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

by Doris Lessing

First published in 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for…

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

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

Where do they come from?

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

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

But we can’t all be physicists.

This is Ambien II, of the Five.

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

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

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