The Sirian Experiments (42 page)

Again Tafta raised his hand and dropped it and the flails descended. I expected perhaps two or three strokes. I had never seen such coldly practised brutality. The groans and cries made the air quiver. The smell of blood sharpened the salt of the sea. It was a late afternoon, and the sun was sinking. 
A gold spread of cloud, gold edging the ridges of the waves, a wash of gold over the sands, and over the scene I was watching. And that hand rose, the palm facing out at shoulder height – and fell, and the whips came down and the shrieks went up. The watching circle of men was silent, watching in terror, their attitudes expressing how they, like me, counted each stroke by the sympathies of their own flesh. And the whistling flails came down, and down … the men being flogged sank as bushes or swathes of grass subside under flames.

And then the groans ceased. But the whips went on. And on. The punished ones were three bundles of bloody rags slumped by the stakes.

Tafta let out a shout. The company of pirates turned their backs on what they had been forced to watch, and shouldered their loads of gold. They made their way to boats tied to some rocks. A vessel with sails awaited them. The beasts they had used to carry these loads were being left on the shore to die or save themselves. I signalled my Space Traveller to wait, and walked down, past the butchered men, to the crowd of thieves. They all became immobile when they saw me, their jaws dropping. It was their silence that caused Tafta to turn, with brutalities already on his lips, before he even knew why they were silent.

There was a moment of indecision when he saw me. Then a grinning confidence puffed him out and he swaggered forward. He made a deep bow, lifting off a broad hat that had jewels in it, and was about to take my hand to kiss it. But while he hid his fear at my look, he did not lose his ease.

We looked at each other, across the small sandy space that separated us.

‘Tafta,' I said, ‘were you punishing those men because they disliked the savagery of your behaviour with the Indian kingdom? Was that it?'

From the men around him arose a deep assenting moan, which was at once stilled at his look. And in a moment they had recovered their air of greedy confidence.

‘One day, Tafta,' I said, ‘there will be an account made. There will come a time when you will suffer as you now make others suffer.'

Again the minutest flicker of indecision, and then his swagger was back. He smiled. This handsome coarse brute smiled, and strengthened the cocky thrust of his shoulders. And I was looking at this stage of the creature's evolution, holding in my mind the stages of what he had been, and crying out to Canopus in my mind, Why, why,
why
do you allow it?

‘It must be a long time since you were on Rohanda,' he said. ‘It is mine. Mine from end to end.'

‘No, Tafta, it is not. And you will see that it is not.'

He let out a guffaw, which was easy, even indulgent, as if I were an inferior in mentality. This was the change in him: and, looking at him, seeing this in him, I glanced around at his company and saw the same in them. It was conceit. They were all thickened and stupefied by it. Their intoxication was of many strands, and conceit was as strong as their greed.

I walked away from them back to the small eminence on which I had been before, and stayed watching as they put themselves and their loot into their boats and rowed themselves out to their winged vessel. Oh, yes, it was aesthetically very pleasing, this galleon of theirs: I had not before seen sailing craft at this precise stage of technology. And the scene was beautiful, as the light faded, leaving the dark acres of the ocean, crisping with light from a thin slice of moon. The Rohandan moon, which was my next assignment.

Having made sure the poor wretches at their stakes were in fact dead and having called to the mules and horses to follow me from off the beaches into the forests where they could find food and water, I took off for the planet's planet.

Since I had been there last, considerable changes. The Shammat stake was still the largest and had been spreading rapidly. Mining operations were predominant. Everywhere the crawlers could be seen at work in the craters, and new craters were visible. That was on the surface: underground, we knew, every kind of technological operation was in
progress. But we, Sirius, had placed ourselves all around the perimeter of the Shammat area in an arc on one side: Canopus had done the same on the other. Our crawlers were plentiful, some of them the largest we had, five or six miles in diameter. We were mining; and we proposed to make use of what we produced: but let me put it this way: I have never seen in one of our operations so great a proportion
of
visible
effect to what was actually produced. And Canopus had placed vast domes, and manned them and armed them. Shammat was therefore contained, and knew it.

Visible, too, were the observational towers of the three planets, and the pylons used by one of them to anchor their aircraft. The moon was now furiously active, but the inhabitants of Rohanda were only just beginning to develop instruments capable of seeing this.

I made sure that our policy of friendly co-operation among the three planets was being maintained, and paid a short visit to each station myself.

After consultation with the Canopean station, I ordered a Demonstration, first class, over the surface of the whole planet. It was interesting to me, underlining certain developments, that it was so long since we had had to use any such show of force, that our Mother Planet was hard put to it to raise enough craft and personnel of the required kind. But at length thirty-seven Battalions of our largest and most impressive machines, built for precisely this purpose, appeared all at once from space, hovered everywhere over the surface of this moon, swept repeatedly around it, hovered again, and departed in clouds of luminosity especially developed for this kind of effect. Yet, remembering Tafta, this new unreal confidence of his, I found doubts in myself. And I was dubious, too, about my reaction when I returned home. Which I then did, getting there not long after the return of the special Battalions.

The Four called me to a meeting.

The personnel were now returning as their tours of duty were completed, from the two Southern Continents, and what they were reporting of their experiences had caused a
furore prognosticated by these experienced ones. Never had our Mother Planet even imagined anything like the pointless, barbarous treatment of the peoples of these continents by the invading ones, the Northwest fringers. They had not believed such cruelty could be …

I shall now take the liberty of making a short observation. It is that a certain law clearly to be observed on Rohanda is not exactly unknown elsewhere. There, a geographical area, or nation, would criticize another for faults it committed itself. To such lengths was this tendency developed in the last period of Rohanda that this planet, at this time, has become the exemplar for us, and descriptions may be found plentifully in our technical literature. But for my own part I must say I have never been more amazed as when observing full-scale, all-global conferences on Rohanda, where all the nations hurled accusations at each other for practices that they were apparently incapable of seeing in themselves.

My colleagues and I were facing a first-class crisis – not immediately evident as one, but with the potentialities of social ferment that could affect everything.

And my request for the thirty-seven Battalions, and the resulting re-organization and rapid re-training, had not gone unobserved by our people.

What was Rohanda, why was she of such importance to us, that so much disturbance was being allowed on her account?

We, the Five, sat together, now Four and One, as on the last occasion, and they wanted to know if I had seen Klorathy again. I said I had not, and that that was not the point. But how could I expect them to understand what had taken me so long?

They waited, regarding me in an expectation not untinged with anxiety. They were feeling, even if they had not formulated this, that their destinies, Sirian destinies, were in other hands. That this had always been so, they did not suspect. Nor could I easily think along these lines, even now.

They were waiting for me to say something as simple as ‘I believe this Canopean bond will benefit us in such and such
a way.'

At last, they demanded, having heard of the developments on the Rohandan moon, if I proposed to send a report to Klorathy. This was because they wished to read it and to assess our relationship from it. I said I did not believe a report was indicated yet.

This ended our meeting. I can see now their faces, turned as one towards me, and feel their fretfulness, their distrust. I don't blame them: I have never done that! In their places I would have been, I would have done, the same.

I was summoned back to the Rohandan moon. Fighting had broken out in the Shammat territory: civil war on Shammat was being reflected here. It was ground fighting. All over their territory were explosions that made new craters where their underground dwellings and factories had been; and wrecked crawlers, their limbs torn off, sprawled over the workings of the old craters. That the factions had not yet dared to make an aerial attack seemed to us a sign that they had not entirely lost a sense of their position. We took no chances; another show of our strength was arranged over their battlefields so that they would not be tempted to forget our presence, and that of Canopus. The details of this war do not concern this narrative.

On Rohanda was a similar state of affairs. That planet was now into its Century of Destruction, with the first of its global wars. Most of the fighting took place in the Northwest fringes, where the nations tried to destroy each other over the question of who was to control – mainly – Southern Continent I. This war combined the maximum of nastiness with a maximum of rhetoric. It was a disgusting war. I caught glimpses of Tafta. Even more inflated with self-esteem than he had been when I had seen him last, he was at work inflaming national passions, as ‘a man of God', the term given
to the exemplars of the local religions. First on one side, and then on the other, he announced God's support for whatever policy of mass destruction was being implemented. I shall not easily forget his evil unctuousness, his face all inflamed with sincerity, as he urged on the poor wretches who died or were wounded and crippled in multitudes.

My recall to Sirius was by the Four, who wanted to know ‘what Canopus thought it was doing' – allowing such carnage on Rohanda. They believed I had been meeting Klorathy and that for some reason connected with my inclination towards Canopus, was not telling them so. I could only repeat that I had not met Klorathy, nor had ‘instructions' from him; but that for my part I was disposed to trust in the long-term purposes of Canopus. This was not a happy meeting; and I was relieved to get an urgent message from Rohanda. The Shammat war on the planet's planet was at an end; the faction that had won on Shammat had imposed itself there, too: it was a matter of indifference to us – for nastiness and baseness there was nothing to choose between the factions. Tafta, the Shammat representative on Rohanda, had been compromised by the civil war in such a way that his personal position on Rohanda was weakened. It was known to us that on his return home he might face arrest or assassination. This was possibly not known to him.

The destructive processes on Rohanda were hastening to a conclusion. The second global war was in progress. Again, this had originated in the Northwest fringes, as an expression of national rivalries, but had spread everywhere, affected every part of the planet. It was this war that weakened, finally, the position of the white races; they had dominated the planet from end to end, destroying every local variation of culture and civilization as their technological needs dictated.

The changes in the balances of power made by the second war are fully documented; but the details of these local struggles – which after all was all they were, looked at from any reasonable perspective – did not concern me nearly so much as the lessons that could be drawn from them and that
could be applied to our own problems.

I was watching the changes in the sets of mind throughout our own Empire, on our Mother Planet and on the Colonized Planets. Every planet had different attitudes and ideas, which were stubbornly defended, always passionately, often violently. And each took in new facts and ideas at a different rate. I did not at first understand that this was my prime preoccupation: it was one thing to have seen that to cause changes in the Sirian Empire was a long-term aim of Canopus, and that I was their instrument – I have done my best to chronicle the slow, difficult growth of my understanding – but to comprehend a process fully, it is often essential to see the results of it. And this is true even for skilled administrators like the Five.

What I was doing during this period, which turned out to be a short one, was to stay quietly in my quarters thinking. It occurred to me that it was a very long time since I had done anything of the kind. I have been almost permanently on the move, or stationed on another planet. But it was not only my remaining at home that was unusual: I understood that the state of my mind was one I did not remember.

It was when the other members of the Five had been to see me, separately and almost furtively, and with that apologetic air caused by not understanding fully why one is doing something, that I began to comprehend. For one thing, I have only too often observed that this type of apology easily becomes irritation and then, very quickly, worse …

We had seldom visited each other in this way. Our formal meetings were necessary for the records, and so that citizens' groups could have reassurance for their anxieties by actually watching us at work in the council chambers.
We had known what we were all thinking, were likely to think, had formed something like a collective mind …
The uneasiness of my visitors was partly because they did not like the necessity they found themselves in, to come to my quarters so as to find out – but find out
what
? They did not know!