Klorathy and I sat together in the Sirian moon station. I had just rescued him from slow death in prison. Nasar had made me captive to save me from being executed, and had secretly released me. I had been one of the raiding horsemen. Klorathy was a deposed judge. Nasar was a female slave from the heart of Southern Continent I, who had risen to be the manager of a large household belonging to an indolent and tyrannical princeling.
A monitor showed that above us on the moon’s surface it was night, and very cold. Rohanda was hidden from us, being between us and the sun.
Klorathy clapped his hands, and on to the blank wall came a map of Rohanda—the continents and oceans laid flat. Klorathy went to stand beside it. With his finger he outlined that part of the main landmass that had been afflicted by the horsemen. Holding me with his eyes he outlined it again—slowly. I knew he wanted me to understand: that all those centuries of invasion and destruction were being contained within the shape his finger had traced. And he expected me to make, too, comparisons with Sirius, our vast Empire.
“Very well,” I said.
“The horsemen have terrorised this part of Rohanda for centuries, and the fear of them is imprinted in the innermost nature of the peoples of this region. Yet soon they will have been absorbed into what remains of the peoples they conquered. And civilisations will rise and fall, rise and fall—until quite soon, a race will come into being—here.” And he ran his finger down the edge of the great landmass. “Here, in the Northwest fringes, in these islands, in this little space, a race is being formed even now. It will overrun the whole world, but all the world, not just the central part of it, as with the horsemen of the plains. This race will destroy everything. The creed of this white race will be: if it is there, it belongs to us. If I want it I must have it. If what I see is different from myself then it must be punished or wiped out. Anything that is not me is primitive and bad… and this creed they will teach to the whole of Shikasta.”
“All? The whole world?”
“Very nearly.”
“Shammat being their tutor?”
“Shammat being their nature. Do you want to see what will happen?” And he stretched out his hand to make a gesture that would summon the stream of pictures, the moving vision, that had showed me the wave after wave of the Mongol threat.
“No, no, no—or not yet.” And I covered my eyes.
He returned quietly to his seat near me.
“You want our help?”
“Yes. And you need our help.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”
I could hear through the earthy walls of this shelter the grinding and shuddering of machinery: Shammat at work in a crater not far away.
“When I go back home now, I shall say only that I have chosen to spend my leave here. I shall not be questioned about this choice: but my reputation for eccentricity will be added to. I, Sirius, shall not be able to say one word to Sirius of what I have experienced with you…”
"Of the work you have done with Canopus…”
“Very well. Of the work we have done together. Because Sirius would not be able to understand one word of what I said. Only Canopus can understand me now.”
“You are lonely, Ambien!”
“Very.”
He nodded. “Please do what you can, Sirius.”
Before I left this moon, I instructed my Space Traveller to fly all over the sunlit side. The Shammat mining operations were evident everywhere. Their settlements were mostly underground, but in places were to be seen their observatories and laboratories. In the craters, some of them many R-miles across, their machinery laboured. It was ingenious, but none was unknown to me. Shammat the thief did not initiate; it sent spies into the territories of others, and copied what it saw.
A vast machine like a segmented worm whose segments could be fitted together in various ways was the kind they used most. One of these could be a mile or more long. Inside it were workplaces; temporary living places of labourers and technicians; and the extremities of a segment could be fitted with excavating devices. Some sucked in earth and sprayed it out again. One I hovered low over looked for all the world like the dragon of the Rohandan mythologies, with its spray of dirt emitted from its “mouth.” Others looked like starfish sprawling. They were a most ingenious type of machine. Flexible, so they could climb and clamber and balance; of any desired size, according to the number of segments fitted; very long, traversing difficult terrain and becoming bridges or tunnels as necessary; easily kept in repair, since an individual segment was so quickly replaced—these “crawlers” had been evolved us for use on inhospitable planets that were rich in minerals. But so adaptable and multifunctional had they proved that they were employed for purposes beyond mining.
As I sped away, I was escorted by a dozen of the wasplike Shammatan fighter craft. This was an act of impudence that in fact I welcomed. It would strengthen my hand in the efforts I was now about to make at home: I had to persuade our Colonial Service that our active presence on Rohanda was necessary to us.
As one will, I formulated in my mind all kinds of approaches to the problem, but soon understood that none was suitable: again and again, bringing to a situation or a person the framework of ideas, already formulated in my mind, these as it were fell apart, dissipated like a mist when the sun falls on it. I saw, then, that there was something wrong in my assessment of the situation. I even wondered if my mind had been affected by my excursions into the Rohandan reality; I half believed I had become more Canopean than Sirian. All kinds of doubts and weaknesses assailed me.
Meanwhile, my colleagues were referring to my “leave” on the Rohandan moon in a careful nonjudgemental way. I knew it was not possible for them to have any inkling as to what I had really been doing; and could not decide what it was they suspected that made them treat me like a—well, yes: I had to accept it: I was being handled in the way we use for those about to be summoned to a formal court of enquiry, or even arrested. Meanwhile discussions went forward for, again, my long interrupted work on our borders. I concluded at last that something was at work in the situation that I was severely misinterpreting.
Time was passing. I not raised the subject of Rohanda. Tempted to let the subject slide from me again, I made myself remember undertakings to Klorathy. At last, not knowing what else to do, I summoned a meeting of the Five.
The Five, of whom I am one, run the Colonial Service. This fact everybody in the Empire knows. That we implement policy made by our Legislature is known. That this policy is influenced by us is known. What is not understood is the extent to which we influence policy. I shall simply state here, without softening it, and as a fact, something that contradicts the Sirian view of itself; our view of ourselves. We Five run the Empire, govern everything, except for the details of the lives of our elite class. That does not concern us in the slightest! This elite of ours does as it pleases. Within limits. Our limits. I have already said that there has to be an elite: legislation will not prevent one coming into being, or do away with one when it has. And as little as we, the rulers of Sirius, are interested in the affairs of these darlings and charmers, so are they interested in what we do. There is a law that no formal framework of an organisation, or a society, can affect. Or not for long. It is that those who do the work are the real rulers of it, no matter how they are described.
We Five embody the governance of our Empire. That is what we are. And have been since the end of the war between ourselves and Canopus.