The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Thanks,’ said he, histrionically. ‘What equipment I’ve got, then!’

  ‘Well, who chose it, Incent? No, I don’t want to hear any complaints that you think free will is a mistake. What do you suppose the difference is between them and us? It is that you choose.’

  A long silence, while some youth chanted: ‘And what is there to prevent this paradise? We all know there is nothing! In our soil lies the wealth of harvests and of minerals …

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you’d better keep me under your eye for the time being, hadn’t you?’

  I took him back to the hotel, and I do not need to say with what relief we entered the wonderful, all-artificial, cool, stimulus-free white room.

  And there we have been resting. Side by side on the recliners. I, on my back, he prone and staring at the dull black of the flooring through the lattices of the chair, we recovered together. It was as silent as in a cave deep under the earth, as silent as if we floated in the black spaces between galaxies. The tall slim room reached up into the building, and at its top was a place of quiet light.

  At first you are allowed only glimpses of circles, triangles, squares, all a luminous white on flat white, and the shapes darken, turn grey and then duller grey on a white that begins to shine, though softly. These statements of order remain, so that the eye may travel, but resting, soothed, reassured; soon, however, the mind begins to protest against changelessness, longs for relief, and as you understand that this is your thought – a hunger transmuted from a sharp need into the passionless stuff of the mind – the eye is in movement again because up there, at the very tip of the dim shaft, it is not polygons but polyhedrons you are trying to encompass with your gaze. They stand there, as it were waiting in the air, but their solidity is not yet defined and heavy, and you still believe it is a hexagon or an octagon that is enticing your gaze up into itself. But no, there is mass, and there is weight on the faintly gleaming white. Silence and stillness, no movement at all, for a long time, a long … And then again, when the restless eye begins to demand change, movement there is, tetrahedrons are changing into octahedrons, and then – dazzlingly! – into those charmers icosahedrons, which transform themselves into icosi-dodecahedrons, and it seems as if high above you in the tapering dimnesses of your own mind roll spheres that have within them all the luminaries, solid and plane, so that dodecagons tease star polygons, and a decagon may merge into a dodecahedron which resolves into a pentagon which opts, modestly, for the condition of being a cube. Though not for long …

  Infinitely refreshed, I suggested to Incent that he might turn over and look. He did so, but at once groaned out, ‘Snowflakes!’ and flipped back again, to lie face down.

  I continued to amuse myself with the mathematical game, and altered the controlling mechanisms from Automatic to Manual, so that I could at will move from the plane into the multi-dimensional and back again, for no sooner had I decided that I could never be seduced from the fascination of the dance of the polyhedrons, than I knew that I could contemplate for ever a ceiling that had become flat and decorated luminously with the patternings and intricacies of the interlacing polygons.

  While I was returning to myself, Incent was also recovering, or at least showing signs of wanting to. ‘I have been thinking about Governor Grice,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘Do you have to? You really do have no sense at all of your boundaries, Incent!’

  ‘Oh. Is that it? Is that what’s wrong with me?’ At the idea that there was some hope of a diagnosis he brightened: it is quite extraordinary how these children of Rhetoric are comforted by the word.

  When I did not say anything, he said, ‘Oh, Klorathy, when I think of how unjust I was. After all, Grice was only doing what he had to do. And yet I was wanting to punish him as an individual.’

  ‘Incent,’ I said, ‘if you’d only do your homework – Do you do it? Do you in fact study what has been set for you? Because there are no indications in your speech or behaviour that you do anything of the sort! If you did, you’d know that when individuals or groups or associations of groups are made exemplar for the populace, they are always blackened and vilified before the ritual sacrifice. After all, you could even look at it as a sign of decency, or of the embryonic beginnings of justice, that it is so hard to get people to kill – even in hot blood – other people who they think are only doing their duty, though misguidedly. No, they have to be told that Grice is Greasy, and that Klorathy is Cruel, and that Incent is –’

  ‘There is something very stale and boring about that,’ said he, turning over suddenly and lying with his forearm across his eyes, ready to shield them, but gazing into the intricate patternings above us.

  ‘You mean the words are stale,’ I said. ‘You have heard them a thousand times in our schools. But they do not seem to affect the behaviour, certainly have had little effect on yours, so the idea isn’t. When you enthusiasts and revolutionaries can withstand Krolgul and refuse to allow yourselves to be whipped into lathers of self-righteousness at slogans like Grice the Greasy, then you can use words like stale –’

  ‘I wish I could go and apologize to him.’

  ‘There is nothing stopping you.’

  ‘Why do you put this terrible burden on us?’

  ‘Why is this burden placed upon us all?

  ‘You too, of course. I forgot.’

  ‘All of us.’

  ‘Why, it is too much. We are not fit. I am not fit. Oh, no …’ And he shut his eyes, away from a vision in the cool shade above of how a pattern of star octagons shifted from the flat into the three-dimensional, and back, lines and planes of dark grey on light grey, then a slight, fine black on shadow that was white only because a sharper white did not lie close enough to contrast with it and contradict. White upon white, or white that was as if a subtle warmth had been withdrawn, a world of strict and formal shapes lived in the spaces beneath the ceiling, which was itself unbounded, seemed to dissolve into nothing.

  ‘Oh, yes, we are,’ I said. ‘Everyone of us has felt exactly like you.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And Johor too – and everyone?’

  His incredulity echoed mine. For of course I find it hard to believe that you, Johor, were ever so feeble, as Incent does of me.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘You’ll learn, Incent. But in the meantime –’

  ‘You do rather despair of me?’ And his giggle was quite consoling, being full of vitality.

  ‘Oh, you’ll do all right. But in the meantime –’

  ‘You’d rather I didn’t go running after Governor Grice?’

  ‘If that’s what you have to do, it’s what you have to do.’

  ‘Hmm … I can hear that there is something about him I don’t know. What is it?’

  ‘If I were to tell you that in some quarters he is regarded as a Sirian agent, what would you say?’

  He exploded into laughter, a good coarse crude bray of scornful laughter. I felt an increase of optimism about him.

  ‘I suppose I can take it that you are planning to bump him off, or get someone else to, and that you have to blacken him first.’

  ‘Logical thinking,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Oh, don’t laugh at me. They used to tell me at school that I always had to worry any proposition through into its own opposite before I could let it go … Well, is he a Sirian agent?’

  ‘That is one of the things I am here to find out. You, Incent – though I can tell by the sudden change in the set of your shoulders you find the news a disappointment – are not my only responsibility down here. Though I can assure you, there are times when you are quite enough for me … Do you think you can get along for a while by yourself in here, if I go out and do some fact-finding? Johor is waiting for a report.’ He watched me, soberly enough, as I prepared myself to leave. ‘Do you want the ceiling show left switched on?’

  ‘Yes. It makes me think of Canopus.’
r />   ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you trust me to stay here alone, after having made a fool of myself so often?’

  ‘I have no alternative, Incent,’ I said.

  KLORATHY IN VATUN TO JOHOR.

  If you were to pay a visit to Volyen now, Johor, I wonder if you would be struck most by the changes, or the lack of change? You were here when Volyen reached its peak as an Empire, having just conquered PE 70 and PE 71, and before it began falling back in on itself. It was very rich, self-satisfied, proud, complacent. Its public note, or tone, was the liturgic chant of self-praise characteristic of Empires at that stage. New wealth poured in from PE 70 and PE 71; Volyenadna and Volyendesta were already well integrated into the economic whole. The cities of Volyen itself grew and fattened with explosions of population due to an increase of general well-being: Volyen had been poor and backward for a long time, after having been sucked dry during its previous colonial period under Volyenadna. But the cities were horrible contrasts of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, for even at its richest Volyen was not able, was not willing, to keep its labouring classes in decency. These millions came into existence because of an improvement in conditions; but they were not allowed to live any longer than was useful to the privileged classes who employed them.

  This was perhaps the most striking part of your Report, Johor, and one which was used in the Colonial Service classes I was teaching that to illustrate an Empire can be described as wealthy; can increase its wealth many times in a century through loot and plunder; can present an image of itself, far and wide through a galaxy, of splendour and prosperity and growth; yet the bulk of its citizens may still be living as meanly and hopelessly as the most neglected of slaves. These, the poorest classes of Volyen, were worse off than slaves.

  Your Report came out just at the time I was on leave on Canopus, and had undertaken to teach the course on Comparative Empires: Sirius, whose Empire had lasted almost as long as ours; and Volyen’s, whose Empire in comparison is an affair of moments, provided my material. Your Report made the strongest impression on my students, and on me. I was able to base not only single lectures but also subsidiary courses on a single sentence. For instance:

  It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

  What riches we found in that, Johor!

  Well, the complacent rulers of Volyen certainly believed in the image they projected. They saw themselves as kindly, parentally concerned instructors, bringing civilization to the backward populations they were engaged in enslaving and despoiling. And this made them blind to the real feelings that were boiling up under their so tender rule.

  I remember how various stages of the Sirian Empire were used as illustration. In the earliest stage of all, they plundered and stole, murdered and destroyed, and this was done in the name only of the good of the Sirian Mother Planet. No pretence about it! (In the very earliest days of Canopus, we too took what we wanted, and blundered, and wondered why it was everything we touched went wrong and at length failed and collapsed, until we discovered the Necessity and were able to do what we should.) But as Sirius developed, not having found the Necessity, that Empire developed Rhetoric. Each new planet, each attractive new morsel of property, was swallowed to the accompaniment of words, words, words, describing theft as a gift, destruction as development, murder as public hygiene. The patterns of words, ideas, changed as Sirius grew a conscience and agonized through its long ages of change, expanding, then contracting, maintaining a sort of stability; then expanding or contracting again, always, always justifying what they did with new patterns of words. These word patterns never were anything like this: We are taking this planet because we need its wealth of minerals or soil, or labour. No, one way or another the conquest was always described in terms of the benefit to the planet itself.

  The lying Rhetoric of invaders can therefore from one point of view, be looked upon as a tribute to morality …

  I remember that I used Puttiora and its pirate subsidiary, Shammat, as an illustration of the opposite, a frankness about motive that was even attractive compared with this:

  The people of (let’s say) Volyenadna, having voluntarily and enthusiastically agreed to our instructing them in the superior ways of our civilization, basely and treacherously rose against us, and had to be taught a salutary lesson by our heroic soldiers.

  Shammat’s style is, always has been, more this:

  Those dirty rats the Volyenadnans saw us loading up our cargo ships with their new harvest and they tried to set fire to it and murdered our men. So we taught them a jolly good lesson, and they won’t do that again.

  The Volyen cities you described were full of new dignified, imposing public buildings, new prosperous suburbs, newly built forms of public transport, bridges, canals, places of amusement – were full of a self-confidence and vitality, all based on this view of Volyen at that time as ‘the greatest in the Galaxy,’ and this consciousness of possession and dominance was shared even by the poorest female labourer, then likely to die a third of the way through her normal life span because of hard work and overuse as a breeder. A loud, bustling, crude vitality; and, for the most part, these cities were inhabited by people of Volyen stock, amalgams of the original stock, which had bred with Volyenadnans, Volyendestans, the peoples of PE 70 and 71 (Maken and Slovin), to make up ‘We Volyens.’

  What I saw when I went out from the tall room where Incent lay recuperating was, at first sight, not very different from your picture. The great public buildings of Volyen’s proud ‘Empire’ are still there, though shabbied by time. The parks and gardens are generously everywhere, but if you look close the trees are mostly old, and neglect shows in eroding earth and in the dirty waters of lakes and ponds. The prosperous suburbs are now parts of the inner city, for Vatun has spread out and abroad into new, smaller suburbs and meaner dwellings; and the dwellings of the inner city no longer hold single families with complements of servants, but several families each. The factories and workshops of Volyen’s greatness decline, and many stand empty. The general mood is not of unthinking and loud confidence, but, rather, of a puzzled and even querulous uncertainty. And everywhere you see how the Volyens who not so long ago held most positions of public importance are not replaced, often, by the citizens of their subject colonies; and this goes from some of the most prominent to the shopkeepers in the large and the little streets: trade was the motive power of Volyen at its peak, and now it is, increasingly, Volyenadnans and Volyendestans who own shops and organize trade.

  As the ‘Empire’ grew uncertain, and resistance by the subject planets made ruling difficult and in some places impossible; as conditions worsened in the subject planets – so large numbers of their population came ‘home’ to Volyen to share in the wealth that had been plundered from them. As you walk through the streets and parks and squares of Vatun, you see as many aliens as you see Volyens. And perhaps that is the most immediately striking difference that you would see, Johor. As for the other differences, the primary ones, they are less easily described.

  To say: This is an Empire in collapse – that is easy, and we have seen it all a thousand times before. To say: As an Empire collapses, those people who have been displaced and deprived tend to be sucked into the centre – nothing new about that. But each collapsing Empire has its own ‘feel,’ its atmosphere, which cannot be conveyed simply by talking of an uncertainty of will.

  And in this case, of course, it is an Empire that will shortly fall apart as it is taken over by Sirius in a phase of its own implosion – and this brings me to the next and perhaps most important part of this, my Report to you.

  As a consequence of a long contact with us, our slow education of Ambien II, the Sirian Empire developed a crisis of self-examination and questioning about its role, its motives, its function: it trembled on the edge of the real question, the only question: What are we for? The Sirian Empire, in one of its stages of co
ntraction, so that its physical size was a fraction of what it had been at its height, was riven into two main factions, one supporting Ambien II in exile and the other Four who had followed her there. (That ex-ruling junta, the Five, have been in exile not far from here, on their Planet 13, for two S-years, fifty V-years.) This faction demanded an approach to us, to Canopus, with a request for an education in fundamentals, an understanding of the Necessity. Meanwhile, a decision to inquire into the possibilities of acquiring Virtue (their name for it) led to a premature conviction that they were already in possession of the real qualities. This faction, during the (brief) period it was on top, enthusiastically expanded, overrunning not only planets Sirius had previously colonized and abandoned, but planets previously not colonized because they were not thought to be of enough value. But in this new mood of ‘Virtue,’ in which they saw themselves as the bringers of benefits, even second-class and third-class planets have been forced to become reluctant members of the Sirian Empire.

  While Sirius has been seeing itself as the bringer of new benefits, because of its new description of itself, its victims have been unable to distinguish between this fresh expansion of Empire and previous expansions, for all have been accompanied by torrents of self-lauding words, and in fact there has been no difference at all in practice. You will already have noted, of course, that this faction on Sirius illustrates the law to which you drew our attention: A governing class that are victims of their own Rhetoric are not likely to survive for long. The faction opposed to the exiled and imprisoned Five, whose ideas exerted powerful influence even though they, the Five, were unable to see any channels of communication whatever, were not able to combat these ideas, and from one end of the Empire to the other, everyone was chanting slogans about Necessity, and Virtue. But it soon became evident to nearly everyone that nothing had changed: the Empire was in a phase of expansion, and planets were falling victim to savage exploitation, as usual to the accompaniment of Rhetoric. The opponents of the Five, who had been conferring without cease as to the choice of the right words with which to discredit the Five, found that the Five were discredited by life itself, for talking about Virtue had not changed anything. The Five, together again in exile on their Planet 13, understood that they, again and for the thousandth time, had been deceived by their own verbal formulations. This time, however, there was a new influence, namely ours on Ambien II, and this did not cease because we were not in actual physical communication. The Five in their enforced isolation and contemplation of events, came to understand that by being responsible for the use of words that distorted and perverted what Canopus stands for, they had been responsible, because of their misguided and premature advocacy of Canopus, for the discrediting of Canopus; but that this fact did not, could not, change the nature of Canopus and what Canopus could offer. The Five learned to hold fast to the truth that when Sirius was up to it, Canopus was there, would remain ready to instruct. And the Five left it at that, refusing to issue new manifestoes, proclamations, theses, analyses of the situation, which they were always being pressured to do because every kind of clandestine messenger and envoy kept arriving on their planet from dissident groups everywhere in their Empire, and of course there were – and are – plentiful spies as well from the Opposition, mostly wanting to get formulations that can be used for their own purposes, and of course wanting too the benefit of the Five’s many thousands of years of experience. There are also historians, archivists, recorders, and Memories of every sort. So the isolation of the Five is relative.