The Four called me to a meeting.
The personnel were now returning as their tours of duty were completed, from the Southern Continents, and what they were reporting of their experiences had caused a furore prognosticated by these experienced ones. Never had our Mother Planet 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 criticise 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 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-organisation 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 with 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 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 other over the question of who to control—mainly—Southern Continent I. This 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 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 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 of the planet. It 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 civilisation 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 mindsets throughout our own Empire, on our Mother Planet and on the Colonised 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 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 unusuaclass="underline" 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, 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 to find out what? They did not know!