The Sirian Experiments (14 page)

The scene that I saw when I looked down from my space bubble, and the thoughts in my mind then are very clear to me: it is because after the ‘events', as soon as I knew that everything I had surveyed was chaos and desolation, I took pains to retrieve my mental picture of it all so that it was clear in my mind, ready for instant recall.

I could see a great deal: below me the fair and smiling islands of those blessed latitudes … on one hand the great
ocean that spread to the Isolated Northern Continent, with its unstable family of islands, now all visible and alive … to the north, the little patch of ice and snow whose very existence showed the sensitive and exact nature of Rohanda's relation with her sun … southwards the coasts of the main landmass stretched – at first balmy and delightful, then rocky and parched – to the burning regions of the middle latitudes … and inland from these coasts, the vastness of the mainland itself, where I had never been, though Ambien I had. I longed to see them. Such forests and jungles were there! – so he said: he had darted back and forth across and about in his spacecraft and even so advantaged had found it impossible to easily mark the bounds of these forests. The beasts in the forests! – such a multitude of them and such a variety of species, some of them even now unknown to us. And beyond the forests, on great plateaux lying under blue and crystal skies, the cities that Ambien I spoke of. These were not the mathematical cities of the Great Time, but were remarkable and amazing places, often with systems of government unknown to us, some of them benign and comfortable to live in, and some tyrannous and very wicked. There they lay, a day's easy journey in my little craft, and it seemed that Canopus did not mind my travels in their dispensation, and so there was nothing to stop my going there at once … nothing except my state of mind, which was most unpleasant, and every moment getting worse.

I did not know what was happening to me. We have all of us experienced those shadows from the future we call ‘premonitions'. I was not unfamiliar with them. It seemed as if I was inside a black stuffy room or invisible prison, where it was hard even to draw breath, and from where I looked down on those brilliant scenes of sea and land that seemed to baffle and reject my sight,
because
of my state of mind. I kept thinking of Klorathy's warning … just as the thought formed that his warnings were filling me with something I had only just recognized as terror, it happened …

What
happened?

I have been asked often enough by our historians, delighted that just for once they had an actual eyewitness to such an event. And I always find this first moment hard.

There was an absolute stillness that seemed to freeze all of the scene below me. The air chilled – all at once, and instantaneously. I looked wildly around into the skies around me, with their Rohandan clouds and vast blue spaces – and could see nothing. Yet I was stilled, checked,
silenced
in all my being.

Suddenly – only that is not the word for the instantaneous nature of this happening – I was in total darkness, with the stars swinging about around me. I was in starlight. And now the stillness had been succeeded by a hissing roar. I looked down to see if the scene under me had also been vanished away, and saw that I was in movement – my craft was being spun about so that I could not see steadily. Yet I was able to make out the coastlands of the main landmass, and the islands, one of which was Adalantaland. My mind was clear only in flashes – as if lightning lit a landscape and then left it dark. This is why I had no coherent idea
then
of what was happening. Moments of intense clarity, when I was able to work out that Rohanda had turned over on itself, as a globe in a decelerating spin may wobble over – an understanding that this need no more affect the tiny inhabitants on its surface than the microbes of a child's ball know that they are in violent and agitated movement as the ball is flung from hand to hand and bounced here and there, but continue complacently with their little lives – calculations of how this reversal of the planet might affect it … all this went on in my mind in those moments of brilliant thought, when that mind in fact worked at a level I have not known since, in between periods of black extinction.

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 had 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.