The Sirian Experiments

I wondered if the upheavals and tumultuousness had affected my senses… my ability to judge… even my mind. Yet I held on fast to my first impression, as one does to some idea, quite stubbornly and sometimes it seems almost at random, to steady one in a time of upheaval. I was holding on obstinately to the fact that the Rohandan sun had changed… was smaller. I was able even to reach out—unclearly and uncertainly—towards the truth, that Rohanda had been driven, or sucked, or pulled, further from her mother-sun by this cosmic accident she had suffered, and I was with one part of my mind working out the possible results of this. Meanwhile, I was standing by my little crystal bubble on a high mountain that was still “normal” in that it had trees and vegetation on it, though everything leaned about or lay crashed on the earth. I have no idea exactly where this mountain was. I was looking out over a plain where the earth been convulsed about, because there were cracks in it, some miles in length, and sometimes miles across, and there were volcanoes and rivers of mingled lava and water opening new beds for themselves. I could hardly breathe for the sulphurous smell. And I had a queer dreamlike vision that lasted only a few moments, of herds of animals—some of which I had never seen, so strange and new to me that I could not believe in them… these were running across the plain between the cracks and the spouting geysers and volcanoes, crying out and screaming and trumpeting and raging, and the multitudinous herds poured around the base of the mountain and vanished, and I was left wondering if I had seen them, just I was wondering if I had been in that snow, had seen the whole globe blotted out by snow… and even as I thought about the snow, again it fell—I saw that everywhere in front of me was instantly covered by thick wads of blue and green and yellow ice, which came to the foot of the mountain I on, and began pressing and squeezing up the sides, with a groaning and shrieking that echoed the sounds of the unfortunate animals who had fled past a few moments before. And again I was blotted out in thicknesses of snow, that almost at once swallowed up the space bubble so that I only just had time to climb into it pull over the closure panel. And here I was, not in the dark, for the lights were working, but inside the dark weight of a snowstorm, and silence. Now that it was silent, I understood what an assault my ears had suffered. I again—what? Slept? Blacked out? Went mad enough that I have no memory of it? And again I can give no idea of how long I was in there. Within the blizzard. Inside—not terror—for that had gone, been driven away by immensities of everything, but a suspension of any ordinary and reliable understanding.

When I was myself again and believed that the snow had stopped falling, and burrowed my way out of the bubble, and leaned on it, holding fast as one does to a solid place in water, because I was as it were floating in loose airy snow, I looked out over an all-white landscape, under a sky that was a light clear fresh blue, lit by the new, more distant, more yellow sun. I seemed to be clear in my mind, and functioning… I pushed enough snow off the bubble to free it, tried the instruments, found everything in order, and took off into this new air, which was so sharp and clean again, yet with a metallic tang to it, and flew interminably over white, white, a dazzlingly correct and uniform white, where all hollows and valleys had been obliterated, only peaks that of bare, scraped rock. But one had a clotted or furred look, as if encrusted with insects of vast size; when I examined it, I saw a multitude of every imaginable variety of animal, large and small, all in the attitudes of immediate death. They had been frozen in an instant where they taken had refuge from the floods, or the surging ice packs, or the oceans of snow. But on other peaks that I past at eye level there were trees still upright, their branches loaded with frozen birds. And in one place I saw a glittering plume rising into the air just in front of me, and, as I came near to it, found it was a geyser that had been frozen so fast it was hanging there with fishes and beasts of the sea solid in it. It sent out a high twanging noise, and snapped and crumpled and fell in a heap on to the white snowy billows below.

The great ocean where the islands had been was not frozen. I saw it then as I have seen it ever since. I was flying across the northerly part, and underneath me was water, where Adalantaland had been, as if it had never been. It was not that there were no islands left anywhere in those seas but that now they were clustered or fringed around the coasts of the Isolated Northern Continent on one side and the main landmass on the other—these being the Northwest fringes that later played such a part in Rohandan history.

I wondered that the ocean was not frozen. And even as I flew across the last of the waters before reaching land, I saw ahead of me that the snows were melting there—had already melted in some places, leaving floods and lakes and muddy expanses everywhere. By the time I did reach the mainland, and was flying into it, the snows had all dissolved in water… I was flying over a scene of mud and water and new rivers. I could not land anywhere, but went straight across the continent looking down at a soaked and watery scene whose changes I was not able to assess because I not been that way before. When I reached the opposite coast, on another vast ocean, I was able to see that pressures of some awful intensity had squeezed higher the mountain ranges that run from extreme north to extreme south of the isolated continents—if one were to imagine these continents shaped in some soft substance, like clay or sand, but on a tiny scale, as on a child’s teaching tray, and then pressure applied by some force right down one side of them, so that they buckle up and make high ridges and long mountain chains separated by narrow gorges and highlands, so had those two great continents been affected, and I had to postulate all kinds of pressuring forces deep inside the substance of Rohanda, under the ocean; and the visible signs of these were in the vast waters muddied and full of weed, and crowding jagged icebergs, and a metallic or sulphurous smell.

I floated southwards along these tortured mountains seeing how forests and rock and rivers had been heaved up and down and toppled and spread everywhere until I reached the south of the Northern Continent turned sharply inland to seek out Klorathy and the other Ambien. Again, I was not familiar with the terrain, but could see that, while everything had been soaked, so that lakes and sprawling rivers stained brown with earth lay everywhere, and the landscape was all mud, all water, all swamp and fen and marsh, yet there were expanses of forests that had not been overturned and mountains that seemed intact, if shaken. And in fact it turned out that the southern continents, partly and patchily frozen and soaked and shaken and squeezed, had come off much better than the northern areas, and had not been entirely devastated. I travelled on in clouds of steam that whisked up past my bubble and made turbulence that tossed and spun me, so that I felt as sick as I had done in the tempests of the great disaster, and all the blue Rohandan skies were coiling and churning with cloud. This had been a high, dry, sharp-aired landscape, and it would shortly become so again—yet I descended to where I had left the others through baths of warm steam. They were still there. On a wet muddy plain surrounded by the mountains of the dwarves were the tents and huts of the tribes, and splashing through mud and shallow lakes, the savages were dancing: were propitiating their deity, the earth, their mother, their source, their provenance, their protector, who had unexpectedly become enraged and shown her rage. And so they danced and danced—and continued to dance on, through the days and the nights. When I joined Klorathy, he was exactly where I had left him, seated in the open of his tent, apparently unoccupied, watching the dance of his protégés. And Ambien was near him.

We told each other our experiences: mine more dramatic than theirs: they had briefly been visited by tempests of snow, which been dissipated almost at once by floods of rain, the earth had shaken and had growled and creaked, some of the mountainsides had fallen and there would be new riverbeds running off the plateau to the oceans.

We pieced together, among us, the following succession of events: The planet had turned over, had been topsy-turvy for some hours, and then righted itself—but not to its old position: Klorathy’s instruments, more sensitive than ours, told him that the axis of the earth was at an angle now and this would mean that as this angled globe revolved about its sun, there would no longer be evenness and regularity in its dispositions of heat and cold, but there would be changes and seasons that we could not yet do more than speculate about. The planet was slightly further away from its sun, too—the Rohandan year would be minimally longer. Many kinds of animals were extinct. The level of the oceans had sharply dropped, because the ice masses of both poles were much enlarged and could be expected to further increase. Cities that had been swallowed by the waters before in previous sudden changes would be visible again… islands that had vanished under the waves might even be visible, glimmering there in shallower seas… and perhaps poor Adalantaland, that vanished happy place, might ring its bells close enough under the surface for voyagers to hear them on quiet days and nights—so we talked, even then, when we were surrounded by mud and flying clouds of steam, and the catastrophe was already receding into the past, becoming another of the sudden reversals of Rohandan condition. But when I used the word “catastrophe” of what had just happened—a not, after all, inconsiderable happening—Klorathy corrected me, saying that the Catastrophe, or, to use the absolutely accurate and correct word, Disaster, meaning an unfortunate alignment of the stars and their forces, could properly be applied to a real misfortune, a true evolutionary setback, namely, the failure of the Lock. I have already hinted at my impatience with Canopean pedantry. As I saw it. As I sometimes even now cannot help seeing it.

I remember my meek enquiry, which was I am afraid all impertinence, to the effect that some might consider recent events to merit that word, and remember Klorathy’s smiling, but firm, reply that: “if one did not use the exact and correct words, then one’s thinking would soon become unclear and confused. The recent events…”—I remember I smiled sarcastically at this little word, “events”—“…did not in any fundamental way alter the nature of Rohanda, whereas the failure of the Lock, and the Shammat delinquency, had affected the planet and would continue to affect it. That a catastrophe, a disaster. This was unfortunate.” And he kept the pressure of his bronze or amber gaze on me, making me accept it.

Which I did. But I was raging with emotion. I thought him cold and dispassionate. I was thinking that being able to view the devastation of a whole planet with such accurate detachment was not likely to he warmly responsive to a close personal relationship: at the time, that my own personal concerns were being intruded by me did not strike me as shameful, though it does now. I have already said that “hindsight” is not the most comfortable of possible views of oneself or of events. The mention of Shammat affected me—I knew of course that it was all guilt. But while I was clear in my mind that our Sirian delinquencies and deceptions that I could not confess to had caused barriers between me and Klorathy, my emotions expressed this in anger and a growing irritation with Klorathy, even a dislike…

I left him and went to my own tent, which was set on a high rock, damp but at least not saturated, and sat there by myself, looking down on the weird scene—the savages dancing and singing, on and on, in the splashing brown water and the mud, illuminated by a moon that appeared fitfully among the tumultuous clouds, and vanished amid the mists and fogs. Ambien I came to talk to me. He was conciliatory and gentle, for he knew how I raged and suffered.

He had wanted very much to leave, before the events that we were not to call a catastrophe. He had become bored with the inactivity of it all. The life of the savages went on, hunting, and curing hides, and eating their stews and their dried meat, and making clothes and ornamenting them. And Klorathy stayed where he. He did not lecture or admonish them. What had happened was that the head man came to Klorathy one evening and sat down and finally asked if he had visited the dwarves, and if there was anything he could tell them—the savages. And Klorathy answered saying that had he indeed visited the little people and that in his view… explaining how he saw things. And then the head man went off and conferred, and days went past, and then he returned and asked again, formally, sitting on the ground near Klorathy, having exchanged courtesies, if Klorathy believed the dwarves could be trusted to keep agreements if they were made—for in the past, so he said, the dwarves had been treacherous and had spilled out of their underground fastnesses and slain the tribes, both men and animals… and Klorathy answered this too, patiently.

What was happening, Ambien I said, was that Klorathy did not make any attempt to communicate what he thought until he was asked a direct question—or until something was said that was in fact a question though it was masked as a comment. And Ambien I then went to Klorathy and enquired if this was indeed a practice of Canopus: and whether Klorathy expected to stay there, living on as he did, with savages, until they asked the right questions… and if this was Klorathy’s expectation, then why did he expect the savages to ask the right questions?

To which Klorathy replied that they would come and ask the necessary questions in their own good time.

And why?

“Because I am here…” was Klorathy’s reply, which irritated Ambien I. Understandably. I felt irritated to the point of fury even listening to this report.

Anyway, Ambien I had wanted to go, but could not, since I had the Sirian transport with me. He had in fact gone off to visit the dwarves again, by himself, another colony of them—a foolhardy thing, which had nearly cost him his life. He had been rescued by the intervention of Klorathy, who had only said, however, that “Sirians as yet lacked a sense of the appropriate.”

Then had begun the “events” that were not to be described as more than that.

At last, I had arrived back, and he, Ambien I, could not express how he felt when he saw the glistening bubble descend through that grey steam, because he had believed me to be dead. And of course it was “a miracle” that I had survived—to use a term from our earlier epochs.

We stayed together that night, in emotional and intellectual intimacy, unwilling to separate, after such a threat that we might never have been together again at all.

We decided to leave Klorathy.

First, having pondered over what Ambien I had said about questions, how they had to be asked, I went to Klorathy and asked bluntly and directly about the Colony 10 colonists, and why we, Sirius, could not use them.

He was sitting at his tent door. I sat near him. We were both on heaps of damp skins… but the clouds of steam were less, the earth was drying, the thundering and trickling and running of the waters already had quietened. It was possible to believe soon these regions would again be dry and high and healthy.

“I have already told you,” said Klorathy, “that these colonists would not be appropriate. Do you understand? Not appropriate for Sirians, for the Sirian circumstances.”

“Why not?"

He was silent for a while, as if reflecting inwardly. Then he said, “You ask me, over and over again, the same kind of question.”

“Why don’t you answer me?”

Then he did something that made me impatient. He went into his tent and came out with some objects—the same things Ambien I and I had been supplied to maintain our balance on this difficult planet.

I at first believed that because of the recent “events,” certain changes in our practice were necessary, and I readied myself to take in instruction, since I knew that exactness was necessary here, and that it would not do for me to overlook even the smallest detail. (I had told him—and heard his dismayed patient sigh about Adalantaland falling off in this respect, how they had not maintained the care needed to make these practices work.)

I watched what he did. Certain kinds of stone, of substance, some colours, shapes, were laid before him and handled and ordered. But I was watching very carefully and saw that he made no changes in the ritual I had been using.

“So nothing has had to be changed?” I asked, knowing my voice was rough and antagonistic. “Not even the recent events, and the distancing of the earth from its sun and all the other differences, are going to necessitate changes in what we have to do?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. Though perhaps later, when we have monitored the exact differences. In climate, for instance. And of course the magnetic forces will he affected…”

“Of course,” I said, sarcastically, as before.

He continued to handle the objects, precisely, carefully. I watched his face, the amber, or bronze face, long, deeply moulded, with the strong eyes that were so closely observing the movements of his hands.

And I continued to sit there, arms locked around my knees, watching, maintaining dry tight smile that was all criticism, and he continued patiently and humbly to manipulate his artefacts.

I did not understand him. I thought this was a way of putting me off, of saying wordlessly that he would not answer me.

As I formulated this thought, he said, “No, that is not it. But if you want to understand, then I suggest you stay on here for a time.”

“For how long?” And answered myself with, “as long as necessary, I suppose!"

“Yes, that’s it.”

“And what sort of progress have you made? Are the savages and dwarves in an alliance? Are they ready to stand against the Shammats?”

“I think it is likely the dwarves have been sealed into their caves, and that we may never see them again.”

The way he said this made my emotions riot. The end of a species—a race—the end of the Lombi strain on Rohanda and the technicians.

He said: “Well, we have to accept these reverses.”

“Then why are we staying on? The reason for your being here is gone—swallowed by the events.”

“The tribes are still here!”

“So you are not with them just because of the old hostility between them and the dwarves?”

“I am here as I often am with all kinds of peoples… races… species, at certain stages in their development.”

I did understand that here was a point of importance: that if I persisted, I would learn. “You want me to stay?” This was a challenge: deliberate, awkward, hostile.

“Yes, I think you should stay.”

He had not said: “Yes, I want you to stay.”

I got up and left him. I told Ambien I that I intended to leave. And in the morning, having said goodbye to Klorathy, we took off in our space bubble. We surveyed, rapidly, the ravages of the “events” on both southern continents, and then went home to our Mother Planet.

For some time I had little to do with Rohanda, which was judged by our experts as too much of a bad risk, and I was allotted work elsewhere. This was, too, the period of the worst crisis in Sirian self-confidence: our experiments everywhere, sociological and biological, were minimal.

The populations on our Colonised Planets were at their lowest, too.

As for me, I was pursuing thoughts of my own, for I could not get out of my mind the old successes of Canopus in forced evolution, and while whole strata of our Colonial Service and all our governing class were publicly asking: What for? I was wondering if they would give room to such emotions (but they were called ideas, as heart-cries of this kind so often are, and the more so, the more they are fed by emotions and sentiments) if they had been able to watch, as I had done, creatures not much better than apes transformed into civic responsible beings within such a short time. I shared these thoughts with Ambien I, with whom I was once again working, but our Empire was less tolerant then than it is now—or so I believe and hope—and the kind of social optimism that inspired me was classed in some quarters as “irresponsibility” and “sociological selfishness.”

This may be the right place to remark that I long since learned that if one is entertaining unpopular ideas, one has only to keep quiet and wait for the invisible wheels to turn that will bring those back as the last word in intelligent and forward-looking thinking.

Meanwhile, I got on with my work. It happened that I was in that part of the Galaxy where the transplanted Lombis on were Colonised Planet 25. I had not thought of them from the old time to this; but I made a detour from curiosity. It could be said that the whole Lombi experiment had been inutile. They had been carefully preserved from any contact with more evolved races, except for very rare reconnaissance trips by Colony personnel to see if it were possible to keep a certain pristine social innocence that might be of use in “opening up” new planets. Yet we had nevertheless ceased to colonise new planets in the total—may I say reckless?—way that had distinguished our policies up till then: we acquired a new possession only after long and careful assessment. Our interest in the Lombis continued to the extent that we wished to monitor the possible development of evidence of a craving for “higher things.” From the spacecraft I made contact home to ask permission to make a small experiment of my own: it would not have been given me if the Lombis had not virtually been written off as useful material.

We had sent no technicians there for over a thousand S-years. Their life-spans remained at roughly two hundred R-years. This meant that as individuals they could have no memory at all of

visitations “from the skies.”

I ordered a rapid survey of Planet 25 sunside and nightside, at maximum speed so that we would not be observed as more than a meteorite—we were not visible at all on sunside when moving—and then, having chosen a populous area, hovered in full view for some hours, while crowds collected.

I made as impressive a descent from the aircraft as could be devised. Unfortunately I had no formal wear with me on this working trip, but I devised a long cloak of some white insulation material, and made the most of my not exactly profuse yellow hair—it is not that I have ever wanted to be more hairy or furred than I am, but the yellow or gold-haired species always evoke awe, because of our rarity. I floated to earth from the spacecraft, and saw a multitude of the poor beasts fall to their faces before me with a deep and sorrowful groan, which did touch me, I confess, accustomed as I am to the awe so easily evoked in uncivilised races.

I had prepared all kinds of suitably vague replies to possible questions, but found that once I had said I had “come from the skies” and was their friend, that was enough: awe is a great inhibitor of intelligent questioning.

They remembered—or their ceremonies and songs and tales did—“the shining ones,” and what dread they still kept from the old time on the other planets, I stilled by the most solemn promises that I would not take any of them with me when I left.

And what was it they were so afraid of being taken away from? The reply to that is ironical… is sad… is a comment on more than just the situation of the Lombis… my so long, so very long career in the Service furnishes me with several similar situations…

But first a comment on their customs and mores.

They had not evolved much; any more than had the parent stock on Planet 24.

The prohibitions against covering themselves, and eating cooked and prepared food had not vanished, but had reversed; it was now for their ceremonies that they had to be naked and eat raw meat and roots and fruit. They lived as before in various types of crude shelter, hut or cave; they hunted; they wore skins; they used fire. Their basic unit was the family and not the tribe: this seemed to be retarding them. At least, as I travelled about that planet, which was adequately endowed with plant and animal life, though meagre compared to other planets—Rohanda, for instance—I was comparing these animals with the savages of the high plateaux whom Klorathy had thought it worthwhile to instruct: and such was the contrast that I was wondering for the first time if the superiority of those others was due to something innate, a superiority of a different kind and classification to those we Sirians could use, and which Klorathy and officials on his level would be able to measure? The point was that the Lombis had no capacity for development, or seemed not to have.

I was examining these short, squat, half-furred creatures, with their immensely powerful shoulders and arms, living in their groups of three or four—up to or eight, but no more—each group suspicious of its patch of hunting ground, its wild fruit trees, its sources of roots and vegetables, able to mingle with other groups only on ritual occasions when they all crowded together—and remembered with admiration things that I had scorned. Where were the customs that can make even hundreds of individuals a mutually supporting and culturally expanding unit? Where the intricate ceremonial dances? The finely worked garments with their fringes, their ornamentation, the delicately used feathers? The necklaces of carved bones and stones? The instruction of the young through tales and apprenticeship? The specialisation of individuals, according to innate talent, into storytellers, craftsmen, hunters, singers? Where was… but I could see nothing here like the skills and knowledge of the Navahis and Hoppes.

Now I come to what was painful and pitiful in their situation. How often as I travel from one of our Colonised Planets to another am I forced to remember the natural advantages of Rohanda, with her close and shining moon, her nightside that is crammed with brilliant star clusters?

This planet was a dark one, by nature and position. No moon here. The Lombis must have had somewhere in their gene-memory the knowledge that nights could be lit with infinite variation from a star hanging so close it seemed like a creature, a living being—and changing from a full and bright disc to the tiniest of yellow cracks one had to peer towards and watch for… The Lombis had known what it was to wait for that moment when a sun seems to slide away into dark—and then up flash the stars, giving light when a moon is temporarily absent.

Not only was there no moon, but the nightside looked out into an almost empty sky—black upon black. In one or two places there was a faint sprinkling of light, stars far beyond our Galaxy, more like a slight greying of the night. And their sun was small and distant compared with the rumbustious Rohandan sun from which one may have to shelter, even now when it is further than it was. The Lombis’ “shining ones” were now these infinitely faint and nearly invisible stars. Their old festivals of the full moon took place once a year, when a vast windy plain became filled with groups of these animals who travelled long distances to be there—and they stood in their family groups, lifting their flat sorrowful faces up to their black night, and sang of “shining ones.”

And their sun was a “shining one,” too, but their worship of it was ambiguous and double, as if it was an impostor, or tried to claim more than was due. When our spaceship descended, a crystal and sparkling globe that evoked from them memories or half-memories buried in them by their environment, it was as if an original primal light had suddenly appeared to them. Oh, those black stuffy nights… those interminable unaltering nights, that seemed to settle on the nightside with the sun’s disappearance like a physical oppression. A complete black, a heavy black, where a fire burning outside a cave or inside a leafy shelter seemed to hold back a felt and tangible pressure of darkness. I have never experienced anything like night on Planet 25. Never been on a planet where nothing could be done after sunset. In the daytime the Lombis ran about, and attended to their sustenance, but at night they gathered with the first sign of the sun’s going into their groups and pressed together around their little fires, cowering and waiting for that moment when a rock, or a leaf, would emerge greyly from the thick black and tell them that once again they had survived the extinction of the light.

I left as soon as I could, making a dramatic exit from the planet, which they took on their faces, thanking me for my gracious appearance to them and my love for them. Yet I had promised nothing, told them nothing, given nothing: so easy it is to be “a high shining thing”!—and, speeding thankfully from that oppressive place, I was remembering the apes on Rohanda under Canopean tutelage, and again my old dream, or if you like, ambition, revived in me, and I wondered if I could not persuade Canopus now to part with some of those skilled colonists, the Giants: after all, a considerable time had passed.

If nothing could be improved in the Lombis, what was the point of keeping them as they were?

I sent in a report on my return home, reminding my superiors of the Lombis’ remarkable strength: this was on the lines of what they would have expected from me. Meanwhile, I decided on guile, but nothing beyond what I believed then, and believe now, to be legitimate: only a question of interpreting my standing orders more liberally than would been expected of me.

Our relations with Canopus had been limited for some time, because of our cutback in colonial development.

I summoned a meeting of my peer group, the Five, reminded them that it our policy to maintain full liaison with Canopus, and asked permission to apply for a rendezvous with Klorathy: after all, it had come from them, originally, though of course the idea had been in my mind, that I should maintain contact with Klorathy. The fact that it had not led to anything then, or did not seem to have led to anything, did not mean there could never be benefits for us. I felt no enthusiasm in them, but I had become used to being the odd one out among the Five, always slightly at an angle to current norms of thought. They did not criticise me for this: it was recognised to be my role, or function. Nor did they discourage me beyond saying that since Canopus could not solve her own problems, she was unlikely to contribute to the solution of ours. This was in line with our attitude at that time; the thriving planets of Canopus, her busy trade routes, her enterprise and industriousness, was being classed by us as “superficiality and lack of experiential and existential awareness.” I quote from a learned journal of that time.

The invitation I got from Klorathy was to meet him on their Planet 11. I was first gratified, since I had long wanted to see this planet that we had heard was “important” to Canopus and unlike any other known to either their Empire or ours. And then I found myself succumbing to suspicion: why Planet 11 and not Planet 10? For Klorathy must believe I was still after his Giants!

Their Planets 10 and 11 were neighbours: planets of the same sun. I even thought of making a landing on 10, with the excuse of power trouble, but decided to go on, and the first thing I saw on 11 was a group of Giants walking from the terminal to a hovercar. I told myself that I should put aside my readiness for suspicion: but wondered if Klorathy’s plans for me to see the Giants here, at work and occupied, was another way of refusing me. By now I had got into my own hovercar.

What I could see from the windows was a flat featureless landscape, greyish in colour, under a greyish sky. The sun was pale and large. As I looked, the sun plunged out of sight. A reddish disc appeared over the opposite horizon. A moment later, close to it, came a smaller bilious green disc. These two moved fast across a lurid sky, giving me a sensation of whirling rotation. Looking out made me feel queasy, so I read the information sheet on the wall.

It said that this planet was a well-lit one, with two fast-moving moons, and its nightside well starred. It had no seasons, but had zones of differing climatic conditions, being generally warm and mild with extremes of cold only at the poles, which were left uninhabited. Visitors should not be surprised to find that most long-term inhabitants wore little or no clothing. They might find they needed more sleep than usual, this being the most common reaction to the fast alternations of light and dark. They would probably lose their appetites for a while. Adaptation might be slow, but a longer acquaintanceship with the planet would…

As an old hand at interpreting these benign messages, I resigned myself to an uncomfortable time. And in fact fell asleep, for when I woke up it was day again, and we were still skimming over a grey-green surface, under a grey sky. I was looking for something on the lines of the mathematical cities of old Rohanda: on a new planet I was always on the watch for them: they had perhaps become something of a fixation with me. My mental picture of the Canopean Empire included planets covered with these fabulous, these extraordinary cities. I knew there were none on the Canopean Mother Planet… But why not?

I had asked Klorathy, one evening among the tents of the savages, where I might see these cities and he said: “At the present time, nowhere.” I saw now nothing but a dreary sameness, at more or less regular intervals rough dwellings like sheds, which I supposed to be some sort of storage shed. And then I saw that outside some of them were Giants, and had glimpses of a type of creature that did not attract me at all.

Just as I had understood that these dwellings were what I could expect to see on this planet, and that there were probably no cities, the hovercar stopped suddenly, near one of the structures, and Klorathy came out of it. It was a single-storey building, flat roofed, surrounded by a type of low rough grass, which was clearly the characteristic vegetation. As I entered the place, dark descended again.

Klorathy and I were alone in a rectangular room, painted white, which was a relief after the dim colours of the sky and the landscape, lit by lines of soft wall lights that automatically came on and went off as the daylight and dark alternated outside.

Because we were alone I at once began to hope for the exchange of understandings that I associate with real companionship, but it was not to be. My set of mind forbade it: it was defensive, and critical; and my physical state forbade it, too, for I feeling sick and a little giddy.

This shack, or shed, had in it some low seats and a table. The window apertures and the doorway had screens that could be pulled over them, but they were open now and Klorathy said at once: “Better if you do not shut out the outside: otherwise you won’t get used to it.”

I submitted. I sat down. On the table was a meal. Klorathy said I would feel better if I ate at once, and I tried to do so, but could not get a mouthful down. Meanwhile, he ate and I watched. The food was standard galactic fare.

We were sitting opposite each other, the table between us. He was smiling and easy, I on my best official behaviour, because it was a way of holding myself together.

I remember thinking that connoisseurs of the contrasts so plentifully offered by the Imperial experience would have found the sight of us two piquant: Klorathy, the bronze man, so strong, well-built, solid, with me, who am usually described—affectionately and otherwise—as “a little wisp of a thing,” with my yellow locks and “luminously pale” or “unhealthily pallid” skin—as the case might be. A good deal of our art, the more popular forms of it, dealt with such contrasts, which are found endlessly entertaining, particularly when suggestive or openly sexual. I am not above finding it so myself. But at the time I wanted only to lie down, and in fact, did drop off to sleep suddenly, and woke to see through the apertures, in the full Planet 11 light, contrasts rather stronger than anything Klorathy and I could provide. There was another shed not far away, and outside it were two Giants, twice Klorathy’s size and nearly three times my size, one a totally black man, shining in the pale lemon glare, the other a rich chocolate brown, both virtually naked. I had always seen them clothed, because during conferences everyone made sure of being well clothed, regardless of the local climate, for the sake of giving least offence during occasions that were always quite rich enough opportunities for annoyance or criticism. They were magnificent men: I never seen anything like them. But they were in a group of creatures half their size, who seemed like frail and pale insects—that was the impression made on me.

As I looked, the dark swallowed everything, and almost at once the two moons appeared, large and small, lighting everything with a strong yellow glare. Their colours seemed different from when I had seen them in the hovercar, and again I dropped off to sleep, with the strain of it all, and when I woke it was light, and Klorathy was outside, talking to group of the “insects.” They were not much different in plan from the physical structure common throughout our Galaxy.

They were in fact not very short, being taller than myself, but seemed so, because they were so extremely thin and light in build, and of a silvery-grey colour that made one believe them transparent when they were not. They no hair on their tall domed heads. Each hand—and it was their hands one had to take note of first—had ten very long fingers, nailless, giving the impression of bunches of tentacles in movement. They had three eyes, quite round, bright green, with vertical black pupils. There was a pattern of nostrils—simple holes—in the centre of their flat faces, three, or four or even more. No nose. And no mouth at all.

I was glad that I was able to examine them from a little distance, and even more glad that Klorathy was not there, because I have never been to overcome an instinctive abhorrence for creatures dissimilar to my own species. This has been my single greatest handicap as a Colonial Servant. Attempts to overcome the weakness have cost me more than any other effort, such as learning languages and dialects, and having to acclimatise myself to places like this Colony 11, with its rapid rotation that one could feel and its violent alternations of light.

Despite my repugnance, I able to watch Klorathy’s lips in movement and his animated face, but could not see how they talked, with no mouth. After a time the same two Giants rejoined the group and Klorathy came in to rejoin me.

I could see no sign in him of repugnance.

Without speaking, he pulled the low seats to a window, and we sat side by side and observed the two Giants and the “insect people.”

As I was thinking this unflattering description of them, and looking at the tentacles that seemed to flow around them and in the air around their heads, Klorathy said: “You are wrong. They are more highly evolved than any but one of our peoples.”

“More than the Giants?” I could not help sounding sarcastic, the contrast between the noble and handsome black men and the “insects” was so great.

“They complement each other,” was the reply. And he looked at me, leaning forward to impress on me the force of his amber gaze.

I could not prevent myself sighing—it was impatience, and also tiredness. This atmosphere was exhausting—not the chemical balance of it, though it had slightly less oxygen than I was used to, but suddenly again the sun had gone, and now there was one moon shining blood orange this time, and then appeared the little moon, a sort of greenish colour, and the scene we had been watching, of low greyish grass, the two enormous Giants, and the cluster of the others, was lit by a horrible reddish light, and the Giants seemed to be made of blood, and the shapes of the “insects” were absorbed, and all I could see was a mass of waving tentacles. I abruptly left my seat and turned my face inwards.

I said, “I don’t think Colony 11 suits me.” And tried to make it humorous. He said nothing and I asked: “And you?”

“I spend a good deal of time here.”

“Why?”

“At this time, for our present needs, this planet is important to us.”

I understood that this reply was specific, and contained information that I been reaching out for. But I felt ill and discouraged; my strongest thought was that if after so many ages I still could not control an instinctive response to creatures physically different, then it was time I gave it all up and retired!

“It is not the physical difference as such,” said Klorathy.

“Well then? I suppose they talk with their tentacles?”

“Their tentacles are sensors. They sense the variations in the atmosphere with them.”

“And I suppose they use telepathy?" We had no races in all our Empire who were telepathic, but had heard there were such races, and believed that Canopus had several. I was being sarcastic again, but Klorathy said, “Yes. They are telepathic. The Giants talk like you and me. The others in their own way. The two species get on well enough.”

“And they have no mouths.” I could not help a shudder.

“Have not noticed something quite unique about this planet?”

“No. All I know is that it makes me feel very sick indeed, and I am going to leave it.”

I looked out again. The moons were in the sky, but the sun was, too. The moons, sunlit, were faintly green and yellow in a grey sky, and each sent off a glow of illuminated gases.

“Wait just little.”

“There are no towns. No cities.”

“And there are no crops growing. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Ah! The Giants have given up eating!”

“No. We import enough food for them. But the people here do not eat.”

“They live on air,” I expostulated.

“Exactly so. Their tentacles assess the ingredients of the air and breathe it in according to what is available at any given moment.”

I absorbed this. It gave me a dismayed, cold feeling. It is not that I am, as our saying goes, eaten by my food, but it does not come easily to imagine life without any at all.

“And the Giants are teaching them, as they did the apes on Rohanda?”

“No. I told you,” he said gently. “They are a balance for each other. Together they make a whole.”

“In relation to what?”

As I said this I realised I had come out with a real question: one that he had been waiting for me to ask. At once he replied: “In relation to need.”

And disappointment made me snap out: “Need, need, need. You always say need. What need?”

He did not reply. While I wrestling with my need to formulate the right question, I fell asleep again, and when I woke up the moons of Colony 11 were absent altogether. The stars were many and bright, though, and I stood looking out into the night, feeling soothed and comforted, but not for long, for soon up sprang the larger moon, and the light was green and metallic and very unpleasant, and I decided at that moment to leave. I could not see Klorathy.

On the table was a large white tablet, and on it Klorathy had written: “The exact disposition of usefulness of this planet according to Need will change in twenty Canopean days. If you feel able to stay until then, I think you should. If not, then perhaps you may care to meet me on Shikasta (Rohanda, if you insist) in the city of Koshi on the eastern side of the central landmass. I have ordered the hovercar to take you to the space-port if you wish.”

It was waiting. I got into it, shut my eyes so as not to see more of this nauseating planet and had thankfully left it before there could be another descent of its lurid and always different night.

Twenty Canopean days make a Sirian year. I attended to some other tasks and then went to Rohanda.

Instructions from Canopus—“may we be permitted to suggest” arrived well before I left, and there was plenty in them to make me think. First there was a change in the protective practices, or rituals. A sharp one, greater than any previous change. I had begun to take for granted certain basic usages that did not alter—nor could, I had thought—but now everything was different. I will not trouble to detail these practices, which were to change again and again thereafter. But it was emphasised that these were of importance, that their exact and accurate practice was vital, and that I should not be tempted to alter them, not for any reason at all, nor at the behest of any person whatsoever, no matter his or her apparent credentials. Certain artefacts were provided for my use. Secondly, I must remember that the planet was now under the domination, for all apparent purposes, of Shammat, and I must be on my guard: this was particularly true of the cities on the eastern part of the central landmass, and Koshi was as bad as any of them. Thirdly, I must remember that the planet, since its axis had been set on a slant, had seasons—Canopus believed that one of our own planets had seasons?—and this had much affected the general temperament, already, of course, thoroughly perverted since the Catastrophe of the failure of the Lock. Fourthly, the predominant stock was now a mix of the old giants and the old natives, with admixtures unplanned and planned from other genes (was that a reminder of my deceptions and errors, I had to wonder), and this hybrid, though physically vigorous, was nevertheless psychologically affected because of a sharp reduction in general life-span, and resulting location of expectations for a certain life-span, and the fact. Fifthly, I should remember that a symptom of the general worsening and corruption was that females had been deprived of equality and dignity, and while I would be able to enter Koshi as a traveller without attracting too much attention, once there I would have to choose my role with the greatest possible care…

There was a good deal more, too. I made a detour to visit our Planet 13 that had climatic seasons. How did Canopus know so much about us? I was prompted to brood about a wonderful espionage system with equipment beyond anything we could imagine. Planet 13’s disabilities were the result of a hotheaded, and to my mind irresponsible, phase of our early Empire. The counsels of maturer minds in our Colonial Service had been unable to prevent a decision to propel a certain planet, then in orbit with several others around a vast gaseous planet, away from its station there, and into orbit around 13, a rich and fruitful planet, where it could make use of 13’s natural resources of water and food to balance its own barrenness. The point was that this thoroughly dreary little world was loaded with every kind of desirable mineral. It was not that I—and my faction—did not want, just as much as the hotheads, to get our hands on these mineral riches but we were not prepared to go to such lengths, take such risks. I maintain still that we were right: they that they were… The propulsion of 14 was a success. It arrived to take up its orbit around 13, again a planet’s planet, but its “pull” caused cataclysms and catastrophes on 13, disturbing its balance, and making it slant on its axis. There were various species of animal on 13, none particularly attractive, but I have always believed in and supported policies that do as little damage to indigenous races as possible.

The upsets on 13 wiped out millions and completely changed the patterns of fertility—I see that I am talking like Klorathy, when he referred to the horrific cataclysms on Rohanda as the “events.” As far as we were concerned, these unfortunate effects on 13 were enough to prove our policy correct: but there is no arguing that 14 has been producing minerals enough to supply all our Empire ever since.

All I wished, during my stop on 13, was to check briefly on the effects of continual, often violent, climatic change, sometimes from extreme heat to extreme cold. My account of this stopover, which turned out differently—and more dramatically than I expected—will be found in the records, entitled “Under a Punishing Moon.”

It is enough to say here that I learned all I needed about these continual variations.

When I arrived over the designated area of Rohanda and looked down, it was with the thought that somewhere here I had been buffeted and swept about in the blizzards and torrents during the “events”—and that below me must be the mountain where I had rested in my space bubble and seen the fleeing herds of animals and heard their sad, lamenting cry. Now I could see a dozen great cities on a vast plain that was coloured green from its grasses, and deeper green where forests spread themselves. But the grassy areas were showing tints of brown and ochre, and I saw at a glance that deserts were threatening—and was able to diagnose at once that these cities were doomed to be swallowed by the sands. As I have seen often enough on some of our own planets, before we became the skilled administrators we now are. I yearned, as I hovered there in my Space Traveller, to simply descend, give the appropriate orders, see them carried out—and then be able to rejoice that these cities, which looked healthy enough from this height, would live and flourish. It gave me the oddest feeling of check and frustration to know that I could not do any such thing!—that I must keep quiet about what I knew, and must allow long experience to remain unvoiced.

It is not often that an individual as well ensconced in a career, a way of living, as I am—with patterns of work, friends, companions, offspring, and so much varied experience always ready to be pulled into use—it is very seldom, in fact, that one may be attacked suddenly with such a feeling of futility. Of uselessness… which feelings must then at once and inevitably attack much more than an individual sense of usefulness. Again I was afflicted—as I had been before, hovering over the Rohandan scene, but such a different one—with existential doubts. It is not possible to be armoured against such feelings. However, I pushed them away and instructed the crew to hover in the fast-invisible mode over Koshi itself.

I like to examine a city in this way before actually entering it: one may often see at a glance its condition and probable future.

The first thing to be seen here was that it had experienced recent growth, that it bulged and spread out to the west in large suburbs of shining white villas and gardens. These covered more ground than the old city, which was earth coloured, and composed of densely crammed buildings from which rose tall cone-shaped towers. In other words, there was a disparity between the rich and the poor—a punishable disparity, to mind. Gardens of an ornamental kind spread around the western suburbs. Market gardens lay to the south. To the east, the poor mud-coloured dwellings ended in the shabby-looking semi-desert. This great city on its eminence in the plain had lost its vegetation almost entirely. The expanses of browns and yellows that surrounded it had little smears of green in some places, but dust clouds hung over the many roads and paths that ran into the city from all directions. I did not need to know more, and gave the order to set me down on the edge of one of the roads, which we could see were not frequented.

When this was done I experienced the usual exhilaration as I saw the spacecraft disappear like a soap bubble and I was alone and dependent on myself. Also, this was Rohanda, a planet with which I could not help but feel bonded. And I was already able to examine evidences of the “seasons” that were now part of Rohanda’s nature: a cold wind blew hard on my back from the north, off ice and snow fields around the pole, so much more extensive than they had been. And the cold would intensify shortly, for it would be the time of the R-year when the northern hemisphere would be revolving on its tilt away from its sun. I was looking forward to experiencing the approaches to a “winter,” something new for me.

There was no one on this road I had chosen. It was a minor road, unpaved, not much more than a dirt track, though straight and well ditched. Looking ahead at Koshi all I could see of the rich suburbs were a mass of trees in which I knew the houses were disposed. But the poor part of the town rose high, in a pattern of shapes I had not seen anywhere. Very tall and narrow conical buildings, twenty-one of them, all dun coloured and rather like certain ant heaps I had seen in my time on Isolated Southern Continent I, were crammed together, in a small space, looking as if their bases touched—yet already I could see low habitations, as if crumbling ant heap filled what space there was between the cones. I judged these tall buildings to be ten or eleven storeys high, and wondered at the reasons for building so tall when there was all the space any system of government could possibly need—unless this was the reason: tall tightly populated buildings are easily policed and supervised. So I speculated as I walked firmly in, keeping my eyes open for other travellers, for I wore my usual garb, basic Sirian, and carried over my arm a large piece of cloth I had been advised I must envelop myself in as a female.

I did see a group of individuals approaching, and wrapped myself completely in the black cloak, allowing only my eyes freedom. They were all men—that was the first obvious fact. Probably traders. And of a very varied genetic mix. I fancied I was able to see in them the high moulded cheekbones and wide-set eyes of the old giants, as well as the sturdy set of the natives, but this group of twenty or so were quite extraordinarily mixed, of several skin tones, and with grey and green eyes as well as the more familiar brown. They wore loose trousers, and baggy but belted tunics. I had seen variations on this theme so often, and in so many places, I was able to guess that these were not of the upper class who with quite remarkable uniformity everywhere in the Galaxy choose garments that are unsuitable for physical labour and for easy and unconfined movement: galactic nature is very much the same everywhere. But as I was thinking this, I remembered the garments of the Canopeans, which contradicted this rule.

There were no gardens on this side of the city. The road or track began to be bordered with many shacks and hovels, mostly of timber, and there were swarms of people, none of whom seemed to take any notice of me at all, neither offering greetings nor expecting any. Yet they all, like the travelling group of males, examined me closely and acutely, their eyes obviously skilled at getting a great deal of information in a curtailed glance: I knew that the inhabitants of this city were afraid, and compared what I was seeing with certain arrivals on our own Colonised Planets where our rule had become too harsh, and local officials needed to be checked.

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

I was now among crooked streets and lanes, all crammed with people. There were open shops and booths, eating places, and so much noise I felt dizzy from it. The silences of space, in which I had been immersed, had ill prepared me for this shouting, sometimes screaming and quarrelling mob. And now I was seeing females not shrouded up. On the contrary, they were almost naked, much painted, bejewelled, and offering themselves freely. This degeneration was worse than I had expected, though of course it is a result of poverty everywhere unless controlled by legislation… I realised I was straying through the crowds as their pressure moved me, looking at everything, stopping to stare when I was able to hold my place in the press, and in every way behaving like a stranger.

And in a moment I found my way blocked by a male, who stood firmly in front of me, obviously intending to keep me there. He was staring close into my eyes through the slit in my black sheet. I found him unpleasant. That is, specifically, there was something in him I was able to sense that was more than the alien, or the not-understood. He was of middle Rohandan height, a couple of spans taller than myself, broad and solid, and his skin, of a greyish colour, almost green, had the smooth cool appearance of stone. His eyes were opaque, oblong, without brows. He had no hair, as far as I could see, for he was wearing a square pull-on cap, ornamented with lumps of coloured stone, of a soft rich-looking material. His mouth was straight, almost to the ears, and only a slit. His clothing was a voluminous fur cloak. He put his arms akimbo, in a way that made me experience them as a fence or confinement, and stared closer and closer, the greenish eyes not blinking, and very intense. I realised he was trying to hypnotise me, and guarded myself. I was also noting something else: he wore heavy gold earrings of a certain pattern.

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

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

I had exactly similar earrings concealed in a bag I had under my wrap, with the other specified objects. I had got to the point of wondering how I could conceal these if this evil—for by now I knew he was that—person captured me or was in position to have me examined, when he said: “Very well then! I shall remember you!” and turned and vanished in the crowds. But he had spoken in basic Canopean, not in Sirian… altogether, I had been given a lot to think about. I concealed myself in a little porch and tried to decide how to proceed. The exhilaration that comes from having to pit one’s wits against strangeness persisted, but I knew I had to find shelter quickly. I had been instructed to go “to the top of the third cone.” And they were built together in a bunch! I was not going to risk my clumsy Canopean, and certainly not my Sirian, here: I left the porch and wandered among the odorous noisy throng, while the light left the sky, and flares were lit everywhere at angles of the streets and outside the eating places. This was a sad and to-be-pitied people, I could see, even more now that the night had come, and they were taking their ease.

They were drunken, often fighting, tense with deprivation, and the degraded females dominated everything, openly selling themselves, and retiring with their customers no further than into a doorway, or under a table. I had never seen anything like this scene, not anywhere. And still I did not know how to find the third cone. I tried to put myself back into that moment when I looked down from the spacecraft at the town, and had been able to notice, if there was one, a pattern in the cones—it could perhaps be said they were built in two very deep arcs that intersected: in which case I was near the third from the end of one of the arcs. I went inside, finding a cool pale interior: they used a very fine plaster, like a ceramic, to line their walls. A steep stairway spiralled inside the building. I went up and up, stopping continually to look out of narrow slitlike openings as the city opened below me, and the noisome hovels of the low town fell away, and the gardened suburbs, now shadowy and attractive with lights shining in the trees, came into view. Up and up… I thought that I would not easily make such a climb again, not that day—but when I reached the very top, I found a doorway curtained in thick red material, and on it a flake of writing ceramic that had on it the one word, in Sirian: Welcome.

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

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

It is not necessary for me to say again how intrigued I was, and had been, by Klorathy, how closely I attended to everything about him—what he said, how he said it. And so on… No matter how often I had been annoyed or checked, or disappointed, I had never ceased to know that if I could understand him and his ways I would understand… well, but that was after all the point! And this preoccupation with him had been bound up, inevitably, with his person, how he looked, spoke, certain tricks of manner. I unconsciously deemed these Canopus, associated a superior, and at the present time out of my reach, way of being with Klorathy’s physical presence. His personality…

Yet in front of me was a man not Klorathy, who looked very like him, and whose smile and nod as he greeted me were familiar. “I am Nasar,” he said. “Klorathy told me were coming, and asked me to see you have everything you want.”

I was quite stunned. Believing he could have no idea why, I disposed myself comfortably on a low pile of cushions and accepted some wine.

What I have to say here, so as to make it unmistakably clear, is that I felt more than the dislocation that comes from misdirected and thwarted expectations. I was feeling a different kind of letdown.

It was a warning, and a strong one. This was not because of how Nasar looked or how he behaved—his courtesy was complete. But warnings were flashing through me.

And I suppressed them!

This was because of my awe of Canopus. Of everything Canopus stood for.

And yet all the time my after-all highly trained eyes were noting all kinds of discrepancies—seeing what I should be seeing, and then setting it aside.

As I play back that scene, so as to examine it, there was everything there that I needed to prevent and save me from so much puzzlement and confusion.

There was a particular smile that appeared on the man’s face, very briefly—only a flicker—of recklessness… carelessness. He had a way of suddenly letting out—and often inappropriately to what was being said or done—a short laugh, as if he were astonished at himself, and yet proposed to stand by what he found. He had a general air or manner that was familiar to me, for I had often to deal with it—yet I chose not to put a name to it then.

So much for my perspicacity—or rather, for my readiness to use it.

We were not together for long. He showed me how to get food, if I wanted it, from the floor below, which was a foodshop for the building, opened a low door into the room next door, just like this one, which I was to use as a sleeping and private place—and having made his apologies, was ready to leave.

I was tired, but stimulated, and had hoped for more talk, or in lieu of that, to go out again into the teeming streets below. But he said that before I went out I must decide what role I was to play.

“In this charming place,” said he, “there are three roles for a woman. One is to be a whore. One, the wife of a high official, or at least a trader or merchant. Or you may be a servant or working woman of some kind. You would not choose, I am sure, the first.” The way he said this had a laugh behind it that I simply did not know how to take. The second is out of your reach—for you are not here with a permit or passport and must conceal yourself. Therefore, I can only suggest that you pose as my servant. This would be entirely within the customs and mores of Koshi. What you wear indoors does not matter, though if someone arrives unexpectedly you must cover yourself up absolutely, but wear appropriate clothes underneath in case you are searched.” He nodded at a chest and left. I found in it a plain blue skirt, baggy blue trousers, and a long tunic. And that was the last I saw of Nasar for several days.

What had I expected?

That I should spend time with Klorathy, that he would instruct me, and explain… all that I could not work out for myself, but felt continually on the edge of discovering.

I did not go out, but observed the town from my high vantage point, and from windows at many levels in the building. In the foodshop below, I excited notice. It was staffed by women wearing the same clothes as I did, short skirt over trousers, and the loose tunic; their hair tied in cloth. My unbound fair hair interested them: I was from the far Northwest, they said, and assumed I was a descendant of the survivors of the “events,” which they referred to as “The Great Punishment.” Some Adalantalanders had escaped somehow, had made their way east, and had helped to settle these great cities of the far eastern plains. They had a reputation for beauty, for wisdom—they were priestesses and shamanesses; and no fair or blue-eyed child could be born anywhere without being called “child of the lost islands of the great oceans of the west.” But I was no true daughter of Adalantaland—I was too thin, my locks were too sparse, my eyes were not sea blue. But my earrings, which I wore at certain hours of certain days, announced my true lineage, so these serving women knew: and they told everybody that the merchant on the top floor had as his serving maid a slave from the Northwest fringes. This I did not want, and wrapped my head thereafter so my earrings did not show, and tried to be inconspicuous, and took at one time as much food as was practical up the stairs so as to keep my visits few, though I wanted very much to talk with these cheerful slaves. For that is what they were. The females of this culture were truly enslaved, in that they did not know they were. They had never questioned that males should run everything, make laws, decide who should marry and how, and dispose of the futures of children. The dispossession of the true role of females had taken place so long ago they did not know it had ever happened. Their reverence for the old Adalantaland was all that remained to them of a real inkling of what females could do and be. And that had become “magic,” and “witchcraft.” Their highest ambition and possibility was to marry a man in a good position: or to give birth to sons who would prove themselves. I longed to study the warps and distortions in the female psyche that this displacement of their true function had caused: I wanted to study them in depth and in such way that I could return home with a contribution to our Studies in Perverted Psychology. But first things first.

I kept myself private and retired to the windows where I could look north and see—so I fancied—the white beginnings of the icecaps, and south to great mountains where the snows lay again. It getting colder daily, and I wrapped myself in my black cloth for the sake of warmth, and sat many hours quietly, thinking of the questions I was going to ask… Klorathy? Well, then, Nasar.

There were specific and definite things I wanted to know. It seemed to me that long ages had gone into my wanting to know them, that this wanting had fed a need that now could not any longer be put off.

And I imagined what would happen, how I would frame questions, how they would be answered, in all kinds of ways. And imagined, too, how they would not be answered, for I was already set to expect checks and delays.

One evening, when I had sat a long time in a window opening gazing over the rich suburbs and wondering who were the rich and powerful ones of this culture, and able—not all that inaccurately either—to picture them because of their victims and subjects I had seen in the streets, from the windows, and in the persons of the women downstairs in the foodshops; when I had watched in myself the melancholies and sadness that went with this “season” of the rapidly darkening days, so that there was less light in any day than there was night; when I had repeated in myself over and over again what I wanted to know, so I could ask sensibly and well—in came Nasar, unexpectedly, and flung himself down on a low seat, opening a package of food he had brought from the shop below, eating rapidly and in a way that I had never seen in Klorathy. He unceremoniously thrust a lump of some sweet stuff towards me and said “Have some,” and wiped his mouth roughly and lolled back, his hands locked behind his head, staring up and out at the sky that showed through the windows high in the ceilings. It was a cool sky and clouds fled past. I was utterly overthrown again, because he was so similar to Klorathy.

I sat myself down carefully, and said to him, beginning my cross-examination: “Are you a relative of Klorathy?”

This he took as a shock, or a check. He set his eyes direct on me, and gave me his attention:

“Well, lovely lady,” said he, and stopped. I remember how he briefly shut his eyes, sighed, and seemed to fight with himself. He said, in a different voice, patient, but too patient, there was much too much effort in it and he was speaking as from out of a dream or trance: “We come from the same planet, Klorathy and I. We are all similar in appearance.” And there was, again, that flicker of restless laugh—and then a turning aside of the eyes, a sort of painful grimace, a quick shaking of the head, as if thoughts were being shaken away. Then he looked at me again.

“Am I going to see Klorathy this time?”

“One Canopean is the same as another,” he said, and it was like the ghost of a derisive quote.

“You are not like Klorathy,” I said doggedly, surprised that I said it. And knew I had not meant it kindly.

He looked surprised, then laughed—sadly, I could have sworn to that—and said gently: “No, you are right. At this moment, at this time, I am indeed not remotely like Klorathy.”

I did not know what to say.

“I want to ask questions of somebody…” and this was desperate. I was becoming amazed at myself—the tone of this interview or exchange was different from any I had ever known. I, Ambien II, age-long high official of Sirius, with all that meant of responsibility and effectiveness—I did not recognise myself.

It seemed to me, however, that incompetent as I was being, he was arrested by me, and returned to something different from… I could not yet say to myself, simply, that he was in a bad, recognisably wrong and bad state. I said that at this moment at least I could see something in him of Klorathy.

“Ask, fair Sirian.” This I did not like but able to swallow it—because of the element of caricature in what he said, the manner of it.

“First of all. I met a man on the very first evening I was here. I disliked everything about him…” I described him, physically, and waited.

“You must surely be able to work that out for yourself. We are under the aegis of Puttiora here. As I believe you were told. That was one of them. They know everything that happens. Who comes into the city and who goes out. But you passed their test.”

“What test?”

“Obviously, you were of Canopus, and therefore you were not molested.”

“I am not, however.”

“They are an ignorant lot.”

“Why do you tolerate their rule?” I asked, fierce, hot, incredulous. “Why?”

“A good question, fair Sirian. Why? I ask it myself. Every hour of every day. Why? Why do we put up with the nasty, stinking, loathsome, horrible…” and he got up, literally sick and choking, and went to the window and leaned out. From far below I heard the clamour of evening, and imagined the flare-lit streets, the poor posturing women, the sale of flesh, the fighting, the drinking.

At that point there was a very long silence. I could have, then, said things I did not until later. But this was Canopus and so… and when he turned a hunted haunted face towards me, and sighed, and then laughed, and then shook his head, and then put his face in his hands and then flung himself down again, and yet was unable to stay still for even a moment, I said to myself that this was a man disgusted by Shammat.

“Very long term, the perspectives of Canopus, you must learn to understand that,” he said at last.

“And very long term are the perspectives of Sirius,” I said, with dignity. For if there was one thing I understood, it was that… empires and the running of them… but he stared and laughed—he laughed until he flung himself back and lay exhausted, staring at the ceiling.

The thought was in my mind that this was a man who was in very deep situational trouble. And I suppressed it.

“Very well,” I said, “for reasons of long-term development, you tolerate Shammat, you tolerate Puttiora and allow them to believe they are in control. Very well. But what are you doing here?”

“A good question again, fair Sirian.”

I said, "You do not have to call me that. I have a name. But it doesn’t matter. What I want to know is, what is the function of Canopus? What are you?” And I was leaning forward, twisting my hands together, so that they cracked—all my limbs are thin and frail, and I sustain breaks easily. I was using enough strength to break bones. I sat back, carefully relaxing myself.

He was watching me thoughtfully, with respect.

“You are right to ask that question.”

“But you are not going to answer it?”

At this he started up, leaning forward, gazing at me as if incredulous. “Can’t you see…” he began—and then lay back again, silent.

“See what?” But he said nothing. “Why do you stop? Why is it that you will never answer? Why is it I always get so far and then you won’t answer?”

He was gazing at me from where he reclined. I could have sworn that this copper man, or bronze man, that bronze-eyed, alert, smiling man was Klorathy. But he was not. The contrast was so absolute, and definite, to the extent that I said to him, not knowing I going to: “What is the matter with you?”

He laughed.

And even then I didn’t pursue it, for if I had he would have answered. He stood up. He collected himself. He smiled—oh, not at all like Klorathy.

“First of all… I have to tell you…” and he stopped, and he sighed. I saw that he was not going to say it!

“I have to go,” he said.

“Why? To work? They say you are a merchant.”

“I am a merchant. In Shammat land do as Shammat does. I am a merchant as you are a servant.” He came close to me then and bent and put out both hands and touched my earrings. “Take care of them,” said he, and sprang back, as if the touch burned him.

“Where are yours?” I asked.

“A good question. But they are on the earlobes of Shammat. They were stolen, you see. Or, more accurately, I got drunk and gave them to the earlobes of Shammat… very bad,” he said. “Not good.”

And he smiled in a way that frightened me, and left.

And now I knew at last that there was something very wrong with this Canopean. I was enabled to search my memory and come up with: the fact that this was a suborned, or disaffected, or rebellious official. I had seen it! I had had to deal with it a hundred times! This was Canopus gone wrong.

And I wrapped myself rapidly in my black cloth and I ran down those stairs after him, catching him halfway, and making him stop.

“Where are you going?”

“To visit my woman. I have a beautiful woman,” he said. “Oh, don’t look like that! Believe me, it is only those who understand nothing that look like that…” and he bounded down the stairs.

I went after him, the alabaster walls of the stairs gleaming around us both, and we reached the dark street that was luridly illuminated and full of sweating shouting demented people. I grabbed him and made him turn.

“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Do you imagine we are unobserved?” He tore himself away. I did not listen, and went after him. He turned again and said in a low urgent voice: “I may be lost, but do you have to lose yourself, too? Be careful…”

And as we stood there, up came two of the same greenish-grey cold-eyed officials I had seen before, and one reached and wrenched down my headcloth to show my earrings, and a hand was already coming out to wrench them off, while another was pulling Nasar around by the arm, when Nasar said, “Punishment from Canopus!” and the one who had touched my earrings fell, like a stone, and the other ran off into the crowds. Nasar looked full at me, his amber eyes pained and sick, and said: “That cost us a good deal, Sirian, more than you know—get back upstairs. I may be lost, but why should you be?”

I took hold of both his arms, and said to him: “Very well, I have just understood… you have gone bad, you have gone wrong… I know the symptoms—yes, it has taken me long enough to see it… but come back, come back, Nasar… please. I demand it. You must. In the name of Canopus.” Well, he came back up the stairs with me, the long climb of them, and when he was at the top he was ill and frightened. He had lost the inner power that for good or bad had sustained him in his encounters with me. He trembled, pale under his dark copper skin.

“What happened?” I kept asking.

I asked, and I pressed, and it was very late in the night, and the snow, a pale presence, filled the windows, and at last he said this: “Lady, I have been on this planet for twenty-five thousand years. Since before Adalantaland. It was I who taught that island and the peoples around it. I was here before the change of earth’s axis and the birth of the seasons. It was I who taught—other cities and cultures you know nothing of. I have been here, here, here. Klorathy my brother has come and gone… there are those who visit, they come, they warn, they set the stones, they make the lines, they order, they align—and they go again if they are recalled to home, but I, I am a permanent official. And in my case they have made a mistake. Do you understand? I have gone very bad, as you say, Ambien the II or the III or the 97th. You come and go, too, I suppose? A sojourn on this planet and a little holiday on that? But I been in this hellhole for… ages, ages, long ages…” He muttered, and he swung his head, and he puckered up his face and sighed, and then leaped up and ran out of the door so fast I could not catch him.

It was a day and an hour when I had to perform the regulatory observances. I set out the objects on the rugs of the floor, arranged colours as they should go, put garments on myself in a certain way, adjusted my earrings, and observed the hour exactly, standing quietly there alone at the top of the great tower, enclosed in the snow’s white hush… it was very difficult. I knew by the resistance of the time and the substance about me that I was contending with a great deal: many times had I performed these rituals, since the failure of the Lock, had performed them on this or that continent, and in several different manners, but never had I felt as if I, or the substance of something felt through me, was pushing against a resistance experienced as—evil. Felt as a heavy, dead weight. But stuck to my purpose, thinking of Klorathy, and that he had asked me here. Why? For what purpose?

I had just finished what I had been instructed to do, when the curtains of the door were yanked back, and the man I had seen on my first evening stood there.

“Canopus,” he said. “You are on sufferance here and that does not allow you to kill our officials.”

What I was feeling as I stood up to face him surprised me: it was exactly the same tone or taste as what I felt when with Nasar. There was no mistaking that sensation, a resonance. I had told myself that Nasar had gone bad: but I had not gone on to understand what it might mean that he had been captured by Shammat, was Shammat.

I said nothing, but stood before him in my slight white robes, the luminous metal circlets on my upper arms, the metal band on my head of the same softly shining silvery gold, a metal foreign to Sirius, which I did not know, and my heavy golden earrings.

As he took in what I was wearing, his dull stonelike eyes stared, and he involuntarily took several steps forward. He was still wearing the golden earrings.

I was preserving a distancing and detached manner, while I attended to a large variety of thoughts and sensations. Speculations about Nasar continued. I was also thinking that this official ought never to have seen me thus accoutred and that he was at this moment fixing my image in his mind so as later to copy what he could. I noted, too, that he had not observed the patterns of colours, nor the scents, nor the stringed instrument on which I had been making the necessary sounds. I was right in thinking that he would be bound to believe these some sort of “female entertainment” and of no use to him. I was thinking that I did not believe the official punished by Nasar was in fact dead: more probably he was stunned. No authority of even ordinary sense uses greater methods of punishment or deterrent than are necessary. I was also concluding that my having to pretend to be Nasar’s servant could not be for the benefit of the Shammat surveillance, but was not to disturb the populace. More than all this, I was trying to decide how to behave in a way that would control him.

Before I could move he had again advanced, and now stood immediately in front of me, arms akimbo, legs apart. Seen thus, I had every opportunity for a full scan of this species, enabling me on my return to furnish the biologists with ample details. The most remarkable feature was the wide slit of a mouth, connected, I judged, not with alimentation, but with voice production: when he spoke next, I was able to see, as I not when crushed in the street, that this slit seemed to vibrate, and the sounds came from his mid-torso. The way he spoke was resonant, giving a fuzzy sound to the words.

“Ornaments of this kind are not permitted in this city!”

And as his stone eyes seemed to swallow the artifacts, so that I was enveloped in a glitter of cupidity, I felt he was again trying some rather crude technique of hypnotism. But there was more to it: he was testing me, trying to elicit from me some kind of show of authority—was that it? Something he had been accustomed to find in Nasar? At any rate, I felt his triumph—and then, in myself, a weakness of fear because of this triumph in him. I knew that I had failed in some test he had applied.

My mind was racing. I turned from him casually, and moved away, my back to him, stood a few moments glancing out of the window, then sat down on a low chair. There are few places in the Galaxy where superiors do not sit, while supplicants or inferiors stand. As I sat, an idea flashed into my mind unrelated to the present situation—very clear my thoughts were, because of the aligning practices just concluded, and because of this situation of danger.

“How long has it been,” I enquired, “since this city was allowed to spoil its original design?” For I had understood that this city, as it had been designed, had consisted solely of the conical towers, in a certain alignment—probably interlocking arcs—and that the huddle of poor buildings around their bases, and the spreading suburbs, were a dereliction of an original purpose. Memories of what I had been told of the ancient mathematical cities, speculations that were never far from my mind as to what their function was—these were in my mind, and my distance from this situation and this stone slab of a man was genuine.

His response was immediate: sullen, and this meant a genuine annoyance, cunning—which alerted me to say: “There will one day be an end to your cupidities and your despoilings.”

He stood still. Very still. The heavy eyes seemed to glow. What I had said, not idly, but certainly not with any crushing intention, had made him remember past—warnings? Threats?

I remained where I sat, watching him. In my mind two were models of behaviour—one was Nasar, and everything that I felt was needed by this situation dismissed him. The other was Klorathy, who I understood as I thought of him would not regard this little servant of even the most horrible power with anything but—at the most—a detached dislike. So I said mildly, even with humour: “As for your colleague, he is of course not dead. He will recover, if he has not already…” and I rose again, as if dismissing him, and returned to the window, for I wanted to look around at these spiring towers with my new ideas in mind, and to imagine this city as it had been. For what purpose?

But I heard a humming, or vibration just behind me, and turning, there he was, that slit mouth of his thrumming: I knew now that that wordless sound had meaning, but knew, too, that I could not allow him to think I did not understand it. I leaned on the ledge there, and saw the towers dark against the pale falling sky.

“You are to come with me. I have authority. In this city I have the authority,” he insisted, and I believed him: it was part of some agreement that Canopus had allowed.

“I shall change my clothes,” I said.

“No,” he said, slamming it out, and he again ate my headband, the armlets, my earrings, with his eyes. I remarked: “But it is cold tonight.”

“You have a cloak.”

“I take it we must be expected at some very fine function indeed,” I said, smiling. And his lips’ rapid quiver conveyed to me that this was the case.

“I can only hope that you have a good reason to take me there tonight,” I remarked, as I took up the great black cloth and enveloped myself in it, “for I had other plans. Canopus has work to do.”

“I understand perfectly, perfectly,” he said, hurried and placating, and I knew that while he had not expected that he would fail to get his way, he was at least relieved he had got it: and was afraid that I might find some reason to give him the slip. And all the time everything about this creature emanated greed, so that I thought back to the visit, long ago, by the hairy avid Shammat-brutes: they were the same breed, different though they were. And I was not going to ask what he must be expecting me to know: Are there many different kinds on that Shammat of yours? Or are you from Puttiora itself? Well, I learned later he was from Puttiora: the cities of this plain were policed by Puttiora, and not by its subject planet Shammat—but that is part of another story.

We descended the long twining stairs, he coming close behind me, and I could feel the pressure of his itching want, want, want, all over me, his eyes like the touch of hands.

In the street we stood in a white storm, with dull lamps half obliterated at the entrances to streets and lanes. There were only the two of us. I was being chilled to stiffness as I stood, and the whine of the northern wind struck a painful fear into my bones: winter was fear, on this planet, and fear was the memory of sudden tempests of snow and ice that could wipe out a continent in a breath, of screaming winds that could tear water-masses and vast sea beasts into the air and whirl them around like dust. A square shape appeared in the white, an opening showed itself, and I got in, urged by my jailer, and found myself in a box furnished with cushions and a little oil lamp. I did not know at once how it was being conveyed, but soon thought it was by runner, for it was not the first time I had been carried in this way—the sign of a slave state, of a proud and ruthless governing class, wherever it is to be found.

The Puttioran smelled bad: it was a cold greasy smell. I of course checked this thought, knowing that mine was not likely to be pleasant to him: smell has always been the hardest obstacle to overcome in the good relations between species: in that nothing has changed! As I wrote the words beginning the account of my entry into the city of tall dun-coloured cones—which, alas, I could see nothing of from inside the jogging box—I was called to a delegation from one of quite the most pleasant of our Colonised Planets, and with the best will in the world, I had to leave the audience chambers on an excuse, for the smell that emanated from the otherwise quite ordinary and normal individuals, equipped as usual with “two legs, two arms, a head, a nose, and mouth.” as we say (but in this case it was a tail as well), was so appalling that I could not stand it.

The distance was not great. We stepped down on to thick snow outside a building that streamed light through pillars and from windows. We were outside one of the villas of the western suburbs, and this was a festivity of some kind, for I could hear music, of a kind I was ready to suppose an entertainment, though to my ears it was a high wail not unlike the whine of the gale. The box we had been brought in seemed to lift itself, and jerked away into the white: I could just see projecting handles, and dimly, four ill-clad beasts, who I hoped were being kept warm by the thick head hair that fell to the shoulders, which they freed from deposits of snow by continually shaking their heads. They vanished with the box into the snowfall.

I ascended wide steps beside the Puttioran, to a deep verandah that had many ornamented pillars, and braziers standing here and there. I was familiar with the affectation of governing classes anywhere for modes of their past, and knew that braziers were not the sum of their current technology for keeping themselves warm: the rooms at the top of the tower were heated by air that flowed in from ducts. Few individuals were on the verandahs because of the cold, but I saw they were in full festive dress by the fact that they were half naked.

I did not know whether it was on account of Sirius or of Canopus that I should strive for a good impression, but removed the poor black cloth in which I was muffled, and draped it over my right forearm in a way that I had seen in a certain history of custom from our early Dark Age: this manner of arranging an outer garment had signified rank.

I was being aided as I advanced through the graceful springing pillars by another historical comparison: a planet recently visited by me had preserved as a record of former times an area of villas similar to these, also set among vegetation—though of course I could see nothing of the gardens that I knew enclosed these suburbs.

The verandah was separated from the very wide and large inner room, or rooms, by curtains of thick many-coloured materials. I stood quite still in the entrance, in order that I might be observed. What I was observing was not unexpected: there were about twenty individuals there, all scantily clad, and with the unmistakable air of a ruling or privileged class taking its ease. They sat about on cushions, or on light chairs. Low tables were heaped with every kind of food and fruit. Around the walls stood about dozen servers, almost naked young females and males, holding jugs and ewers of intoxicant. The lights were not braziers, but some kind of gas burning in transparent globules from pillars and walls. The stone floors had handsome rugs.

Their immobility was not because they were surprised at my arrival but because they had expected it and did not want to show—yet—whatever emotions or needs had led to my being summoned. For I could see that this was the case. There was no surprise shown by the Puttioran at my side. There were two others of this most unattractive species present, seated among the others, but not lolling or sprawled about—I was at once able to see that they were tolerated here, no more.

“Klorathy”—was there: Nasar, in this dim light so like Klorathy that for moment I could not believe it was not he. But then he turned his head, and I knew at once his lateness in doing this was not because he had only just understood I arrived but because he was ashamed. He had a studied and casual air, as he sat on a low square seat with his back to a pillar. He at least was not half naked.

In every scene there is a focus… a centre… and Nasar was not that centre here. Nor were the Puttiorans. At an arm’s distance from Nasar, on a wide seat, which was not as low as the others, so that she looked down on her guests, sat a woman who dominated everything. She was exceedingly beautiful. She was more than that. I am certainly not talking of the aesthetic here, but of a sexual fascination, which was immediately and instantly evident, and which I had seen nothing to compare with for many ages.

Every breeding female has this quality, often briefly enough. But in certain conditions this sexual attraction can be concentrated and maintained by an effort of individual will, if the social circumstances permit. Of myself I can that I am pale and blonde; but of her I can say only that she gleamed and shimmered. Her hair was of fine gold, elaborately dressed, with a mass of little waves and curls, and very fine plaits, like twisted gold wires, on either side of her broad, smiling face. Her eyes were grey blue and widely set under shining blonde brows. Her long white hands were displayed, unadorned, in her lap. White feet were in jewelled sandals.

On her bare arms were heavy gold bracelets made of repeated and interlocked V’s, which very slightly compressed her flesh, in a calculated manner. Now these bracelets were of the exact pattern prescribed for previous practices set by Canopus, those that had been superceded by the “suggestions” sent to me before I began this visit. I looked quickly around again and saw that nearly everyone there, male and female, wore bracelets, earrings, anklets, or an association of colours that were almost accurate, for in each place I observed them, a pattern on a hem, or a design on a skirt, they had, as it were, slipped out of true—and now I understood why Nasar could not easily meet my eyes. Though he was in fact now rather sullenly gazing across at me, not so much defiantly as in reckless sombreness.

I understood a good deal as I stood there, smiling calmly. For one what it was they wanted of me now: the three Puttiorans all wore the earrings of the current prescription—they and I wore them, not one of the others, and not Nasar. Who, of course, if he were being ruled what had been prescribed, would not be wearing them at this occasion. Just as I should not, had I not been commanded and brought here in the way I had.

I saw that the eyes of every individual there glittered at the armbands, the headband, the earrings I wore, and as I wondered why the Puttioran who had fetched me had not simply taken them, realised that of course he must be afraid, or that is exactly what he would have done.

Still no one had moved, or made a sign of greeting. I took then a great chance, which made me quite cold, and inwardly confused for a moment: I stepped forward, with “Canopus greets you!” and glanced at Nasar to see how he took this, as I gestured to a girl servant to bring forward a chair that stood by the wall. This was a chair similar to the one used by the beauty, who was, I had decided, hostess there: I seated myself on her level, a short distance from her and from Nasar, and clapped my hands without looking to see if this was being obeyed—a custom taken from another recent visit of mine—and when a goblet was presented to me of some crystalline material, was careful not to let a drop of it touch my lips, while I pretended to sip.

“I understood that you were from Sirius?” remarked the fair one, clapping her hands as I had done, and accepting a fresh goblet—this was done to put me at my ease. To encourage me to drink?

This the most dangerous moment of my meeting with these decadents. I could not afford to hesitate, and I smiled, merely, and with a rather amused little glance at Nasar, as to a fellow conspirator in a harmless joke: “If it has amused Nasar to say that I am, then why not?” And I laughed. And did not look at him, but smoothed my skirt.

He had now to challenge me. I knew that if he did, it would probably mean the loss of my life, let alone the ornaments they all coveted so much. I sat at ease, pretending to sip the intoxicant—pretty rough stuff, too, nothing tempting in it—and examining the scene quite frankly and with apparent enjoyment.

I cannot begin to convey how it dismayed and disgusted me.

The signs of a degenerate class are the same everywhere and always: I will not waste time in details. But I have seen them too often, and in too many places, and their perennial reappearance can only weary and dismay. The smiling ease, the cynical good nature that is so easily overturned when challenged and becomes a snarling threat; the carelessness that is the mark of easy success; the softness of the flesh; the dependence on ease; the assumption of superiority over inevitable slaves or serfs or servants who, of course—everywhere and always—are their real and often evident masters… here it was again, again, again.

I had wondered often enough if on Canopus, or in her Empire, this rule applied, but as I was actually thinking that Nasar’s presence here, subjugated and used, was an answer, he lifted his bronze eyes direct at mine and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, fair Canopean.”

And he turned away, with an air so defeated, so angry, that I did not know what to do. But I knew, at least, that I had survived a very dangerous moment. It would have been piquant, to say the least, to end my life here, on this degraded planet, with these demoralised creatures.

“Am I not to know the name of my hostess?” I asked.

“Your host is Nasar,” she said, in that voice I absolutely expected: it was lazy, rich, suggestive: her voice, just like her appearance, could make you think of one thing, one thing only, and even if you had never experienced it. For I had not! I had read of it all, certainly—I had made a study of pathology. But it had so happened that my career in the Service had begun very young, and that while our Empire has suffered periods when I might very well have been at risk myself, I was always occupied, well away from the Mother Planet.

But sitting there in that gilded, amiable, pleasure-loving scene, which had over it a sort of silky dew if it were drenched in ethereal honey, looking at the smiling glistening woman, it was not necessary to have experienced it! I understood it all, and only too well—because I was being affected I sat there, trying to preserve a correct, if not an official, air. For one thing, I ought not to be wearing these artefacts, which were too powerful, even if they had been put out of exact use by the fact that they were not in alignment with the other dispositions of the practice that had been disturbed by the interruption by the Puttioran.

For another, it is of course not the ease that to turn your back on an area of life is the same as to abolish it! Often enough, and even with Ambien I, I had understood very well what a seductive realm lay there, just for the effort of saying: Yes! Of course I had known—been aware of—watched for—guarded—that door, or entrance, which watchfulness is in itself way of signifying a disposition to enter into something. This was what I was seeing. And what I was understanding. Oh yes, the woman was magic! And as I thought that word, I understood that she was a daughter of old Adalantaland; I remembered this full smiling ease of the flesh, the glisten—but there and in that time it had very different function. The wonderful females of that island had been in a correct alignment—or almost; of course I remembered how they had begun to slide away: yet one could sense their oneness with their surroundings. But this descendant of theirs had all the magnificence of the physical, but in addition a witchery that had slipped out of its place, had become sufficient to itself. As I looked at Nasar, tense and miserable there in his low seat, and then at her, I did not have to be told anything: I felt it. And I began to be afraid: it very a very easy door to open, just one little step, one little decision—and suddenly I found myself thinking of Klorathy as I had never done yet: I was amazed and appalled: it seemed as if there, beckoning me, was a smiling playful amorousness, which was certainly not what I was in search of—in wait for—when thinking of companionship with Klorathy… with Canopus. And this lighthearted amorousness was in itself an antechamber where I could very quickly indeed descend to something very different. What I saw there, in front of me now—nothing lighthearted about that! Nasar was gazing sombrely at the woman’s indolent lolling arm, and on his face was a look of such pain that… but she was saying again: “It is Nasar who is your host.”

“I think not,” I said smiling, as pleasantly as I could… and I heard rather than saw the Puttiorans mutter to each other—or rather vibrate together, a twanging sound added to the whining repetition of the music that was working on my nerves as much as the general atmosphere.

“Her name is Elylé,” said Nasar abruptly. “This is her house. And we are all her guests—aren’t we?—your guests or your captives?” and he laughed, flinging back his head pouring down the fiery intoxicant.

“Her willing captives,” said a dark smiling lisping youth, who had about him every sign of the spoiled rich. He rose from heaps of cushions and sat by Elylé’s chair, and, grasping her hand with a rough painful movement, began planting kisses up and down the forearm. She hardly moved, did not look at him—but at Nasar, who had gone pale.

“Nasar,” said she, in her soft beguiling voice, “is not as willing a captive as you,” and she looked at Nasar, with a laugh, challenging him—willing him. I saw there a truly dreadful struggle in him. He was being drawn forward by her seductiveness, her frank and open invitation, and at the same time he was fighting in himself to resist her. Everyone in the room watched the struggle. And what happened at last was that he gave a great gasp, leaned forward from his seat, lifted her white arm, and having gazed it with shudder that shook every part of him, kissed the hand, but negligently, and even clumsily—so did the conflict in him manifest itself. He sank back in his seat, staring in front of him, then took another great gulp from his goblet.

He said harshly: “This desiccated bureaucrat of a Sirian is shocked by us.”

There was an indrawn breath and from the Puttiorans a louder thrumming. I could not laugh this off.

I said, “It is very clear that Nasar is not himself.” This was certainly obvious to everyone and saved me.

The cringing youth at Elylé’s knees, his mouth on her forearm, now lifted his face to lisp: “We all want to know what that material is your dress is made of—fair Sirian!” He felt his daring, for he glanced up at the woman to see how she would take it—she frowned and withdrew her arm. “My dress is made of Canopean crepe,” I said.

“That is certainly true,” confirmed Nasar: he was breathing harshly, and his eyes seemed fixed on the beautiful woman and the youth who, snubbed, was literally grovelling on the floor, his curly head on her nearly bare feet. And I could see it was all he could do to stop himself from doing the same.

“Can I feel it?” asked a girl sitting near me. She wore a blue glittering skirt, but her breasts were bare, except for a pattern of jewels over the nipples. Her black hair hung down to her waist, she was dark skinned, dark eyed, very slight. There were no two individuals alike in this room: the genetic mix was very wide.

She got up, and bent to finger my dress. It was cut full, but was sleeveless—not so dissimilar from their style as to be a comment on it, but the fabric was one I had not previously been familiar with myself, rather like a fluent and supple metal. Glistening white, impossible to crease, it flowed through the fingers as you attempted to fold or settle it, and if it had not been so ample I would have been embarrassed, because where it did touch the flesh, it showed its contours—in my case, as Nasar had said, certainly “desiccated”; and it was a measure of how the atmosphere of this rich perverse villa and its emotive music affected me that I was full of wild regret that this was so, and that I was not like Elylé, whose very presence fascinated and drew and stung.

As this girl fingered my skirt, in a moment half a dozen others had crowded forward, handling first the stuff of the gown, and then their hands straying over my armlets and touching my head where the circlet gleamed. “What’s this material?” they were murmuring, and asking each other, as if I were not there! As if I were some kind of dummy on which these things were displayed… And then I felt the weight of the circlet lift from my hair and I was just in time to put up my hand to stop the thief from slipping it off. I was being pressed down in my seat by the weight of thieving hands and fingers.

Past a cluster of heads bent all around me, I could see Elylé sitting in her chair, longing to come forward and handle me with the rest, but her pride forbade it. Nasar had turned his head sharply, and was staring too at the scene, and I could see he was alarmed for me… And I certainly was in great danger.

I stood up, and dislodged the greedy ones, so that they fell, and lay about on the floor laughing foolishly, drunk and helpless.

“Perhaps you could take off your bracelets and your headband,” said Elylé, “and let us see them. I for one would love to see them closely.” As she said this the tones of that indolent voice struck into me, so that I felt them in my senses as a pang, a song.

“No,” I said, “I shall not do that.” She looked at Nasar—and this look’s command I was able to feel in myself.

He sighed at the strength of the pressure on him: sweat started out on his face—and he said to me in a hurried voice: “Yes, take them off…” And he added, “This is a command.”

I cannot describe, even now, how this affected me. It was a command from Canopus: this, despite everything, was what it was. And from a man who was in appearance, even in manner—or some of the time—Klorathy, who I had been thinking of as one might open doors for me, say to me what I longed to hear… and when he said, “This is a command,” I was struck silent. What I was thinking was I had been warned of this moment! That he had known of it… or of something like it that must present itself. I was thinking, as I remembered Klorathy, his presence, his manner, what he was, that no matter how I suffered—and I was suffering in every particle of myself—I must resist.

“I have already said that you are not yourself,” I said coldly. “Canopeans do not command Canopeans.”

“But perhaps they do command Sirians,” said Elylé and laughed her fat low laugh.

“Perhaps they do,” I said, “but I don’t know about that. What I do know is this: these things that I wear are not ornaments. And those who use them wrongly will suffer.”

Again I heard, or felt, Nasar struggle with himself. The sombre, sullen struggle went on, and his breathing sounded against the low fluttering vibration of the three Puttiorans, who had crowded up to me and stood close enough to snatch off what I wore—if they dared. And they still did not dare, and that was what gave me courage to go on. For I was reasoning as I stood there, my mind working as fast it had ever done, that Nasar himself must have given warnings, even as he had weakly parted with these things as ornaments…

“Is that not so, Nasar,” I said, forcing him with my will to turn and look at me. He sat upright, his hands loosely held around his goblet—which was trembling, because he trembled. He looked at Elylé, who was smiling at him—and yet there was fear in her smile.

“Yes, it is so,” he muttered at length.

And now there was a long pause, the scene again seemed to freeze, as it had when I entered. I stood quiet, empty, my will on Nasar. The three Puttiorans, the grey-green stonelike men, with their dull eyes, and their fluttering humming lips, had turned to look at Nasar, and they were waiting for him to make a sign… it was a sign that had been agreed upon before I entered this place. I understood a great deal in that moment.

And again the moment stretched itself… and I looked, at my ease, from one face to the next… first the beautiful Elylé, Adalantaland’s fallen daughter, and the besotted youth who had returned to slaver over her hand, and the others on the floor, silly and sprawling, and the almost naked servants, who were watching, with the mask-faces of servants everywhere and at all times—and what I was seeing struck me into an inner acknowledgement of something. These faces for that moment were all vacant, yet this was because within themselves they had been attacked by an inner questioning: they were lost, vague, dissatisfied, restless—they gripped their fingers against their palms or bit their lips; their eyes roamed everywhere, they sighed, they twisted themselves, and they sat staring emptily.

Oh, I knew very well what I saw: it was a variation of the existential question, or affliction—how could I not recognise something I knew so well, so very well, and in all its manifestations? Their clutching and sneaking and wanting after what I wore now—what Nasar had worn at other times—were nothing else but symptoms of that deep and basic yearning.

What I was thinking disarmed me. I felt as if I was on a level them and no better, and had no right to withhold anything from them. If at that moment Nasar had said: “Canopus commands… I would have handed over everything I had on.

But Nasar saved me, saved himself.

He was slowly struggling to his feet—the struggle was shown in the tenseness of heavy limbs, as if his longing simply to fall on the floor and put his lips on the smiling warmth of Elylé’s flesh was weighing him—he did straighten, and then, gasping, turned towards me.

“It is time Canopus left,” he remarked, in a heavy, dreamlike voice. I could see that if she spoke to him then he would simply fling himself at her feet and that would be the end of it.

“Yes, it is. And Canopus will now leave,” I said. I put my hand at Nasar’s elbow, afraid at this last moment that he would simply shake me off in repulsion because this touch was not hers.

“Nasar,” she said softly, and the sound of it struck through me and I could feel him shiver.

“Come,” I said softly. He gave a sort of groan and left himself in my hands. Gently directing him, I went with him through the parting in the gaily coloured curtains beyond which we could see the verandah with its exquisite pillars, the glowing braziers.

Just behind us I could sense the three Puttiorans.

We went to the edge of the verandah. On a long low bench one of the revelers lay sprawled, his cheek in his vomit—the sight of it seemed to strengthen Nasar.

“Be careful,” he muttered, and we turned together to face the three evil ones, their hands outstretched for my headband, which was the easiest to take.

“It would kill you,” I said coldly, and with contempt.

And daring to do it, I turned my back on them and at Nasar’s urging ran down the steps into the snow, which was still smothering everything.

I could hear the feet of the Puttiorans scraping and slipping on the steps.

“I do not think you have understood,” said Nasar, into the whiteness. “This lady is from the High Command of Canopus. You know what the agreement is.”

I saw their stone faces looming vaguely in the white—and then vanish.

“Call a chair,” said Nasar to them. I saw the bearers shaking themselves free of the snow as they laboured running under the box-conveyance, but when we were in the box, Nasar and I, I had no time to think of them or of the Puttiorans, for now Nasar slumped back in the box, his eyes shut, breathing as if he were very ill, and shaking all over. Then his eyes were open and they stared, and from them poured liquid. Canopeans do not, normally, weep—that is behind them. The fact that Nasar wept now said everything.

I remained quiet. I was bracing for what I thought would happen—and it did. When we were deposited at the foot of the great cone that soared above us into the whirling storm, the winds whining around it, there were the three stone men waiting for us.

“Nasar,” I said, “one more effort; they are here.”

Again he seemed to shudder as he took command of himself. We descended from the box, and walked straight up to the three.

“You are fools,” said Nasar, using contempt like a weapon.

“You gave us these,” we heard, and saw the hands stroking the golden earrings on those narrow rims around their ears. “You gave us these…”

“Give them back,” I said. “Canopus commands… But they were running off into the white, for they weren’t going to give up this fancied authority of theirs—for now I understand that this indeed was how they saw it. All the bits of gold and metal and buttons and bracelets—they believed them to be intrinsic and unchanging substance of Canopus and authority for themselves.

I saw Nasar staring after them, with the sombre anger that I was ready to believe was not only the characteristic of his subjection to this place but his characteristic and even, possibly, a Canopean characteristic.

And again, my thought was answered: “Oh no,” he said, “that is not so. Believe me, fair Sirian. You must not think that, for your own sake…” and I saw him gazing at my earrings, my other appurtenances, and in such a way that for a moment I fancied myself back in the hands of the hungry ones in Elylé’s house.

I walked swiftly away from him started up the stairs. So we went up together, I first, he behind, up and around, and around, and around, until we reached the top.

I knew that I had by no means finished the battle: and that more was to come. I was prepared to face him then, as we entered that half-circle of a room, whose windows were showing a grey daylight where snow whirled. But Nasar staggered forward and had fallen across piles of cushions before I was fairly inside. I put some coverings over him and retired next door where I sat quietly in a window opening to watch the day come, a grey-gold light behind the white whirl.

And what I was thinking then was not of what I was going to have to fight out with him but of those privileged citizens of Koshi in their soft-lit and luxurious rooms.

It will not, I am sure, come as a surprise to any of my readers that I was thinking of the problem Sirius has perennially had with a privileged class, which seems to re-create itself constantly and everywhere. I am sure there are those have been wondering why I have not made the comparison more strongly before—particularly as I am known to have always been of the administrative party that has sought to check these privileged classes, when it has not been possible to prevent their emergence. I have more than once put forward the view that the possibility is we exaggerate the importance of this phenomenon. If a corrupt class can be expected to form, always and invariably, then this is as a result of, concomitant with, the strengthening and enlarging of a larger, and generally vigorous and active, class on which the effete ones float like scum on a wave. Has there ever been a society without its spoiled and rotten minority? Would it not be better to expect this, and to legislate limits to what cannot be prevented, rather than allowing fear of it to prevent reforming efforts to be made at all—for that was what tended to happen. There was for a time—students of this particular sociological problem will be familiar with it—a very vocal faction putting forward the point of view that there is no point whatever in making revolutions (this was particularly strong after the rebellions on our Colonised Planets during the phase of our Dark Age) because any revolution, no matter how pure and inspired, can be guaranteed to produce a privileged class within a generation. Worse; it was held that it was useless even to reform and reconstruct a society, for the same reason.

This point of view certainly had the effect of causing a slump in morale, and a general pessimism, and had to be proscribed for a time because of this. Yes, we (that is, the administrative class) were indeed aware of the humour of the situation: that we were imposing the strictest penalties on the proponents of the viewpoint that the rulers (for we are certainly that) must not be attacked and criticised because our continual tendency towards corruption must not only be expected but cannot be averted: we were vigorously encouraging opposition and criticism, even to the extent, at one point, of actually setting up a party ourselves—secretly, of course—so alarmed were we at the pervasive cynicism and disgust. I myself was too well known a figure to be one of these individuals, but three of my progeny (not by Ambien I) took part, and so I had the benefit of their reports. It is my view now, after what I am sure must be conceded as pretty long and thorough experience, that there is nothing to be done to prevent an effete class; it can be postponed for a time, at the best. But it certainly can be circumscribed, and a difficulty in the way of such circumscription is a too-violent, an emotional judgement of such—after all—weak and pointless people. There has never been a self-indulgent privileged class that has not destroyed itself, or allowed itself to be destroyed, almost as soon it has come into being and grown, and flourished… temporarily.

But as I watched the snow fall there, with these thoughts in my mind, I was again wondering about Canopus: how did that great Empire deal with these problems? If they had them at all?—for we had never heard of them! And if they did not arise with them, why not?

I did not sit alone there for long. I listened for sounds on the other side of the dividing wall, for I had a good idea that Nasar was in too poor an emotional state to rest, let alone sleep. I heard him moving about, clumsily and roughly. There was a silence for a while, but then I heard him enter from the stairs—he had been to the foodshop. He muttered, then he groaned. I believed I heard him weep.

I changed my garments, putting on my Sirian garb of the Colonial Service from some impulse, of which I was fully conscious, to stand on an exact and accurate footing with Nasar. I then asked if I might enter, and having repeated it and heard his “Very well then, come in!”—I went in. He was stretched out full length, on his side, head propped on his elbow. He was dishevelled. His eyes were red. So dejected was he that I could have believed him surrounded by a thick black cloud. He was certainly quite repulsive, and I heard myself mutter: “But he’s so ugly!” So much for the outward form of attraction! And I could not help remembering the “insect people” who were superior, so Klorathy said, and whom I found repulsive.

And he knew what I was thinking, for while he did not look up, he smiled briefly and bitterly. He said, “Help yourself if you are hungry.” He had brought some sort of tea, and bread. I filled a cup for myself and refilled his, a service that he did not acknowledge, for he stared unblinking, seeing very little. I wondered briefly if I should seat myself low, like him; or put myself in a magisterial chair—for that there going to be a confrontation I had no doubt. But in the end I took my cup to a window opening and looked out, which is what I wanted to do. I was able to see to the northeast, where the snow had stopped falling. And to the southeast, where it was retreating. The tall thin brown cones were reappearing from white obliterating clouds, and the cold fluffy masses seemed to pile themselves halfway up—but of course this was an illusion. Already around the bases of the towers now the snow had stopped falling, armies of small figures were at work making tunnels and runnels for themselves, and the huddle of the lower town, which had been blotted out by the storm, was reappearing under the efforts of this energetic swarm.

There was an idea—no, a memory—persistently presenting itself in my mind: this was that I recognised the black emotions that emanated from Nasar. Not so very long ago, one of our officials on Planet 9 had become demoralised after having been left there—so I thought, and so I put forward on his behalf—for too long. He had allowed himself to become a tool of an anti-Sirian party. I had been sent to adjudicate the situation. There was no doubt he was guilty, and I took him back to our Home Planet where, unfortunately, he was executed.

I believed him capable of rehabilitation. He had radiated this same sullen explosive anger that, not being allowed to express itself outwardly, was as if the whole organism was vibrating on a strong discordant note.

I could see that Nasar was not able to keep still, but continually shifted position, how he jerked and twitched, how his eyes roved and glanced everywhere, how he sighed and then flung back his head, gasped, and again stared sombrely in front of him. But he was watching me, too, I could see that he was calculating—on guard, preparing himself. Was he planning to return to subjection to Elylé? If so, having felt the strength of it myself, I could understand it—understand it even as I shuddered.

“Quite so,” said he suddenly. “But no, I shall not go back. I’ve been able to break it at last. And I suppose for that I have to thank you.”

I was reflecting on how, and when, he was able to know I thought, as he went on: “But there is a price to pay, dear Sirius. And I am sure you will not be surprised to know what it is.”

At this it came into my head that he going to demand the prescribed artefacts from me: that I had by no means finished with that pressure.

“Exactly so,” he said. “As you can see, I no longer have the things I need to protect me here…” “You have given them away,” I said—dry enough.

At which he leaped up, and began striding around and about the room, sometimes stopping and standing quite still, eyes staring, mouth open; then going on again, restless, discoordinated, driven—it was making me feel quite ill watching him, so I turned my back and looked out past the brown spires into the back of the retreating storm, and heard the winds whine and whisper around the grey sky.

“I have to have them,” he said. “I have to.”

“And so do I. I was invited here. I am here because of that. And I was given the things. And told how to use them. And I do not feel entitled to give them away.”

“To give them back—to Nasar of Canopus.”

“I was told most specifically not to give them to anybody,” I said.

I felt his eyes on me, and turned and he stood staring—trapped. That is how he felt.

And now I knew what he was thinking, and I said, “There is nothing to stop you from taking them. You are stronger than me. But then, Canopus has always been in a position simply to take.”

I saw him shudder as if a black force had let him go, so that he could stand up straight, and breathe more easily.

“Thank you for reminding me," he said. Oh, not without humour—and I heard that note with enough relief! But he had spoken also with a note of responsibility. For he looked at me differently. “Yes, thank you. Thank you, Sirius.” He stood, as if waiting for more.

I turned and faced him fully. I was conscious of every sort of irony, and sorrow in this situation: I, in my garb of the top administration, but still of Sirius, and Canopus, our magnanimous superior, but in the shape of this criminal official. The word was taken up by him at once.

“You have criminals,” he said, smiling. “With us—we merely fall by the wayside.” And he laughed genuinely; and the laugh changed, as it were, midway, and the haunted driven one was back, and once again he was being impelled to stride around and across and back and forth.

“What do you do with your criminals, Sirius? What would happen to me, if I were one of yours?”

“I think you would be executed.”

“Yes. That is what I thought. And suppose I agree with you and not with my own dear Empire? Suppose I think I ought to be executed?”

“You want to be punished?” I enquired, as I dry as I could manage. And again I saw him straighten, the black weight on him lift.

He said, just as dry, “Yes, perhaps that is it. But Sirius, when I say that they have made a mistake, I mean it. I have not been strong enough for my work.”

“Do you never get leave?” I asked. “They surely do not put you here indefinitely—not for the long ages you tell me you have been stationed here.”

And now he came to stand by me, in my window embrasure, leaning against the inner wall, looking at me.

“I take it,” said he, “that you are of the liberal party on Sirius.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Poor Sirius,” he said softly, those dark-bronze, or copper, or amber eyes full and strong on my face. “Poor, poor Sirius.”

Now this was quite unexpected, and I was thrown off my balance with him. We stood there, very close, looking into each other’s faces. I was not now thinking of Klorathy, or of my search for his real friendship, or anything of the sort: I felt near, because of what Nasar had said, to some sort of mystery or understanding.

I waited until I could speak moderately, and said: “Why do you not simply go back home and tell them what you are saying to me.”

“Because I done so already.”

“So you have been on leave?”

“Yes. But it was a long time ago—just after what these poor wretches call ‘the Punishment.’ But Sirius, to spend time there—and then to return here—do you know what that means? How one feels? How utterly intolerable…” and he struck off and away again, and began his despairing pacing.

“In short,” he said, “it is not worthwhile to go home if one has to come back. And in my case I have to come back. That is what they say. This is my place. This hellhole. Shikasta the disgraced and the shameful one. This.”

“Rohanda is very beautiful,” I said, with a sigh for my long stay on the Southern Continent, before the failure of the Lock. “No planet in our system is anything near as beautiful or as rich…” I was looking at the golden light in the grey sky to the southeast where the storm had now quite gone away. The brown cone nearest to this one showed the most elegant pattern of black markings all the way up, each touched with white: the snow underlined each window opening, and the symmetry and balance of the patterns gave me the deepest satisfaction; and that is what Rohanda—I was simply not prepared to use their niggardly little word for it—so plentifully did offer. A rich food for the senses—always and generously.

“Yes, it is beautiful,” he said in a stifled voice, and he stood upright, eyes closed, his hand at his throat, and his eyes closed tight, quivering. He was thinking of Elylé.

“I understand,” I said quietly. His eyes flew open: he gazed at me, sombre, but himself, and he strode across and bent over me, looking into my eyes. “Desiccated bureaucrat though I am, I understand very well. I wish I did not.” And I could not prevent myself shuddering.

“Thank you,” he said and went off again.

“I would like to know about this city—before it was spoiled.”

He laughed, and with such bitterness. “And the other cities—before they were spoiled—because they are spoiled, always.”

“Always?”

“Yes.”

“So then you have to make allowances for that?”

“Yes,” he said with a sigh, the driven black one gone again, and he simple and there with me. “Yes. We make allowances. We know that if we build a city, or make a jewel, or a song, or a thought, then it will at once start to slide away, fall away—just as I have done, Sirius—and then—pfft!—that’s it, it’s over. This city, you say: the city of the twenty-one tall cones? And what of the city just there—can you see?"—and he pointed to where the storm had gone. I could just see a blur on the white horizon.

“That is the city of the gardens. That was the city of the gardens…”

“And what is it now?”

“It is a city of gardens,” he said, grim and savage, black and vibrating. “A gardened city. Elylé adores it. She has her place there, fountains and delights… Elylé, Elylé,” he moaned suddenly, rocking, his hands up over his face.

“Nasar,” I said sharply and he sighed and came to himself.

“You are going to have to give me your earrings,” said he, coming up to me, taking me by the shoulders and peering into my face. The grip of those large hands bore heavily and he felt me brace myself and he loosened them. “There’s nothing to you,” he said, incredulously. “A dry bone of a woman, with your judicious little face and your…”

“No, I am not Elylé,” I said steadily. “Do you want me to be sorry for that?”

“No,” he said simply, coming to himself.

“Nasar, is it that you want the earrings because you can stay here instead of going back home—and you have been ordered back home and don’t want to go?”

“Exactly so.”

“But wouldn’t they—come after you and punish you?”

“No,” he said, with his short laugh, that I now knew to associate with his inner comparisons between Canopus and what I made of Canopus as a Sirian. “No. What need of punishments? What punishments could conceivably be worse than this…” and he shut his eyes, and flung back his head with something like a howl—yes, it was like the howl of a desperate animal. “Ohhh,” he groaned, or howled, “to be this, to have become part of it, to be Shikasta, to be Shammat…”

“You are not Shammat,” I said, sharp and cold. And afraid.

“What do you suppose Shammat is, lady?” And he again marched and strode, and stopped, on his desperate course.

I been given—I felt—another piece of my puzzle.

“Shammat is not merely an external tyranny?”

“Surely that is evident?”

“I see.”

He enquired, really surprised. “How is it you have to ask?”

“I ask… and I ask… and I ask… there are questions I seem to ask over and over again. Yet I do not ever get an answer.”

“But wasn’t that an answer?”

I felt weighted with a half-knowledge, something too much, too painful, too dark—a long dark wail that was inward. And I could see the same on Nasar’s face.

“This is a terrible place,” he said in a bleak voice, as if suddenly seeing something for the first time—he who had lived this for so long! Yet he was contemplating it again, anew. “A terrible place.”

“Will you tell me why?” I said. “Please will you try and say. What is Shammat? That is what I want to know.” And I added, “If I knew that, then could I understand Canopus?”

At this he laughed—a real laugh. “What is Shammat? Shammat is this—if you build a city—perfectly and exactly, so every that feeling and thought in it is of Canopus—then slowly, the chords start to sound false—at first just slightly, then more and more—until soon the Canopus-nature has gone, it has slipped, it has fallen… like me… and if you start again, and collect together, let us say, ten people and teach them Canopus—if you can, if you can—then that is all you can do because Shammat rises up and strikes back and for the ten of Canopus nature there will be ten times ten of Shammat. The ten you cherish, if they stand, if they stand, if they do not fall away like me… and if you say Love, then Love is the word, it is Love, yes, but then…” and he was muttering now, in a crazy, restless, wild desperation and misery, “but then it is Love still but cracked, the sound false, then falser, and it is not love but wanting, oh Elylé, Elylé, Elylé the beautiful one, beautiful one…”

“Nasar!” I stopped him and he sighed and came to himself.

“Yes,” he said, “Love the golden word does not sing her song for long here, before her voice cracks… Love slowly turns down, down the spiral and then there is Hate. Each perfection becomes its opposite, that is Shammat. You ask what is Shammat—it is that if you say Love, then before long, it is Hate, and if you build for harmony, then soon it is quarrelling, and if you say Peace, then before long it is War—that is Shammat, that is Shammat, Sirius.”

“And yet Canopus persists here. Canopus keeps this planet. Canopus does not jettison it. Rohanda is under your protection.”

“That is our policy.”

“And do you not agree with it?”

“No, I do not agree with it—but then, I am now Shammat, or at least for a good part of the time, so what does it matter what I agree with or not?”

“Tell me, you have been ordered back and you do not want to go.”

“Yes.”

“Because you cannot face what you feel when you have to come back again?”

“Yes.”

“And if I gave you the earrings and the other things…”

“Oh, the earrings would do, would be enough,” he muttered, desperate and evasive and savage. “How could they be enough? You have certain exact and accurate practices, changing as circumstances change. Is that not so?”

He was staring at me, sullen, admiring in a way but disliking.

“Very true.”

“So if you are asking for the earrings, they cannot be to enable you to maintain yourself healthily here, but to give to Elylé. Is that it? Or is there something else?”

“There might be.”

“Can it be that the Puttiorans, who have the earrings and who are making wrong use of them, are putting pressure on you to join them?” I heard my own voice, prim and scandalised—and incredulous.

“Something like that.”

“You cannot conceivably be tempted by Puttiora?”

“Why not? If I can be tempted by Elylé—and more than tempted—do you realise I have been as good as her husband for—oh, I don’t want to think how long…”

“Well, how long?” I asked, as the thought came into me that these creatures lived very short lives.

“Exactly so, Sirius. There is the additional torment that this absolute and incredible beauty is—stuff for a moment, snow on your palm. It is like being allowed to become besotted, drunk, gone into the perfection of a butterfly. Do you have butterflies on Sirius?”

“No. But I have seen them elsewhere.”

“In Shikastan terms, I have loved—forgive the word—Elylé for a long time. In our terms, our time, I am drinking, drunk, gone into something that dissolves as I look at it, like wanting to possess a snowflake. Can you imagine the fascinations of that, Sirius?”

“Nasar, you should go home. And you should say all this—in the right quarters.”

“And then?" he said—amused. I could see that: and in exactly the same way as I would be by a very young child.

“Very well,” I said. “Sirian ways are not yours. But surely the problems of discipline are the same everywhere? You should obey orders, freely confess your derelictions, and take your punishment—but you say there isn’t any.”

He sighed, and began his pacing.

“And you should put forward your point of view—you should say that in your opinion the policy for this planet is incorrect.”

He flung himself down on pile of cushions, stretched his legs out, put his behind his watched me, with smile.

“Canopus should argue with Canopus,” he said. “Well, why not? It has never been done. But…” and he laughed.

“I do not understand why that is so amusing,” I said. “But I have had a very great deal of experience with the administration of planets, and the personnel who administer them. I have been an advocate of the policy that does not only allow, but insists on, the views of personnel being heard all times. It is not possible for an administration that has to be centered on the Home Planet to remain always au fait with local problems. That is exactly how administrative policies get top-heavy and inflexible. If there is not a continual and active liaison between headquarters and the local officials—then in my experience, one can expect things to go wrong.”

I have to record here that he laughed until I became very angry, but on behalf of Sirius, not of myself. For it was Sirius that was being criticised.

“Very well,” said he, “I shall go back, as ordered. I shall demand active rehabilitation—for I certainly need it. I shall demand the right to put forward an opposition to existing policy. I shall that that this was on the advice of Sirius…” and he nearly began laughing again, but he saw my face and stopped. “I am sorry,” he said, “I really am. But you simply do not know…”

“No, I don’t know. But I would like you to go on. If your persuasions fail, and the existing policy stands, then…” I hesitated, and said: “I shall not attempt to conceal from you that Sirius would like all of Rohanda. We obviously have very different ideas from yours. Let us say they are not so lofty! We could make good use of this Planet for our experiments. We have made very good use of the southern hemisphere…” and here I had to stop.

I had forgotten, because of the superior and even commanding position I had had to take in relation with this Canopean functionary, that our part on this planet had not always been honestly played! Again I found myself in the position of hoping a Canopean was not able to read my thoughts, yet knew he did.

I made myself say: “Did you know that some of our experiments in the south were not always entirely within the terms of our agreements?”

“Yes, of course we know that.” He did not seem inclined to say any more. Because it was of no importance?

“That you would not keep to the spirit, let alone the letter, of our agreements, was foreseen and allowed for.”

I was angry now. And defensive. “What I can’t understand is this: Canopus both allots this defective little planet a far more important role than we do—certainly you go to far greater lengths than we ever do—but at the same time you seem quite extraordinarily perfunctory…” and as I spoke, words flashed into my mind, and I received them with a sense of weariness. “I suppose you are going to say that what you do is in accordance with what is needed?”

“But what else could I possibly say?” he asked, genuinely surprised. For some reason the insectlike people of their Planet 11 came into mind: I remembered an infant that was a frail pink squirm held in milky semitransparent arms, surrounded by waving tentacles. And these loathsome things were higher in the evolutionary scale than I was, or at least very well regarded by Klorathy, and, therefore, also, by Nasar. For me to approach “the Need” seemed to demand resources of tolerance in me that I could not believe I would ever have. And yet again we reached, Canopus and I, a moment when understanding had been on the verge of trembling into light. And then had gone again. Had been engulfed in anger, guilt, and in disbelief in my own capacities.

I did not know what it was I had not understood. I heard myself muttering: “I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

“Poor Sirius,” said Nasar, in the way he had done before.

“What will happen if you fail to persuade them?” I asked.

He stood up. He looked drained, and ashy and lustreless, all the energy gone out of him.

“I shall go home now. I shall take your advice. If I succeed in my application to question the Colonial policy, I shall say that in my view we should jettison Shikasta. I shall say that Sirius has put forward a serious request to take over Shikasta. If I fail, and the existing policy stands—and this is what will happen, Sirius, please do not expect too much—I shall, I suppose, have the pleasure of seeing you here some time.”

“Are you not permitted to request transfer to another planet?”

“I do not think that… but let us put it this way. Once I am there, and back in my normal frame of mind, I probably will not want to demand a transfer.”

“I do not understand why not,” I insisted. “And if you do return here, I hope you will suggest you are not to be left down here so long without periods of leave.”

He smiled again. It was gentle, and even appreciative and even—again—with a certain admiration. “I shall make your views known,” he said.

“And what work do you think you will be assigned when you come back? If you do.”

“What? Why, as always, I shall be sent to a new place—for of course it will not have escaped you that these cities of the eastern central landmass will soon be under sand?”

“No, it did not escape me!”

“Exactly so… and I shall either find myself in some dreadful city, which I shall regard, at first, as hell and torment, and then… perhaps it will all happen again? In any case, I shall set the current flowing, and guard the flow, and make checks to Shammat… all that I shall do—as I always do! Or perhaps they will tell me to make another city, or a cluster of cities, like these—all perfect, perfect… until…

“How do you go about creating your cities?” I asked—and again the word came to me. “Oh, according to need,” I said. “Yes, but how?”

“I think I shall go now,” he said. “If I don’t, who knows what may happen! I shall even perhaps find myself back with Elylé—I wouldn’t put it past myself, I assure you.”

“How will you call your spacecraft?” I asked.

“I shall return—in another way,” said he. “Goodbye, Sirius. And thank you. Look after your equipment—your earrings and the rest—they will be coming after it and after you, and when they find I have disappeared they may make that an excuse to take you physically… Call your spaceship in and leave. That is my advice.”

He ran out of the room, and after some time I him, small dark figure, emerge from the base of the tower. He taken no covering with him. I understood. He was going to walk off into the great snow wastes and die there. This gave me food for thought indeed—it was the beginning of a new understanding about the ways of Canopus, their different means of going and coming, of “travelling,” if you like… I did not have time to think of all this then, any more than I had time to reflect on this long conversation with Canopus, in which there were so many openings for a greater comprehension. I was watching Nasar struggle forward. I could see from the low crowding white in the northeast that soon it would snow again. But long before it did, Nasar would be lost in the billowing piling masses. He would be dead very soon, I knew. He would not be found, I could be pretty sure, until the snow melted. That was when I could be afraid of the Puttiorans coming to take me in; probably on a charge of not reporting a disappearance, and even of murder—who knew what one could expect in a place like this! But the melting of the snows was a long way off. I had hoped to wait till the spring. I stood looking out at the scene that seemed crammed with white substance, and thinking that all that was water. How it would swirl and flood around these towers when the season changed! I would stand up here in the little tip of this tower, and look down at brown floods—and then, so I believed, there would be a burst of vegetation. I had never seen anything like that.

I had no reason at all to doubt that when Canopus warned, they should be listened to. I did not want to have to face the Puttiorans, or even that degenerate smiling cruel lot—these gone-to-self-indulgence classes are always cruel in their lazy insolent way… Then why was I waiting here? Why, of course, to meet Klorathy.

I had come here to meet Klorathy…

I understood that I had met Klorathy. There was a mystery here I did not expect to unravel then, but I knew there was one.

I decided that I would call in my hovering Space Traveller and leave. I sent out the call and collected my belongings. I found a white hooded garment folded in a chest and huddled myself in it. I did not want to be seen, a dark escapee against the snows, and arrested.

Just as I was preparing to leave these high rooms at the cone’s tip, and descend to the street, I saw some writing sheets where Nasar had been stretched before I came into the room.

His despair, his misery, his self-loathing, his conflicts, were written there in broken, sometimes abusive or obscene words. I ran my eyes swiftly over them, leafing through the many sheets: there were months of comment there. But on the sheet he had been scribbling over, just before I had come into the room, was written:

I come again and again to the same thought. I may not be able to face Canopus and my own nature now, and the shame that will overwhelm me when I contemplate what I have been here, but I have only to contemplate Sirius to be strengthened in the better side of myself: thinking of Sirius I feel that perhaps I may at last force myself back to my duty. How is it possible that an Empire can be so large, so strong, so longlasting; so energetic, so inventive, so skilled; how can it be so admirable in so many ways—and yet never have any inkling at all of the basic fact? They continue; they thrive; they fall into periods of decline; they make decisions; they advance again… they let their populations rage out of control, and then suddenly limit them to practically nothing. And all this done according to a temporary balance of social forces and opinion—never according to Need. This worthy and correct and competent official who is no more capable of the shameful falling that I have shown I am only too capable of, is not able to take in anything of what the function of Canopus is. What the function of Sirius could be. Is that not a thought with enough power in it to make me whole again?

That is what I saw written there. I put this sheet of brittle yet at the same time flexible substance—it was new to me—in my clothes, and in my turn walked rapidly down the stairs and out into the cold whiteness. It had begun to snow again, though lightly. I not afraid I would not find the Space Traveller, only that I might be stopped first. I did see a couple of Puttioran guards at the base of the far tower, and I ran fast along the road I had come into the city on. It was hard to keep on the road. On either side were faint depressions to mark the ditches. I stumbled on, wondering if Nasar was still upright and walking onwards, or if he had fallen and was dying. It was strange to think in this way: we did not expect to die! Not we of the Sirian Mother Planet who can renew our bodies almost indefinitely. Death was hardly a reality to us. And that Canopus should use bodies like an equipment of garments…

I had not run forward for long when I saw the soft glitter of the Space Traveller, and was in it and up and off the white thicknesses in a moment—soon below us the brown cones stood up out of the white coverlet, and above us was the Rohandan night sky crammed with blazing stars. I looked for our own dear star, which shed such a happy glow on our Home Planet, but I was bound for the southern hemisphere. We swept on, with the white expanse below us, and then over the mountains that were white, too, and suddenly below us was the blue ocean. The experiments I was proposing to organise do not concern my purpose in this account.

And so I conclude my report of my encounter with Canopus in Koshi, of the cities of the eastern central landmass.

For long time I was nowhere near Rohanda, but at the other end of our Empire, dealing with problems, mostly psychological, arising from the reductions of population. I did not enjoy this work, and if it were not that the problems were so taxing, and, often, dangerous to the Empire, I would have visited Rohanda for a personal inspection of the experiments that were being pursued there. But none of these were of the class described sociobiological, only small-scale laboratory work on genetic engineering.

It not until the question arose of Planet 3 (1) and its future that I could with good conscience return home for the discussions on policy, and then look forward to a tour of duty on Rohanda.

The policy discussions were long and even stormy. Our decision not to acquire and develop further planets had been maintained. Planet 3 (1) was Planet 3’s moon or satellite. Planet 3 was in active use. Its moon had never been developed, was almost entirely without oxygen: but it fell within the class of planets that are considered potentially the most useful and desirable, if their atmosphere can be adjusted. At the height of our Empire’s expansion, plans had been made to force 3 (1), for it plentifully equipped all kinds of minerals. But as pursued our deliberate policy of retraction and reduction, the search for supplies of minerals became unnecessary. I think it is not far off the truth to say that we came to overlook 3 (1), even forgot it. Planet 3 itself, an adequately functioning place, was not concerned with it, except as to how it affected her gravitational situation.

The question of developing 3 (1) arose because there is a latent hunger in our Colonial Service for the old days of expansion and development. I say this knowing I shall attract criticism, and cries of “Old Imperialist!” But why avoid the truth! It is my belief that very many of the ills and problems of our Service stem from this hunger. There is something in Sirian nature that demands, that flourishes, in situations of challenge, provided best by the takeover of a new planet, its problems, it regulations, its development. To expand, I maintain, if not normal for us (in the sense that is right) is at least the most agreeable condition. To monitor and police planets kept deliberately stable, and on a low level of energy generally, is not exhilarating, does not inspire and develop the members of the Service. If this were not true, should we always have in operation so many schemes deliberately contrived to provide challenge to our Service?

No, the truth is that Planet 3 (1) came to our attention because a large number of our personnel, particularly the younger ones, wanted to experience the sharp edge of difficulties, problems, hazards. Even dangers—for there is something quite different in quality between the dangers that have to be surmounted in establishing something new, and those faced in, let’s say, a regular policing job on a planet that erupts in dissatisfaction or discontent because of a life level that is seen too clearly to be stagnant. I do not wish here to re-introduce metaphysical questions! It is far from my intention to stray into regions that are only too thoroughly explored by our social philosophers. If I mention that on many of our thoroughly stable and economically balanced planets we have deliberately—during some epochs—allowed the inhabitants to believe in dangers that are nonexistent, that is only because it is relevant here. We have invented threats from Puttiora, or from Shammat; caused rumours of possible cosmic hazards, such as approaching comets or unfortunate starry alignments; even provoked minor uprisings—all of this to prevent planets from becoming dolefully sunk into What-is-the-purpose-of-it-all states of mind that, unchecked, can even lead to mass suicide.

At any rate, this was the main reason for our reconsidering Planet 3 (1), and it did not appear on the official list of reasons as released finally by our deliberating Conference. (It is my experience that this is a general rule, to be observed everywhere and in all kinds of situations: the real, the propelling cause of a situation or decision or change of policy is never mentioned at all, and must be sought for behind and buried under the peripheral ones.)

The reasons were listed as follows:

1.Planet 3 (1) is the only one of our Colonised Planets, or Planet’s Planets, left undeveloped, or not made use of in some way or another.

2.To choose an analogy from the remote past, it is as if a well-run farm of the old kind allowed a single field to remain uncultivated. (Our younger members are particularly fond of these archaic and romantic comparisons—one may almost say that it is a cult with them.)

3.This planet, being so near to Sirius, would be more economical to use for its minerals than other mineral-rich planets.

4.Planet 3 has shown signs of the familiar moral stagnation and will benefit from the debates and disagreements resulting from the decision to bring its moon to life.

5.Planet 3 (1) presents new problems, and their solution will add to our stock of scientific knowledge.

6.There have been reminders from our personnel on Rohanda that our territories there are underused, and that parts of them are already overrun by peoples and races resulting from our previous experiments. The provision of atmosphere for 3 (1) might be dovetailed into certain local conditions on Rohanda, as discussed at the Conference.

I had a message sent to Canopus asking if it would inconvenience them to let us use part of their territory for a limited and definite time. I was not unaware of a certain duplicity here, if one was not to call it, simply, diplomacy; the point was that we did not know exactly how long we would need the territory. We wanted the highest possible mountains. Extremely high mountains covered a large area of the southern part of the landmass. These had become higher still, more extensive, during the internal squeezings and pushings of the planet during the unfortunate “events.” We believed, through our espionage, that Canopus was not making much use of these mountainous areas. (Later we discovered this was mistaken.) But in any case, the message came back that they were not able to lend us these mountains or any part of them, and they “wished to draw our attention to” the very high mountain chains along the western edge of the Isolated Southern Continent II. Thank you very much! I thought; but of course we did have these mountains, and they were adequate for our purpose. One motive for at least attempting occupation of their Great Mountain was that our reports indicated that Klorathy was or had been stationed in those parts. I had not heard anything further from him.

Nor from Nasar.

My experience with Nasar had gone into the background of my thoughts shortly after it ended. This in spite of an intriguing report of a conference on Canopus that had caused “great and unprecedented interest.” It was a question of whether Rohanda should be entirely given up. “Top and Authoritative Policy” had been challenged. “The debate, which lasted longer than any previous debate, and which argued the very bases of Canopean colonial policy, ended in a majority vote in favour of the maintenance of Rohanda.” Colonial policy been changed in a way that was unprecedented. “The disgruntled minority had put forward a suggestion which was adopted: that with the exception of those officials who had always been involved with service on Rohanda, service on the recalcitrant and burdensome planet would be voluntary: no one should be forced to sign up for a tour of duty.” I translated these concepts, all very Sirian, into what I imagined would be nearer to Canopean ideas, in accordance with the conversations I had had with Nasar, and with what had I learned of the nature of Canopus.

But a fact remained: there been a conference on Canopus, as I had suggested to Nasar, to debate conditions of colonial service on Rohanda. (Their Shikasta.) He had laughed at the mere idea of it, but it had happened, nevertheless. But I had too little information. All this was not even secondhand: one of our officials, visiting Colony 10 for a routine exchange of information with their officials, had heard this conference mentioned in a casual conversation and had enquired about it, but without any sense of its importance, or its historic nature… And I had to confess, thinking it all over, that perhaps it was not all that important. How was I to know the emphases Canopus must place on events, according to that “Necessity” of theirs! Because a disgruntled and disaffected—I hoped and believed only temporarily—official disagreed with a top-level policy, this did not mean that one had to take it that seriously! Officials on my level had to consider this kind of thing all the time, and I took it as no more than routine. All the same, there had been a conference, and Nasar had laughed, and laughed, at the very idea of such a conference being possible… I had to end up with this small fact, and abandon all other speculation.

The reason I did not dwell overmuch on my visit to Koshi was that it was all too much for me. That is the truth. What I had learned was a challenge to everything I was as a Sirian official. How could it not be? And yes, I was only too aware that to think on these lines—that I, Ambien II, might have ideas and intimations beyond my role as Sirius (I thought often enough of how Nasar had called me, simply, Sirius!) and was even beginning to separate off in myself these two entities, or ways of experiencing living—was, probably, treason. Treason of a kind. Treason to the Sirian of looking at things. Yet who and when had ever shown tendencies of this sort before? I could not remember it! When we (Sirius) had to face revolts on our colonies or disagreements about policy, these were within Sirian terms, ideas, concepts. As for our famous “existential situation,” this certainly did not go beyond Sirian boundaries. But, when I was with Canopus, inside Canopean thinking, it was Sirius itself that was challenged, its very bases, its foundations.

No, I certainly was not able to see myself as an alien to Sirius. For that was what it amounted to. Was I to put myself forward at one of our regular Conferences on Overall Policy and say—but what? That I believed Canopus to be altogether finer and higher than we were, and that we should go humbly to Canopus begging for instruction? Wrap it up as I might, that is what it amounted to.

I have already made it clear in this memoir, or account, of mine that our attitudes toward Canopus made that quite inconceivable.

Was I then—knowing this—to start propaganda work among my close colleagues and personal allies, such as the others of the Five, or Ambien I, or my offspring, with the idea of changing a nucleus that would (but how?) slowly change all of Sirius? The formation and cultivation of such “cells” of course was perennial and only to be expected by all of us when facing dissident planets and insurrectionary movements.

I might consider this, playing with the idea sometimes, but could not imagine myself actually doing it. There is such a thing as the art of the possible, and working with it. Well, it was not possible that I, with my position in the Empire, my experience, my temperament, should start what amounted to revolutionary cell-building!

What alternatives were there? I now have to state, categorically, that I could not envisage any alternatives. These were the possibilities… as I saw it. I did, dimly and distantly, see that Canopus itself might have ideas of its own… I would entertain, sometimes, these rather visionary notions, and always when brooding about my various encounters with Canopus—where I had failed, where I had, in spite of these failures, learned. The practised and practising person that was Ambien II had to recognise facts, when I saw them. Facts, the more experienced one became, were always to be understood, garnered, taken in, with that part of oneself most deeply involved with processes, with life as it worked its way out. Facts were not best as understood formulas or summings up, but through this inward groping and recognition. Well, what I recognised in contemplating my relations with Canopus was some sort of purpose. It was unmistakable. To dismiss it, deny it, meant denying everything I had ever learned in my long career as participator in events. I could not dismiss it. But I could say that it was all too much for me. I postponed it. And for a long time was busy with my work, which I was not enjoying, and which inwardly I was questioning and feeling sapped and diminished by because of an ever-increasing sense of its (oh yes, treachery and treason, I know!), because of, in fact, the steady, unstoppable growth in me of that person or individual who was not “Sirius.”

Who was—who? Or what? Canopus?

This was why I caused the request to be sent that we might borrow or lease their Great Mountains. This was the cause of the disappointment at their refusal.

So! I was not to see Klorathy yet… Very well then. I set myself to my task, and again pushed these thoughts to the back of my mind.

A map of Isolated Southern Continent II shows that rather more than a third of the way down the mountain chain is a lake high among the peaks.

What we wanted was to accustom a sufficient number of suitable individuals to living on sparse supplies of oxygen. It happened that we had, on our Colonised Planet 2, some high mountains, and on them were living a species able to function on comparatively little oxygen. But they had been established for generations. We needed flexibility, adaptability. After some thought, we chose a species from C.P. 9, a damp, dismal sort of place, whose nature was to match, phlegmatic and dour. We space-lifted 30,000 of them not to the highest peaks but to a plateau halfway up a mountain range that had sparse but adequate food, and a wet changeable climate. There left them, under supervision, to adapt.

Meanwhile, 3 (1) was being surveyed and prepared. I visited there, I suppose it could be said, from curiosity, though there was not much on the place to feed interest.

It was arid, chilly, dusty. There were semi-frozen marshes, maintaining some sluggish lizards and frogs.

The vegetation was lichens, and a curious form of marsh weed that seemed half-animal. At any rate, while being anchored at one end in mud or slushy ice, the fronds, branches, feelers, crawled about all over the surface of the soil, sometimes even lifting and overturning stones and rocks, or burrowing down into mud, for the primitive insects and crustaceans. Sometimes these branches were half an R-mile long, and a single plant could cover a square mile. These animal-plants were a danger to our technicians. One was walking through what she believed to be quite ordinary, if unfamiliar vegetation, when the creature reached up with its “hands” or feelers, and tugged her over, and when she was rescued, it was only just in time, for the “plant” had already begun to dismantle her spacesuit, undoing screws and fastenings in search of the—obviously—delectable food within. This caused much excitement among our naturalists, it goes without saying; but as for me, I had a more localised interest in the place, namely, whether it would indeed be possible to change the planet’s climate, as our experts claimed. It had one great advantage from our point of view: there was oxygen locked up in the soil.

This moon revolves about Planet 3 four times in its year, and spins on its axis once. Planet 3 is far from its sun, and is itself on the cold and lethargic side.

I left instructions to follow our experts’ recommendations that thermonuclear explosions should be tried, with the aim of warming the planet, and returned to the settlement of our experimentees on the mountainside of Isolated S.C. II.

Enough time had passed for the first generation to have died out, and it was now a question of examining their progeny for signs of possible failure. None was found. Although they were existing on an oxygen supply of two-thirds of their familiar conditions on C.P. 9, they seemed to be thriving. I therefore took a decision: instead of giving them a further intermediate acclimatisation period, I ordered them to be transferred at once to as high as it was possible for animals to subsist. This was at over 15,000 R-feet, more than twice the height of their previous station, and the drop in oxygen level was severe, not only in comparison with that station halfway up the range but particularly in comparison with their Home Planet. The experts reported their lungs were already enlarging. I saw them established. It was now such an effort for them to accomplish what was needed that I ordered an abandonment of our usual policy and had housing installed for them.

As it happened, it was possible to get this from a Canopean settlement on the Isolated Northern Continent—I was interested, more than interested, in how this happened. I was pondering about how to get this housing easily, for while we had settlements over the other side of the mountain range—this was not far, relatively speaking, from my settlement of the old days, in the time of the Lombis—it happened we were short of suitable aircraft. It was at this moment I had a message from Klorathy offering the materials I needed. I record that I merely noted that this was Klorathy, that he was at work so close, in the continent north of this one, and that he had known where I was. I noted it, and went on with my task.

I did not meet the fleet of their cargocraft as they arrived on the sea parallel with the mountains we were on, for I was convinced that Klorathy would not be there personally. The materials were lifted to the high plateaux by our craft. The settlement was soon in existence, double-storey wooden buildings, set out according to a plan that was found attached to the consignments of dismantled dwellings. I merely ordered this plan to be put into effect.

The Planet 9 animals were not the most attractive I have known! Again, they were of small build, not more than three to four R-feet. They were stocky, and their original hairiness already enhanced, because of these cold heights they were adapting to. Very bright glassy blue eyes peered from under shelves of reddish fur. They had bred three or four or even five to a litter, but already were giving birth to only two or at the most three. They were strong, physically, but more importantly—as we believed—strong by moral nature. That is, they were not subject to emotional collapse under difficulties.

I watched these animals in their snowy valley lifted high up among those dreadful peaks, moving slowly in packs and groups, turning as one to face a new challenge—as, for instance, my appearance among them, or that of their supervisors. They stabilised their balance on long thick staves, and set their furry legs wide apart… the slow difficult turn of their heads, and the careful swivel of the cold blue eyes… the baffled glassy stare… all this was to see, or to fancy that one did, animals drugged, or tranced. I had seen this species on their Planet 9, where they are hardly a volatile or quick-moving kind, but at least did have some native liveliness. I was sorry for them, I admit. They had been told, on being rounded up for this experiment, that they were to accomplish a task of the greatest importance to Sirius, and that they would be honoured by the Empire if they succeeded: and what now remained in their progeny of this sense of importance was a feeling of having been chosen, or set apart. The supervisors reported that their instruction to their young centred on their “special destiny” and their “superior qualities.” All this was satisfactory.

Their high valley, with its beautiful lake, enjoyed three months of summer, when they were able to grow brief crops of a cereal we introduced from our Central Cereal Stocks that was able to flourish in high places, and to come to fruition within the three months. This was their staple, but they grew, too, various kinds of marrow and pumpkin. They kept some sort of sheep for milk and meat. But they were not able wholly to maintain themselves, so slow and difficult were their lives, and so prolonged their periods of snow; and so we supplied them yearly with additional foodstuffs, telling them it was an expression of the gratitude of the Empire. After all, it was not our intention to breed a species self-sufficient under difficult circumstances, but to breed one able to stay alive in the early stages of the new existence of 3 (1).

I did not stay long on that trip. I had heard that the intermediary settlement, on the mountainside, had been visited by observers from a “kingdom” further north along the mountain chain, and that attempts had been made to kidnap some of the animals. Presumably as slaves. It was a slave state of a particularly unpleasant sort. Further attempts would probably be made.

So went my reports. I then made a mistake. Believing that the extreme height of the settlement would be enough of a deterrent, I did not order an increase in the supervisory force.

I ordered, however, a visit by spies into this “kingdom,” and asked that their report should be sent to me where I would be on the other side of the mountain chain on the foothills above the great jungles that now covered so much of the continent.

I wished to visit Ambien I, whom I not seen for a long time.

Ever since the unfortunate “events” on Rohanda, which had knocked the axis askew and caused seasons, involving changes of vegetation and weather of a sometimes spectacular nature, it had been fashionable for certain of the more advantaged of our citizens to spend holidays on both southern continents to observe these “seasons.” Not only the well off; there were also excursions for officials of the more lowly kind, or even of ordinary citizens, particularly the elderly. In other words, there were two different sorts of visitor to Rohanda, for whom two standards of accommodation were prepared. My old friend Ambien I was put in charge of arranging the accommodation for the second class of our citizens and colonists. This did not mean more than a supervisory eye on the work of underlings. But he had indicated he would appreciate a chance to spend time in the better class of place, where I would join him.

As this most agreeable visit has nothing to do with this account of mine, I shall merely say that I flew down to a holiday settlement, from which one was able to see the high mountains on one side, and over the top of the jungles on the other, and where we watched the snows of the winter dwindle off the mountain ranges, and rush everywhere in fountains and torrents of sparkling water. Meanwhile, Ambien and I caught up with news and gossip of what turned out to be—when we added it all up—fifty thousand R-years! We had in fact last met on this planet, on a joint mission connected with the inspection of our laboratories.

That meeting had seemed to us short enough; but this one was even shorter, for the reports of our spies in the threatening kingdom reached me, and it was clear that something had to be done at once. An expeditionary force had been sent up into the mountains, and it had succeeded in capturing over 2,000 of the poor animals, whose future, judging from what I was finding out about Grakconkranpatl, was dark indeed.

Ambien I and I talked it all over, and I made my plans. Leaving him, reluctantly, I flew away from this holiday place, full of species from every part of our Empire, all revelling in the sharp new sensations to do with changing weather, the delightful emotions associated with the “seasons”—which pleasures are to be found only on Rohanda, or only to such a prodigal and always unexpected extent.

It was as a result of this meeting of ours, and what we observed together of the reactions around us, that we recommended a team of medical experts visit the Southern Continents, to see whether sojourns in places where the changes of the “seasons” were particularly marked could benefit certain psychological conditions, such as melancholia, or an exaggerated dose of “the existentials”—an irreverent name among the young for this emotional affliction. Our recommendations were followed; a team of medical technicians did explore possibilities on both continents; they agreed with our—tentative—conclusions; clinics were set up on appropriate sites; and was it not long before Rohanda became the most favoured place for the treatment of these afflictions.

A side benefit was that a new branch or department of literature resulted. It is categorised in our libraries as Effluvia of the Seasons. I wonder how many now realise that this honoured, not to say hoary, branch of our great literature originated in Rohanda with that—now long-past—era of its use by us as a station and emotional-adjustment area?

As usual, I began my investigation with an aerial survey. I had to decide whether I wanted this to be noticed, and interpreted to Sirian advantage. After deliberation I decided on minimum visibility, choosing a surveillance aircraft that, if seen, could easily be dismissed as the result of freak atmospheric effects. Whirling at extreme speed, at the worst it would be seen as a kind of crystalline glisten. I chose a day of high winds, fast-moving white cloud, and bright sun, and hovered over Grakconkranpatl long enough for a good survey.

I certainly did not like what I saw: for one thing, I observed our poor Colony 9 animals being sadly misused. I had to retire with my observations to my old headquarters in the foothills that once had monitored the Lombi and other experiments, for an opportunity for solitary thought.

What I had seen was this. Descending through gaps in the mountain ranges, my eyes filled with the blue sweep of the ocean, below me was what at first glance could seem to be an assemblage of stone cubes assembled on a high place between peaks. The vegetation was heavy, a dense green, kept back from the piled stone by brief clearings showing the reddish soil. The massive cubes were of a dull greyish blue, the same colour as certain ticks I have seen infesting animals. These great blocks crammed and piled together were the city, and closer analysis showed they were built of uniformly cut stones, fitted together. Their lowering colour, their massing and crowding arrangement, gave an impression of hostility and threat, and even of great size. Yet it was not a large city. There were no gardens or green. No central open space, only a not overlong avenue, or narrow rectangle, that lay between two very large buildings, facing each other. These two opposing facades had no openings or windows. There were few windows anywhere, and once observed, this fact explained the sombreness and the threat of the place. The roofs, however, did offer some relief, for they were flat, and each was crowded.

I had never before seen a city like this, and, if it had not been for our spies’ reports, would not have been able to interpret it. The social structure could not easily be inferred from it. I knew this to be a wealthy culture with a large ruling class of one race, and slaves and menials of other captured races.

There was no sign here of rich or poor buildings, or rich and poor quarters of the city. Each of these vast blocklike buildings was a microcosm of the society, housing the rich and their attendants. The rich, it was clear, lived on the top layers, where there were more windows, and on the roofs, which were equipped with awnings and shades wind screens of all kinds. The slaves were down in the dungeonlike bottom layers where there was very little light. Life was never communal or public; there were no festivals or common amusements; no eating places, no baths, no shops.

Around this central city, the heart of Grakconkranpatl, on lower slopes, were the farms and the mines. These stretched in every direction for long distances. The farms were worked with gangs of slaves. They lived in heavy stone buildings, built in regular blocks. From the air they looked depressingly uniform. They were prisons. Even from the height of my observation craft I could see that where there was a cluster of working slaves, there were lines of supervisors, with weapons. I thought of our encampment in the heights where our Colony 9 animals were being acclimatized, and the regular patterns of huts in which they were kept, and could not help a pang, wondering if they perhaps felt not very different from the poor wretches I could see slaving below me. But after all, our supervision was only for their benefit, to keep them in health and of course to prevent them from running away, which would do them no good. And our punishments were hardly of the kind I knew were used here.

All the same, I must record that I did not enjoy the comparisons I was being forced to make; I suffered more than a few moments of attack from the existential problem.

At various distances from the central city, beyond the farming areas, were mines; the culture made extensive use of minerals. The same dark and forbidding patterns of barracks showed where the mines were. Down the mountainside from Grakconkranpatl ran an absolutely straight paved road, a dark grey streak through the lush forests. This road can only be described as insane. It made no concession to the terrain, to ups downs or even mountains and precipices. Where there was a mountain it did not wind about it, but drove straight through. A long precipitous decline of several R-miles had been filled with rubble and the road taken over it. What it looked like was that some tyrant in a fit of hauteur commanded: Make me a road straight to the ocean!

In fact I learned later that this was what had happened: hundreds of thousands of slaves died in its making.

From my craft, I could watch long trains of transport animals with their loads of fish from the sea making their up to the city on its high place. I could see that it was joined all along its length by smaller, equally straight roads, for the transport of farm produce and minerals.

I had to decide how best to present myself. I was handicapped by not having experienced this particular type of society before. “Religions,” of course, are to be found in one form or another everywhere. Only on Rohanda, due to the influence of Shammat—so I came to understand later—were theocracies common: that is, societies where the social structure was identical with the hierarchies of the religion. The ruling class was the priesthood, was hereditary, was all-powerful. The slaves were kept in order by the priesthood.

The root of my problem, so it seemed to me, was the degree of cynicism of the priesthood. In other words, could they be frightened through “religion” or could they not?

I studied the reports for accounts of their ceremonies and practices, and concluded that since—for Rohanda—they were well established, not to say ancient, having lasted for over a thousand years, and since this same ruling class had been perpetuated for so many generations, there was a likelihood that they in fact believed their repulsive inventions. The practice on which this “religion” based itself was murder, ritual murder. This has always struck me uneconomic, quite apart from its barbarity. One has to postulate a population organised to renew itself in excess of the needs of labour and breeding; or if not, then accessible to weaker cultures for the capture of slaves.

Not only were large numbers of unfortunate creatures “sacrificed” continually, the method was most disgusting. The heart was cut out while the victim was still alive. This had been going on, as I say, for centuries. This fact raises problems and questions that as an administrator cannot help but fascinate me, to do with the nature of what subject classes and races can be made to believe, or submit to.

The thought that occurred to me when I read of this practice was, of course, how it originated? Memories of meetings with Canopus, reports from our agents, came to my aid. Canopus always and everywhere on Rohanda attempts to modify and soften the effects of Shammat by enjoining moderation of the natural appetites, sometimes referred to as “sacrificing the heart.” I concluded that this emotive and rhetorical phrase had, due to the continuous degeneration on Rohanda about which Nasar had been so eloquent, come to be taken literally. If this was the case, it seemed to me to indicate that Rohanda had, in the long interval since I had been involved there last, made a further step, and a large one, into brutishness.

It did occur to me that in culture so addicted to murder, I might find myself a victim, but I dismissed the thought: from our agents’ reports I had concluded that erring slaves or captives from other cultures were sacrificed. In other words, I did not feel myself eligible. This was because situations of danger are so rare in our lives that I, like all of us long-lived administrative-class Sirians, had come to think of myself almost as immortal! Death did not—does not—often approach my mind. And so I walked calmly and unafraid into the greatest danger I ever experienced. This was not courage, but a result of the atrophy of the instinct of self-preservation.

I considered, and dismissed, plans for taking a large entourage. For instance, the inhabitants of Grakconkranpatl were dark skinned; both rulers and slaves. A plan was for sending a craft down to the recreation settlements and asking for volunteers, from those races who were pale skinned and, preferably, with pale hair. I imagined the effect of a company of silvery ambassadors, arriving unexpectedly among those coppery or reddish people. Or, the opposite: I had often observed the impressive effect of individuals from C.P. 2: enormous black specimens, totally and glossily black, with cone-shaped narrow heads and long fine features. I imagined an entry of myself companioned in this way, but decided against this, too.

I toyed with a display of our crystal observation spheres, hovering over the city, for long enough to be thought a permanent invasion, and then broadcasting loud and portentous messages, threatening them with destruction if they raided our settlements.

But I have always been reluctant to use complicated or even untruthful means when something simpler would do.

What was the simplest of the means within my scope?

It was to go myself, alone. It was to demand to see the High Priest alone. It was to tell him the truth: that this territory of theirs, on the slopes of the mountain ranges, was not at all, as they seemed to imagine, theirs, and under their rule, but under the overall sovereignty of “the Gods.” Their astronomy was fair; they knew enough about the movements of the stars to match these with effects on crops and weather. They could be persuaded to make the step onwards to knowing that their superiors dwelled on the far stars: Gods. I would present myself as a God.

This was not untruthful, from the perspective of Rohanda.

I caused one of our agents to make a secret visit into the city, with a written message. I took care to use writing material foreign to Rohanda, and to choose solemn phrases to the effect that an Emissary from the Gods would visit them shortly, “from the skies.” I then left a good interval, so that this should become well absorbed, and took the opportunity to pay another quick visit to my dear Ambien I.

I was conveyed to Grakconkranpatl by a war machine specially summoned by me from the Home Planet. Our population-control experts had been instructed to design an aircraft that could intimidate by appearance. It was extremely swift, could hover, and shoot off in any direction, or land and take off very fast. It was absolutely silent. It was black, with a single dull-red eye on its body, which emitted greenish rays that in fact did have a temporarily stupefying effect on any thing beneath. But its shape was the real triumph of the experts. This managed to suggest a heavy implacable strength and brutality. Nobody underneath it could avoid an emotional reaction: one was being monitored by a crudely punitive and jealous eye. This machine was very seldom used. The more sophisticated of our Colonised Planets were not likely to be more than irritated by it. Those of our planets kept backward, as for instance 24, where the transplanted Lombis were, would be too affected by it: the balances of their culture might be entirely overthrown. But for an occasion like this, it was admirable.

So I thought. I was right. But I should have ordered a fleet of them, accompanied them with threats, and not appeared myself at all…

The machine set me down at such speed that I had no opportunity to take in that the long oblong or central avenue was crammed, but in an organised and purposeful way. I was at one end of this avenue, my back to one blank frowning facade, facing down its length to its opposing building. The avenue was longer than it seemed from the air. It was narrower because it was banked with seemed to be statues, or even machinelike beings. They wore straight dark grey tunics, to the ankles. Over their heads they wore hoods of the same colour, with only narrow slits for eyes. Their gloved hands held upright before them very long iron lances. Their feet were in heavy leather. They were five deep on either side.

It will already have been seen by the reader that these figures underlined and reinforced the theme of the buildings, with their featureless uniformity. Behind these guards stood in rigidly ordered groups the contents of each individual building—the living contents, in the shape of the members of a family group, or tribe, all wearing identical black robes, which covered them completely, leaving their faces bare. My first sight of the visage of this culture caused my physical self unmistakably to falter. It was a harsh, authoritarian face, remarkably little diversified, and with little difference, too, between the tribes or families. On their heads they each wore a certain style of stiff conical hat, in black felt. I was easily able to recognise this as having derived from one of the old and superceded special articles prescribed by Canopus to its agents. These privileged ones, the rulers of Grakconkranpatl, carried no arms.

Far ahead of me, at the end of the narrow grey corridor between these dark grey guards, and their black-robed rulers, was a massed group of priests, and theirs was the only colour on the scene. In scarlet and yellow, bright green and brilliant blue, these stood waiting under the blank dark wall of their temple. For these two buildings that stared eyelessly at each other were temples.

I understood, rather late, that this was a reception for me: and that the exact time of my arrival here had become known. This gave me food for thought indeed, since my decision when to come had been made two days before.

I was already aware that I had made a mistake. For one thing, I should not be wearing a slight white robe, that paid little homage to ceremonial. (I of course had on me the artefacts currently prescribed by Canopus, some concealed, and others in the shape of a necklace of Canopean silver, heavy bracelets.) To these people, able to be impressed only by the grandiose, the emphatic, the threatening, I must be seeming like a leaf or piece of dead grass. Able, at any rate, to be crushed at a touch.

I walked slowly forward in a dead, an ominous silence. I could see the glint of eyes inside the oblong narrow slits in the dark hoods that hemmed me in; I could see behind them the heavy savage faces of the men and women of this horrid land.

I understood that my mouth was dry. That my knees were weak. That my breathing was shallow. Recognising these classic symptoms of Fear, which I could not remember having felt, I was of course fascinated. But at the same time I was analysing my situation. Very bad indeed, if they meant ill by me, as the atmosphere convinced me they did. I had told the aircraft to vanish itself well and it would not return without my signal. This would depend on my being able to preserve my Canopean artefacts exactly as they should be.

When I had got halfway along this living avenue, four figures detached themselves from the group of priests ahead. They were in black, the same robes as those of the patricians. These advanced swiftly towards me, and two came behind me and two went just ahead. I was impressed by their odour, a thick cold dead smell.

I knew now I was a prisoner.

When I was standing in front of the group of priests, in their vivid clothes, heavy with gold and jewels, the four escorts went back to join their groups—each to an exact place. I was reflecting that in all that large multitude there was not one out of his or her ordered place, not one there by casual impulse, or who was watching, even, from the roofs. The slaves were well down in their dungeons, it seemed, for none was to be seen here. Yet at other times, so I learned later, when the sacrificial murders took place, the slaves were herded out, and crammed into the narrow place between the five-deep bank of guards.

There was not a single individual in that city, on that day, whose whereabouts could not be accounted for, was not known by these dreadful cruel men and women whose faces I was studying as I stood below them, looking up. I said nothing. Silence is a potent weapon. Can be.

And so they had decided, too. Nothing was said by them. They stared contemptuously down at me. I outstared them, and even, sometimes, turned my head, as if unimpressed, and allowed myself to glance about.

On either side of the bank of brilliant priests sat a large animal of a kind unfamiliar to me, a feline, with a yellow hide marked with black, and large unwinking green eyes. At first I thought them statues, so still were they; then saw the lift and fall of breath as sunlight moved on glossy fur. These were not chained or restrained in any way. Beside each stood a tall strong female, skirted to the waist, naked above, but marked with many intricate patterns all over the flesh, using the breasts and nipples and navel as eyes. The animals kept their gaze on me. I realised I was in danger of being torn apart by those trained beasts. I therefore summoned up certain techniques that I had learned, and had hardly ever had the occasion to use. I caused them one after the other to lie down, their paws stretched in front of them: their eyes, no longer on mine, were directed out over the heads of the silent crowd.

I heard the slightest commenting breath among the priests, and momentarily in the ascendant, I smiled at them and said:

“I am from the star Sirius. Your Lord and Governor.” I had spoken loudly, so that I could be heard at least by the guards nearer to me. I heard a movement among them. I knew the priests would now have to act one way or the other.

The four black-robed ones closed in on me, and I was hustled by them into the midst of the priests. I could not then be seen from outside that group. I saw the harsh angry faces, reddish-bronze, with dense black eyes, bending down all around me. I was moved off by them into the low entrance of the temple. There was a smell of stale blood. The blood of this planet is a thick unstable substance, and its smell speaks of its animality. It was dark in the temple, except for flames high up near the unseen roof. I was hustled along passages, and then more and longer dark passages that were cold and musty—I was in the lower part of these great blocklike buildings, perhaps even being pushed along from one to another, and then another. We passed slaves, poor pallid creatures, who stared in terror at my guards and shrank away into some side passage. These corridors were lit at very long intervals with feeble lights on the walls. This was the underworld of the slaves. I was at last thrust into a cold and dimly lit place and left.