The Sirian Experiments by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page B

easily visible. This was why our first attempts to locate them had been so frustrated.
    Constant movement and activity – great festivals of thousands of animals all dancing and singing; and, at the same time, a terror of being observed and overseen.
    The pleasant, easygoing, unsuspicious race of Planet 24 had become nervous, paranoid.
    One of the changes had been expected by us.
    Because of the disruption between males and females at the beginning, which took nearly five hundred years to disappear, the females had become the lawgivers, if not in fact, then in their view of themselves. The males were dominant in that they hunted, appointed sentinels and guards, saw themselves as protectors of the nation, but the women because of how they had been competed for at the beginning had all kinds of airs and graces, behaved as if mating were ‘a gift of themselves’: and there were courtship rituals where it had to appear as if males were fighting for a female who at last and after long hesitation then ‘chose’ one: and this even when the balances had been redressed and there was no competition for females. The females all had a rather bossy elder-sister manner, which was taught them by the mothers: this could even approach the regal, the gracious. These inevitable results of certain statistical facts do not cease to be risible because they
are
inevitable …
    But these poor animals aroused more pity than amusementamong our technicians. We were approached by a delegation from them a few months after their acceptance by the Lombis. They all felt uncomfortable about what they were doing, which was to put into operation a plan that involved lying and deception. We had expected this delegation; the 2,000 Planet 22 technicians were being observed, in the same way as the Lombis were: it was necessary for us to find out if they were to be entrusted with taking the Lombis to Planet 25 and supervising them there when they expected to be returned home.
    It is our experience that if you put two species together, after initial hostility they will begin to absorb each other’s ways. If one is in a supervisory relation with the other, who are suffering hardship, then it is to be expected that a percentage of the first will sympathize with the second and make attempts to alleviate conditions – which result is often to be welcomed and encouraged – or to help efforts to escape. Under certain conditions even this second result is not always discouraged.
    While we were making plans for adding companies of supervisors from another planet, which had not had contact with the Lombis, to the personnel who would transfer and police the Lombis, we were selecting 22-ers for further training in the arts of long-term judgement and assessment, and were putting the following points to them.
    That conditions on Rohanda were better than on Planet 24.
    That conditions on 25, while not perfect, could not be described as bad.
    That it was no hardship to be a servant race – which admittedly was our plan for the Lombis – unless this race felt and resented their subjection, in which case the laws of our Empire made it inevitable that they would be advanced to a level they could sustain.
    It was true this whole experiment was based on an attempt to keep, just for once, a race on a subservient level; but surely the fact that we had to make it at all proved our past good record.
    Did they, the Planet 22 technicians, not think they might be sentimental instead of showing
true
benevolence – which always involved an overall view …
    To all this they respectfully but self-respectingly replied that they thought our arguments sophistry.
    There was no need for them to say any more than one thing, to bring forward more than one basic fact: the Lombis had been free, living where they had evolved, and had shown all the characteristics of such races. Now they had all the attributes of slaves.
    We inquired from them what they