The Sirian Experiments

  I had no idea how long this thing went on, and can only say now that it was for some hours – so our astronomers have calculated. Suddenly – and again I have to emphasize that this word cannot in any way convey the feeling that the event happened in an order of time not Rohandan – I was back in sunlight. The scene below did not change – that is, not for a long moment. And then all at once, flick! just like that, Adalantaland vanished beneath the sea, and a whirlpool formed where it had been. My eyes drawn to that place, darkened in grief for the loss of those people, were nevertheless aware that all around the periphery of my vision islands were vanishing, leaving their spins of water, or land was rising up – and sometimes islands would plunge under the waters and then almost at once rise up again, seeming to be settled there stable and permanent, and then, flick! they disappeared. When I was able to withdraw my immediate grief from Adalantaland, to gain a wider view, I was able to see all over the great ocean the islands that studded it had gone. And have not come back again since … and that is when the Isolated Northern Continent became permanently isolated. Though of course I am using that word relatively: often enough I have flown from one end of that enormous expanse of waters, with its few and clustered islands, and remembered those other times, and thought how at any moment those old islands may rise again, bare, water-scoured, to begin their slow process of weathering into fruitfulness and plenty. Not only islands were vanishing or appearing – everywhere the earth of the mainland was bulging up and buckling, and the waters were rocking and spouting and sloshing about as they do when someone jumps heavily into a water pool. There was a foul mineral smell. The scene grew wilder as I watched – as I intermittently watched, for I was being spun about and I could see only in flashes. Spouts of water miles high rose into the air and crashed thunderously, land spurted upwards like water, clouds formed in the skies in a swift massing process that seemed impossible – and then poured down at once in rain. Suddenly everything below was whitened: the rain had fallen as snow, and I was in a blizzard being whirled about in shrieking winds. And yet, immediately afterwards, the white had all gone, warm rains had washed the snow away from the heaving spurting boiling surfaces of the globe, and I saw that the ice of the pole had gone, and where it had been was a spinning whirlpool – and then the spin of the water was slower, was hardly there, a crust was forming over it, and the white of the ice cover gleamed again, and spread, was rapidly growing. Again I was in a thick snowstorm that seemed to be weighing down my little bubble. I felt that I was sinking down, was being pressed down, and then again – and with that same unimaginable suddenness – a wind arose from somewhere and carried me violently off. Of course none of my instruments was working, nor had worked since the start of this violent re-orientation of Rohanda. I did not know where I was being sucked or pulled, but felt that it was not any longer in a vortex or spin but was direct, in a straight line. And I was always inside the thick swirl of snow that was like no snow I had ever seen anywhere or on any planet. I knew I was being steadily pressed down by it and readied myself for a crash. Now that I was able to be more calm, because of this long steady drive onwards inside the storm, without sudden twists or dizzyings, I was able to hear again: beyond the dreadful hush of the snowfall and the howl of the wind that drove me were the multitudinous sounds of the earth itself, groaning and shrieking, moaning and grinding … this went on for some time, and yet, even as it did, there were sudden spaces or moments within this time when the opposite happened. I mean that I suddenly found myself in sun and wetness, clouds of steam arising everywhere and not a trace of snow to be seen anywhere under me: a water world, with spouts of water flung up to the height of my craft, lower now than it was, far too close to the earth, and in that space of – a few minutes? seconds? – I was able to direct my craft upwards, away from the heave and churn of the muddy steamy land under me. And then the snow descended again and the cold was intense and frightful. I lost consciousness, I think, or at least if I did not, the awfulness of the strain has blocked out my memory. For what I remember next is that I had come to rest, and the crystal shell of my little space bubble was hot and glittery with sun. I was beyond rational thought, or decision, and I opened it and stepped out – risking death from a change of atmosphere, though I certainly did not think of that. The sun was what struck me at first. It had a different look to it. Seemed smaller … yet not much. Seemed cooler … but was that possible? I wondered if I had been tossed off Rohanda altogether and had arrived on another planet. 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 away 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 had been convulsed about, because there were cracks in it, some many 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 as 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 was on, and began pressing and squeezing up the sides, with a groaning and a 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 and 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. And 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, leaving only peaks that were of bare, scraped rock. But one had a clotted or furred look, as if encrusted with insects of a vast size; when I examined it, I saw a multitude of animals, every imaginable variety of animal, large and small, all in the attitudes of immediate death. They had been frozen in an instant where they ha
d taken refuge from the floods, or the surging ice packs, or the oceans of snow. But on other peaks that I flew 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 last being the Northwest fringes that later played such a part in late 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 had 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 two 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 and 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 earthy 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 and spun me, so 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 doorway 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 been briefly visited by tempests of snow, which had 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 instrument, 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 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 many 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 swamp and flying clouds of steam, and the catastrophe was already receding into the past, becoming yet 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 only 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 inquiry, which was I am afraid all impertinence, to the effect that some might consider recent events catastrophe enough 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 was 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 a being able to view the devastation of the whole planet with such accurate detachment was not likely to be 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 w
ere 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 was. 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 Klorathy if he had visited the dwarves, and if there was anything that he could tell them – the savages. And Klorathy answered saying that he had 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.