The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

But not a word can be got from them of an excitatory, inspirational, provocative, rhetorical kind.

It might be said – is said, and often enough by the Five – that this is slamming the reactor door after the electrons have escaped.

For meanwhile, the whole Sirian Empire is in a fervour of words and phrases and slogans, all originating from the Five in their idealistic and Virtuous phase, now disowned by them; all of Sirius is word-fevered, and it expands desperately, frantically, partly because the sober and tempered guidance of the Five is now absent, and their successors are supported only by an idea of themselves as Rulers, an idea with nothing solid underpinning it, partly because expansions of Empires have their own momentum, partly because the present rulers of Sirius-a hotchpotch and a rag-bag and a miscegeny and a rag-galaxy if ever there was one-are the prisoners of their own Rhetoric and can no longer distinguish between fact and their own fictions.

And the word formulations they use are all, because of the period when the influence of the Five conduced to convictions of Virtue, of the most high-flown, simpering, sentimental, nauseating kind you can bring to mind, all based on the rewards of Virtue. I must say that I thought, before this visit to Volyen, I had suffered the worst that was possible in the line of verbal effluvia.

At the time of your visit – so recently, even in Volyen terms – the young of the expanding upper and middle classes all were educated for, dreamed of, and found a place in the administrative machinery of the Empire. Education matched expectation, expectation matched achievement.

But for the last thirty years, since the last war, when Volyen fought a dissident group from Sirius which planned to use this weakening Empire as a possession from which to begin its own adventure in Empire – fought and won, but at heavy cost, because that ‘victory’ in fact weakened it and left it unable to recover – since then, the educated youth have had to face a very difficult future. Yet the education is still largely based on the past: that is, on a conviction of Volyen moral superiority over lesser breeds. Year after Volyen year, the youngsters emerge from the training establishments with all the equipment, practical but mostly moral, for running, administering, advising, ruling others, and find their occupation gone. Also, because of the savagery of the war with the Sirian dissident group, because of the lying propaganda on both sides, so soon to be exposed by ‘life itself,’ these successive generations of the youth have had a valuable but painful education in de-conditioning, in the use of their minds in analyzing propaganda, that of their own side as well as that of any enemy.

It was as a result of that war that a new mode or pitch or style came to characterize the training establishments of the young on Volyen, one that would previously have been impossible. It was a savage and angry criticism of their own elders, but a cynical criticism as if nothing else could be expected. It was a sneer expressed not only in the tones of a voice, but in characteristic shrugs of the shoulders, a superior tightening of the lips accompanied by a nod and the lowering of eyelids, as if to shield the associate or accomplice from the tedium of thoughts whose banality of course was not one degree better than has to be expected. The flavour of course pervaded these interchanges. Of course this incompetence, this indifference to public good, this venality, this corruption; of course the lies of skilled and cynical propagandists had to be expected. But not endured … For over the horizon, no farther than the next star and its friendly planets, was Sirius. Sirius the new civilization. Sirius the great and the good, the hope of the Galaxy. For the absolute readiness to see nothing but evil in Volyen was matched by a need to see everything good in Sirius.

And the Sirian agents, everywhere even then, noted this new mood among the youth, the future class of public administrators (though few of them would in fact find such work in the dwindling Empire of Volyen), and reported to the representatives of Sirius on the near planets, who then reported to Sirius (in the hands of the junta who had supplanted the Five) that the entire youth of Volyen, sickened by the flagrant corruption of the ruling class, revolted by the depredations of their Empire (you will recall that Sirius was again in the grip of fantasies about its own nature as a ruling power, and saw itself only as a source of virtues), were only too ready to betray their planet and become agents of Sirius. This without money, for the most part; without reward, other than that of a conviction of Duty well done; and purely out of idealism and love of Progress and Future Harmonious Development, not only of local galactic populations, but of peoples through the Universe … You will forgive me if from time to time I seem infected by the style.

That war of thirty V-years ago was truly horrible. A developing technology introduced new and awful weapons. The Sirian Rhetorics, and the Rhetorics used as counterforces by Volyen, were sickening. On Volyen there is a time when the young are able to see through local Rhetorics, though this is usually for only a short period before they have to earn a living and thus to conform; before they can be accepted as members of a governing class – and thus must conform; and now, when there is so small a governing class to belong to, before they join one or another of the innumerable political groups, each with its own Rhetoric, which they cannot afford to criticize, for if they do they will forfeit membership in the group, which is their social base, the only base they have for friendship. For Volyens, evolved so recently from animal groupings, for the most part cannot function outside groups, packs, herds, and each of these has its own verbal formulations which are sacred; they can be changed, but only with difficulty, and while they are being accepted cannot be questioned.

Rhetoric rules these youngsters again, when they have sought to escape from it. Shedding the Rhetoric of Empire, which they are prepared to analyze with acumen and to reject with scorn and contempt, they become prisoners of the Rhetoric of oppositional groups whose only aim is to become, in their turn, rulers who will govern through Rhetoric. Through the formulation and manipulations of words.

Sirius, skilled in group psychology, in manipulation, in the uses of ideology, knew how to subvert the young people at just that moment in their lives when they had turned their powerful youthful scorn on the Rhetorics they were refusing.

On Volyen these youngsters became Sirian agents in considerable numbers. This, long before it became part of the public consciousness that Sirius was a real physical threat, might actually physically invade and conquer; though why it was so difficult for Volyens to accept that it is hard to say, since they had themselves overrun and stolen other planets so recently. No, how these young people saw themselves was not ‘I am paving the way for an invasion by Sirius,’ which struck them as a laughable idea; but ‘I stand for the noble true, and beautiful ideas of Sirius, which will transform this shoddy and pitiful and corrupt and lying Volyen into something not far from a paradise. These ideas will abolish the already disintegrating Empire of Volyen, and the sooner the better, for empires are wicked and disgusting. Sirius stands for the ever-upward march of evolving galaxies. Sirius means Justice! Truth! Freedom!’ (And so on ad nauseam.)

While hundreds of thousands of ‘the flower of Volyen youth’ have been dreaming of the virtues of Sirius, the fact is that this Empire is at this stage as brutish a tyranny as we have ever seen. At various times of expansion in the past, Sirius has simply decided that a certain planet would suit its purposes, sent in its armies, established a ruling base, exterminated those who resisted, and adjusted the economic conditions to its advantage. But under the influence of all this ‘Virtue,’ the pattern has become more like this. A planet lying somewhere in the path of expansion becomes next in the line of conquest. Agents and spies enter it in all kinds of guises and spread information about the advantage of Sirian rule. This operation is a mixture of purest cynicism and purest muddleheadedness and creates maniacs by the planet-load, for it is necessary both to know that the conditions you are describing conform to the classic descriptions of tyranny anywhere at any time, and yet to believe that these constitute ‘Virtue.’ Local populations ‘believe’ at first in these fairy tales about Sirius to a greater or lesser extent. When Sirius invades, there is a core of believers ready to commit any crimes against their own people for the sake of ‘Virtue.’ They form part of the new ruling machinery. Some, if not most, soon become disillusioned as they see what horrors are being perpetrated around them, and these are at once murdered. Others, blinding themselves, become willing tools of Sirius. The wealth of the colonized planet becomes available to Sirius. This process, of course, is nothing like the well-planned, thought-out processes during the times of the Five, who at least understand long-term planning of an economic kind, if nothing higher. No, all is muddle, confusion, inefficiency. Miserable exploited populations, refused any means of protesting, have to listen to the chants of self-praise of the Sirians and their local captive minds. Anyone who tries to use language accurately to describe what is in fact happening vanishes into torture rooms and prisons or, diagnosed as mad, into mental hospitals. There is soon a sharp division between the masses and the small, obedient governing class, one living in direct poverty, the other given every advantage. A major occupation is the fabrication of verbal formulations to disguise this very ancient organization of a country and to describe it as some sort of Utopia; a large part of the time and energy of the administration is concerned with nothing else.

That is the truth of all the Sirian colonies near Volyen. They can be described as prison planets. If this Report were to be stretched to twenty times its length, I could not begin to give an idea of the suffocating, lying, claustrophobic atmospheres of such planets: the poverty, the misery, the exploitation of every possible resource for the benefit of Sirius.

Meanwhile, on Volyen, a thousand groups of energetic, educated youngsters base their hopes for the future on the Sirian rule; and, as every year the training establishments spill out their occupants, they form new groups, new societies, new parties, all with one idea, to make Volyen ‘like Sirius,’ though each group chooses a different example from the near planets to use as inspiration. For, of course, information comes out from the Sirian slave planets about their real condition; unable to jettison the dream, these groups will at once change the formulations and announce that such-and-such a planet has unfortunately ‘left the correct path’ but that another planet, probably just conquered (so that news of its real condition has not yet come out), is now the inspiration for all.

And the generation of Volyens who became agents for Sirius have become middle-aged or old. Everywhere through the administration of Volyen are people who became agents to one degree or another, and who then, through the processes of ‘life itself,’ saw what a nightmare they had been so anxious to introduce into Volyen. Some fled to one of the Sirian colonies, knowing they would get favoured treatment, even if it was only the comfort and contentment allotted to an imprisoned animal whose function it is to provide some kind of nourishment for its owners. Some were caught and imprisoned. Some were found out – and were not punished; for it was soon discovered how widespread was this weakness of the Volyen governing fabric and how many would have to be exposed, thus advertising everywhere the extent of the weakness. Some were never found out, but lived out their lives – still live out their lives – in dread of being discovered. But the citizens of Volyen are only beginning to suspect how many of their trusted rulers were ready to betray them, to the extent that even their secret services, whose first task, of course, is to keep a watch on the ever-expanding Empire of Sirius, were full of Sirian agents; to the extent that at a certain point the head of these secret services was a Sirian agent …

And so – there it is, this fact that I think is perhaps of the most interest. It is here that we have this phenomenon – I believe unique, for I cannot remember another case of it, either in our Archives or in anything that has come to our notice from Sirius in the past – of an Empire (Volyen) being sapped and weakened by the thousands of its citizens who admire one of the worse tyrannies the Galaxy has ever seen; admire it not for its tyranny, but for its idealism, its ‘Virtue.’ The irony is that Volyen itself – not its colonies, which it has always reduced and enslaved – is rather a pleasant place. The extremes of poverty have been abolished, and you would not see now, Johor, if you were to pay a visit, streets full of people with all the obvious marks on them of hunger and illness. You would not see children ill-fed and cold. Nowhere is to be seen what you wrote of so sorrowfully, the use of children as labour in conditions that meant they must die, the use of females in cruel occupations. No, for just this small space of time, no more than a few of their decades, Volyen has been, still is, a place where there is adequate if not perfect health care, adequate education, enough food for everyone, shelter of some kind for most. And above all, an absence of that immediate oppression that keeps the Sirian colonies in sullen quiet, afraid to use words to describe anything at all as they actually see it.

This rather pleasant, if recently achieved and of course temporary condition, is what their idealistic youth long to overthrow.

And their idealistic ex-youth. Like Governor Grice, who came to adulthood at the height of the recent war and was appalled at the propaganda, first of the Sirian would-be invaders, and then of his own side, for he found it cynical and opportunistic. Who then, looking around him at Volyen’s treatment of her colonies, felt he had been tricked and betrayed – by words cunningly deployed against him. Who then, meeting a member of his peer group who had become a Sirian agent, agreed to ‘give information, but only what I choose to give, mind, and when I choose!’ (This formulation is only possible to a young male member of a ruling caste accustomed to choosing his times and his places.) Who, at last, finding himself deeper and deeper in the toils of Sirius, and learning of the real conditions in one after another of the Sirian near-colonies, gave himself up to his superiors for punishment. ‘Do with me what you will. I deserve it.’ They, recognizing a state of mind that afflicted at least some of their number, reflected, decided it was a pity to waste his real qualities, and made him first a minor functionary in their colonial administration, and then Governor. Thus Governor Grice, Greasy Grice, came into being.

But he has had to be sustained by salutary incidents. Such as visits from a certain Trade Representative, at whom Grice has learned to gaze as if into a horrible mirror, for an attractive and affable companion alternates with another, a writhing misery of a man, who begs Grice for sympathetic understanding. ‘That’s all I want,’ he cries in the moments when he is not being the social adept; it is amazing how fast the two souls can switch places inside the carefully maintained flesh and well-tailored clothes of the spy. ‘All I need is to talk to someone who understands me, and what a hell I live in! But you know what I mean.’

This is a Sirian agent who was trained to undo Volyen in any way he could. Picked as suitable material from an elite school on his own planet and sent to the Sirian Mother Planet for training, he was then instructed to make himself at home on Volyen, to insinuate himself into high places – and so on and so forth, as usual. Energetic, clever, ambitious, and above all dedicated, he pleased his superiors and delighted himself with his accomplishments. Meanwhile, he enjoyed life on Volyen, so agreeable a contrast to the gloomy fanaticisms of Sirian rule. It was some V-years before, as he described it to Grice, ‘all at once and in a single moment’ the scales fell from his eyes. What was he doing, trying to destroy these amiable if feckless people, this pleasant if declining and badly organized society, in order to introduce the hideousness – as he now recognized it – of the Sirian Empire? He broke down. He suffered. Unable to confess to his own side, who would of course have had him murdered at once in the name of the Virtue, he confessed to the secret services of his host country, who were sympathetic with his moral predicament and who, when offered his talents, not to mention his ‘total dedication,’ as a double agent, temporized. Like so many of his opposite numbers in the Volyen services, he was left in a condition of wondering whether he was, or was not, ‘really’ a double agent. Meanwhile, he was indeed being found useful by his confidants, in keeping people like Grice up to the mark.

Grice suffers bad times when he wonders whether he is a big enough person to sustain the ambiguities of his position. A Governor who hates governing; a Volyen who loves Volyen at home but not abroad; an admirer of the Virtue, but only in an abstract, pure, and ideal way, for never yet has the Virtue been applied on any planet in a way that deserves the name; a hater of Sirian Virtue, not to mention the Virtue of the Sirian colonies …

At such moments, when he tells himself that it is all too much for him, a visit from X never fails to convince him his own position is a paradise in comparison. ‘This is your pal, Mr X,’ is how he announces himself to Grice, who has to shudder, not least because he wonders how ‘they’ seem so infallibly to sense when he is low in spirits.

Grice is now on Volyen, demanding to be heard ‘at the highest possible level.’ This high level, recognizing that, indeed, it would probably be to their advantage to see Grice, is engaged in checking him out from the point of view of possible renewed defection: once an agent, always an agent, is how they see it. Besides, it is known to them that he has been observed in disguise at meetings of Calder and his men.

He is sending in one message after another, as he hovers in outside offices. ‘It is Urgent! You should hear me At Once! There is a Critical Situation!’

Krolgul has found all this out and is brooding about how to use the situation for his ends.

KLORATHY ON VOLYEN, TO JOHOR.

Yes, my information confirms yours. We may expect a Sirian invasion of Volyen earlier than we thought, but by which planet?

I have been following Grice, as I did Incent on Volyenadna: Grice has been no less fevered in his efforts. But Grice has been leaving a very different trace. Trying to ascertain from person after person what Grice is planning, I have had to conclude not only that he is disordered mentally, but that everyone can see that he is.

This has meant that his old colleagues, responsible for his being Governor, and who are mostly in the same delicate position vis-à-vis Sirius, have dealt with him by making excuses. Yes, yes, their attitude has been, what brilliant ideas he has brought with him for the well-being of Volyenadna; meanwhile, why doesn’t he enjoy a pleasant holiday away from the provincial tediums of that planet?

Unable to make anyone in his own generation listen to him, Grice is now approaching one after another of the revolutionary groups that are his generation’s successors.

I at last met up with him in a small town in the north of Volyen. He sent invitations to the Virtuous Party, the Party of Real Virtue, the Party for the Support of Sirian Virtue, the Party of Opposition to Sirian Virtue, the Friends of Alput (the Sirian CP 93), the Enemies of Alput, the Friends of Motz (the Sirian CP 104). These groups, every one of which is devoted to the future well-being and good government of Volyen, spend all their time quarrelling viciously among themselves.

When I arrived at Grice’s hotel room, he thought I was the last of a long stream of young revolutionaries, and simply went on with a speech that he had been delivering for hours.

Striding up and down the room, his lank, pale hair flopping over a face inflamed with emotion, his pale eyes gleaming, gesticulating wildly, he was painting a picture (accurate) of the sufferings of the Volyenadnans, and (inaccurate) of the successes of ‘dedicated experts on colonial revolutions from Sirius.’ Meaning Incent.

‘Grice,’ I kept having to say. ‘Grice, come down to earth. I am Klorathy. We saw each other there, don’t you remember?’

He did and he didn’t. He came stooping towards me, blinking and peering, literally vibrating all over from the effects of having to stop in the middle of his verbal self-stimulation. Then he sank into a supine position.

I talked and talked, more or less at random, until he was able to listen, and then I put to him that:

We, Canopus, could cause to arrive in Volyenadna everything necessary to start a new agriculture. In a very short time that poor planet would be enabled to feed itself adequately and be able to export as well. This would have all kinds of important consequences. He, Governor Grice, could cause the Volyen rule to be associated with this beneficial development, but he would have to be quick about getting the approval of his superiors.

He came, minimally, to life – ‘Them? You’re joking!’ – and slumped back into enjoyable gloom. ‘Rotten, hopeless, decadent …

I let him run on for a while, and said, ‘Very well, but do you want these improvements – which would amount to a revolution of a kind – to be associated with a Sirian influence?’

This caused him to stiffen all over, in fright and shock; then to lift his head cautiously and give me a swift glance, and then lie rigid again.

He said nothing. But he was searching for a suitable formulation.

I had been hoping the shock would bring out of him some news of his exact involvement with Sirius, but it did not.

At last he said: ‘Well, there’d be plenty of people glad enough if that happened …’ And he burst into shrill laughter, then tears. For his conflict over Sirius was profound, even worse than I had feared ‘… You have no idea how many people – I’ve been meeting them all day and every day since I came. It’s strange, isn’t it, we know exactly what Sirius is capable of now, but all the same it’s as if they don’t want to know.’ And again the reaction of mixed laughter and tears. ‘Oh, I know what you are thinking, I was taken in by it all long enough, but at least I …

What I want to know, of course, is exactly the hold Sirius has over him. Is he held by blackmail? I think not. It seems to me the ruling class of Volyen, when it discovered the extent of its servants’ subordination by Sirius, and how many were being blackmailed, simply took the power out of that threat by telling the same servants: Very well, you come clean about what you’ve promised Sirius, what hold they have over you, and we will stand by you – that will dish them, in ways they’ve never even imagined! For they are not the sort to stand by their own in similar circumstances, not at all; more likely that any hapless employee of theirs would get a knife in the back some dark night, or a dose of poison. An ‘accident’ … No, I can see that Sirius, after so long and so skilled a process of involving hundreds of key Volyens in their plots, and then finding that Volyen had foiled them in this way, must have been at least temporarily nonplussed. Probably admiring too. Yes, I think I can imagine Sirius admiring their opponents’ cheek in this game. For what tricks and traps and toils and snares were revealed then! And what nets and snares were left unrevealed! For some agents would have confessed all to Volyen; some part; some not at all; some falsely. Probably some highly placed ones would also have believed that, once they had confessed to youthful folly – ‘Please, I didn’t know what I was doing’ – and been forgiven, there was an end to it, only to discover later on that it was not an end at all! Sirius might say, ‘Yes, but you didn’t confess that to them, did you? What will they think now if you say you simply forgot? You plan to say you didn’t know anything about it? How naive you are! Or how culpably careless!’ Sirius might say, ‘Yes, but now that we are poised to invade, now that we are all around you, what do you feel about having betrayed us, who represent your real allegiances, to them, who are due only a sentimental loyalty? Shortsighted, wouldn’t you say? No, no, we go in for the long perspective, the historical view. We’ll give you another chance, if you will agree to …’ Sirius might say, ‘You thought we’d forgotten all about you! But Sirius never forgets! Very well, but you know all we can do in the ways of punishments, don’t you? And you’ll feel the full weight of them unless you …