cosmic reversal, and ceased to be so pleasant, even if it did not lose any of its fertility, Canopus at once jettisoned the name Rohanda, substituting another, Shikasta, “the broken or damaged one,” felt by us to be unnecessarily negative. This mixture of pedantry and poeticism is characteristic of Canopus, one that I have always found irritating.

Spacecraft had already thoroughly surveyed both Southern Continents, independently of Canopus. Our scientists had visited selected areas, and recommendations had been made. It was decided that Southern Continent I would be used mainly for agriculture. We had recently acquired our Colonised Planet 23 (C.P. 23) found it well able to sustain large-scale settlement, provided it was supplied with food. This being part of the same system as Rohanda, and quite close, we thought from the start of using one or other of the southern continents as an agricultural base. S.C. I was admirably equipped from the point of view of soil and climate. It was roughly divided into three zones, the middle one, equatorial, being too hot, but the other two, the southern part and the northern, useful for a vast variety of plants. We introduced several grain plants from both our colonised planets and those of Canopus and developed some indigenous grasses to supply grains and also developed locally-originating tubers and leaf crops. I was not directly in charge of this enterprise. Those interested will find accounts of S.C. I’s twenty-thousand-year career as a food supplier for C.P. 23 in the appropriate documents. During this time, too, several laboratories were maintained on that continent, and a good deal of useful research accomplished. This was nearly all to do with agriculture and the use of indigenous and introduced animals. Our C.P. 23 flourished during this period. Its inhabitants originated on our Home Planet, of first-class stock, carefully selected. None of their energies needed to be spent on feeding themselves, or on anxieties about their nurture; they had their attention free for mentation and intellectual activity. This twenty-thousand year period was C.P. 23’s Golden Age, when it achieved the position of Planning Centre for the whole of our Empire. The fact that it was short-lived does not detract from this achievement.

I do not propose to say much more about the experiments on S.C. I. Nor shall I be giving full or even balanced accounts of our experiments on Isolated S.C. II. Details can be found under the appropriate headings.

I shall again say that the purpose of this record is to put forward a certain view of our relations with Canopus. There have been a thousand histories, formal and informal of our experiments on Rohanda, but not one setting these in the Canopean context. This fact alone makes my point. What I say, therefore, about our researches will be chosen entirely from this point of view; and it must not be thought that the emphases given here would be those adequate from the point of view, let us say, of someone looking at the Rohanda experiments from a long-term view of their evolutionary usefulness. This epoch on Rohanda, short though it was, proved crucial in our relations with Canopus, both then and subsequently, and not only on that planet but generally. Which may lead us to ponder profitably on the implications of the fact that a short period of time, twenty thousand years, may turn out to be of more importance than epochs lasting millions of years; and that the small planet of a small and peripheral sun may have more influence than large and impressive-seeming constellations. I feel that this kind of speculation may throw light on the Canopean superiority to us in certain fields of endeavour.

In order to understand how our Colonial Service was thinking, it is necessary to sketch the situation in the Sirian Empire at that time.

Our technological development had reached a peak and had been established long enough for us to understand the problems it must bring. The chief one was this: there was nothing for billions upon billions of individuals to do. They had no purpose but to exist, and then die. That this would be a problem had not been foreseen. I shall at this point hazard the statement that it is usually the central, the main, consequences of a development that are not foreseen. What we had seen was the ending of drudgery, of unnecessary toil, of anxiety over the provision of the basic needs. All our efforts, the expenditures of energy of generations, had gone into this: a double or two-branched advance: one aspect of it to do with the conquest of space; the other, with the devices that would set us all free from toil.

We did not foresee that these billions, not only on our Home Planet but also on our Colonised Planets, would fall to depression and despair. We had not understood that there is inherent in every creature of this Galaxy a need, imperative, towards a continual striving, or self-transcendence, or purpose. To be told that there is nothing to do but consume, no work needed, nothing to achieve, is to receive a sentence of death. The hapless millions, offered by their triumphantly successful leaders plenty, leisure, freedom from want, from fear, from effort, showed every symptom of mass psychosis, ranging from random and purposeless violence to apparently causeless epidemics and widespread neurosis. This period, known as the Sirian Dark Age, does not lack its historians, and I shall concentrate on its aspects that germane to our theme. One was a phenomenon that became known as “invented usefulness.” Once the cause of the general malaise had been understood, there were various solutions suggested, of which this was the first attempted: areas that had been relinquished to machines and technical devices were deliberately reclaimed. I will mention one example.

Everything to do with the supply and demand of food, and household goods, had been mechanised so that the means in most general use everywhere in the Empire were vast depots, each one of which might supply a million inhabitants, needing no attendants at all. These were dismantled in favour of small suppliers, sometimes specialist suppliers, and the billions employed in this artificial industry were conspicuously happier than the idle masses. For a time. We had to take account of what is, so we know now, a law. This is that where the technology exists to accomplish a service or task or to supply a need, then if this is not used, because of humanitarian or other social reasons, there is no real or lasting satisfaction for the people in that sector. they all in the end, even if this realisation is delayed—sometimes deliberately, and by themselves, in efforts of self-deception—that their labours, their lives are without real purpose. And—in the end, if this is delayed—they fall victim to the same constellation of ills and general malaise. This is not to say that “invented usefulness” was not plentifully used; that it is not sometimes, in controlled areas, still used. As therapy, for instance; I will shortly describe an experiment on these lines.

Another phenomenon of the Dark Age was named, derisively and with unconcealed resentment, “pastimes of the rich.” Few of our better-off citizens did not acquire for themselves land, where they farmed in the old style: “pastimes of the rich” were mostly in the agricultural area. Innumerable people everywhere on our Colonised Planets left their leisure, their controlled and planned entertainments, regressed to a long distant past, with families working sometimes quite small plots of land, aiming at full self-sufficiency, but of course using the technical advances when this suited them. A favourite model was the ancient one of crops, animals, and workers as an interacting and mutually dependent unit. Such “farms” might not trade at all, but consumed what was grown. Others did set up trade, not only with each other but sometimes even made links with the cities where their products were in great demand—again with the rich. I do not have to say that the resentment against these “drop-outs” was due to envy. There was a time when it seemed as if there was not a male, female, neuter or child in our Empire who was not possessed of one idea: to get hold of some land, even criminal means, and to retreat into primitive production. This period produced its literature, a rich one, which is not the least curious of our literary side products. This phenomenon, at its height, was not confined to parts, or areas, of planets, but whole planets were taken over, and sometimes even conquered, with this idea in view.

Our Colonised Planets 19 and 22 were for several millennia agricultural paradises, with not a town to be seen and both consciously planned and developed to avoid the growth of villages larger than marketplaces for the exchange of goods. There were mass movements of mainly young people whose aim was only to reach either of these planets or to conquer a new one. These movements had all the characteristics of the “religions” that afflicted Rohanda in its period of decline and degeneration. To “live simply,” to “get back to nature,” seemed to nearly everyone the solution to all our new problems. But this phase, too, passed, when it became evident that these artificial schemes, these expedients, did not succeed in stilling the inner drive towards transcendence, both social and personal. There are still such farms, such ideas, in existence, but they have long been understood by everyone as pathetic regressions.

It was by then clear to us that we needed a drastic decrease in population. To state this is enough to raise the questions that then ravaged us all. Were we saying that the conditions of our existence in our Empire were to be governed entirely by economic factors? That the lives of our peoples should be judged solely by the levels of our technical achievements? Of course it goes without saying that when the question was put like this, the answer was that the numbers of populations, and their ways of living, had always been governed by economic factors: all that had happened was that famines, floods, diseases, had been replaced by the consequences of technical development. Nothing had changed: that was the argument. No need to torment ourselves now about questions about the purpose of life, the value of the individual, and so forth. Had we pondered and agonised over the results of natural disasters? Yes? Had this done any good? No? Then were we now prepared to agonise and torment ourselves over equally uncontrollable factors?

But that was the nub of the thing. We had seen ourselves, in bringing our technical achievements to such a pitch, as being in control, as exercising choice. Our thinking had been governed by this one idea. That we had abandoned chaos, and random decimation; that we had advanced towards conscious and deliberate controls.

To say that we were deliberately choosing to reduce our populations, that this was a choice, was simply not true, no matter how judiciously and carefully we were doing it. We been forced into this position by our economic growth that had gone naturally from step to step—upwards. As we had seen it.

This debate went on for a long time, throughout our Dark Age, in fact, and while we were actively reducing populations everywhere. And has gone on ever since, in one form or another.

Thus did our technological announce to ourselves, to other empires, to anybody interested, that what governed the coming into existence, or not, of an individual, was work. Or the lack of it. And where would that end? Were we to refuse life to more people than we had work for? Surely that was ludicrous, absurd. We needed agriculturalists—these could never, can never, be dispensed with. We needed technicians of all kinds to do with the production of synthetics and foodstuffs and household goods. We needed some craftsmen. And there was necessary a small governing and administrative class. On our Home Planet, it was estimated that we could do very well with half a million people. At our population peak, our Home Planet had two billion people.

Again, it had to be recognised and acknowledged that we were not in control of what we did, for we were forced into what we did. And that our social programming was always a matter of compromises, of adjustments, of balancing one force against another. We had a small area of choice, if that word could honestly and accurately be used at all.

This realisation affected some of our administrative people badly, resulting in depressions and psychological maladjustments of all kinds.

The populations everywhere, on everyone of our planets, were drastically, but carefully reduced; while the philosophical aspects of the matter were left, temporarily, to the intellectuals.

There was a very long period while this was being done when there were blocs of vast numbers of people who had no occupation, and for whom occupation was made. This fact, too, is relevant to what follows.

Meanwhile, there were extraordinary and bizarre contradictions to be observed everywhere.

The idea of ourselves, not only on Home Planet but everywhere, as people who had evolved beyond certain levels made it impossible for them to be asked to do some kinds of work.

I did not mention in the list of classes of work that had still to be done by people and not machines, some kinds of heavy manual labour for which we had not found technical substitutes. Without using force, it was not possible to get any of our peoples to undertake these. In the early heady days of euphoria when we were so effortlessly and successfully—it seemed—surmounting every kind of technical obstacle, abolishing one by one the different classes of unpleasant and degrading work—so we called it—intensive propaganda had gone into adjusting and setting the minds of populations accordingly. When we reversed, or were prepared to adjust, our thinking, it was too late. It is easy for a skilled administrative class to change the ways of thinking of populations, but not easy to do it fast—not without all kinds of social upheaval. We found ourselves in the ludicrous situation where, with hundreds of millions of “surplus” people, we did not know where to find enough ordinary labourers.

We had evolved beyond using force: Canopus had shown us this path long ago. (By this I mean the use of large numbers of people, under duress, for tasks they found abhorrent or demeaning. This did not mean that we did not conscript for work that everyone agreed to find interesting—such as the Colonial Service.) It was not possible for us simply to round up the numbers needed for mining, quarrying, building and so on, and then turn them into a prison population to do society’s dirty work.

In the preceding remarks to do with our condition during that time, I have not yet done more than mention the space drive, which was the greater part of our development—indeed, the motor that governed all our technical development.

Our crisis had its own built-in solution from the beginning. It was to increase our space fleets, our space personnel, our programme for the conquest of space. Our situation was not a static one, not self-limited. Though it certainly did have its limits: the war with Canopus was a result of this sudden restless drive outwards. The devastation caused, the vast numbers killed, certainly solved, or postponed, some problems. I am speaking now dispassionately, and without submission to sentimental considerations: it had not been our intention to use this way of reducing our surplus populations—but that was the result; not our intention to ruin whole planets, so that much labour would be needed to repair them—but that was what happened. These were the facts. But the inherent productivity and resources of our Empire were such that all this damage was soon and easily—looking at it from a long-term view—put right. The real lesson of this war was that we were not to be allowed to trespass on Canopean territory. Certain parts of the Galaxy were out of bounds. This meant that the planets available to us, at our then level of technical achievement, were limited: we had already conquered, or at least surveyed, them all. What was necessary was an expansion of our space technology so that greater areas of the Galaxy would become open to us. This is what happened; but this story does not concern us here: only the aspects of it that help to make clear the general situation then, which was, to sum up: a deep and indeed permanent and incurable crisis due to technical mastery, which could be only be alleviated by a continuous expansion in space.

I have now said enough to set the background to our experiments on Rohanda—which of course was only one of the planets being used in this way.

There are very few biosociological experiments not the result of natural development; whether they are set up deliberately or merely monitored as they unfold. Our first on Rohanda was imposed on us by necessity throughout and came definitely into the category of those that are observed during changes imposed by extraneous pressures.

I am starting with the Lombis, not because it was the first experiment but because it had long-term effects on the planet.

THE LOMBI EXPERIMENT. SOME OTHERS

Colonised Planet 23 needed to be made ready for the Thinkers… the reader may detect a note of derision in that phrase: but it is not my intention to detail social controversies of that long-past time: the criticisms of the institution of a planet devoted entirely to one function were certainly many, but these did not in any way affect it. It was a barren planet, waterless, all rock and sand and extinct volcanoes. Our activities there cannot be regarded as experiments, because we had long since perfected techniques for existing on such planets. We had to make structures that were self-contained, with their own climates and atmospheres. Once created, such societies needed very little maintenance. It was quite easy to grow food by hydroponic and other techniques, but these had proved to have their limitations. One was in the area of grains. There were other foodstuffs, too, that did not do well in these limited conditions. And it had been long established that while adequate for maintaining life, crops produced in water lacked an element that we only later isolated. But this subject can be studied under its headings. It had been decided that since C.P. 23 was close to Rohanda, which was so fertile, there was nothing to be gained by planning C.P. 23 to feed itself. The structures on C.P. 23 therefore were not as comprehensive and vast as they sometimes are on such planets; but they were large enough so that flying over it, the entire surface seemed to be covered by glistening silvery blisters: the domes of the controlled environment.

They had to be built. This involved the use of large numbers of ordinary labourers, not only for the putting together of the dome-sections, which were of course manufactured elsewhere—on C.P. 3, at that time specialised for this type of manufacture—but for clearing the ground, a formidable task on that uneven and rocky terrain, which needed hundreds of different types of machine. I have said that our many and varied populations all had been taught to consider themselves to have gone past this type of work and would not be induced to undertake it.

We had come up against a problem, central to the development of our Empire, which the Lombi Experiment was directly concerned with. It was this: as soon as we had colonised a new planet that already had on it an indigenous population, and even if these were at the beginning not more advanced than apes, or other types of animal, almost at once they saw themselves as defrauded of benefits and advances that they were entitled to. Over and over again we had seen this development. Our administrators would arrive on such a planet, and it could still be in condition of first-degree savagery, and in no time at all, it was clear that a process of rapid social evolution had been begun, which might express itself in many ways, one of which was rebellions and revolts that at the start, and before we understood the causes, had to be put down by force. For it was then believed that this impulse towards self-betterment was due to crude envy and primitive emulation, and was regarded unsympathetically. It only later that we saw that we were observing a force for growth that would constantly uplift and progress all the peoples of our Empire. It was not at all just a question of “they have such and such good things, and we want them, too,” but of an irrepressible evolvement. Very soon in our career as the makers of Empire, we knew that if we established ourselves on even the most barbarous of planets with the intention of using its inhabitants in various necessary ways for the good of our Empire as a whole, then it must be expected in short time these savages would demand—at which point they would be freely given—all the advantages at our disposal. Our Empire could be regarded as a mechanism for advancement of an almost unlimited number of planets, in different stages of development, towards a civilised norm. Towards uniformity?—an unwanted and undesirable uniformity? That is a different question; a crucial one, certainly, but not our concern here.

What we were considering, at the time Rohanda’s new phase began, was why and how the mechanism worked that our mere appearance on a planet began this remarkable process. It was one that we found embarrassing, unwanted. We needed peoples at different levels. We already had billions of privileged peoples entitled to every benefit of technology. We did not want to discover, and then colonise, planet after planet of savages or semisavages who then, it seemed almost at once, would become privileged citizens. In short, we needed a reservoir or bank of populations whom we could use for ordinary, heavy, undifferentiated work.

We had recently found, and explored, Planet 24. This was in a solar system distant from both ours and Rohanda’s: too distant to be conveniently incorporated in our Empire in a closely interacting bond. Visits would have to be infrequent, and strictly functional. But it was a productive and fertile place, with an atmosphere, and an indigenous population of animals of a common—and useful—kind. They were of simian type, using four legs or two according to need, were both vegetarian and carnivorous and extremely strong and vigorous. They had long but not overthick hair on their heads, shoulders, and backs, but little in front. They were endowed with powerful shoulders and arms. They were squat, and shorter than any of the species we had discovered anywhere. Compared to the peoples of our Mother Planet they were a third of our height.

They lived in a variety of patterns, in tribes, smaller groups, in families, even as solitaries. They knew fire. They hunted. They were at the very beginnings of an agriculture. It will be seen that their main characteristic was adaptability.

It was decided that our technicians should from first contact with them adapt themselves to their level, their ways. There was to be no attempt at our usual practice of maintaining a clear-cut, well-defined level of Sirian living—which we did both as self-discipline and as an example. The problem was the physical difference. We chose Colonial Service officials from C.P. 22 who, because of their experience with backward self-sufficient agriculture, could be expected to find conditions on 24 at least recognisable, and who fortuitously were a small, stockily built people. They were instructed to approach the Lombis in a way that would give no indication of any sort of superiority in thought or practice. It was these researchers who established our knowledge of the Lombis.

Another controversy arose at this point. Previously it had been our practice to space-lift as many males, or females without young, as needed. But not both. There had been disquiet at the inhumanity of this practice recently. I was involved in the widespread self-questioning: it was no longer possible for us to use conquered peoples without considering their emotional and mental, as well as their physical, welfare. To accommodate families on 23, and then on Rohanda, would add difficulties to our attempts, but would also enhance and widen the experiment. Our faction in the Colonial Service won the day. We defeated a compromise suggestion of taking sterilised females, and adopted a further compromise: of taking not equal numbers of males and females, but two-thirds males to one-third females. There were advantages to this: not least that it was something not yet tried by us before.

Fifty thousand of these animals were space-lifted to 23, where conditions contrasted in every way with what they had been used to, and both males and females were set to work to set up the space domes. This involved their working, to start with, heavy in equipment, of the standard type for such environments, which they could discard only when the domes were operational. This was not without interest: taking animals who had learned to spit meat over a fire, but not yet to use cooking pots, and putting them into space-age suits and machines. They were able, after instruction, to manage both.

Our technicians were always with them, on exactly the same level, eating as they did, deliberately refraining from any show of difference or superiority.

These technicians continued to be recruited from C.P. 22. This caused a good deal of unrest throughout the Service, though its necessity was appreciated: only 22 produced the individuals of a build approximating the Lombis’. Involvement in such experiments was always competed for. There was not enough to occupy our clamouring and idealistic youngsters. The term of service for the technicians was restricted to six months (Rohandan time) for two reasons. One was to give as many young people as possible their chance; the other was the contradictory one that none could have endured it for longer. To live on a day-to-day level with the Lombis was to regress to a past that our planets liked to think they had gone beyond forever.

During their time on C.P. 23, the Lombis were not pressured or indoctrinated in way whatsoever.

Previously, our practice had been to find out the structure of belief on a planet, and then use these “Gods”—whatever form they took—in appropriate ways. For instance, we would have told the Lombis that their “Gods” needed them to perform special duties in distant skies. But as far as we could see, they had not reached the stage of gods and deities.

We told them nothing. Our technicians were among them on 24 for a time, without explanation—and none could easily have been given, within their language structure, which was primitive. When our spaceships descended on 24, they took the fifty thousand from different areas so that social patterns would not be too badly disrupted. On 23 they were simply told what they had to do, put into space suits already being used by our exemplars, shown where they were to eat and rest. When the first domes were up, they were given the use of them. All without any information beyond the utilitarian. The atmosphere on that planet inside the domes, strictly controlled, approximated that of their own. No physical shock could been experienced on that score. Their food was also arranged with this in view.

It was much too soon to watch for signs of a demand for “higher things,” for such impulses in them were bound to be absorbed by these new habits of living they were learning. An immediate and expected development was fierce competition for the females, and a certain amount of belligerence. Their term on C.P. 23 lasted five Rohanda years, during which were supervised and instructed by the Planet 22 technicians, who were always changing, always lived exactly as they did, and who explained nothing at all of the reasons for what was happening to them.

Then these Lombis were all, again without explanation, spacelifted to Southern Continent I. Their task was the same: to create the physical conditions for others to use; but not controlled domes and environments, since this was Rohanda. As they arrived on the planet and were released from the spacecraft, our observers were there—but concealed from them.

The Rohandan atmosphere is not dissimilar from that of C.P. 24, but it has 5 percent more oxygen.

I have to record that the observers—among whom I was one—felt more than a little disquiet as the poor creatures emerged on to the grassy, watered plains. They had been for all that time—to them it must have seemed interminable—on 23, either within the domes, or outside working in their cumbersome space suits. There were skies inside the domes—but false skies, which they knew, since they had made them; there was vegetation, but none they had not put there; there was water that they set moving. Here they stood on earth that was not all sand and rock and gravel, but was grassed and fertile, under real skies… as they came pouring down the spacecraft steps they let out hoarse cries of wonder and gratitude, and then flung themselves down on the grass and rolled there, and then clutched each other and—so it sounded—laughed and, when we looked closely at their broad, hairy faces through our powerful lenses, wept: we saw the tears roll. Tears are not part of our functioning on our Mother Planet, but they are of some among our family of species. We had not known that these animals wept; no mention had been made of it. And then they danced, slowly, solemnly, thousands upon thousands of them, holding up their arms, lifting their ape faces to the skies and celebrating their joy at returning to—normality? Was that what they thought, we wondered? That this was their own home again?

So it turned out. They believed that they were home, since trees and blue skies and grasses and freedom from clumsy machinery and space equipment were their home; and did not realise for some time that this not part of their own planet but another planet.

When they did, they were not given time to develop negative reactions.

After an interval while they were allowed to rush about and to dance and to let out strange—and surely rhythmic—grunts and cries, a time while were permitted to enjoy their freedom, they were again rounded up, divided into companies, and set to work. Forest had to be cleared for, first of all, settlements of our colonisers; and then when this accomplished, wider tracts cleared for the planting of crops, and the siting of laboratories. When one station was ready with its buildings, its cleared fields, its laboratories, then the entire work force was lifted off again to another site further south. As soon as they left, but not before, since these animals were not to see creatures more evolved than themselves, the first contingent of agriculturalists came in from our Mother Planet. They had been chosen by lottery; such was the fierceness of the competition for this work, it was the only method that could be guaranteed not to cause resentment.

Ten different agricultural stations were established on Southern Continent I. These were enough not only to supply all of 23, but later there were plentiful supplies of what were luxury products, at luxury prices, for our Home Planet. The setting up of these took over a hundred R-years.

The average life of the Lombis was 200 R-years. As always when establishing a species on another planet, the this would affect a life-term was a major consideration. We had come to expect random and wild fluctuation at the beginning, and thereafter unforeseen variations in life-term. The Lombis were no exception. During the first few R-years, some died for no apparent reason (some race-psychologists classed these deaths under the heading of due Mal-Adaptation due to Life Disappointment), and the young that were born seemed likely to be set for longer life-terms. There was also a quite unforeseen increase in height and girth.

When their work was done on Southern Continent I, they were not returned to their own planet. This was because, during the period between their being taken off their planet, and the end of their term on 23, another planet had been discovered, much nearer to Sirius, not dissimilar from 24, but with only limited and lowly evolved life-forms. It was our intention to space-lift the Lombis to this planet—Colonised Planet 25—in order to establish on it this species, which, we hoped, would continue to be useful for general hard unskilled labour.

In other words, they were not to return home at all.

But it was not possible for them to be taken to 25 at once, because that was being used for certain limited and short-term experiments, and their presence there would be disruptive. They were therefore brought under my aegis, on to Isolated Southern Continent II, as an interim measure.

During their hundred years on S.C. I, they were in what can only be described as a social vacuum. They had not been allowed to glimpse any sign of Sirian general levels of culture. They had continued to be instructed—less and less, since they proved able pupils—by the C.P. 22 technicians, who never allowed themselves to be seen as superior in expectation to their pupils. They were not told why they were doing this work of establishing agricultural stations. Nor what happened on 23 after they left it. Nor what their destiny was to be. Some of their supervisors considered they were not capable of either asking questions or understanding the answers. Others disagreed. We took note of these comments but continued our policy, unmoved by criticism that this whole experiment was brutal.

We were watching, closely, constantly, for signs of the familiar demand for more, for higher, for better. That was, after all as much a purpose of their being put on 23 and then on Rohanda as the actual work they did. Meanwhile, they were set free on a particularly favoured part of Isolated S.C. II. Of course this before the “events,” the changing of the angle of the axis, the slight distancing of Rohanda from the sun. Everywhere on Rohanda was hotter then, proportionately. The southern part of the continent was ideal, a paradise—for once to use the emotional language of course inappropriate to this report—and I have never seen anything to equal it. The conditions but similar but better than what the Lombis had known on 24: drier, more even, without extremes of any kind. They given well-wooded, fertile plain, that had a central river and its many tributaries, informed they were not to stray beyond certain limits, and left entirely to themselves. Our monitors from 22 were withdrawn.

I and my staff were established well away from them in an inaccessible place among mountains that they had no reason to approach. They were not told that their stay in this beautiful place would have a term—and probably a short one.

I was at that time much occupied with other enterprises.

This was one: observing the invigorating climate of this continent, we thought it worthwhile to transfer on to it, though temporarily, some of those who were succumbing to the mental disorders, chiefly depression and melancholy, that characterised our Dark Age. We used it, in fact, as kind of mental hospital, or asylum. The conditions were so easy, so little effort was needed to maintain life, that all we did was to space-lift those who wished to try the experience to parts of Isolated S.C. II—of course well away from the Lombis, and leave them there to make their own shelters of branches or grass. Food was brought across from Southern Continent I. They were not permitted to hunt or harm the animals, but were allowed to fish, within limits. The idea was a deliberate return to a primeval innocence, of a kind that did not need even to be newly invented or rehearsed, for this type of fantasy too, had its literature, and its conventions, like old-time farming. What we were doing, in fact, was really a variety of tourism, but in ideal conditions, allowing highly civilised and refined populations to experience instead of observing. Yet they could observe, too—for one thing, all kinds of animals and birds unfamiliar to them, as well as the most attractive forests and rivers. This scheme was immensely popular. From everywhere in our Empire they clamoured to be allowed a sojourn on Rohanda. Our medical profession were enthusiastic. At its height half a million were living over the southern plains, for shorter or longer periods.

But I have to record a failure. The original cause of the malaise that sent them to Rohanda was not touched. Doctors who worked among the unfortunates had to conclude that if melancholy and listlessness were sometimes palliated, then restlessness, feverishness, a hectic dissatisfaction, took their place. The scheme was classed as a mistake, ended. No one was supposed to be left behind after the final space-lift, and officially this was accomplished, but after experience in many such projects, I believe that a few eccentrics and solitaries always manage to evade vigilance and creep away to make lives for themselves. So in a small way this experiment may have affected Rohanda.

There were many other short-term experiments and they absorbed enough of our attention to prevent us from doing more with the Lombis than make sure they did not stray off their terrain.

When we were told Planet 25 would shortly become vacant, this was rather before we had expected. We at once put on order a complement of 2,000 Planet 22 technicians. Our immediate problem must be obvious: it was essential that the technicians should be able to mingle with the Lombis on their level, but we did not know what that level now was, after nearly a thousand R-years.

Before the 22-ers came, we had done enough work with binoculars and judicious near approach to have ascertained that they were outwardly at least not much changed. We put the techs in quarters near our head station. They had nearly all been involved with the moves of the Lombis from C.P. 24 to 23; from 23 to Rohanda; their sojourn on 23. There were no unexpected adjustments for them to make. But when the first investigative contingent of 500 went off stripped of their clothes, carrying nothing, not even a little food or a weapon, they could not hide discomfort. The 22 people do not have hair on their bodies, and have forgotten when they ran on four legs. But in my observation it is the moment a species puts on garments, even the most vestigial, such as aprons of foliage or bark, that marks the transition upwards from beast; and this much more than standing on two legs. It is the birth of a certain kind of self-consciousness. To put off every bit of clothing was hard for these Planet 22 people, and they did not like being looked at by us. We respected their feelings and let them go off down the side of our rocky plateau unaccompanied: normally some of us would have gone with them part of the way. We did watch them for a time, though: this kind of observation being part of our task. Planet 22 people are more yellow than the dark Lombis, and they had been under the sun-machines; but they were still more yellow than brown. The company of wiry little people were soon lost to view among the foothills, and we heard no more of them for some days.

Messengers sent back to report on first encounters with the Lombis said not much more than that it was safe to send in the other 1,500, who duly set off, naked and discomfited.

The task of these 2,000 techs was to dwell among the Lombis and to assess them and what changes had taken place.

I shall now sum up their several reports.

The first 500 did not find it easy to locate the Lombis. When they did see some out on the plain gathering plants, and were observed, the Lombis ran to find cover and disappeared. It took days for the first encounter. None of them remembered, as individuals, their capture from their home planet and subsequent events. But they remembered as a race: this was the most important change: their speech had evolved. Not over the business of the day-to-day maintenance of life, but in this one direction: they had songs, and tales, that instructed them in their history.

The second change was that they now had festivals, or feasts, at the time of the full moon, so that these songs and tales could be exchanged. This had unified these animals. On their own planet they had lived in all types of association, sometimes in small groups with no contact with others. But now every individual without exception was expected to travel in to a central feasting place once every R-month. This not always the same, but changed, and situated in a well-wooded place with a river for hygiene and water supplies. Not only the regular festival or “solemn remembrance”—which was how their word for it translated; and the singing and storytelling; but the travelling to and from the central place had become ritualised and made the bonds held this new nation together: for this is what they now were, according to our classifications.

They were, in any case, constantly on the move, changing their residences, their plant-gathering places, their watering places. Restlessness and fitful energy was their new characteristic. This was because they were using more oxygen than they had done on Planet 24. It was their chief physical change.

And here was a paradox, a contradiction. While never able to be still, always active, they nevertheless had become fearful and secretive. This characteristic was reinforced by the subject of their monthly rituals, which was, in various forms, their abduction from their home.

They had become a race of strong, indeed violent, contradictions. When first seeing our exploratory contingent, they hid themselves—because their history was of just such “strangers from the skies” who arrived among them, were friendly, and then ruthlessly kidnapped them. But “strangers from the skies” were what they expected to come again and rescue them… for they expected to be returned to their “real home in the skies.”

They had, on their own planet, sometimes used leaves or hides as coverings, either for warmth or for ornament, but now all clothing of any sort was forbidden, and inspired terror, because the space suits of C.P. 23 were the worst of their memories. Even a female balancing a few berries on her nose in play or trying them behind her ears, or tying some leaves around her middle, or sheltering an infant in a pelt would bring forth a storm of chattering and scolding from any who saw her—as if they all felt that these were the first steps to the so-much-feared garments; the claustrophobias of the “little prison.”

On 23, and while 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 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 done only at feasts, as if it was 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, 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 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 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 sympathise 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 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 this they respectfully but self-respectingly replied that they thought our arguments sophistry.

There no need for them to say 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 enquired from them what they would like us to do. Their 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 memory of the abduction of what had been very small proportion of their number? There was no doubt at all 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 out 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 been accepted by a family or a group, and never even in pairs, let alone groups, that could seem a challenge, these little yellow people, hairless though they were, did not seem so very different from that company of short, squat, brown, very strong apelike creatures bounding and prancing and wailing under the full moon. I myself saw them from the “shining machine” that had picked me up from our headquarters, and was taking me back to our Home Planet where it would drop me off for a spell of leave.

I looked down on thousands of faces lifted in supplication to the skies, on thousands of raised arms, palms held outwards in a manner I had observed on so many planets! I was looking at a manifestation of the need for “higher things”—and thought that we had not foreseen how this innate and unconquerable need would develop in this way, with these creatures, safely channelled into nostalgia for “home,” for “visitors from the skies,” and so on.

They were singing about the shining machines as these descended. Drugged and entranced by a night of mass dancing and singing, they trooped willingly on to the spacecraft and were lifted off to C.P. 25. Their future development does not concern this history; but I shall describe later visit I paid them.

Not all of them were there at that feasting place that night.

About 10,000 had been set down on Isolated S. C. II. And about 10,000 were taken off again. Yet their numbers had slightly increased, in spite of the inevitable deaths due to adaptation to the unfamiliar, if so beautiful, terrain. The technicians had of known that the spaceships were to arrive and when. Some of the more disaffected had enticed away a few Lombis before the feast, telling them the shining ones were certainly coming, but they would be evil and would take them to a bad place. We lost 9 technicians, and about 500 Lombis. We did not mind this. What we had wished to forestall was that any of them should stay in that area, which we wanted to use for other controlled experiments—as far as such experiments can be controlled. We had therefore informed the technicians that all that terrain was to be used in a trial of certain diseases, so that they would move well away with the Lombis. We done something else, too. Having carefully observed the more rebellious of the technicians, we had chosen two of them, told them we knew they intended to stay behind when the spaceships came, said we did not mind this, nor intended to stop them. But we would like them to undertake a task for us, for Sirius, who was after all—and would remain—their master, their friend, Sirius who had raised them from an animal status not in any way higher or better than the Lombis. We did not want promises from them; we were not promising them anything; we were not threatening them—but if it became possible for them to accomplish a certain task, then we be grateful, they be playing a great part in our plans.

The names of these technicians were Navah and Hoppe.

When the planet was shared out between us, any things were left unsaid, implicit. One was that we would inform each other of what we did. This had been done—within limits on our side, due to suspicion; and within limits on theirs because we could not understand Canopus. Another was that we would not interfere with each other. Canopus has not interfered with us. This I aver, from my position as one who can state this categorically. They have behaved throughout honourably. I use this word advisedly, in this place.

When Canopus “gives her word,” she keeps it. This concept, which is foreign to us—again I must insist on this, as part of this history, which is being written as factually as I can make it—is one of several similar concepts, part of a general way of looking at things. If something is said by them, then it is the truth. If Canopus “gives its word,” then this is kept, regardless of the inconvenience (and sometimes worse ) to themselves. If Canopus “promises,” then this is done. If Canopus offers aid, then this is the very best that can be given at that time in those circumstances. Canopus is always and absolutely to be relied on. I state this because it is the truth, and knowing full well the sort of reaction I may expect from certain of our historians.

We do not, many of us, understand this now; and we certainly had no idea of it then.

In short, we all believed that Canopus would to trick us, as intended to trick them. Not in any very important ways, or ones that be damaging to them. It all more in the spirit of youngsters who still find it amusing and clever to outwit each other.

I wanted to know what was going on in the Canopean part of Rohanda. That is what I had asked Hoppe and Navah to find out. It would be dangerous for them. They were very small people. The colonists Canopus had introduced from their Colony 10 were three times their size. Hoppe and Navah were yellow. The Canopus colonists were black or brown. There was no way the two spies could conceal themselves among these colonists. And we knew the ape species of the northern areas were again, large, hairy, and organised in tribes that almost certainly be hostile to hairless little yellow men. But it was my belief that Navah and Hoppe would enjoy the challenge; and in any case, they were not compelled in any way.

Now to anticipate. Twenty R-years later Hoppe returned, alone. Navah had settled in the southern part of Isolated Northern Continent, with a few of the Lombis. But Hoppe had travelled steadily north, a journey that took five years, while Lombis left the travelling party, in pairs and groups, and made settlements in favoured places.

They did not find any Canopean settlements. Later found out there weren’t any then. That continent was not the paradise S.C. II was at that time, but very hot, and in parts still swampy. Hoppe went to the north, and on the east coast found that the indigenous ape-people were travelling back and forth from the main landmass, by various types of boat, passing from one island to another: at that time the ocean was full of islands of all sizes.

Hoppe allowed himself to be made a prisoner by them. He not ill-treated, but regarded as a curiosity and even as a pet. On the western part of the main landmass he found the following facts.

One was that the Colony 10 colonists and the natives had started to increase in height. This I found easy to believe because the Lombis’ height had increased by an R-span during their thousand years.

Another was that both colonists and natives were living longer, after an initial period when the colonists had a dramatically reduced life-span. This I believed, too, for the Lombis had shown signs of a longer life-span.

But the next fact was not believed by us, although Hoppe insisted on it.

It that the colonists were living in settlements quite apart from the natives. These settlements were not makeshift, or arbitrary and casual, but were carefully constructed. Yet they were on a lower level than the cities of Colony 10. The natives, who had been at that stage so often found by us and Canopus on many planets—just beyond the animal level, beginning to use fire, sheltering in caves and structures of branch and grass, sometimes covering themselves with leaves or pelts—were now in proper settlements, which were well made and sited, and they were being taught all kinds of crafts by the colonists. The colonists did not stay near the natives, but visited them for short spells while they imparted their information; then retreated to their own places, and only returned after an interval to see how their instruction had taken. No attempt was being made them to use the natives as servants. So said Hoppe. So he swore.

Having found out all that he could, he begged the natives to let him travel back, island to island, to the Isolated Northern Continent, and they did. They were a good-natured species, and never harmed or threatened. Once there, he did not wait to argue with them, for he knew they would not want to lose him permanently, and he slipped away one night and travelled by himself southwards, where he was able to visit the colonies established by the Lombis, and he was much welcomed. I was relieved that Canopus had not set up colonies of their own on that northern continent, which was definitely part of their assigned territory; though, of course I had planned to plead, if challenged by them, that the Lombis had escaped from one of our experiments—which was true after all.

As for what Hoppe had said of the relations between the colonists and the natives, I did not believe him, not being able to match with my own experience what Canopus had told us of their plans for careful, controlled, and scientific development—for the “symbiosis."

Hoppe felt that he had fulfilled his undertaking to me; and indeed he had. He went back north where he found a place in one of the settlements. I heard no more of him. The Colony 22 people are not long-lived and he could not be expected to come back within his lifetime.

But I was intrigued and curious about what went on up north. During all this time there were conferences between us and Canopus on various planets, and more than once on Colony 10 itself, but I did not find the information we were given adequate. For one thing, it reported such rapid progress of the Canopean plan that I did not believe it. We were in the habit of exaggerating successes and concealing failures, and so we assumed that this is what Canopus also did.

But I couldn’t leave it at that either. The next time one of our supply craft came from Southern Continent I, I asked its head operator to a consultation. I wanted a smaller craft, of the kind that kept liaison between the different agricultural stations on S.C. I, to visit enough of the central landmass to make sure of one fact: that the Canopean colonists and the natives lived in settlements at a good distance from each other. This was risky. Not because there was any need to expect more than reproaches from Canopus—certainly not reprisals—but because it would be a definite breach of our agreement. I reasoned, however, that it was unlikely settlements on the fringes of the landmass would ever have seen any type of aircraft, for we knew it was Canopean policy to visit their Rohandan settlements as seldom as possible. Besides, it was only a practised or expectant eye that was likely to see our modern craft, they were so fast, and because of the materials they were made of, almost invisible in certain lights.

The investigation was made, and the craft did more than actually fly over settlements to survey them; it landed, and several groups of both natives and colonists were watched from a distance. There was no doubt about it: Hoppe’s report was true. Colonists were not employing the natives. I was ready to believe that this was because the natives had proved too backward to be employable, but this was not what our spy craft had found. On the contrary, even in the hundred years since Hoppe’s visit, it seemed that the natives had advanced and were already using the skills they had been taught.

I gave the whole question a great deal of thought. Looking back I have to credit myself with this, at least. But I concluded that the reason for the rapid evolution of the natives was something in the atmosphere of Rohanda. And that we had been unfortunate in our choice of both our Colony 22 and the Lombis. In this respect, not in any other: these two races may have been impervious to these peculiar and specialised Rohandan influences. When supply craft came from various agricultural stations on the other southern continent, I questioned the crew carefully about the personnel on these stations, who came from several of our Colonised Planets. But none had shown any marked evolutionary changes, whether for better or for worse.

I then concluded that it was the northern areas that must hold the beneficial influences, and I was bitter, believing that Canopus had withheld from us information about them so we would not resent their claiming them.

It this anger that was responsible for my next decision.

It must be remembered that Isolated Southern Continent II had no indigenous apes of any size; and that those on S.C. I were all small and far from even standing on two legs. Our use of the Lombis and of the people from Colony 22 had been well enough as far as it went but these were both such small races they were classified in our system as dwarves. I made a survey of all the races throughout our Empire, but at last wondered why I was taking this trouble, when what I wanted lay to hand for the taking… I instructed one of our fast liaison craft to make a reconnaissance of the Northwest fringes of the main landmass and then to direct a large cargo craft to kidnap an entire community of natives, without alerting the colonists who would then be sure to inform Canopus. After all, if our aircraft were not seen the colonists could report only that the natives had gone—had decided to escape from a tutelary supervision unwelcomed by them. All this was done, and I was delivered an entire community of seventy natives, males, females, and young. They were treated at all times with kindness.

We put them, not on the plain vacated by the Lombis, which was too large and was needed by us for other purposes, but on high wooded terrain not far from our own headquarters. There was no reason why they should not be aware of us; this experiment did not resemble that of ours with the Lombis. They at once made shelters for themselves of a quite advanced kind, using bricks of sunbaked earth, and well-dressed thatch for roofing. They showed no signs of distress at this arbitrary disruption of their lives but, on the contrary, were ready to be friendly and—because of their relationship with the Canopean colonists—to be taught. But while I forbade them to be used as servants or labourers in any way whatever—thus copying what I had understood of the Canopean experiment—I also forbade them to be made pets, or to be allowed inside our houses or to be taught any further skills, for it seemed to me that they had already been shown more than they could use. They knew, theoretically, for instance, about planting seeds and tubers for food, and about keeping animals for meat and milk, but were careless and forgetful in these, showing signs of letting aptitudes slide away from them altogether. Remembering that the settlements of colonists in the north were at a distance from their charges, and that contact was seldom, I believed I was following this example in not pressing our tutelage. At this stage the natives were slightly shorter than our own average height, at about seven or eight R-feet. They were upright, never descended to all fours, kept their dwellings clean, ate meat and vegetables and fruit, and milked a species of deer, but not with any system.

This little colony of northern animals was a most important factor of our relations with Canopus, and of subsequent developments on Rohanda. But this did not seem to us so at the time. Far from it. Yet we could hardly forget these creatures, who lived so close to us, always visible, and of much interest to us and our visitors in their comings and goings. They multiplied, but not very much; and their settlements spread, but never did more than cover the hills that were first allotted to them. Nor did we cease to monitor their development because this was where our preoccupation with Canopus and its work focussed. But while several thousand years passed, we were involved in many other experiments, all over this wonderful and rich continent, and these took up our attention.

I shall mention the one that did have an indirect effect on long-term Rohandan development.

Millions of females throughout our Empire, forbidden to produce young because of our population-reduction programmes, craved this experience while subscribing to a prohibition whose necessity they understood. We had more volunteers than we could use for our various eugenic attempts.

Prefabricated buildings of a high standard were space-lifted in from our manufacturing Planet 3, and placed on the terrain that the Lombis occupied. These were filled with females, already impregnated, from various of our planets. The fathers had also been chosen. Our need was to produce a strain that would adapt easily to widely varied conditions on different planets. While we were restricted by the nature of the conditions on our Mother Planet to planets that fell within certain atmospheric limits, these limits proved to be much broader than we had envisaged in the early days of our Empire. Species could learn to adapt: some much more others. But our experience had been that if representatives of one species had adapted to certain conditions, then these did not necessarily take to further adaptation. We wished to breed technicians who would be available for work on different planets, of differing atmospheres, sometimes with little or no time for adaptation or acclimatisation. These all-purpose, hardy, multifunctional technicians in fact were absolutely essential in certain outlying parts of our Empire.

The females on what we now called the Lombi plain numbered fifty thousand. They were supervised as much as was necessary to prevent them from escaping, to supply them with first-class medical care, and to monitor the growth of their young, with the appropriate testing and analysis.

These females regarded themselves as favoured and privileged: indeed they were. They knew themselves to be of superb fitness and condition. They had been told by the highest among our Colonial Service, which is itself the highest function of our Empire, how much their services were valued. But in spite of all this, we knew a degree of watchfulness had to be maintained: this, the reproductive instinct, being the strongest there is, it could take—had taken, in the past—many surprising forms; and we did not want any of them escaping with their young when the time came to give them up. For they all knew that this must be when the young had attained five R-years.

This was one reason the breeding station was on Rohanda, which was a long from our Mother Planet and visited by none except our craft and those of Canopus. (Or so we believed then—but of that later.) It would not be possible for them to escape either by spacecraft or out of the Lombi plain, for there were guards stationed all around a vast periphery, well out of sight, who had been trained in every manifestation of the maternal instinct in desperation.

The other reason this station was here, well out of the way, was that such experiments always aroused opposition. This phenomenon is so well known that I will do no more draw than attention to it. Even when females have volunteered for this type of service, even when the experiments are crowned with success, and the results are shown in new breeds and strains that fulfill everything expected of them and are heaped with honours, and whose functioning is remarked and followed with approval and admiration from everywhere in our Empire—even so there is criticism, and of a certain kind, which I have learned to recognise. It is always marked by a sharp painful note, or tone, that signals a feeling of loss—and not only a personal loss, not at all: this is why I for one have taken pains to notice this cry or protest, which is so much more than personal. I can only put it like this: that it seems as if—I do not see how we can conclude anything else—when such deliberate, controlled experiments take place, to produce definitely envisaged stocks or strains, it is felt—most deeply and profoundly, and by the most responsible and evolved of our peoples—that some other possibility been lost.

As if randomness and chance in themselves are a good and a blessing and even a means of acquiring something not yet defined… I am stating my own personal opinion here, arrived at after much reflection.

This was the largest experiment in eugenics ever undertaken by us. Its success was due not least to the Rohandan atmosphere, the Rohandan isolation from other influences, our distance from the centre. When the fifty R-years of the experiment were over, and the breeding station was finally dismantled, we congratulated ourselves that in that time not one of the successive inputs of females had escaped, and that we had not again contributed to the Rohandan species.

For five thousand R-years we did not investigate conditions in the northern Canopean areas: it will be remembered that we believed we had before us millions of years of a stable environment. We were informed that Canopus was sending a special mission, as they had reason to believe their plans more successful than had been envisaged. The report of this mission was sent to us: it recommended the immediate implementation of something they called a “Lock”.

Again it has to be emphasised that we did not understand the bases of the Canopean work. We did not know what this “Lock” was: though this did not mean we were not aware that there was regular contact between Canopus and Rohanda. But we assumed this was on the lines of the various types of electrical communication used by us with our own planets near enough for these methods. They also talked about a “degenerative disease,” but without specification. These two concepts were not understood by us at all, until recently: are not understood now generally. We might have asked questions: Canopus was always ready to answer them. We might asked ourselves questions, since we believed our technology was as advanced as that of Canopus. But we did not. The reason was the same: various forms of pride. What was in the body of the report inflamed us with disbelief and suspicion.

The natives who still enjoyed their well-supervised and comfortable lives so close to us were nowhere near the level described in the report on the northern hemisphere.

We had chosen disbelief—but not entirely, for again I decided on some investigations of our own.

It happened that at that time Ambien I was visiting me.

In our long distant early youth we been aligned for the purpose of producing our allotted four progeny—that was before the reduction of general population levels. Ambien I had decided after our progeny were grown to enter into another alignment with a female who subsequently worked with me on various projects when we had reached general-service-age. The eight products of the alignments had formed bonds of various kinds and, in short, the personal aspects of our lives had been satisfactory.

Ambien I had been on the committee that first considered what our work would be on Rohanda, and had been involved with it ever since. His visit to me was partly old friendship and partly investigative: I not been back to our Home Planet for millennia: this was because I was thoroughly happy on Rohanda, enjoyed my work, and thought it too pleasant a place to abandon for service leave. Members of the Colonial Service, even members of the Five, visiting us for any reason always made excuses to stay. In short, Rohanda had become my home.

When we had had time to satisfy our accumulated curiosity about each other’s doings, after what had been a good lapse of time, I asked him if he would undertake a spying mission to the northern areas. He agreed readily. More than once he had been in the teams that “opened up” new planets, and he had always enjoyed this type of rough dangerous work. We did not expect danger from this particular enterprise, but at least it would be a break from routine. He took a liaison ship to the extreme south of the central landmass, where he dismissed it. Altogether he was away ten R-years.

He travelled extensively over the central landmass, where there were everywhere settlements of colonists and natives, always positioned at short distances from each other. He went on foot, boat, and sometimes by using suitable animals. Ambien I and myself are of course of the same general species, but his particular subspecies are broadly built, brown of skin, with straight black hair. I, being fair of skin and hair and very slight in build, could not go anywhere near the Northern areas without discovery. But he, while being much shorter than the colonists—who were rapidly increasing in height, and were now twice the size of the original Colony 10 species—was rather taller than the natives, and could not hope to be taken for one of them. He at first avoided close contact with them, but seeing that he could not get the information we needed this way, approached them in settlement after settlement, and found no hostility at all—at the most, curiosity.

At first he put this down to innate good nature due to the favourable conditions they lived in, and lack of challenge. But then, though reluctantly, he came to believe they had visitors of other kinds. Not colonists, who were unmistakable because of their size. (They from this time were referred to as Giants by Canopeans, and I shall do the same.) If not colonists, then who? Was it possible the dwarf races of the Isolated Northern Continent had grown large and were making island-hopping journeys across that ocean? We were soon to learn differently: but it was this speculation that made him decide to visit the Northern Continent on his way back to me.

What he found everywhere on the central landmass corroborated the Canopean report. The native stock had improved so far beyond what they had been seven or eight thousand before, it was not easy to believe them the same species. They were practising agriculture, understood the use of animals, and their dwellings were not only built in well-planned settlements but were even being ornamented with designs in sophisticated colours. They had begun to wear clothes, too, and these were well made and often dyed.

It was the Giants’ settlements that could not be explained. They were living on a level not very much higher than the natives; and on Colony 10 they had evolved to the stage of advanced cities.

Ambien I’s survey was complete, he instructed the liaison ship to fly down over Isolated Northern Continent, to see what had happened to the Lombis and the stock from C.P. 22. But he could find no sign of them. We had a rough idea of where they ought to be, from Hoppe’s information—but nothing. We concluded that they must have succumbed to some epidemic, since there was no sign of settlement by natives or Giants either.

We had to come to terms with the facts about the Canopean work in the north. The captured native stock so happily living on their hillsides where they were always under our inspection could not be said to have regressed. They had not developed. They had abandoned attempts to care for and use other animals, but hunted skillfully and intelligently. They grew a few roots for food, but not grains. They picked leafy plants from the wild, but did not plant any. They wore animal pelts but no art used in their preparation. The shacks and huts they lived in were adequate.

We did not understand what had happened to make the difference.

Again I was ready to conclude that the Canopean north was in some way better endowed, but Ambien I reminded me that the Giants actively instructed the natives on their visits, whereas we had pursued a policy of noninterference.

We decided to divide our stock of natives into two, and establish a colony of them at a distance from us, so that there could be no contact. This new colony would be energetically supervised and taught by us in the practical arts. Ambien I undertook this task: it was one he was particularly well fitted for.

He built himself a shelter in the new village, and settled down with them as an instructor.

This attempt was a failure. He was not able to teach them anything they could retain. That is, he taught them a variety of crafts, which they seemed to understand—but in a short time everything was forgotten. After a period of intensive work, he had to confess that the new colony was not much better off than the first one.

He did make further attempts during the next ten thousand years, goaded by the amazing results of the Canopeans, but they all failed. Meanwhile he was making more trips to find out what was happening in the north. Not only he, but others, too, whom we ordered from our Home Planet. We wanted individuals as near to the natives of the north as possible—no races in our Empire attained anything like the height of the Giants. Ambien I and these new experts again and again surveyed the north. Always, we believed, without discovery. Certainly without resistance.

Because of the number of spies we sent northwards, we believed that the Canopeans must be doing the same to us; and we were careful to spread rumours of the fierce and warlike nature of the southern hemisphere.

All this activity of ours during that period now makes me amazed and incredulous—as we are when remembering earlier cruder phases of ourselves. None of it was necessary. All we needed was to read, without suspicion and with an open mind, the material continually supplied us and then to ask them questions. But it is always useless to bewail past mistakes.

During this period of ten thousand years the reports by Ambien I and the others were increasingly amazing. There were cities being built everywhere, of a kind Sirius knew nothing about. The beauty of the cities on Canopus was famous, and we had always emulated them: to state the fact, which even now we are reluctant to admit. But these cities were built in remarkable shapes, of a mathematical kind. They were all different. The Giants and the natives lived together now. The cities were different not only in shape and size but in their qualities: Ambien I always said it was not easy to describe what he could feel. On the islands, great and small, of the ocean between the Northern Continent and the main land-mass were many cities, and the life on them was more advanced than any in our Empire. And we were talking about not only the Giants—whom we were certainly not surprised to find at this highly evolved level—but the indigenous stock whose unregenerate state we could see by going to the windows of our citadel and looking down: there they were, a lazy, amiable colony of—apes, for after all, that was all they were.

Why? It is not too much to say that Ambien I and myself and the others of our staff became obsessed with Canopus and their successes. I was, particularly. I had not seen what they described. But I did once insist on being taken in one of our fastest craft on a trip over the island-crammed ocean between the Northern Continent and the main landmass, and saw a very large island, that had on it a magnificent white city, circular, with surrounding channels and causeways, and ships as fine as any used anywhere riding in the harbours. This after only 5,000 years of the “Lock” that Canopus attached so much importance to.

Because of the primary intention of this account—Sirian relations with Canopus—and emphasis on aspects of our researches that affected these relations, there is a danger readers may believe what is described here more or less defines these researches. I can repeat that during the roughly 18,000 years of that ideal period on Rohanda, only a small part of our work had long-term effect on Rohanda or on Canopus. During the 10,000 years we were so preoccupied with what went on in the north, we were also making full use of opportunities. I will mention one project, which lasted more than 10,000 years, involved nearly the whole of Southern Continent II, employed millions of our technicians from every part of our Empire, and which had no contact at all with, nor influence upon, our spying missions into the north, or Ambien I’s attempts with the captured natives.

The paradoxical Sirian situation already mentioned had not improved: on all the older and long-established Colonised Planets were millions who had no employment nor hope of any, who knew that their deaths (which we of course did not hasten in any way whatsoever) would be a relief and lessening of burden on us all, and who were too softened and enfeebled by affluence for any but the easiest work, who had come to crave even the physical labour they believed to be beneath them—but who, when offered it, were not able to do it. For there was a period when we of the Colonial Service did in fact do our best to use these noisy and complaining hordes where we could on large-scale development projects. It was a failure. While demanding “any kind of work, no matter how rough”—most vociferously and tiresomely—when they were in fact put to this type of work their ingrained belief in their own superiority, their weakness of will, their self-indulgence, caused them very soon to slacken, or to manifest a large range of psychosomatic problems.

For a period of about 8,000 years, we had vast encampments all over Southern Continent II, where physical work graded to easy preliminary stages was created for these people, in order to fit them for the real work elsewhere on the newly acquired and still undeveloped planets that we were “opening up”—to use our term for the early phases of our colonisation. Our problem was that we did not want to disturb the ecological balance of Rohanda more than we had to. We did not want to destroy vegetation or animals. Nor to engage in that would scar or mar the earth. We had plenty of other planets whose natural endowments were suitable; but only one whose endowments were so lavish, fertile, beautiful. The food for these millions of apprentice colonists was supplied by S.C. I—whose agricultural stations remained successful beyond anything we had hoped for. But to supply them work without upsetting their environments was a different matter. It was—it had to be—invented. As each new contingent of, sometimes, many hundreds of thousands arrived from this or that planet, flown in by our giant transport craft, they were set to make their own housing and amenity buildings by using premade building materials. But this did not take them long. And while so easy, involving very little real labour, they were complaining that they were “demeaned” and “degraded.” Yet each one was a volunteer, and had had explained to them that their sojourn on Rohanda was temporary, and for training purposes only.

I will make here an observation that was formed in that time and which I seen no reason since to modify. It is that if a race or stock or species has once become enfeebled by soft living and a belief that it is owed easy living, then while physically such individuals may later adapt to vigorous use of themselves, mentally this is almost impossible except for very few of the more flexible. Self-pity will be their disease—a disease of the will, not of the flesh.

Once their settlements and camps were set up and operating, the real problem began.

The training work we created for them was of two kinds. One involved the local animals. Using varieties of deer, we bred adaptations of them, thus enabling our volunteers to become used to ideas relating to eugenics, which we used so extensively everywhere in our Empire, and also taught them how to choose and use animals for food and heavy labour. Of course the animals of Rohanda were all strange to these volunteers who had come from so many different planets, and the novelty assisted us in the task of keeping alive their interest and enthusiasm, for they became bored and indifferent quickly: they all needed constant stimulus. We also set them to classifying and recording the species of plant life—this meant that they had to keep on their feet out of doors. They were sent off on long investigative trips, under careful supervision so that they would do no damage to the environment.

But while this could not be described as hard work, it was too hard for most of them. So went our diagnoses at the time, and these were of course true. But I wondered then, and wonder now, if part of their lack of enthusiasm was due, quite simply, to knowing that this was work already done—for of course they had to know this. Although they were told—again—that this was preparatory training for their endeavours to come on other planets, they did not have the appetite for it. Continually demanding that they be put to work on “the real thing” at once, complaining that they were being undervalued by us, because of these “easy and piffling” tasks, they failed to make use of the real opportunities they were being offered to accustom themselves to harder. They were quite unreliable, shiftless, and, in the end, unproductive.

They were returned to their own planets after all had been given a fair chance to show if they could match their actions with their demands. But we did not want to exacerbate their already poisonous discontent and therefore tried to soften this rejection of them in various ways, saying that work would be found for them later, and so on.

On the whole it was felt that these attempts had not only been failures but worse: for when these millions found themselves back on their home planets, their complaints and discontents fomented uprisings and uproar of every sort, which were already quite enough of a threat. Our military strength had to be increased at time when we believed that we could look forward to rapidly rising prosperity due to a welcome dismantling of our armies. Some of the more discontented planets became, for a time, not much more than vast prison camps. And yet I can say that every possible effort was made by us to alleviate the tragic situation of these unfortunates, the victims of our technical genius.

In the meantime an, alas, only too familiar situation continued: while these useless millions degenerated, we still needed vigorous and intelligent stock for hard labour on the planets that the same technical prowess was opening up.

What we had to do was to take from those planets recently settled species that still retained their native vigour and were uncorrupted by soft living—as you can imagine, we were being extremely careful how we introduced our luxuries and our ease to these newcomers to our Empire—and after suitable training, use them to develop the new ones. We would choose from these planets stocks and species that seemed suitable, and train them not on their home ground but somewhere else. Rohanda was tried for a while, the empty settlements and stations of the failed experiment being put to use. The work given these more vigorous stocks was much harder than that given to the enfeebled once. It necessary to preserve a balance between retaining an ability for physical labour, while developing capacities for initiative and enterprise. What we did was to tell them they were to explore possibilities of developing fauna and plant life, without damaging their surroundings. The results were most gratifying and useful.

I remember a trip I made with some of my staff from end to end of Southern Continent II during this period, using a small fleet of our liaison craft. Flying north to south and up the coasts, crossing the continent back and forth, it was over magnificent terrain with vast peaceful rivers. But everywhere this paradise, populated by herds of peaceful animals, showed the settlements of the successful experiment. We landed day after day, week after week, among these representatives of species from our numerous colonies, all so different, yet of course all basically of the same level of evolution—for it is when a species has got to its hind legs and started to use its hands that it can make the real advances we look for and foster. Furred and unfurred, with long pelts and short, with fells and tufts of hair on their backs and shoulders leaving their fronts bare, black of skin and brown, their faces flat and snouted and heavy-browed and with no brow ridges, jutting-chinned and chinless, hairless and naked, naked but with leaves or bits of skin round their loins, slow of movement and quick, apt to learn and not capable of anything but beast work… to travel thus from place to place was really an inventory or summing up of the recent developments of our Empire. This trip was pleasurable, and gave us relief from the disappointment of our recent failure with the northern captives.

All these species—some of them new ones to me; all these animals, and none of them incapable of adaptation, were nevertheless, when matched in our minds with what we were being told of the Canopean experiments up north and the amazing, the incredible evolution of the indigenous native species, fell so short that the two achievements could not be compared. We knew this. We discussed it and thought about it. We did not conceal the situation then; though our pride made it something to be glossed over and then forgotten.

This entirely successful experiment on Rohanda—the teaching of so many different stocks to be good flexible colonisers, which was making us so gratified and confirming our confidence in our Colonial Service—was nevertheless and at the same time a defeat. We knew very well that none of these animals we were teaching would evolve very much beyond they were now, or not quickly: their capacities would be stretched, their skills added to, they would make use of their new opportunities. But it was out of the question that we could expect them to make the jump, in a few thousand years, from their animal state to one where they would live in cities as fine as anything we knew on Sirius, and maintain them, and change in them so that they could hardly be recognised as the same species as our engaging and likable companions, the simians who lived on their hillside so close to our headquarters, and who were always such a pleasant source of entertainment and interest for us and our visitors.

The Canopean experiment had changed the native stock. Fundamentally. This was the point.

Our being able to survey all these different kinds of animals all once, and coming to terms with their possibilities and limitations, resulted in a stepping up of our already quite intensive spying in the north. We had spies, both as individuals and in groups everywhere. We used less and less disguise. This was because of the openness with which we were received. Partly because all the southern hemisphere was covered with our supply fleets filling the skies between Southern Continents I and II, and we could always excuse our presence by talk of forced landings. Partly because of a new factor.

We were approached by emissaries from Shammat. It is not easy to believe now, but Shammat at that time was hardly even a name. Puttiora, the shameful Empire, was, of course, not ignored us, if for no other reason than that we were continually having to fight off incursions on to our territory. Shammat was spoken of as some dreadful sun-baked rock used by Puttiora as a criminal settlement. At any rate they were pirates, adventurers, desperadoes. We had certainly not thought of them as having reached the stage of technology, and we were right, for the craft that set itself down on the plain below our headquarters was a stolen Canopean shuttle.

Four Shammatans came up the rocky road with the confidence of those invited or at least expected, and this arrogance was typical of everything they did. In type they were Modified Two. Head hair, localised body hair, teeth at primary animal level, well-adapted hands, feet used only for locomotion. They were therefore above most of the species, though not all, currently being trained by us for colonial work; but far behind the Rohandan native species as evolved by Canopus. Though we were wondering, as we entertained these extremely vigorous and energetic visitors who had about them every mark of the barbarian and the savage, if this after all so common, not to say basic, type everywhere throughout the three Empires we knew anything about—Canopus, our own, and Puttiora—would not, if put into contact with the Giants, become as advanced as the northern natives. For we had recently adopted the theory that it was the Colony 10 Giants who had the secret of rapid evolution of inferior species.

I will not waste time describing our encounters with these Shammatans. There were many, because they would not our “no” as final. They lacked inner discrimination as to other people’s intentions. What they wanted was this. They had heard of our experiments with deliberately breeding first-quality colonisers. They knew everything about these, so we had to come to terms with knowing that their spying on us had been as intensive as ours on Canopean territory. Shammat wanted to “take off our hands” some of our surplus females. There were very few on that horrible planet of theirs. Those they had were not “able to match demand.” I cannot exaggerate the crudity of their thought, and their talk.

While we continued to refuse, for of course there was no question of submitting any peoples under our care to such criminal savages, and while they continued to arrive day after day at our door, as if we had not discussed everything already, a pretty clear and unwelcome picture of their activities was forming in our minds.

Shammat had been on Rohanda for some time, both sending down spaceships, though not often, and fostering a small colony that continually kept spies at work among the Canopean settlements. This was the explanation of the easy reception of our first emissaries: our visits had by no means been the first received by the Giants and the natives. Whatever it was Shammat had wanted, they had not been given it. Our visitors were cunning and evasive, but not able to hide what they felt and thought. They were angry, no, murderous, because of blocks and checks received from Canopus. And it wasn’t—from Canopus—females they had wanted, but something else. What this was we did not know, nor did we find out for millennia, millennia! And we did not find out because we did not know the nature of Canopus, any more than Shammat did. But Shammat had suspected, had wanted, had tried to get—like Sirius. And Shammat succeeded where we failed. I am making this statement, here and now, without concealment—though certainly not without trepidation, nor without anticipating criticism—that Shammat the barbarous, the criminal, the horrible, that planet that for so long we cannot remember the beginnings of it has been a synonym for everything disgusting and to be despised: it was Shammat who found out something at least of the Canopean secrets. Enough to steal a little. And we, Sirius, the civilised, the highly developed, have not found out.

To return to smaller matters. We of course wanted to know why these pirates had not simply stolen females from Canopus, since a spacecraft had been stolen—if not more than one. We could only conclude that Shammat was afraid of Canopus, and afraid of us, too: believing that punishment would more likely follow theft of people than theft of things. Rightly. But there was more to it than that. These Shammatans, returning day after day, climbing up the road to our fortress headquarters, did so for the same reason we were so ready to listen to them: they wanted to find out what we were doing.

We asked them at one point why they had not simply kidnapped some of the indigenous natives—at this point we had to suffer conniving glances and grimaces, as criminals—but saw that they wanted not the unevolved unregenerate stock but the new improved stock, and members of this they were afraid of stealing, since they were all in the new fine cities where the Giants lived, too. They were quite remarkably shamefaced and shifty about this, and itching with greed. Why had they not stolen some members of our other species—both failed and successful—who had, at various times, populated the Southern Continents? But again, it was the same: all these different types and kinds and stocks and strains were not good enough. Not good enough for these nasty thieves of Shammatans sitting there in their red jackets—Canopean ex-colonial uniform of centuries back; in their green pantaloons—Puttioran fashion, long outdated; their hide shoes made from some unfortunate animals somewhere. No, they wanted the best. Their eyes were fevered as they talked of the fine, handsome, healthy females in the glorious cities up north. And they talked lip-lickingly of “those females on Canopus—they’ve got yellow hair and blue eyes, so we hear…” (This was untrue.) And all this while they ate me up with their eyes. I could see that their fingers itched to feel hair and poke pale skin.

Shortly after these visitors took themselves off—back to the northern areas, not to Shammat—we discovered that the females who had volunteered for breeding service had also been visited by Shammat. To the extent that some of the progeny were Shammatan. There had been plots to escape, with Shammatan help. These had failed. But it was now important to watch for Shammat characteristics among the race of colonisers that we had been so proud of. Later still we had again to modify our conclusions. Some of the breeding females had in fact escaped. Their places had been taken Shammatan substitutes. The escaped ones had gone to Shammat, taking a good supply of the best Sirian genes with them. Some of these females had originated in our C.P. 7 of fair-haired, blue-eyed stock—Planet 7 was the birthplace of my mother. They had proved very popular on Shammat, and new supplies were being demanded…

I come to the end of this phase on Rohanda.

About ten thousand years after the Canopus-Rohanda “Lock,” we were summoned to an urgent conference. Canopus had to announce disaster. Unexpected cosmic changes… failure of the “Lock”… total write-off of the poor planet for whose sake Rohandan development been speeded up… degeneration and dislocation of Rohanda inevitable.

We were told to expect random and wild mutations and changes of every kind among our experimental species; advised to limit our attempts until these changes could be monitored and understood.

I have to admit that at first we believed this was a feint, a ploy.

Particularly as we did not receive reports of any increased activity in the north—for instance, no increase in visits by their spacecraft. But then, their visits had always been few, and this had reinforced our belief that the “contacts” they were always hinting at were to do with communications.

We heard that a single emissary had arrived and was stationed in a circular city in a region where there were many inland seas. This was Johor, an official then of junior rank. Soon after that, our spies reported that spacecraft had taken off nearly the entire complement of Giants from the north, though a few had escaped. Our spies then submitted reports that seemed contradictory, vague, even foolish—we understood that Canopus had not exaggerated the ill effects that would be expected. We recalled our spies, though a few never returned at all, and shipped out the remaining experimental subjects. After only few years, these were showing signs of decrease in life-span and of tendency towards rapid reversal to barbarism—but this particular phase of Rohanda is so well documented under Social Pathology that I shall not linger over it: it has become, after all, the classic case of sudden evolutionary reversal. Our most urgent question C.P. 23, which had been established as our Think-Planet—if I may be forgiven the flippancy at such a serious point in my story. It was completely dependent on supplies from Southern Continent I. We decided not to make alterations in our agricultural stations. It was necessary to increase our police establishment almost at once, for it was discovered that workers previously quite reliable had taken to pilfering, and then, slowly, to various kinds of criminality. Still we maintained our agriculture. Then something unexpected: waves of invaders from the area of the inland seas came sweeping down, destroying first the more northerly agricultural stations, but then penetrating further and further south. Who were these rapacious ones? None other than the natives brought to such a high pitch of civic and personal responsibility by Canopus. What it amounted to was that we would have to maintain armies right across the top of Southern Continent I. Full-scale and urgent conferences were held on the Sirian Mother Planet itself. Our military resources were stretched to their limit by the unrest on many of our Colonised Planets. We had no alternative but to withdraw from Rohanda.

Other arrangements were going to have to be made for C.P. 23: its brief but glorious career was concluded, and the Thinkers were transferred elsewhere.

I went on a last survey of S.C. I, just before the end. Everywhere over this noble continent, similar to S.C. II, but even larger and more various, were our agricultural areas. Each little group of buildings was surrounded by vast fields over which our servicing and surveillance machines hovered, glittering in the sunlight: green and yellow and umber fields, and brightly coloured craft. The shining rivers… the infinitely variegated greens of the plantations… the irrigation canals… enormous transparent structures for hydroponics, and for general research… I cannot pretend that I enjoyed that final trip. Even then they were dismantling the stations, while the enormous craft of our Inter-Colony Heavy Transport Fleet were landing and taking off, loaded with these structures, and with the last of our crops. I flew over some stations that had already been evacuated. Our policy to disrupt the landscape as little as possible had succeeded. Nothing was left to be seen but some hastily harvested that would shortly be reclaimed by jungle and forest, and some belts of introduced trees that were already Rohandan. The millennia of our occupation would soon have left no traces.

I was not feeling myself, and Ambien I was not either. We put this down to disappointment at this check of our plans. Then all our team confessed to general malaise and low spirits. It became evident that our mental powers were being affected. There was nothing for it: I gave the order for us all to leave Rohanda.

Shortly after that, Canopus convened a conference, again on Colony 10. Rohanda was only one of the items on the agenda. At the time it did not seem more important than the others.

It has always seemed to me that this question of "hindsight" is not to be solved!

What I see now, looking back, is not what I experienced then, but are we to cancel out former, and more immature, ways of viewing things? As if they did not matter, had no effect?—but of course not.

Among the many interests Canopus and Sirius had in common at that time one stood out. The Colony 10 Giants, returned to their own planet and waiting for new work to be allotted to them, had suffered. Now twice the size of their former compatriots and evolved beyond them, they could not settle in their old ways, nor was Planet 10 able to accept them easily. Superiority is never easily tolerated.

There no planet among the Canopean colonies that could usefully welcome the Giants. Not immediately. Having learned of the Giants’ capacities, and believing of them that they could make—almost overnight, evolutionarily speaking—civilised races out of apes, we wished Canopus to “lend” us the Giants in order that might teach our specialised colonists “their tricks.” Yes, that is how we talked. There is no point in blushing for it now. Canopus steadily, kindly, gently, resisted us. It was not possible, they said. We saw in the refusal niggardliness; saw in it a reluctance to help Sirius to advance beyond Canopus—saw in it everything but what was there. Formal application had been made to Canopus for this “loan” and it was the main item on the agenda, and the chief topic of all the informal discussions during the conference. There was ill-feeling on our side. Resentment. As usual.

The general atmosphere of the conference was low and dispirited. Canopus had been shaken by the Rohanda failure, and was made miserable, as they freely confessed, because of the fate of the unfortunate Planet 8, which they now could not save and which, even as the conference took place, was being abandoned, with loss of life and potentiality. And we Sirians were low, too, because of Rohanda. I cannot in fact remember a conference that had so little of the energy that comes from success; though of course it did not lack purpose and determination for the future.

For me personally the conference was important because it was there I first saw Klorathy, who led their team. It was he who supplied the occasion with what vitality it could aspire to. I liked him at once. He was—and is—a vigorous, sardonic being who can always be counted on to alleviate the torpors and languors that attend even the best conferences. We were attracted, told each other so, in the way of course appropriate to our life-stages: both of us had our breeding-bond phases behind us. Ambien I also liked him, and all three looked forward to many pleasant and useful encounters.

It was Klorathy who had to carry the burden of refusing us the Giants, and I recall his patience as he over and over repeated: But, you see, it is not possible… while we didn’t see.

I can do no better than to get down the main points of the agenda as it related to Rohanda, in order to illustrate points of view then and now.

1. The Canopean-Rohandan Lock had failed—the basic fact.

2. That degeneration of various kinds must be expected—which we had already experienced.

3. That Canopus intended to maintain their link with Rohanda, some sort of skeleton staff, in order to maintain the flow at a minimum level.

4. As far as could be seen, the cosmic alignments that had caused this Disaster would not reverse for several hundred thousand years, after which there would be no reason Rohanda could not revert to its flowering flourishing healthy condition.

5. That (and this was to them—to Canopus—the most important factor in this summing up) Shammat of Puttiora had discovered the nature of the Canopus-Rohandan bond, and was tapping strength from it. And was already waxing fat and prosperous on it.

I can only say that, reading these words now, remembering what I saw in them then, I have to marvel at my blindness.

Again, resentment partly the cause. And also fear: There much talk about the Shammat “spies,” which Canopus claimed they had known nothing about. We did not believe this. But could not pursue it, for fear our own spying would come to light…

It will be seen from these brief remarks that this was an uncomfortable, unsatisfactory conference. When it was dissolved, I could see nothing positive in it except my meeting with Klorathy, and since he was to stay on Colony 10 to assist the Giants in their painful period of waiting, and I was to return to Sirius, we had nothing much to hope for, at least immediately.

Sirius had not abandoned the idea of using Rohanda for experiments. It was a question of finding ways of doing this without harm to ourselves. A joint committee Canopus/Sirius was set up at the conference for this purpose. Again I was assigned to Rohanda, at my request, and with instructions by Canopus—called by us and them advice—on how to survive the new discordant Rohandan atmosphere. We were told that if we were to build settlements in exactly this way and that—measurements and proportions prescribed to the fraction of an R-unit—and wore such and such artefacts, and ate this and that (there were long lists of such prescriptions), then we might work on that unfortunate planet, at least for limited periods.

To begin with, their advice was only partly, or halfheartedly, obeyed: bad results followed. We then took to an exact obedience. Success.

This obedience was more remarkable than perhaps it will seem now. At that time it would have been difficult to find anything good being said about Canopus anywhere in our territories. Our tone was one of indifference at best, but usually derision. We were spying on them everywhere and in every way. We did not hesitate to outdo them when we could, often quite childishly, and even illegally. Any who doubt this may find what I say confirmed in any common chronicle or memoir of that time: we were not ashamed of our behavior. On the contrary. Yet we suspected Canopus of ill-feeling and delinquency towards us, and complained of it. At the same time, and while apparently having little respect for their prescriptions, for we mocked them when we thought this would earn us admiration, we nevertheless followed them, and to the point where the practices became second nature, and we were in danger of forgetting where they originated. Then we did forget—or most of us—and “the Rohandan Adjustment Technique” was talked of as if it were a discovery of our own.

For a long time, more than a hundred thousand years, we Sirians were more on Rohanda than Canopus was. So we believed then. It was because we told our spies to look for Canopean technicians by the same signs that we understood for our own necessities and behaviour. We did not know then that Canopus could come and go in any way other than by spaceship—by ordinary physical transport. Did not know that Canopean technicians could exist on Rohanda—and on other planets—by taking the outward shape of the inhabitants of a particular time and place.

For long ages Canopean individuals were at work on Rohanda and we did not know it. Even now there are those who refuse to believe it. But a few of us who worked on Rohanda came to understand. And I will come to a fuller description of this, in its place.

Meanwhile, my preoccupation with Canopus continued, and I was not by any means the only one. And this was for a specific and definite reason.

It is necessary for me now to make general statement about Sirian development—a summary of history from the end of our Dark Age until the present. It will be argued that it is not possible to sum up several hundred thousand of Empire’s history in a few words. Yet we all of us do this when describing others. For instance, how do we—and even our most lofty and respected historians—refer to Alikon, the long-lived culture that preceded our own on Sirius, before we became an Empire? “Alikon was a rigid and militaristic society, based on limited natural resources, whose ruling caste maintained power by the use of a repressive religion, keeping nine-tenths of the population as labourers, slaves, and servants. It ended because…” That is how we describe ninety thousand S-years of what we always refer to as “prehistory.” To take another example, Colony 10 of the Canopean rule was once “Senjen, a natural paradise, a pacific, easygoing matriarchal society made possible by pleasant climate and abundant vegetable and animal stocks.” Senjen lasted for two hundred thousand years before Canopus decided it needed improvement.

No: the dispassionate, disinterested eye we use for other peoples, other histories, we do not easily turn on ourselves—past or present! Yet most societies—cultures—empires—can be described by an underlying fact or truth, and this is nearly always physical, geographical. Is it possible that our reluctance to regard ourselves as we do others is because we do not like to categorise our own existence as physical… merely physical?

The Sirian Empire has been preoccupied by one basic physical fact and the questions caused thereby since its inception: technology: our technical achievements that no other empire has ever approached… I write that statement without the benefit of “hindsight.” That is how we have seen it until very recently. It is because of how we define (and many of us still do) technology. The subtle, infinitely varied, hard-to-see technology of Canopus was invisible to us, and therefore for all these millennia, these long ages, we have counted ourselves supreme.

We now mark the end of our Dark Age at the point where “we got rid of our excess populations.” As I saw it expressed in a somewhat robustly worded history. At the point, then, when “population balanced necessity.” Ah yes, there are a hundred ways of putting our basic dilemma! And each one of these formulations, evasive or frank, can only mask something we have never come to terms with! To sum up our culture, then, as we so arbitrarily encapsulate others: “The Sirian Empire, with its fifty-three colonies, almost infinitely rich, well-endowed, fruitful, variegated, and with its exemplary technology has never been able to decide how many people should be allowed to live in it.”

There you have it. I touched on this before: how could I not? There is no way of even mentioning Sirius without bringing up this our basic, our burning, problem…

The Dark Age over, we saw to it that our populations everywhere were reduced to the minimum necessary for… for what? In our enthusiasm over our new concept, our new capacities of control, we set fairly arbitrary limits to population on our fifty-three colonies. Very low numbers were permitted to be.

What happened to those teeming millions upon millions upon millions? Well, they were not exterminated. They were not ill treated. On the contrary, as I have hinted—to do more than lightly sketch these developments would come outside my scope—all kinds of special schemes and projects were set up to soften their tragic fate. They died, it is generally agreed now—now that so much time has passed and we can look at those days more calmly—of broken hearts, broken will. They died because they had no purpose, of illnesses, of epidemics that seemed to have other causes, and during mass outbreaks of madness. But they died. It took fifty thousand of our bad—our very bad—time, but at the end of it, we were left with empty planets, with everything open for us—ready for a magnificent purpose, a new plan.

But, in fact, nothing changed: we still did not know how to look at ourselves. Our technology was such that our entire Empire could be run with something like ten million people. That was what was needed. If to run our Empire was our purpose, and nothing else…

I shall not go on. Some people will say I have already said enough about this; others that, if I were to pay proper and due respect to our terrible basic dilemma, I should devote not a few paragraphs but several volumes to it.

Well, myriads of volumes and whole ages been devoted to it—when our stage was, as it were, swept empty, waiting for its appropriate dramas. What happened was that schools of philosophy sprang up everywhere, and nothing was heard but their debates, their arguments… What was our purpose? they enquired of themselves, of us, pursuing “the fundamental Sirian existential problem.”

So violent, lowering, unpleasant, became these debates that it made illegal to even mention this “existential problem”—and that epoch lasted for millennia. Of course, there were all kinds of underground movements and subversive sects devoted to “maintaining knowledge of the truth.”

Then, as these became so powerful and influential they could not be ignored, public expression of our preoccupation was made legal again. At one time several of our planets were set aside as universities and colleges, for the sole purpose of discussions of our existential problems. This is how “the Thinkers” of 23 originated.

Meanwhile, sometimes our populations grew larger and sometimes smaller, and these fluctuations did not relate to individuals needed in order to operate our technologies, but according to how tides of opinion flowed… if we wanted to, we could have crammed our planets with billions of genera, species, races—as they once had been. When we wanted, they could be left empty. We could—and did—maintain some planets, for special purposes, at high levels of population, and leave others virtually unpopulated.

While all these variations on our basic problem were attempted, our space drive had been stabilised. We had discovered that no matter how forcefully we swept out into space, gathering in suitable planets as we found them, incorporating them into our general plan, we took our problems—or rather, our problem—with us. What did we need all these new colonies for? What was their purpose? If they had special conditions of climate, then we could tell ourselves they were useful—for something or other; if they had new minerals, or large deposits of those already known to us—they were used. But suppose we went on acquiring colonies and reached the number of a hundred… a thousand… what then?

As our philosophers asked, and argued.

We, the administrators, had been watching Canopus: she was not acquiring ever more colonies. She was stabilised on what she had. She had far fewer than we… she was developing and advancing them… But that was not how we saw it then: I have to record that we despised Canopus, that great neighbour of ours, our competitor, our rival, for being satisfied with such a low level of material development and acquisition.

I now return to our preoccupation with Canopus.

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 that 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 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 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 while 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 hoped that Klorathy might take the place of this boonfriend. 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 something about Canopus itself that… is the word attracted? me. No. Obsessed? No, there was too much else in my life to allow 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… 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 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 degeneration, but found something we had not expected and could not at first interpret. The natives had become two distinct species. Some remained the same, though more quarrelsome, and divisive, no longer living in a large and easygoing tribe, but in small family groups, or individuals, each defending patches of territory, hunting grounds, caves, or rough shelters. They had sunk 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 stock 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, almost furtive look of species would who soon die out from discouragement.

We took note that this new stock could be used 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 to deduce that the gap had been there for a long time, because the stocks on the Northern Continent had not infiltrated southwards.

We met Klorathy as arranged on a high plateau of 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 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 likable as these races often are, to meet one’s equals is something to be looked forward to.

Klorathy was typical of Canopean Mother Planet Type I: very tall, lightly built, strong, light bronze in colour, his eyes 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 to be 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, if instead of being open and generously available to this 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 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 organised tribes who did not war with each other, since there plenty of territory and apparently infinite stocks of animals. The 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 recognised in a this sort of shorthand for much more… for 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: 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.

We concealed the two machines as well as could in a canyon and walked forth boldly towards the mountains. These had not been devastated by the quake, though some rock falls had taken place, giving the mountainsides a raw disturbed look. Standing close against a precipitous surface we could hear kinds of murmurings and knockings and runnings-about, and I was reminded of the termite dwellings on Isolated S.C. II—putting one’s ear to the walls of one of these, having knocked on its surface or broken a part off, one heard just such a scurrying, rustling murmur. Coming round the edge of this precipice, there was a low dark cave entrance, Klorathy walked at once towards it, lifting up both his hands and calling out words I did not know. We, too, lifted our hands in what was obviously a gesture of peace. There was a sudden total silence, from which we were able to gauge the degree of the background of noise to which we had adjusted ourselves approaching the mountain. Silence—the sun blazing down uncomfortably from the warm Rohanda skies—heat striking out from the raw and unhealed rocks—heat dizzying up from the soil.

Suddenly there was a rush of movement from the cave, so swift it was impossible to distinguish details, and we three were enclosed in a swarm of squat little people who were hustling us inside the cave, which we tall ones—they came up to our knee level—had to go on all fours to enter. We were in a vast cavern, lit everywhere by small flames, which we later found were outlets of natural gas, controlled and kept perpetually burning. Yet they were not enough to create more than a soft twilight. The cavern was floored with white sand that glimmered, and in crystals in the rock twinkled, and a river that rushed along the cavern’s edge flung up sparkling showers of spray. I had not expected to find this soft exuberance of light inside the dark mountain, and my spirits rose, and as I was rushed along by the pressure of the little people I was able to examine them. They were certainly less animal than the horrid new beast-men of the Southern Continent, but quite seemly and decent creatures, wearing trousers and jackets of dressed skins. Very broad they were, almost as broad as tall: and I was easily able to recognise in the stock the powerful arms and shoulders of the Lombis, and the yellow skins of the technicians. Their faces were bare of hair, under close caps of tight rough dark curls, and were keen and sharp and intelligent.

We were taken through several of such caverns, always with the river rushing along beside us, until we were deep inside the mountain—yet it did not feel oppressive, for the air was sweet and fresh. We were in a cave so enormous the roof went up above us into impenetrable black, and the illuminations around the rocky verges were pinpoints of innumerable light. There was a cleared space in the centre, quite large enough to take a horde of these little people and ourselves, but small in proportion to the enormousness of the place. We were sat down on piles of skins, and given some food—hardly to the palates of such as we—though it was not without interest to be reminded of what was—what had to be—the food of all the lowly evolved planets of our Galaxy. Meat. A sort of cheese. A kind of beer. All this time Klorathy was keeping up talk with them: he seemed to know their language at least adequately. It was Ambien I and myself who puzzled them, though they were civil enough—for we were both obviously of different kinds from Klorathy. They eyed us, yet not unpleasantly, and one of the females, a quite attractive little thing in her robust heavy way, begged to touch my hair, and in a moment several females had crowded up, smiling and apologetic, but unable to resist handling my blonde locks. Yet I, for my part, was looking around into the faces packed and massed all around, and remembering the Lombis—who had never set eyes on me or anything like me—and the Colony 22 techs, who had… a long, long time ago, far out of personal memory, in their time reckoning, but such a short time ago in ours. Did they have any sort of race or gene memory? We examined each other, in a scene of which I have been a part so very often in my long service: members of differing races meeting, not in enmity but in genial curiosity.

How were we able to do this—see each other so close and well, when the twinkling walls of the cave were so distant? It was by—electricity. Yes. Everywhere stood strong bright lights, wooden containers that housed batteries: it is never possible to foresee what part of a former technology a fallen-off race will retain.

And they were that—reduced, I mean; under pressure, beset… I able to recognise it at once, by a hundred little signs that perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to consciously describe. These were a people in danger, endangered—desperate. It showed in the sombre consciousness of their eyes, fastening on Klorathy, who for his part was leaning forward, urgent, concentrated on this task of his…

Later we were led off, I by the women, the men separately, and we slept in small but airy rock chambers. And next day the discussions with Klorathy went on, while I and Ambien I were taken, on our request, to see this underground kingdom. Which I shall now briefly describe.

First of all, it not the only one: Klorathy said that not only all over this continent but in most parts now of Rohanda spread these underearth races. But they not taken to the caves and caverns by nature, only from need, as they found themselves hunted and persecuted by races so much larger than themselves. Though not more skilled.

These caverns were by no means the habitations of brutes. They had been adapted from holes and caves, often the old tunnels of former underground rivers and lakes. Sometimes they been excavated. Many were carefully panelled with well-tailored smoothed planking. All were lit either by natural gas or by electricity. There were meeting places and eating places, sleeping places, and storage caves and workshops. Animals had been captured from the surface world and brought down to breed and increase in this below-earth realm. There were birds, some flying freely about, as if they had been in the air. These were underground cities, underearth realms. And they were all based on the oddest and saddest contradictions or predicaments.

This race had become skilled miners and metallurgists. Beginning with iron, they had made all kinds of utensils and then—finding themselves hunted—weapons. For time, and in some places, they had made approaches out into the world to offer trade, and trade had often been effective. They exchanged iron products for roots and fruits and fresh supplies of animals for their chthonic herds. Then they found gold. They had seen it was beautiful and did not rust and crumble as iron did, but found it too soft for tools and vessels—yet it was so beautiful, and they made ornaments and decorations with it. Taking it out to the tribes now forming everywhere above ground—for these were more likely to be their neighbours than the people of the advanced cities, at first gold was a curiosity, and then, suddenly, was something for which murder could be committed, and slaves captured—the dwarves were chased into the mountains and whole communities wiped out. They fled deeper into the mountains, or went into further ranges, always going further, retreating, becoming invisible except for rare careful excursions to see if trade was possible again. Sometimes it was. Often, coming out with their vessels spears and arrowheads, their glistening gleaming ornaments, they would be ambushed and all killed.

Yet they always mined, since it was now in their blood… the skill of it in their hands and minds.

Yet, this was the sad paradox that they did not fully see until Klorathy pointed it out to them: suppose they had never mined at all, would they have missed so much: Did their food depend on it? Their clothing? Even their electricity? Their clay vessels were beautiful and strong and in every way as good as their iron ones. Suppose they had never learned how to melt iron from rocks, and gold from rocks—what then? But it was too late for thinking in this way. Finding themselves harried and hunted, these poor creatures had sent Klorathy a message. Had sent a message “all the way to the stars.”

How?

Coming together in a great conclave, from every part of this continent, creeping along a thousand underground channels and roads, they had cried out that “Canopus would help them.”

Two of them had made a dangerous journey to the middle seas. There, so the news was, were great cities. This journey had taken many R-years. The two, a male and a female, having crept and crawled and lurked and sneaked their way across a continent and then from island to island across the great sea, and then across land again, had found that upheavals and earthquakes had vanished the great cities, which were now only a memory among half-savages. The two had gone northwards, hearing of “a place where kindness and women rule.”

There they were directed to Adalantaland, where there was kindness and a wise female ruler, who had said that “Canopus had not visited for a long time, not in her memory or in that of her mothers.” The two had left their messages, obstinately believing that what Canopus had promised—for promises were in their memories—Canopus would perform. And though they had died as soon as they had delivered their reports of that epic and terrible journey, soon Canopus did perform, for Klorathy came to them.

He had come first on an investigational trip from one end of this continent to the other. He had heard, then, of the “little people” in the other continents, for oddly—or perhaps not oddly at all—emissaries from the “little people,” hunted and persecuted everywhere, had made their brave and faithful journeys to places where they believed “Canopus” might have ears to hear their cries for help.

Klorathy had then summed up all this information he had garnered, and pondered over it and concluded that there was another factor here, there was an element of beastliness, more and above what could be expected. It was the work of Shammat, of course, who Canopus had believed to be still far away half across the globe—not that its influence wasn’t everywhere… but on the subject of that “influence” Klorathy was either not able or not willing to enlarge.

“What do you mean, Klorathy?—when you talk of Shammat-nature?”—and as I asked the question I thought of those avid greedy faces, those glittering avaricious eyes. “A savage is a savage. A civilised race behaves like one.” At which he smiled, sadly, and in a way that did not encourage me to press him.

What Klorathy hoped to achieve by this present excursion into the realm of the dwarves was first of all to encourage them, saying that Canopus was doing what it could. Secondly, he said he would now go out to meet with the Hoppes and the Navahis and put it to them that to harry these most excellent craftsmen of the mountains was folly—better rather to become allies with them, to trade, and to stand together with them against the vicious children of Shammat who were the enemies of both, the enemies of everyone. Therefore, Klorathy asked them—sitting in the vast cavern under its canopy of twinkling lights, on the warm white sand that the dwarves carried from the outside rivers to make clean, shining floors for themselves—leaning forward into the low and immediate light of the electric handlamps: be patient. When—if—the tribesmen come offering treaties and trade, then see if ways cannot be found to do this without laying themselves open to traps and treason. For his part, he, Klorathy, pledged himself to do what he could. And so we left that hidden and fantastic realm, with its race of earthy craftsmen, being escorted into the outer air and the blue skies towards which the dwarves lifted their longing and exiled eyes before fleeing away into the earth again.

Now we had to make contact with the tribesmen.

Their lookouts soon saw us as across the rocky and raw landscape, with no aim except to he captured. Which we were, and taken to their camp. This was the usual functional unit of the Modified Two stage. Their skills were less than those of the dwarves, so soon to be extinct. They hunted, lived off the results of their hunting, and had developed a close harmonious bond with the terrain on which they lived. In which they had their being—as their religion saw it.

They did us no harm, because they recognised in us something of the stuff of certain legends—all about Canopus. Always of that Empire, never of ours. I drew the attention of my colleagues in the Service when I returned home to the fact that even in territories close to our allotted portion of Rohanda, which might be expected to owe some sort of allegiance to us, to Sirius, it was to Canopus that their higher allegiances were pledged, were given. Why was this? Surely there was a fault here in our presentation of ourselves?

These Hoppes recognised us—all three—as “from there,” meaning Canopus. So it was as Canopeans that we were welcomed into the camp, and then as guests at a festival that lasted thirty R-days and nights, which Klorathy obviously much enjoyed. I cannot say that I did. But I recognised even then that the ability to become part of—I was going to say “to sink oneself into,” but refrained, because of the invisible moral pressure of Canopus—an unfamiliar scene, a foreign race, even one considered (perhaps out of ignorance) inferior, is one to be admired, commended, and even emulated, if possible. I did try to behave as Klorathy did and as Ambien I was doing, as far he was able. Klorathy feasted and even danced with them, told stories, in their tongue—and yet was never able to be less than Canopus.

And when the feasting was over, I was expecting something on these lines: that Klorathy would say to them: I have some news for you, some suggestions to make, now is the time for us to confer seriously and solemnly and at length, please make arrangements for a formal occasion at which this can be done.

But nothing of the sort happened. Klorathy, in the tent allotted to him, and we two Ambiens, in our tents, simply went on taking part in the life of the tribe.

And now I have to record something that I most bitterly regret, for it set back my understanding for a very long time. Millennia. Long ages. I missed an opportunity then. I shall simply say it, and leave the subject.

I was impatient and restless. I found these Hoppe savages interesting enough and I would have stood it all—the lack of privacy, the flesh food, the casualness and indifference to dirt, the thousand and one taboos and prescriptions of their religion—if I had known the ordeal would have a term. The other Ambien advised patience. I did not listen to him but went to Klorathy and demanded how long he proposed to “waste his time on these semibrutes.” His reply was: “as long as it is necessary.”

I consulted with Ambien I, who said he would stay with Klorathy, if Klorathy “would put up with him”—a humility that annoyed me—and I took our surveillance craft, leaving him dependent on Klorathy for transport, and flew up northwards by myself.

This was the first time a Sirian had openly travelled into Canopean territory. Klorathy made no attempt to stop me, or discourage mc. Yet he did say, quietly, just before I left: “be careful.” “Of what, Klorathy?” “All I know is that our instruments seem to indicate some sort of magnetic disturbance—in my view it would be wiser to stay in the centre of the continent rather than anywhere at sea level.” I thanked him for the warning.

Millennia had passed since I travelled this way with Ambien I. From the height I was flying, the terrain mostly showed little signs of change, but there were areas sometimes several minutes flying time across (I was in a Space Conqueror Type III, long since obsolete) where below me was nothing but savagely torn and tumbled rock, stumps of trees, overthrown or shaken mountains. I remembered that the cities of the middle seas, which I had flown over with Ambien, had been shaken into ruin and wondered if this was in fact a particularly seismic time on this precarious planet. Flying over the areas of islands and broken waters that had been, and would be again, the great empty ocean separating the Isolated Northern Continent and the central landmass, I thought I saw that some islands were quite new, as if they had just been upthrust from the ocean bed. The island that had been covered by that marvellous city surrounded by its great ships had been under the ocean and risen out of it again. It had some rather poor villages on it now.

But I wanted to see that area of great inland seas again, and I flew over and around it seeing everywhere near the rocky sunlit shores, ruins and collapsed buildings, some gleaming up from under the waters. But the region of these seas was rich and fruitful and would soon again put forth cities, as it had done so often before. It was, however, discouraging to see how transient things were and must always be on this planet, and I fell into state of mind unusual for me, of the generalised discouragement known by us Sirians as “existential problem melancholia.”

For what I felt was nothing more than the emotional expression of our philosophic dilemmas: what were the purposes of plannings, our manipulations, our mastery of nature? I was in the grip of a vision—as I hung there in my little bubble of a spacecraft, looking down at that magically beautiful place (for Rohanda was always that), the brilliant blue seas like great irregular gems in their setting of warm reddish soil—of impermanence, as if this little glimpse of a small part of a small planet was an encapsulation of the whole Galaxy, that always, despite its illusions of great stretches of time where nothing much changed, nevertheless did change, always, and it was not possible to grasp a sense of it as lasting or of anything as permanently valuable… I hovered above that lovely but desolating scene for as long as I could bear it and then directed myself northwards again to Adalantaland, for I wanted to see what a peaceful realm run by women would be like on Rohanda in its time of rapid degeneration.

Analyses of Adalantaland are plentifully available in our libraries, so I shall confine myself only to my present purposes. It was a large island among several on the edge of the main landmass. While the middle areas of Rohanda at that time could be described as too hot for comfort, the northern and southern parts were equable and warm and very fruitful. It was a peaceful culture, rather indolent perhaps, hedonistic, but democratic, and the line of women who were its rulers governed by “the grace of Canopus,” which were a set of precepts engraved on stones and set up everywhere over the island. There were three main rules, the first saying that Canopus was the invisible but powerful lawgiver of Rohanda and would punish transgressions of its Rule; the second that no individual should consider herself better than another, nor should any individual enslave or use another in a degrading way; the third that no person should take more from the general stock of food and goods than was absolutely necessary. There were many subdivisions of these precepts. I moved freely over this well-governed and pacific land, and found these laws were known by everyone and on the whole kept, though the third perhaps rather freely interpreted. I was told that the Mothers had other, secret, laws given them direct by “those from the stars.” I was not considered as emanating from “the stars.”

It happened that in type I was not far off from the Adalantaland general type: they were mostly fair-haired people, pale-skinned, with eyes often blue, and on the whole tending towards large build, and plenty of flesh. My height and thinness caused much concern for my general health. I spent time with the currently reigning Queen, or mother, who lived no better than her subjects, nor was in any way set up over them. The focus of special was one that could not be shared with them. I wanted to know how it that this realm managed to be so ordered, lacking crime and public irresponsibility, when these qualities were not to be expected of Rohanda in this time of a general falling-off.

The beautiful and generous and genial Queen, or Mother, of course did not realise that this paradise of hers—for she and her subjects saw their land as one, and knew they much envied by more barbarous races—was not an apex of a long growth from a low culture to a high one, but was nothing but a shadow of former greatness that lay on the other side of that Catastrophe, the failure of the Lock. There were hints in old legends of a disaster of some sort, and many to do with the “Gods” who were watching over them and “would come again.” They had come in the time of this Queen’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. From the description I recognised Klorathy. He had given fresh precepts, somewhat at an angle to those used previously; had—also—rebuked, and had strengthened in them their purpose towards the maintenance of their fair and smiling land.

And the secret laws? The Queen was not at all reluctant to share these with me; the only reason, she said, they were not given out to everyone, and written up on the public stones, was that they were so precise and persnickety—yes, I recognised Canopus here!—ordinary people, preoccupied as they had to be with ordinary life, could not be expected to bother with them.

These precepts were the same as those given to us Sirians by Canopus, used by us and already considered as Sirian, at least to the extent that it was hard to remember their Canopean origin. I even remember a feeling of affront and annoyance at hearing the Queen describe the things as from Canopus, remember chiding myself for this absurdity.

The Queen took time and trouble to explain these regulations, which were all to do with what substances would protect and guard, how to use them, the times to use them, the exact disposition of artefacts and how and when, certain types of place to avoid and others to seek out… and so on. There is no point in listing them, for they were not the same, but changed, and we had been told how to change them and in accordance with what cosmic and local factors.

But I noted that in what the Queen was telling me were inaccuracies. Slight divergences from prescription. It was a disturbing experience for me to sit quietly listening while this competent and friendly lady explained to me the conduct that must be followed on Adalantaland to preserve health, sanity, and correct thinking, when I was using the same laws of conduct myself… but using them not exactly in the same manner. My observances were more likely to be correct, since I had only just left Klorathy, who checked them with me. Yet he had told me not to alter this Queen’s practices; had not mentioned them. So I said nothing.

The Queen wanted to know what part of Rohanda I came from, and I spoke to her of the Southern Continents, of which she had heard. In fact her mariners had visited the coasts of both—this interested me, of course, and from what she said, it seemed that these coasts had been explored by them. But recently she had forbidden voyages far afield: there was disquiet and alarm abroad, had I not felt it? People had not spoken to me of their fears and forebodings? Well, if not, that was because I was a foreigner and it would be discourteous to spread such unhappy states of mind. But as for her, the Queen, and the other Mothers who governed this land, they felt that indeed there was reason to fear. Had I not heard of the great earthquakes that had swallowed whole cities down southwards? Of storms and tempests where normally the climate was equable… So she talked, her blue eyes, which reminded me of the seas I been hovering over only a few R-days before, roaming restlessly about, worried, full of trouble… and I was experiencing a lesson in the relative, for she was in fear for her culture, her beautiful land, while I had recently been contemplating the destruction of planets, cities, cultures, realms—and flying over large tracts of earthquake-devastated landscape in a frame of mind not far off from that used for contemplating the overthrow of termite-queendom, or the extinction of a type of animal for some reason or other.

I left Adalantaland regretfully and travelled slowly to the coast where I had left my space bubble, not wanting to leave this realm of such lush and full fields, such orchards and gardens, so many orderly and well-kept towns—and not wanting to say goodbye either to these handsome people. I was thinking, as I went, about their third precept, that they must not take more than they could use, for it seemed to me to go to the heart of the Sirian dilemma… who should use what and when and what for? Above all what for!

The scene that I saw when I looked down from my space bubble, and the thoughts in my mind then are very clear to me: it is because after the “events,” as soon as I knew that everything I surveyed was chaos and desolation, I took pains to retrieve my mental picture of it all so that it was clear in my mind, ready for instant recall.

I could see a great deal: below me the fair and smiling islands of those blessed latitudes… on one hand the great ocean that spread to the Northern Continent, with its unstable family of islands, now all visible and alive… to the north, the little patch of ice and snow whose very existence showed the sensitive nature of Rohanda’s relation with her sun… southwards the coasts of the main landmass stretched—at first balmy and delightful, then rocky and parched—to the burning regions of the middle latitudes… and inland from these coasts, the vastnesses of the mainland itself, where I had never been, though Ambien I had. I longed to see them. Such forests and jungles were there!—so he said: he had darted back and forth across and about in his spacecraft and even so advantaged had found it impossible to easily mark the bounds of these forests. The beasts in the forests!—such a multitude of them and such a variety of species, some of them even now unknown to us. And beyond the forests, on great plateaux under blue and crystal skies, the cities that Ambien I spoke of. These were not the mathematical cities of the Great Time, but were remarkable and amazing places, often with systems of government unknown to us, some of them benign and comfortable to live in, and some tyrannous and very wicked. There they lay, a day’s easy journey in my little craft, and it seemed that Canopus did not mind my travels in their dispensation, and so there was nothing to stop my going there at once… nothing except my state of mind, which was most unpleasant, and every moment getting worse.

I did not know what was happening to me. We have all of us experienced those shadows from the future we call “premonitions.” I was not unfamiliar with them. It seemed as if I was inside a black stuffy room or invisible prison, where it was hard to draw breath, and from where I looked down on those brilliant scenes of sea and land that seemed to baffle and reject my sight, because of my state of mind. I kept thinking of Klorathy’s warning… just as the thought formed that his warnings were filling me with something I had only just recognised as terror, it happened…

What happened?

I have been asked often enough by our historians, delighted that just for once they had an actual eyewitness to such an event. And I always find this first moment hard.

There was an absolute stillness that seemed to freeze all of the scene below me. The air chilled—all at once, and instantaneously. I looked wildly around into the skies around me, with their Rohandan clouds and blue spaces—and could see nothing. Yet I was stilled, checked, silenced in all my being.

Suddenly—only that is not the word for the instantaneous nature of this happening—I was in total darkness, with the stars swinging about around me. I was in starlight. And now the stillness had been succeeded by a hissing roar. I looked down to see if the scene under me had also been vanished away, and saw that I was in movement—my craft was being spun about so that I could not see steadily. Yet I was able to make out the coastlands of the main landmass, and the islands, one of which was Adalantaland. My mind was clear only in flashes—as if lightning lit a landscape and then left it dark. This is why I had no coherent idea then of what was happening. Moments of intense clarity, when I was able to work out that Rohanda had turned over on itself, as a globe in a decelerating spin may wobble over—an understanding that this need no more affect the tiny inhabitants on its surface than the microbes of a child’s ball know that they are in violent and agitated movement as the ball is flung from hand to hand and bounced here and there, but continue complacently with their little lives—calculations of how this reversal of the planet might affect it… all this went on in my mind in those moments of brilliant thought, when that mind in fact worked at a level I have not known since, in between periods of black extinction.

I had no idea how long this thing went on, and can only say now that it was for some hours—so our astronomers have calculated. Suddenly—and again I have to emphasise that this word cannot in any way convey the feeling that the event happened in an order of time not Rohandan—I was back in sunlight. The scene below did not change—that is, not for a long moment. And then all at once, flick! just like that, Adalantaland vanished beneath the sea, and a whirlpool formed where it had been. My eyes drawn to that place, darkened in grief for the loss of those people, were nevertheless aware that all around the periphery of my vision islands were vanishing, leaving their spins of water, or land rising up—and sometimes islands would plunge under the waters and then almost at once rise up again, seeming to be settled there stable and permanent, and then, flick! they disappeared. When I was able to withdraw my immediate grief from Adalantaland, to gain a wider view, I was able to see that all over the great ocean the islands that studded it had gone.

And have not come back again since… and that is when the Isolated Northern Continent became permanently isolated. Though of course I am using that word relatively: often enough I have flown from one end of that enormous expanse of waters, with its few and clustered islands, and remembered those other times, and thought at how any moment those old islands may rise again, bare, water-scoured, to begin their slow process of weathering into fruitfulness and plenty. Not only islands were vanishing or appearing—everywhere the earth of the mainland was bulging up and buckling, and the waters were rocking and spouting and sloshing about as they do when someone jumps heavily into a water pool. There was a foul mineral smell. The scene grew wilder as I watched—as I intermittently watched, for I was being spun about and I could see only in flashes. Spouts of water miles high rose into the air and crashed thunderously, land spurted upwards like water, clouds formed in the skies in a swift massing process that seemed impossible—and then poured down at once in rain. Suddenly everything below was whitened: the rain had fallen as snow, and I was in a blizzard being whirled about in shrieking winds. And yet, immediately afterwards, the white had all gone, warm rains had washed the snow from the heaving, spurting, boiling surfaces of the globe, and I saw that the ice of the pole had gone, and where it had been was a spinning whirlpool—and then the spin of the water was slower, was hardly there, a crust was forming over it, and the white of the ice cover gleamed again, and spread, was rapidly growing.

Again I was in a thick snowstorm that seemed to be weighing down my little bubble. I felt that I was sinking down, was being pressed down, and then again—and with that same unimaginable suddenness—a wind arose from somewhere and carried me violently off. Of course none of my instruments was working, nor had worked since the start of this violent re-orientation of Rohanda. I did not know where I was being sucked or pulled, but felt that it was not any longer in a vortex or spin but was direct, in a straight line. And I was always inside the thick swirl of snow that was like no snow I had ever seen anywhere or on any planet. I knew I was being steadily pressed down by it and readied myself for a crash. Now that I was able to be more calm, because of this long steady drive onwards inside the storm, without sudden twists or dizzyings, I was able to hear again: beyond the dreadful hush of the snowfall and the howl of the wind that drove me were the multitudinous sounds of the earth itself, groaning and shrieking, moaning and grinding… this went on for some time, and yet, even as it did, there were sudden spaces or moments within this time when the opposite happened. I mean that I suddenly found myself in sun and wetness, clouds of steam arising everywhere and not a trace of snow to be seen anywhere under me: a water world, with spouts of water flung up to the height of my craft, lower now than it was, far too close to the earth, and in that space of—a few minutes? seconds?—I was able to direct my craft upwards, away from the churn of the muddy steamy land under me. And then the snow descended again and the cold was intense and frightful. I lost consciousness, I think, or at least if I did not, the awfulness of the strain has blocked out my memory. For what I remember next is that I had come to rest, and the crystal shell of my little space bubble was hot and glittery with sun. I was beyond rational thought, or decision, and I opened it stepped out—risking death from a change of atmosphere, though I certainly did not think of that. The sun struck me first. It had a different look to it. Seemed smaller… yet not much. Seemed cooler… but was that possible? I wondered if I been tossed off Rohanda altogether and had arrived on another planet.