The Sirian Experiments by Doris Lessing Page A

called by us and by them
advice –
on how to survive the new discordant Rohandan atmosphere. We were told that if we were to build settlements in exactly this way and that – measurements and proportions prescribed to the fraction of an R-unit – and wore such and such artefacts, and ate this and that (there were long lists of such prescriptions), then we might work on that unfortunate planet, at least for limited periods.
    To begin with, their advice was only partly, or halfheartedly, obeyed: bad results followed. We then took to an exact obedience. Success.
    This obedience was more remarkable than perhaps will seem now. At that time it would have been difficult to find anything good being said about Canopus anywhere in our territories. Our tone was one of indifference at best, but usually derision. We were spying on them everywhere and in every way. We did not hesitate to outdo them when we could, often quite childishly, and even illegally. Any who doubt this may find what I say confirmed in any common chronicle or memoir of that time: we were not ashamed of our behaviour. On the contrary. Yet we suspected Canopus of ill-feeling and delinquency towards us, and complained of it. At the same time, and while
apparently
having little respect for their prescriptions, for we mocked them when we thought this would earn us admiration, we nevertheless followed them, and to the point where the practices became second nature, and we were in danger of forgetting where they originated. Then we
did
forget – or most of us – and ‘the Rohandan Adjustment Technique’ was talked of as if it were a discovery of our own.
    For a long time, more than a hundred thousand years, we Sirians were more on Rohanda than Canopus was.
So we believed then.
It was because we told our spies to look for Canopean technicians by the same signs that we understood for our own necessities and behaviour. We did not know then that Canopus could come and go in any way than by spaceship – by ordinary physical transport. Did not know that Canopean technicians could exist on Rohanda – and on other planets – taking the outward physical shape of the inhabitants of any particular time and place.
    For long ages Canopean individuals were at work on Rohanda and we did not know it. Even now there are those who refuse to believe it.
    But a few of us who worked on Rohanda came to understand. And I will come to a fuller description of this, in its place.
    Meanwhile, my preoccupation with Canopus continued, and I was not by any means the only one. And this was for a specific and definite reason.
THE SITUATION IN THE SIRIAN EMPIRE
    It is necessary for me now to make a general statement about Sirian development – a summary of history from the end of our Dark Age until the present. It will be argued that it is not possible to sum up several hundred thousand years of an Empire’s history in a few words. Yet we all of us do this when describing others. For instance, how do we – and even our most lofty and respected historians – refer to Alikon, the long-lived culture that preceded our own on Sirius, before we became an Empire? ‘Alikon was a rigid and militaristic society, based on limited natural resources, whose ruling caste maintained power by the use of a repressive religion, keeping nine-tenths of the population as labourers, slaves, and servants. It ended because …’ That is how we describe ninety thousand S-years of what we always refer to as ‘prehistory’. To take another example. Colony 10 of the Canopean rule was once ‘Senjen, a natural paradise, a pacific, easygoing matriarchal society made possible by a pleasant climate and abundant vegetable and animal stocks’. Senjen lasted for two hundred thousand years before Canopus decided it needed improvement.
    No: the dispassionate, disinterested eye we use for other peoples, other histories, we do not easily turn on ourselves – past