I had never before seen a city like this, and, if it had not been for our spies’ reports, would not have been able to interpret it. The social structure could not easily be inferred from it. I knew this to be a wealthy culture with a large ruling class of one race, and slaves and menials of other captured races.
There was no sign here of rich or poor buildings, or rich and poor quarters of the city. Each of these vast blocklike buildings was a microcosm of the society, housing the rich and their attendants. The rich, it was clear, lived on the top layers, where there were more windows, and on the roofs, which were equipped with awnings and shades wind screens of all kinds. The slaves were down in the dungeonlike bottom layers where there was very little light. Life was never communal or public; there were no festivals or common amusements; no eating places, no baths, no shops.
Around this central city, the heart of Grakconkranpatl, on lower slopes, were the farms and the mines. These stretched in every direction for long distances. The farms were worked with gangs of slaves. They lived in heavy stone buildings, built in regular blocks. From the air they looked depressingly uniform. They were prisons. Even from the height of my observation craft I could see that where there was a cluster of working slaves, there were lines of supervisors, with weapons. I thought of our encampment in the heights where our Colony 9 animals were being acclimatized, and the regular patterns of huts in which they were kept, and could not help a pang, wondering if they perhaps felt not very different from the poor wretches I could see slaving below me. But after all, our supervision was only for their benefit, to keep them in health and of course to prevent them from running away, which would do them no good. And our punishments were hardly of the kind I knew were used here.
All the same, I must record that I did not enjoy the comparisons I was being forced to make; I suffered more than a few moments of attack from the existential problem.
At various distances from the central city, beyond the farming areas, were mines; the culture made extensive use of minerals. The same dark and forbidding patterns of barracks showed where the mines were. Down the mountainside from Grakconkranpatl ran an absolutely straight paved road, a dark grey streak through the lush forests. This road can only be described as insane. It made no concession to the terrain, to ups downs or even mountains and precipices. Where there was a mountain it did not wind about it, but drove straight through. A long precipitous decline of several R-miles had been filled with rubble and the road taken over it. What it looked like was that some tyrant in a fit of hauteur commanded: Make me a road straight to the ocean!
In fact I learned later that this was what had happened: hundreds of thousands of slaves died in its making.
From my craft, I could watch long trains of transport animals with their loads of fish from the sea making their up to the city on its high place. I could see that it was joined all along its length by smaller, equally straight roads, for the transport of farm produce and minerals.
I had to decide how best to present myself. I was handicapped by not having experienced this particular type of society before. “Religions,” of course, are to be found in one form or another everywhere. Only on Rohanda, due to the influence of Shammat—so I came to understand later—were theocracies common: that is, societies where the social structure was identical with the hierarchies of the religion. The ruling class was the priesthood, was hereditary, was all-powerful. The slaves were kept in order by the priesthood.
The root of my problem, so it seemed to me, was the degree of cynicism of the priesthood. In other words, could they be frightened through “religion” or could they not?
I studied the reports for accounts of their ceremonies and practices, and concluded that since—for Rohanda—they were well established, not to say ancient, having lasted for over a thousand years, and since this same ruling class had been perpetuated for so many generations, there was a likelihood that they in fact believed their repulsive inventions. The practice on which this “religion” based itself was murder, ritual murder. This has always struck me uneconomic, quite apart from its barbarity. One has to postulate a population organised to renew itself in excess of the needs of labour and breeding; or if not, then accessible to weaker cultures for the capture of slaves.
Not only were large numbers of unfortunate creatures “sacrificed” continually, the method was most disgusting. The heart was cut out while the victim was still alive. This had been going on, as I say, for centuries. This fact raises problems and questions that as an administrator cannot help but fascinate me, to do with the nature of what subject classes and races can be made to believe, or submit to.
The thought that occurred to me when I read of this practice was, of course, how it originated? Memories of meetings with Canopus, reports from our agents, came to my aid. Canopus always and everywhere on Rohanda attempts to modify and soften the effects of Shammat by enjoining moderation of the natural appetites, sometimes referred to as “sacrificing the heart.” I concluded that this emotive and rhetorical phrase had, due to the continuous degeneration on Rohanda about which Nasar had been so eloquent, come to be taken literally. If this was the case, it seemed to me to indicate that Rohanda had, in the long interval since I had been involved there last, made a further step, and a large one, into brutishness.
It did occur to me that in culture so addicted to murder, I might find myself a victim, but I dismissed the thought: from our agents’ reports I had concluded that erring slaves or captives from other cultures were sacrificed. In other words, I did not feel myself eligible. This was because situations of danger are so rare in our lives that I, like all of us long-lived administrative-class Sirians, had come to think of myself almost as immortal! Death did not—does not—often approach my mind. And so I walked calmly and unafraid into the greatest danger I ever experienced. This was not courage, but a result of the atrophy of the instinct of self-preservation.
I considered, and dismissed, plans for taking a large entourage. For instance, the inhabitants of Grakconkranpatl were dark skinned; both rulers and slaves. A plan was for sending a craft down to the recreation settlements and asking for volunteers, from those races who were pale skinned and, preferably, with pale hair. I imagined the effect of a company of silvery ambassadors, arriving unexpectedly among those coppery or reddish people. Or, the opposite: I had often observed the impressive effect of individuals from C.P. 2: enormous black specimens, totally and glossily black, with cone-shaped narrow heads and long fine features. I imagined an entry of myself companioned in this way, but decided against this, too.
I toyed with a display of our crystal observation spheres, hovering over the city, for long enough to be thought a permanent invasion, and then broadcasting loud and portentous messages, threatening them with destruction if they raided our settlements.