The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘Down with him,’ shouted Incent. ‘We will drag him from his palace, we will make him stand here among us all-’

‘Among the people,’ prompted Krolgul – and Incent was lost. Standing there among us, his arms raised above his head, he seemed to flicker and shine with the life that Krolgul was feeding into him. No check there now; Incent was his, and everyone in that courtroom leaned towards him in a kind of yearning, a hunger. And, Johor, I must tell you that I was affected myself. Oh, how small and meagre and pitiful suddenly seemed to me all our efforts, above all our language, so cool and measured and chosen. I saw myself as, I knew, those miners saw me at that moment: a figure apart from them, their lives, their efforts, an alien figure sitting quietly on a bench, indifferent and passionless.

But simply because of my distance, and because anything I said must seem so wrong, even brutal, I knew they would listen, and I remarked, with no raising of the voice, no show of willing self-immolation and sacrifice: ‘And once you have dragged Grice from the Residency, and even killed him, what difference will that make to Volyen? You will have a new Governor at once, and possibly one much worse.’

A growl, a groan from the men, who looked, as if at their own lost potentiality, at the exalted Incent. But Calder did allow his eyes to flicker over me, just once, with a look of dislike that I was weak enough to find painful.

‘And,’ I inquired, ‘just how do you propose to drag him from his palace?’

Krolgul said: ‘We shall go out into the streets and the meeting places and we shall say to the people, Come with us … And that’s all we shall need.’

‘I think perhaps not quite all,’ I remarked, in the same flat voice. Meanwhile I had turned my head just enough to see that Grice was visible to anyone who chose to glance up at the little window. He was leaning forward, gazing with sombre passion down at us. And particularly at Incent, the ennobled youth, who was chanting softly to himself: ‘Freedom or death, death or freedom.’

I laughed. Oh, yes, it was a laugh as calculated as anything Krolgul went in for.

Through the mutters, then the shouts of indignation, I said to Calder, who alone of the miners was still sufficiently his own master to keep a connection with me, ‘Shall I tell you the last time I heard that cry, freedom or death? Calder, would you like to hear?’

Still those stony grey eyes refused actually to engage with mine, went past me again, and I said, ‘Calder, do I have the right to speak?’

With the same dislike he at last looked at me and nodded.

‘Go ahead, then,’ he said.

And while Incent chanted, ‘Liberty or death!’ I said, ‘It was on another planet. The people of a certain country were impoverished and the economic conditions chaotic. They wished to rid themselves of a variety of parasites who lived off them, one of these being a something called a church, which at least you have never heard of here. While they debated and conspired and conferred, always at great risk, certain professional revolutionaries took charge, using words like Liberty or Death, We can be reborn only through blood –’

‘Reborn through blood …’ chanted Incent, and it was as if the words were feeding strength into him. He seemed positively to float there on the power of the words he was using, or which used him.

‘The King and the Queen, who were in fact quite well meaning and responsible people, were used as scapegoats, and the revolutionaries directed popular rage and resentment against them. The lies and the calumnies created a picture of monstrous personal self-indulgence that was strong enough to last centuries. The revolutionaries murdered the King and the Queen and the people around them as representatives, and then as the populace became more and more inflamed with words, words, words, the murdering became indiscriminate and soon the revolutionaries were killing one another. An orgy of killing went on, as the degenerates and criminals who always flourish at such times became powerful and could do as they liked. In the frenzies of killing and revenge, and the orgies of words, words, words, that everyone took part in, the reason for the revolution, which had been to change the economic conditions and to make the country strong and wealthy, became forgotten. Because in every one of us lies, only just in control, the brute, the brute that in this planet here was so recently one that ate raw flesh and drank raw blood and who had to murder to live at all. The energies of the poor country had gone into killing for killing’s sake, into the enjoyment of words –’

Incent was chanting: ‘Kill, kill, kill …

‘And soon there was chaos. Into this chaos came a tyrant, using inflammatory words, uniting the disunited people by words, and he took control, reinstated the class that had fattened on the poor and even added to it, and then set about conquering all the neighbouring countries. He too, having risen by the power of words – lies – fell again, having murdered and plundered and destroyed. And the country where the words Liberty or Death had seemed so noble and so fine was in the hands again of a hereditary ruling caste that controlled wealth. All that suffering, killing, heroism, all those words, words, words, for nothing.’

Calder and the miners now had their attention fully on me. They were taking no notice of the unfortunate Incent, who still stood there chanting. They did not look at Krolgul, who was inwardly conceding victory to me and quietly working out plans for another day. A modest figure, with his chin in his hand, he was watching the scene with an ironic smile: the best he could do.

‘Calder,’ I said, ‘there are those who exist on words. Words are their fuel and their food. They live by words. They make groups of people, armies of people, nations, countries, planets their subjects, through words. And when all the shouting and the chanting and the speeches and the drunkenness of words is done, nothing has changed. You may “rise” if you like, you may drag Grice or some other puppet to the bar of history or geography or “revolutionary inevitability,” and you can make yourselves and your entire people drunk on shouting, and at the end of it all, nothing will have changed. Grice is about as guilty as a –’

At that moment I noticed everyone was looking, not at me, but past me. I noticed that the pale blur on the high shining wall had disappeared. I saw Incent’s face change from the exaltation of his Blood … Death … Liberty … into a perfectly genuine scowl of hatred. Grice was standing there among us, beside Incent. As exalted as he, as pale, as ennobled, in the same pose of willing suffering, arms raised, palms forward, chin lifted, eyes shining, he said, ‘I’m Grice. I’m Grice the Guilty.’

‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘You are nothing of the kind. You are a person who has been doing his job, and not too badly. Don’t get inflated ideas about yourself.’

There was by now an uncomfortable silence. Even Incent had stopped his chant. The actual physical presence of Grice was a shock. No one had seen him except half invisible behind the various kinds of Volyen uniform, all designed to obliterate the individual. Of course, everyone knew that he was not some corpulent monster stuffed with the blood and flesh of his victims, but what they were actually looking at now was hard to assimilate. Grice is a weedy individual, pale, unhealthy, with a face ravaged by undirected introspection, weakened by unresolved conflict.

Grice said, with dignity, ‘Subjectively I can say I am not guilty. I do not stuff myself; in fact, I have been on a diet recently. I do not care about clothing. I am not interested in luxury, and power bores me. But objectively, and from a historical perspective, I am guilty. Do with me what you will!’

And, spreading his arms wide, he stood there before us, waiting for some apotheosis of fate.

‘Just a minute,’ said Calder, disgusted by him, ‘where’s your bodyguard?’

‘They don’t know I’m here. I gave them the slip,’ he said with pride. ‘I’ve been attending your meetings in disguise. Not as often as I’d like – I have so much to learn, don’t you know! But I’m your greatest fan, Calder. I simply love what you do. I’m on your side.’

Incent had collapsed. He was sitting on his bench, staring at this villain, and I could see he was in a state of clinical shock. I had to do something with him. I got up and pulled him to his feet.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ I said to Calder, who was conferring with his colleagues. As I left, dragging Incent with me, I heard Calder saying to Grice, in a disgusted irritated voice: ‘Now, you run along back to your palace, Governor. And be quick about it. We don’t want it to be said we’ve been kidnapping you, or something like that.’

I took Incent back to our lodgings. He was really in a pitiable condition, fevered with Rhetoric, for he had not been able to let loose all the words that were in him.

I sat him down and said to him, ‘I am sorry, Incent, but I have to do it.’

‘I know I deserve it,’ he said, with satisfaction.

Total Immersion it had to be, then. ‘I shall cause you actually to live through the horrors of the events I described to Calder in the court,’ I said.

I made him a metalworker in Paris, not in the depths of poverty, of course, because it is essential for a revolutionary of a certain type to be free from the worst of hunger and cold and the responsibilities of a family. The most energetic revolutionaries are always middle-class, since they can give their full time to the business. He met with others like himself in a hundred poor places, foundries, cafés, dens of every sort, made speeches and listened to them, ran through the streets with mobs shouting out words: Death … Blood … Liberty … Freedom … Down with … To the Guillotine with … He greedily assimilated every bit of news about the King and the Queen, the court, the priests. He was like a conduit for words, words, words, he was in a permanent high fever of Rhetoric, he fell under the spell of all the wonder-workers, the hypnotizers of the public. Then, as words took power completely, and the madness of words had all Paris in its grip, he ran with tumbrils to the places of ritual murder, he shouted filth and abuse at King, Queen, aristocrats, he screamed hatred at former allies like Madame (We-can-be-reborn-only-through-blood) Roland, and soon he was screaming with the mob as former idols fell. It was he who was the loudest, the most vociferous, as Paris exulted in the details of cruelty. When the Parisians, on the call of the Commune, broke into the nine prisons and for five days killed in cold blood fourteen hundred people, it was he who carried Danton’s message when told of this: ‘To hell with the prisoners, they must look after themselves.’ And he killed, and killed, always chanting as he did, ‘To the death with … death death death …’ After the killing had exhausted itself, and people were sickened, he sang sentimental songs about the fate of the murdered, and ran about the city like a rat or a beetle because running and shouting had him in their power and he was unable to stop. And when the new tyrant took power, he ran and shouted and praised, ‘Up with … Glory to …’ He struggled and lied his way into the armies of the tyrant, for he was now no longer a fervent, handsome, eloquent youth, but a rather fat man bloated with words and indulgence and cruelties, and he marched with armies into country after country, murdering and raping. And, finally, he went with the armies on the tyrant’s last war of conquest, which failed, and he died of starvation in the snow with thousands of others, still mouthing words, abuse of the people whose country he had invaded.

And returned to himself, sitting in the chair opposite me, blinking and staring as the reality of his present situation became stronger than the life he had just left.

He began to weep. First almost silently, sitting there with blank, frantic eyes, water pouring from them, and then with abandon, lying in his chair, his face in the crook of his arm.

I left him there and went out into the streets. Everything seemed as usual. That is to say, the better places of the city – gardens, restaurants, cafés – were full of Volyens, and the Volyenadnans crowded the back streets, with their cafés and clubs. There seemed no more of the armed patrols than usual. In the Residency, a single light burned high up.

I looked in at Incent: he was asleep in his chair.

I walked across the square to the Residency and asked to see Governor-General Grice. I was informed that he had unexpectedly left for Volyen.

I left messages for Calder in all the places I knew he frequented that I was available if he wanted to talk to me, and waited for several days; nothing happened. I listened to Incent, who needed to tell me about the life he had just lived: the fever had – only temporarily, I am afraid – left him. Nothing burning and inspired about these halting, fumbling, painful words. He was shuddering and trembling, sometimes rigid with horror at what he had seen and at what he had done.

But I need to go to Volyen itself, that is clear. I cannot give Incent any more time to recover. Giving him choice – as, of course, I have to do, even when it would be so dangerous for him now to make the wrong one-I told him that he could go with me or stay with Krolgul. But at Krolgul’s name he shuddered.

We are leaving at once.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM VOLYENDESTA.

I dropped in here on my way to Volyen, to see Ormarin.

The Sirian presence is very strong. Roads, bridges, harbours are everywhere being built. Everywhere are the camps of the slave labourers. In the skies are positioned Sirian craft of all kinds. There is nothing to be heard but talk of the coming Sirian invasion. Sirius, Sirius, they say. But who is Sirius? While I was there the spacecraft all vanished, leaving the skies empty, and reappeared the next day. Some shift of power on the Mother Planet. But they know nothing on Volyendesta of the struggle there; for them it is simply ‘Sirius.’

Ormarin, our main hope, is in hospital! A setback! His medication could have been better judged. They subjected him to Benign Immersion, choosing five different historical episodes, all aspects of the conquest of the weaker by Empires at the height of their outward sweep. All short-lived Empires, and all from Shikasta at the time of their numerous and so short-lived Empires based in the Northwest fringes. Since it was Benign Immersion, he was not a participator in events, only an observer, but I am sorry to say that this course of treatment has plunged him into a state of mind that is only slightly better than Incent’s condition of Undulant Rhetoric. Ormarin sits at the top of the hospital, gazing out over the desert weeping, and in the grip of a severe attack of What Is the Point-ism, or The Futility of All Effort.

‘Come, take hold of yourself, man!’ I exhorted. ‘Pull yourself together! You know quite well the Sirians, or somebody, will attack soon, and here you are in such a feeble condition.’

‘I don’t care,’ said he. ‘What is the point? We will fight them – or not; we will struggle against them once they are here – or not; we will die in our thousands – millions – in any case. Those poor wretches, the Sirian slave labourers, will die in their millions, since that is their function. We Volyendestans will die. And then the Sirian Empire will collapse, since all Empires do sooner or later –’

‘In this case, very much sooner than later,’ I interrupted.

‘And then? Another example for the history books of a failed enterprise, a uselessness, something accomplished in blood and suffering which would have been better never attempted …

He went on like this for some time, and I listened appreciatively, for seldom have I been able to hear such a classic case of this condition, with all the verbal formulations that are the most easily recognized symptoms, so beautifully and elegantly expressed.

In fact, I was having the interview recorded for the use of the doctors.

But what I had been hoping was that I could take him with me to Volyen to assist me with poor Incent.

The doctors assure me that Ormarin will soon be himself again, and ready to play his part in our celestial charade – a phrase he repeats over and over again. I find it quite an attractive one, appealing to those aspects in me which I know my immersion in these events is designed to cure or at least to make more easily controllable.

‘This celestial theatre of yours,’ said Ormarin, his honest face full of the exhaustion that is the result of an overindulgence in irony, ‘this peep show for the connoisseurs of futility! This play staged by planets and constellations for the benefit of, one presumes, observers whose palate needs ever and ever stronger stimulation by the absurd –’

‘Ormarin,’ I said, ‘you may be ill, our good doctors may have overdone things a bit with you, but I do have to congratulate you on at the very least an increase of overall understanding, a widening of perspective. I look forward very much to working with you when you are a bit better.’

He nodded sombrely, his eyes fixed on visions of ghostly conquering armies destroying all before them, these armies almost at once being swept away and vanishing, to be replaced by …

I remember I myself suffered a prolonged and intense attack of this condition, and while it caused those responsible for me – you among them, of course, Johor – a lot of trouble, I can report that it is not without its consolation. There is a proud, locked-in melancholy that accompanies the contemplation of what must appear to the infant-mind as futility, which is really quite pleasurable. Very well, then, remarks this philosophical spectator of cosmic events, immobilized by cosmic perspective, and addressing the Cosmos itself; very well, then, if you are going to be like that, be it on your own head, then! And you fold your arms, lean back in your chair, fix a sardonic smile on your face, and half close your eyes, ready to watch a comet crash into a pleasant enough little planet, or another planet engulfed by – let’s say – a Sirian moment of expansion due to a need for some mineral or commodity, a mistaken need, as it turns out, the whole thing a miscalculation on the part of the economists.

‘I’ll see you soon, Ormarin,’ I said. ‘On the whole I’m very pleased with you. You are coming along nicely.’

But he has brought himself to ask, ‘Very well, then! If you are not Volyen, if you are not Sirius, who are you, with your authoritative ways?’ When I mention Canopus – rarely – his eyes slide: he doesn’t want, finally and definitely, to know.

FROM KLORATHY, IN VATUN ON VOLYEN, TO JOHOR.

I went at once to see poor Incent. It had not been easy to find the right place for his recovery. What he needed was an absence of stimulation. But on present-day Volyen, where even the most secluded rural retreat will at any moment begin to vibrate to the din of machines or of recorded or transmitted noise? One of our friends runs a hotel in the centre of Vatun. Yes, it was in the capital itself that I was able to arrange what I was looking for. A large room in the heart of the building, well insulated, and above all without apertures into the outside world. As you will remember, Vatun is full of parks and gardens, though they are perhaps not as well kept as they were at the height of Volyen’s power, and I wanted above all to protect Incent from the debilitating thoughts inevitably aroused by the processes of nature. The cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death, the transmutation of one element into another, the restlessness of it all – no, these were not for Incent, not in his condition. The slightest stimulation of any unhealthy kind was contraindicated.

I told our friend the proprietor, in the letter I sent by Incent, that of course no force of any kind was to be used, but that Incent would probably be only too ready to accept bland and unstimulating surroundings.

And so I found him. Leaving behind the crash and the grind, the shouting and singing and screaming of Vatun’s streets, and the disturbing thoughts inevitably aroused by Vatun’s gardens, I entered – perfect silence. I approached a tall white door at the end of a thickly carpeted corridor, opened it, found a tall white room, and Incent, lolling in a deep chair, gazing at the blank ceiling. In this haven of a room there was not one natural object, not so much as a thread of plant fibre in a carpet or the bed coverings, not a reminder of the animal world in the form of skins or parts of them, not so much as a flower or a leaf. What perfect peace. I myself was much in need of a rest after adjusting my inner balances, which had been, I must confess, disturbed by the philosophical torments of Ormarin, and I sank into a recliner near Incent and gazed with him at the whiteness all around, and listened with him to – nothing.

‘I shall never leave here!’ said Incent. ‘Never! I shall live out my life within these four walls, tranquil, alone, and doing no harm to anyone.’

I did not bother to reply.

‘When I think of the horrors I have seen and been part of – when I …’ And tears flooded from his great dark eyes.

‘Now, Incent,’ I said, and offered a selection of the soothing and useful phrases I had so recently offered Ormarin.

‘No. I’ve learned what I am capable of. I’ve decided I’m going to apply to go home. But first I have two things I must do. One is, I must apologize to Governor Grice.’

‘Ah.’

‘And second, I want to find Krolgul and … and …

‘And what, Incent?’

‘I thought – I would like to have a try at reforming him.’

‘Ah.’

A long silence.

‘Well, as you know,’ I said, ‘you can do whatever you feel you have to. That is the law. Freedom. Of choice. If you feel it is your destiny to reform Shammat, not to mention Puttiora, then …

‘And now you are laughing at me! It isn’t kind!’

‘Ah, well,’ I said, ‘perhaps it is too soon. In my view you should stay here a bit longer and have a nice rest. I wish I could do the same. But if you want to leave, then of course you may.’

I left then myself, noting with relief that Incent stayed where he was. If a reclining position, feet on the same level as the head, can be called heroic, then Incent’s approached the heroic: arms folded defiantly, chin confronting the ceiling, feet at attention.

After I left the hotel, through a lobby all excitement and noise – a trade delegation from the Sirian HQ on their planet Motz were just leaving, looking pleased with themselves – I walked straight into the park opposite. Some freely wandering gazelles came to greet me. They originate, as it happens, from Shikasta, stolen by Sirius and presented as part of a state gift. They licked my hands and nuzzled them, and I knew my emotional apparatus was nearly at Overload. Plant life in every stage of growth. The songs of birds. In short, the usual assault on one’s stabilizing mechanisms. So hard did I find it to keep my emotional balance that I nearly went back into the hotel to join Incent.

Oh, the glamour of the natural life! The deceptions of the instinctual! The beguilements of all that pulses and oscillates! How I do yearn for Canopus and for its … but enough of that. Forgive my weakness.

I was, of course, on my way to Krolgul, and in fact had nearly gone to him first, before Incent.

Shammat has set up on Volyen a School of Rhetoric. This is along the lines of the very successful School of Rhetoric that flourished for so long under Tafta on Shikasta during its latter days, positioned there to take advantage of the emanations from the Religions and Politics. But when Tafta made his miscalculation and backed the wrong junta on Shammat, the school on Shikasta was neglected and became useless. It was Krolgul who studied the history of that school, and who applied to the new Lords of Shammat to try to make one work on Volyen. It has been in operation since just after your visit here, fattening on the effluvia from the turbulences of Sirius.