DORIS LESSING

CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES

Documents relating to

THE SENTIMENTAL AGENTS IN THE VOLYEN EMPIRE

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

KLORATHY, FROM INDEPENDENT PLANET VOLYEN, TO JOHOR ON CANOPUS.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM MOON II OF VOLYEN, VOLYENDESTA.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM MOON I OF VOLYEN, VOLYENADNA.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM VOLYENDESTA.

FROM KLORATHY, IN VATUN ON VOLYEN, TO JOHOR.

KLORATHY IN VATUN TO JOHOR.

KLORATHY ON VOLYEN, TO JOHOR.

KLORATHY ON VOLYENADNA, TO JOHOR.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR. FROM VOLYEN.

REPORT FROM AM 5.

KLORATHY, ON SLOVIN, TO JOHOR.

AM 5 ON MOTZ, TO KLORATHY.

KLORATHY ON VOLYEN TO JOHOR.

EXTRACTS FROM A REPORT FROM AM 5.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR FROM VOLYEN.

AM 5 TO KLORATHY.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM VATUN.

GRICE VS. VOLYEN

KLORATHY TO JOHOR. FROM VOLYEN DESTA.

ORMARIN TO KLORATHY.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, ENCLOSING THE ABOVE.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM HIS SPACE TRAVELLER, EN ROUTE TO SHAMMAT.

About the Author

By the same author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire is the fifth in a series of novels with the overall title ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’; the first is Shikasta (1979); the second The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980); the third The Sirian Experiments (1981); and the fourth The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982).

KLORATHY, FROM INDEPENDENT PLANET VOLYEN, TO JOHOR ON CANOPUS.

I requested leave from service on Shikasta; I find myself on a planet whose dominant feature is the same as Shikasta’s. Very well! I will stick it out for this term of duty. But I hereby give notice, formally, that I am applying to be sent, when I’m finished here, to a planet as backward as you like, as challenging as you like, but not one whose populations seem permanently afflicted by self-destructive dementia.

Now for my initial report. I have been here five V-years, and can confirm recent reports that our agent Incent did succumb to an attack of Rhetoric – not, after all, unknown, and not, as I may remind you, always unwelcome if regarded as an inoculation against worse – but unfortunately he did not recover, and suffers still from a stubborn condition of Undulant Rhetoric.

It was ten V-years ago that he fell to the wiles of Shammat, reporting his reactions in a letter which I attach herewith. Please see that it reaches the Archives.

Klorathy, I am taking the liberty of writing to you direct, instead of to the Colonial Office, because of our meeting when I came home to Canopus on leave last year and you said you had been assigned my supervision. I feel that what I want to ask is so important it goes beyond my little personal problems, but on the other hand I have no actual administrative problems as such to report.

To come to the point, I met someone on this planet’s second planet, Volyendesta, when I was there because of the riots, which necessitated the withdrawal of Volyen’s Imperial Forces. I do not have to tell you that all through my training as Colonial Servant, and during my briefing session, the dangers of Shammat were drummed into me – and everyone else! But imagine my surprise after the most inspiring evening of my whole life when I found that my companion was from Shammat! When he said he was Krolgul of Shammat I thought he was joking. I was awake all night in torment, Klorathy; I can’t remember ever spending such an awful night. Then I met him again by chance in the courts as the rebels were being sentenced, and I saw a man of such compassion, such warmth of heart, such sensitivity to others’ sufferings. This was the terrible Shammat! This wonderful being who wept as the rebels were led out to execution! I spent the next weeks with him. I was given a view of, first, Volyen, and then of the Volyen ‘Empire.’ I put it in inverted commas as is our Canopean way – but does this not show arrogance on our part? The Volyen Empire, consisting of the two moons, Volyenadna and Volyendesta, and two neighbouring planets, Maken and Slovin in Volyen terminology (the Sirian planets PE 70 and PE 71), hardly stands comparison with our Rule, or that of the Sirian Empire, but from their point of view it is something, an achievement. I was quite ashamed to see Krolgul’s ironic but kind smile when I spoke of the Volyen Empire with what I am afraid I now see as something not far from contempt.

And it was not only of Volyen affairs but of Sirius and ourselves as well that I was introduced to a very different view.

So different there was a point when I realized, and with what shock and distress I hardly dare to say, that my attitude was no longer consistent with that of a loyal servant of Canopus.

I am prepared to offer my resignation. What shall I do?

Your always grateful pupil,

Incent.

I did not reply to this, though, of course, had he resigned I would have asked him to reconsider. But he did not. I heard he was sufficiently involved with the rebel forces on Volyendesta, to the point where he was wounded in the arm and had to be hospitalized. Since I was due in the Volyen system, I decided to wait till I had seen him.

Volyen itself seethes with emotions of all kinds, its four colonies no less – to the extent that there is nowhere I could place Incent hoping he would be free from the stimulus of words long enough to recover his balance. No, I had either to send him home to Canopus with the recommendation that he was unfit for Colonial Service, and this I was reluctant to do – as you know, I am always unwilling to waste such experiences in young officials who might be strengthened by them in the long run – or to regard it as a case where we must decide to exercise patience.

Of course we can decide to submit him to the Total Immersion Cure, but that does seem rather a last resort. Meanwhile, he is still in hospital.

THE HISTORY OF THE VOLYEN EMPIRE. SUMMARY CHAPTER. (EXCERPTS.)

This is the largest planet of a Class 18 Star situated on the remotest verges of the Galaxy, on the outside edge of its outer spiral arm. It is in a very poor position for Harmonic Cosmic Development; and for this reason it has never been part of the Canopean Empire. We did not do more than maintain Basic Surveillance for thirty thousand Canopean years. At the beginning of this period an evolutionary leap had taken the population from Type 11 to Type 4 (that is to say, Galactian Basic), and a predominantly gathering-and-hunting type soon developed agriculture, trade, and the beginnings of metallurgy, and built towns. There was little contact between Volyen and near planets. Then, because of a cosmic disturbance resulting from the violent ‘soul-searchings’ of the neighbouring Sirian Empire, the population increased rapidly, material development accelerated, and a ruling caste came to dominate the entire planet, making slaves of nine-tenths of the population. All the planets in that sector were similarly affected, and there began a period of history during which they have been invading and settling one another, as short-lived and unstable ‘Empires,’ for twenty-one C-years.

Volyen has several times been dominant, and several times a subject.

The Sirian Empire, like us, had never made any attempt to absorb Volyen. During Volyen’s stable period, Sirius was more or less stable and had made a decision not to expand. When Sirian influences upset the balances of Volyen, it was because of the turmoil, from end to end of the Sirian Empire, attendant upon the conflict between the two parties known as the Conservers and the Questioners, a conflict that split even the governing oligarchy of Sirius, the Five. Some of their outlying planets rebelled, and were instantly punished. Some asked to be permitted to secede and become self-governing. There were reprisals. These energetic, not to say savage, measures caused the Questioners to redouble their protests and demands that Sirius should be studying its own nature and potentialities from points of view not exploitative. For a short period the Conservers were dominant, and the Questioners were also punished. While all this upheaval went on, the fact that Volyen, in a dominant phase again, had developed its armies and sent them out to conquer its two moons, or planet’s planets, went virtually unnoticed. When Volyen dubbed itself the Volyen Empire, Sirius, like us, merely noted the fact, as we had done before. But when Volyen expanded beyond its own planets and sent armies into the two other planets of its solar system, Sirius did take notice. For these two planets had been for S-millenniums subjects of sharp debate and disagreement. When the Sirian Empire, long before this time, had made a decision not to expand further, it was these two planets (Maken and Slovin) that had been next on the list for conquest and colonization. Neither we nor Sirius had named these planets; in their system they were designated PE 70 and PE 71 (Possible Expansion). The Questioners volubly, not to say violently, objected to having any attention whatsoever paid to this ‘Empire,’ which from their point of view was useless because of its backwardness, but they were overruled. The decision of the Sirian governing body, the Four, to ‘punish’ Volyen, and to claim PE 70 and PE 71, marked the beginning of a renewed Sirian expansion, which was nothing like the planned and controlled developments of Sirian expansion under the Five but was the result of internal convulsions. The Sirian Empire made a wild surge outwards, intensifying its own instability, and leading inevitably to its collapse.

NOTE BY ARCHIVIST. Klorathy arrived in the Volyen ‘Empire’ when its two planets and Sirian PE 70 and PE 71 were in revolt and rebellion against Volyen, and before Sirius invaded.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM MOON II OF VOLYEN, VOLYENDESTA.

Apologies. I have been engaged in cultivating Shammat on Volyen’s planets, found myself afflicted by brief attack of Shammatis, put myself into Restorative Detention while it lasted, and came out to deal with Incent, as a priority. This because of the key role he is now in with Shammat. I told you Incent was hospitalized for a flesh wound. I had him transferred to the Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases, and went to visit him there.

I positioned this hospital on Volyendesta because of probability forecasts that Volyen itself, as its ‘Empire’ collapses, will be savagely overrun, whereas Volyendesta will be little affected. As indication of the healthy state of Volyendesta: Agent 23 was able to have the hospital built and equipped by the rebellious party that is led by a rather remarkable character, one Ormarin, of whom more later, on whose comparative freedom from illusions I am learning to rely. The concept of the hospital, as I explained it to him, amounting to a (for him) completely new outlook on (as he put it, in the current Volyen mode) ‘the nature of the class struggle’ – but we must not expect too much too soon – caused in him a sharp but fortunately short attack of Elation. You will of course have seen that his agreement to build this hospital was partly due to a misunderstanding of our purposes. By the time he had really understood, the place was up and in use. There followed the routine riots and protests. But the effort at attempting to understand this hospital, the discussions and debates, some of them violent: this process itself caused the creation of a new faction, political in expression, which came to support and strengthen Ormarin.

Volyendesta is a watery planet, with a large, rapidly circumgyrating moon afflicting its inhabitants with a vast variety of unstable moods; but the sheer effort needed to cope with these conditions has evolved a breed (partly originating, as you will recall, from the Volyen stock) able to withstand rapid changes of emotional condition while ostensibly succumbing to them. On my first visit to this planet I was disheartened by its inhabitants’ violent reactions to everything, but soon came to see that these could be regarded, rather, as surface storms over a comparatively untouched interior. And I saw that a few of the inhabitants had even been able to use this condition of constant stimulation to evolve and strengthen inner calm. Ormarin is one.

I went straight to the Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases. This, on advice from Ormarin which Agent 23 was quick to take, is called by them the Institute for Historical Studies. I was in the guise of a lecturer visiting the place to judge whether I wished to take up an appointment.

The site was chosen after consultation with their geographers to provide the maximum opportunities for natural stimulation. It is on a short and very high peninsula on a stormy coast, where the ocean is permanently in a tumultuous roar, and where its moon has full effect. Immediately behind the peninsula the mainland affords, within achievable limits, extremes of terrain. On one side rise grandiose and gloomy mountains, full of the graves of overambitious mountaineers. On the other reach vast and ancient forests, guaranteed to bring on thoughts of age, the passing of time, inevitable decay. And, extending almost to the hospital itself, a ridge of barren, rocky sand which, if followed, leads to the beginnings of a desert so very hot, cold, bleak, blistering, and hostile; so full of escarpments emphasizing skies sometimes scarlet, sometimes lilac, often a sulphurous yellow, but always changing; so thickly piled with sands, shales, gravels, and dusts incessantly moved from place to place by ever-shifting winds, that reflections on the futility and vanity of all effort are automatically provoked – leading, if the sufferer persists in his stumblings through and over dried bones, bits of stick that were once forest, or the remains of ships (for this desert was once, fortuitously, the bed of an ocean), and rocks in which one may find entombed the imprints of long-dead species, to a most satisfactory and salubrious reaction. This has been named by our Agent 23 as the Law of Instant Reversal, describing what happens when, in the words of the inhabitants themselves, ‘there is too much of a good thing,’ causing a stubborn inward strengthening which they express thus: And so what? One still has to eat!

I surveyed all this terrain by Space Traveller, comfortably and with enjoyment, and was set down on the ridge of sand far enough from the hospital to enable me to say I had been conducted thither by local means of transport.

Large parts of the building still lie unused. I told Ormarin that the intensifying crisis in the ‘Empire’ would fill them soon enough, and he kept his followers quiet with excuses about faulty planning, unreliable contractors. Who was paying for it? He told them a cock-and-bull story about Sirian spies who were offering money for secret support, and this is close enough to things actually happening for it to be believed. His supposed cleverness in outwitting the Sirians has gone to his credit.

The building does not differ much from others we have devised in similar conditions on several of our colonized planets.

With what dislike I enter these places you know full well: and yes, I have, believe me, understood why I find myself in them so often. I have even mastered myself to the extent of contributing somewhat to the science: I shall shortly come to the Department of Rhetorical Logic which I devised.

I have to report that Incent is in a bad way. I found him in Basic Rhetoric, for he has not progressed beyond it. This ward is at the front of the building, on balconies built over continual crashing, moaning, or murmuring waves. The winds whine and roar all day and all night. To augment this we have arranged background music of the most debilitating kind, largely originating from Shikasta. (See History of Shikasta, Nineteenth Century Emoters and Complainers: Music.) Most of the patients – a good many of them our agents, for it will not have escaped your notice how many are succumbing during this phase of heady partisan enthusiasms – have advanced beyond this basic and infantile condition and were in other wards, so poor Incent was by himself. I found him gazing out over the ocean, where a morbid sunset tinted the waves scarlet, his inner condition aptly expressed by a robe of red-and-pink silk, its luxuriousness emphasized and made striking by his soldierly bandaged arm. Tears flooded down his pale and tragic face. You will recall that his choice was for large black soulful eyes, an indication we might have taken more notice of (it comes into my mind for the first time that perhaps you did). But it was a bad sign … Yes, large tragic black eyes mourned over the wastes of water – a sentence I might have found in the book that lay open on his knee, again from Shikasta, entitled The Hero of a Lost Cause. He was not looking at the screen on which was being projected his medication for the day, which happened to be a programme I am rather proud of: Shikasta again! How invaluable is that poor planet to our Canopean treatment for these conditions! Two vast armies, equipped for killing to the limits of current technology, fight each other for four Shikastan years with the utmost heroism and devotion to duty and in the most vile and brutal conditions, for aims that are to be judged as stupid, self-deluding, and greedy by their own immediate descendants a generation later, urged on by words used to inflame violent rival nationalism, each nation convinced, hypnotized by words to believe that it is in the right. Millions die, weakening both nations irreparably.

‘Incent,’ said I, ‘you are not taking your medicine!’

‘No,’ he cried, and he started up and clutched a pillar of the balcony with both hands, gazing with streaming eyes into the crashing and booming waters that flung spray up as high as the hospital windows. ‘No, I can’t stand it. I can’t and I won’t! I cannot endure the horror of this universe! And as for sitting here hour after hour and watching this record of tragic loss and waste –’

‘Well,’ I remarked, ‘you are not actually throwing yourself into the sea, are you?’

This was a mistake, Johor. I had underestimated his demoralization, for I was just in time to catch him by the arm as he flung himself over.

‘Really,’ I heard myself scolding him, ‘how irresponsible can you get? You know quite well you would only have to come back and do it again! You know how much it costs, having to refit you with a new outfit, getting you into the right place at the right time …’ I record this little tirade to show you how quickly I was affected by the general atmosphere; are you sure I am really suitable for this work? But he at once collapsed into self-pity and self-accusation, said he was fit for nothing (yes, I have seen the echo here – thanks!), not up to it, and unworthy of Canopus. Yes, he was prepared to agree, if I insisted, because he knew I could not be wrong, that Shammat was evil; but it was merely an intellectual assent, his emotions were at odds with his thoughts, he could not believe that he would ever be a whole person again … All this to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky and Wagner.

I switched on a particularly therapeutic programme illustrated by newsreels of a recent disturbance on a planet situated on the very edge of the Sirian Empire where it borders the Puttioran Empire. Constantly invaded by one or the other of the two Great Powers, sometimes described as Sirian and sometimes as Puttioran, the inhabitants of Polshi, because of these continual strains and tensions and persecutions, because of the efforts they have always had to make to preserve their planetary identity and their sense of being Polshan, have evolved a dashing, heroic, audacious planetary character for which they have long been famous. Throughout two vast Empires (I do not mention our own) the Polshans are known for this peculiarly dramatic and even self-immolating nature. Their more prudent neighbours criticize them for it, notably those most firmly under the heel of (forgive me) Puttiora or Sirius; but they are admired by other, less pressured, planets, usually in inverse proportion to their distance from centres of power and oppression. Thus, ‘the Polshan cause’ tends to be celebrated most passionately in planets like Volyen, which has not itself been recently invaded.

The wars and massacres that have always afflicted Polshi have recently been absent, long enough for a generation to grow up with no personal experience of anything but the verbal stimulations of Sirian Rhetoric, the ideas generated by Sirian Virtue. And these most admirably brave people announced to Sirius that, by definition, Sirian Virtue and the custodians of it must admire planetary self-determination, justice, freedom, democracy (and so on and so forth). Therefore, Polshi intended forthwith to take control of its own affairs. At the same time, these intrepid ones invited all the neighbouring Sirian colonies to follow the roads of self-determination, democracy, justice, Virtue (and so on and so forth). Sirius (in this case the Conservers) watched all this without surprise, since rebellion is the main thing they study and what they expect, and did nothing whatsoever, refraining from intervention until that moment when the heroes were on the verge of setting up a government that repudiated Sirian Virtue in favour of their own. And then the Sirians moved in. By delaying as they did, they allowed every individual with the potential for Subversion/Self-determination/Heroism/Sedition/ Anti-Sirian feelings / Polshan Virtue (and so on and so forth) to expose himself or herself, and were thus enabled to arrest, destroy, isolate, and make harmless the possible opposition. For that generation, at least.

‘Klorathy!’ demanded Incent, his eyes streaming, ‘are you saying that tyranny should never be resisted?’

‘When have you ever heard me say so?’

‘Ah, what nobility! What self-sacrifice! What daring! What reckless heroism! And you stand there dry-eyed, Klorathy! Empires rise and Empires fall, you say, and I remember your cool exposition of the subject in our classes on Canopus. But they fall, surely, because subject peoples rebel?’

‘Incent, would you not agree that the outcome of this particular heroic episode was not all that hard to foresee?’

‘I don’t want to think about it! I can’t bear it! I wish I was dead! I don’t want to know! Switch that beastly thing off.’

‘Incent,’ I said, ‘you are going to have to take it from me that you are very ill. But you will recover, I assure you.’

I withdrew, leaving him sobbing and wringing his hands, then stretching out his arms to the waves as if he needed to embrace the ocean itself.

On consultation with doctors, I discovered that no one before had ever resisted such treatment for so long. I could see they were at a loss. After all, this intense variety of homoeopathic medicine is the best – or worst – we can do. We have never, in short, had a case like Incent’s. In every other acute case the stage of ‘So what!’ followed by rapid recovery, has been reached fairly quickly.

The doctors having said they had no suggestions, I reassured them that I would think it all over and take responsibility.

I then briefly visited the Department of Rhetorical Logic, which works on the opposite principle, withdrawal of emotional stimulus.

High in the wing of the building away from the ocean, overlooking the beginnings of the desert, with the mountain peaks on one side and the dark stillness of the forest on the other, we have built rooms of stark white that are kept silent except for the clicking and ticking of the computers, into which are fed by remote control historical propositions such as capitalism equals injustice, communism equals injustice, a free market equals progress, a monarchy is the guarantee of stability, the dictatorship of the proletariat must be followed by the withering away of the state. And so on.

But this ward was empty: its time has not yet come.

I did not take Agent 23 with me to visit Ormarin. He reported unmistakable symptoms of Rhetoric, asked to be put into curative custody, and then showed that the disease had indeed set in seriously by ceasing to see that he was ill and announcing with much emotion that the elevated language of the Constitution of the Volyen ‘Empire,’ which promises happiness, freedom, and justice to every one of its citizens as inherent, inalienable rights, seemed to him the ‘most moving’ thing he had ever encountered. He is drying off in Mild Rhetoric and will soon be normal.

Ormarin.

I can most quickly characterize him by saying that he embodies a number of contradictions: his situation is one of high tension, and this is his strength as well as his weakness.

You will recall that when Volyen conquered Volyendesta, the indigenous inhabitants were murdered or enslaved, and their land was taken from them. You might not remember, because of its basic improbability, that this cruel process was accomplished to the tune of Rhetoric claiming that it was for the benefit of the said natives. The ability to disguise truth by the processes of Rhetoric is of course one in which our Canopean Historical Psychologists are particularly interested in connection with the Sirian Empire, but I feel that they have overlooked the extremities of this pathological condition as exemplified in the Volyen ‘Empire.’ At any rate, I am drawing attention to this now because it is of vital importance to what I am finding out as I move (for the most part secretly) about Volyen and its four colonies.

Ormarin has all his life represented ‘the underdog,’ though this does not mean the miserable semi-slaves but, rather, the less fortunate of the conquering minority. As an intelligent being he is well aware of the anomaly and, to compensate, is capable, at the slightest stimulus, of providing floods of compassionate and sorrowing words describing their condition. This ability to, as it were, mourn verbally is appreciated by his fellow settlers, who demand from him on ceremonial occasions set pieces of grief on behalf of the exploited, beginning with words such as these: ‘And now I want to say that the condition of our fellow beings who are workers like ourselves is always in the forefront of my mind …’ And so on.

That, then, is the first and worst contradiction in Ormarin.

The next is that, while he represents the worse-off of the settlers, some of whom are indeed deprived, his own way of living can hardly be described as lacking in anything. His tastes are those of the fortunate minority everywhere in the Volyen ‘Empire’; but he has to conceal this. There was a period when he saw this as hypocrisy and went through some uneasy reversals: making a point of living at one time on the basic wage of the poor, at another on his wage as an employed official; at yet another time making speeches saying that although his position necessitated his living better than the average, this was only to demonstrate what was possible for everyone – and so on. But then there entered another factor – you will have guessed what and who – Shammat, the Father of Lies, in the person of Krolgul. Up and down and around the five units of this ‘Empire’ went Krolgul, as he still does, at his work of making black white, white black.

He is a personable creature, with all the attractions of a robust and unconscious vitality, and he won Ormarin over by his rumbustious enjoyment in putting in clear and unlikable terms the uneasy compromise of which Ormarin’s life is composed.

‘You’ve got to face it,’ said he. ‘In the times in which we have to live, bad luck for us all, we must go with the tide and adapt ourselves to circumstances.’

He evolved for Ormarin a persona that would reassure the people who kept him in power, actually an image of themselves, or of how they like to see themselves. Ormarin was taught to present himself as a solid, reliable, affable man – genially tolerant of his own deficiencies with regard to the fleshpots – though these were not allowed to be visible as more than the merest peccadilloes – humorous, slow-speaking, full of common sense.

In fact, in the case of Ormarin the picture is not wildly inaccurate: Ormarin does possess many of these qualities. But Krolgul has been creating these personae by the score, all over the ‘Empire,’ so that everywhere you go you meet representatives of ‘the workers’ or ‘the people’ who are affable, solid, et cetera, and who all, without exception, smoke a pipe and drink beer and whisky (in moderation, of course), these habits being associated with sound and reliable behaviour.

Ormarin soon stopped pointing out that he loathed pipes and beer, did not care for whisky, and preferred a certain brand of cigarettes captured by space raiders from Sirian cargo ships, along with Sirian (Mother Planet) nectar similarly acquired. He is uneasy about his acquired personality, and apologizes for it if he thinks you are likely to be critical. This, then, is a second strain, or contradiction.

Third, he is of Volyen stock, yet all his life has resisted – verbally – Volyen domination, though he is at the same time a welcome visitor on Volyen, where his children were educated. Volyen drains wealth from its four colonies while presenting itself as their benefactor under such slogans as ‘Aid to the Unfortunate’ and ‘Development for the Backward.’ Ormarin, then, is continually involved with schemes to ‘advance’ Volyendesta, originating from Volyen, but he protests continually, in magnificent speeches that draw tears from every eye (even my own if I don’t watch myself, and yes, I am conscious of the dangers), that these schemes are hypocritical.

Fourth. Sirius. Because Volyen itself is comparatively resistant, with a high morale among the population, who are well fed and well housed and educated, compared with the four colonies, Sirius ignores it (except for infiltrating Volyen with spies) and is putting its pressure first and foremost on the colonies, particularly Volyendesta. Ormarin, hating the ‘crude imperialism’ of Volyen – which is how he, on behalf of his constituents, has always described Volyen, the birthplace of some of his recent forebears – is able more easily than the inhabitants of Volyen itself to be sympathetic to Sirius, whose approaches are always in terms of ‘aid’ or ‘advice,’ and of course in interminable and highly developed rhetorical descriptions of the colonial situation of Volyendesta.

Volyendesta, like Volyenadna, like Maken and Slovin, is short of hospitals, physical and emotional, short of every kind of educational institution, lacking in amenities Volyen takes for granted – and these Sirius offers, ‘without strings.’

Sometimes, among the proliferations of Volyen Rhetoric, we find pithy and accurate phrases. One of them is ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’ Unfortunately Ormarin was not applying this mnemonic to his own situation.

My situation was complicated by the fact that I didn’t want him to apply it to me, where it doesn’t apply.

I found him on an official occasion: he was standing on a low hillside, with a group of associates, watching a section of road being built by a Sirian contractor. The road, an admirable construction, a double highway, is to stretch from capital to seaport. Sirius flies in continually renewed supplies of labour from her Planets 46 and 51, houses them in adequate compounds, oversees and guards them. These unfortunates are permitted no contact with the locals, on the request of the Volyendestan government. And thus it was that I approached Ormarin in yet another of the ambiguous roles that characterize him: he and his mates could not possibly approve of the use of this slave labour or of how they were treated, and yet they were there to applaud the ‘gift’ of the road. As I approached, all the male officials took out pipes and began to smoke them, and the two females hastily hid some attractive scarves and jewellery of Sirian origin. I was just in time to hear Ormarin’s speech, which was being broadcast for the benefit of the workers, their guards, and the Sirian delegation.

‘Speaking on behalf of the working men and women of this planet, I have the great pleasure to open this section of the highway and to express gratitude to our generous benefactors the Sirian …’ etcetera. Ormarin had seen who it was by then.

Ormarin likes me and is always pleased to see me. This is because he knows he does not have to disguise himself from me. Yet he suspects me of being a Sirian spy, or sometimes does; or of being some kind of a spy from somewhere, the central Volyen government perhaps. He jokes sometimes that he ‘should not be associating with spies,’ giving me looks that compound the ‘frank honest modesty’ of his public persona with the inner uneasiness of his role. Or roles …

I joke that at any given time among his associates there is at least one spy from the Volyen central government, one from the Volyendestan central government, probably one each from Volyenadna, PE 70, and PE 71, and several from Sirius. He jokes that if that were true then half of his associates at any given time would be spies. I joke that he surely understands that this is an accurate statement of his position. He puts on the look obligatory at such moments, when one is forced to admit impossible truths – that of a wry, worldly-wise regret, tinged with a scepticism that makes it possible to dismiss the necessity of doing anything about it.

He is in fact surrounded by spies of all kinds, some of them his most efficient associates. Spies who have certain talents for, let’s say, administration, and who are in administration for the purposes of espionage, often enjoy this secondary occupation and even rise to a high position, at which point they may regret that they didn’t start off in a career of simple ‘public service,’ as this kind of work is styled, and they suffer private sessions of ‘Oh, if only I had seen early enough that I was fit for real work, and didn’t have to settle for spying.’ But that is another story.

Ormarin soon ended the official part of the occasion; his colleagues went off; he shed his public self with a small smile of complicity with me; and we sat down together on the hilltop. On the hilltop opposite us the Sirian contingent were heading back to their spacecraft. The several hundred Sirian workers swarmed over and around the road, and we could hear the barks and yelps of the supervisors.

This planet’s weather is unstable, but one may enjoy intervals without needing to adjust to unpleasant heat, cold, or assaults of various substances from the skies.

We watched, without comment, one of the men who had just been with us running to join the group of Sirians: a report on me and my arrival.

I was relieved that Ormarin decided against a ritual lament along the lines of ‘Oh, what a terrible thing it is to have to work with deceivers …’ and so on. Instead, he said to me, on a questioning note, ‘That’s a very fine road they are making down there?’

‘Indeed it is. If there is one thing the Sirians know how to do, it is road-building. This is a first-class, grade I road, for War, Type II, Total Occupation.’

This was deliberate: I wanted him to ask at last, But where are you from?

‘I am sure it could be used for any number of purposes!’ said he hastily, and looked about for something neutral to comment on.

‘No, no,’ I said firmly. ‘When Sirius builds, she builds to an accurately defined purpose. This is for the purposes of Total Occupation, after Type II War.’

Was he now going to ask me? No! ‘Oh, come come, you don’t have to look all gift horses in the mouth.’

‘Yes, you do. Particularly this one.’

Alas, I had miscalculated my stimulus, for he assumed a heroic posture, seated as he was on a small rock beside a rather attractive flowering bush, and declaimed: ‘We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the roads, we shall fight them in the air …’

‘I don’t think you’ll get very far, fighting Sirius in the air,’ I said in a sensible voice, designed to dissolve this declamatory mode into which all of them fall so easily.

A silence. He kept sending me short anxious glances. He didn’t know what to ask, though. Rather, he didn’t want to ask me the key question, and perhaps it was just as well. The trouble is, ‘Canopus’ has become a concept so dense with mythic association that perhaps he would not have been able to take it in, or not as fast as I needed.

I made it easy for him to think of me as Sirian, at least temporarily. ‘I’ve seen this type of road on a dozen planets before a takeover.’

A silence.

‘Oh, no, no,’ he said, ‘I really can’t accept it. I mean, we all know that Sirius has quite enough trouble as it is, keeping her outlying planets in subjection; she’s not going to add to her troubles … and anyway … they needn’t think they are going to prevail over …’ There followed a few minutes in the ritual patriotic mode.

After which, since I said nothing, he said, in a different voice, low, appalled: ‘But I can’t face it; I really don’t think I would want to live under Sirian occupation.’

I recited a portion of the history of Volyendesta, as it appears in our annals.

‘Of the fourteen planets of Star P 79 three are inhabited, Planet 3 and its two moons. The central feature of their history is that they have been invading and settling one another for millenniums. The longest stable period was of several thousand millenniums, when Moon II overran and conquered the other two and maintained by a particularly savage despotism –’

He interrupted, as I wanted him to: ‘Excuse me, Moon II, is that this planet or …?’

‘You. Volyenadna is Moon I.’

It was wonderful to see the look of satisfied pride, which he was unaware of. ‘We, Volyendesta, administered all three planets? Volyen was an underdog then?’

‘As you so graphically put it, Volyen and your brother planet Volyenadna were underdogs.’

He became conscious that his reaction of exulting pride was hardly becoming to an opponent of Empires, adjusted his expression, and said, ‘There is nothing of that in our history. And besides …’ The opponent of Empires was struggling for the appropriate words. ‘The locals here, the natives, they are pretty backward. I mean, it is not their fault’ – and here he cast fearful glances right and left, in case he might have been overheard – ‘there are sound historical reasons for it, but they are just a little, let us say …’

‘Backward,’ I said firmly, and he looked relieved.

‘As always happens,’ I went on, ‘there came a time when the peoples of your two enslaved planets grew strong and self-reliant through overcoming hardships, and they evolved in secret the methods and technologies to overthrow – not you, but your predecessors, who were almost entirely wiped out. A rather unpleasant race, they were. Not much loss, or at least so it was felt by those whom they had subjugated. But one may still see traces of them in these natives here, if one knows how to look.’

‘Extraordinary,’ he murmured, his broad and honest face (genuinely honest, on the whole) showing the tensions of historical perspective. ‘And we know nothing of all that!’

This was my clue to say, ‘But luckily we do …’ but I had decided against the subject of Canopus, for the time being. I saw his eyes most shrewdly and thoughtfully at work on my face; he knew a good deal more than he was saying, and more, perhaps, than he was admitting to himself.

‘You don’t want to know the rest?’ I asked.

‘It is all a bit of a shock; you must realize that.’

‘What I am going to say now is in your histories, though certainly very differently from how it appears in ours. I shall continue, then. Moon II – you – and Moon I were occupied for several V-centuries by Volyen. It was not entirely a bad thing. Moon II, this planet, was sunk in barbarism, so thoroughly had your former subjects from Volyen defeated you. Volyen’s inhabitants, so recently your slaves, were full of confidence, knew all kinds of skills and techniques, most of them learned from you. You could say that it was they who preserved your inheritance for you, at least partly. These qualities were introduced, reintroduced if you like, and maintained by Volyens – though interbreeding soon made it hard to say what was native and what Volyen in what had become a vigorous new people. And the same process was going on in the more temperate parts of Volyenadna. Even faster there, because the awful hardships of life on that icy planet had always produced strong and enduring people. Very soon Moon I, or Volyenadna, partly threw off, partly absorbed its Volyen invaders, and then conquered Volyen, and settled this planet.’

‘One of my ancestors,’ said he, with pride, ‘was a Westerman from Volyenadna.’

‘I can see it in you,’ said I.

He looked modest, while holding out his hands for me to admire. They are very large strong hands, the distinguishing mark of Westermen from Volyenadna.

‘Mind you, we gave them a good fight, it wasn’t just a walkover,’ he boasted.

‘No, an army of one thousand Volyendestans met them as they landed, and every one of the Volyendestans was killed. You died to a man, all blasted to cinders by the weapons of Moon I.’

‘That’s right. Our Gallant One Thousand. And as for the invaders, nine-tenths of us were killed, even though the Volyendestans had only primitive weapons in comparison.’

‘What a massacre that was – of both invaders and invaded.’

‘Yes.’

‘A glorious chapter in the annals of both sides.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was admiring today the two memorials standing side by side in your main town square, commemorating that glorious day, one for the Gallant One Thousand, the Volyendestans, or Moon II, and the other for the Heroic Volyenadnans, or Moon I. Your ancestors, whose blood runs in your veins. Together, of course, with the blood of the Volyens, and many others.’

He was regarding me steadily, with a thoughtful expression tinged with bitterness.

‘Right, mate,’ he said. ‘I know you well enough by now. What is it you are warning me about?’

‘Well, what do you think, Ormarin?’

‘You really think Sirius will …?’

‘You are weak, divided, declining.’

‘We’ll fight them on the –’

‘Yes, yes, but don’t you think …’

‘How is it you are so sure of it, if you aren’t a Sirian agent, that is? I’m beginning to think –’

‘No, I am not, Ormarin. And I am sure that you don’t really think anything of the kind. Why should I have to have any special sources of information to enable me to see what is obvious? When a planet is weak, divided, declining, nearly always it is taken over by a stronger planet or group of planets. If not Sirius, then some other power. What makes you think you are immune to this law, Ormarin?’

Down in the valley dark was falling. The hundreds of slave labourers were being pushed into a double file on the new road by the guards who ran and scampered all around them: they were being marched off for the night.

‘Poor creatures,’ he said suddenly, his voice hot with pity. ‘And is that going to be our fate?’

I said, ‘The Sirian Empire is well past its peak. It has been expanding slowly, for – But if I told you how many millenniums, would you be able to take it in? Your history covers a few thousand of your years. The Sirian Empire is the greatest in size in our galaxy. There have been periods when its growth was checked, periods when it was reduced, because of indecision on the part of the rulers of Sirius. But, looked at overall, it has grown. This last period is one of frenetic and frantic unplanned growth, because of the internal battles going on inside the Sirian ruling classes. It is an interesting fact that the theory governing the Sirian Empire at this time does not include the idea of expansion! Expansion is not on its agenda. They are not stupid, the Sirians, or not all of them: some at least know they are not in control of what they do, and they have just begun to understand that such a thing is possible, that an Empire may control its development according to … but that is another story.’ I was watching his face for a glimmer of understanding, and if he had showed any sign I would have gone on to talk of Canopus, and what governs us. But there was nothing there but the strain of trying to follow ideas, if not beyond him, at least too new for easy assimilation. ‘Recently – talking comparatively, of course – Sirius has conquered several new planets, not as a result of a planned and considered decision, no, but because of some hasty decision made to meet an emergency.’

‘Hasty,’ murmured Ormarin, indicating the fine road below us, along which the slave labourers were being marched to their barracks for the night.

‘The decision to build this road was made a year ago – a Sirian year. When Volyen conquered the two planets that Sirius considered were part of their Empire.’

‘You didn’t finish that history.’

‘The Westermen, those unscrupulous conquerors of whose blood you are so proud, created here and on Volyen a highly structured society of multifarious skills.’ Here I saw him smile wryly down at those formidable Westerman hands. ‘But, as always has to happen, Moon I and its two colonies lost impetus … This time it was Volyen’s turn to rise again and conquer. A quite interesting little Empire it has been, the recent Volyen Empire, with some mild ideas of justice, not indifferent to the welfare of its inhabitants, at least in theory, trying to absorb into its ruling classes the upper echelons of the conquered …’

I saw him begin to feel ashamed, and heard him sigh.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you could have chosen to live in the compounds and barracks with the natives, rather than compromise, but you didn’t …’

‘Oh, believe me,’ said he, in the hoarse, suffering voice I had almost deliberately invoked, ‘I have lain awake night after night, hating myself.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ I said, ‘but the fact is, you did do what you’ve done, and as a result your position on this planet is a key one. And when the Sirians invade –’

But I had miscalculated. The stimulus had been too much.

He leaped to his feet on the now dark hill, with the stars coming up bright behind him – one of them Volyen, his present master – and, holding up his right fist, his Westerman or Volyenadnan fist, he orated: ‘I stand here as a free man, breathing free air, my feet on my own soil! Rather than submit to the tyrannies of alien invaders I will pick up stones from the hillside if need be, and sticks from the forest, and fight until death overcomes me and –’

‘Ormarin!’ I tried to interrupt. ‘What have all those fine words got to do with your situation? For one thing, you have efficient modern weapons, you free peoples of the Volyen Empire …’ But it was no use.

‘Who with real manhood in his veins would choose to live as a slave when he can die on his feet fighting? Which man, woman, or child among you who has known what it is to stand upright……’

I am afraid I must report that this was a bad attack. I had to have him confined to the hospital for a few days.

But I have worse to tell you. While there, I went to see how poor Incent was and, finding him comparatively sensible and able to talk about his situation, asked for his permission to administer a test.

It was the simplest possible test, based on the word history.

At this word itself, he was able to maintain composure. The word historical caused his pulse to quicken, but then it steadied. At historical processes, he remained firm. Perspective of history – so far so good. Winds of history – he showed signs of agitation. These did not decrease. I then decided, wrongly, to increase the dose, trying logic of history. At this point I began to realize the hopelessness of it, for his breathing was rapid, his face pale, his pupils dilating. Inevitability of … lessons of … historical tasks……

But it was not until dustbin of history that I gave up. He was on his feet, wildly exultant, both arms held up, preparatory to launching himself into declamation, and I said, ‘Incent, what are we going to do with you?’

Which flight of Rhetoric must be excused by the circumstances.

I gave instructions for him to have the best of care.

He has escaped. I did not have to be told where. I am leaving for Volyenadna, where Krolgul is active. I shall report again from there.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM MOON I OF VOLYEN, VOLYENADNA.

This is not the most attractive of planets. The ice sheets which until recently covered it have retreated to the poles, leaving behind a characteristic landscape. This is harsh and dry, scarred by the violent movements of ice and of wind. The vegetation is meagre and dull. The rivers are savage, still carrying melting snow and ice, hard to navigate, offering little in the way of pleasure and relaxation.

The original inhabitants, evolved from creatures of the ice, were heavy, thick, slow, and strong. The great hands that Ormarin is so proud of built walls of ice blocks and hauled animals from half-frozen water, strangled, hammered, wrenched, broke, tore, made tools from antlers and bones. Invasions of less hardy peoples (unlike Moon II, this planet was conquered and settled more than once by Planets S-PE 70 and S-PE 71) did not weaken the stock, because the conditions continued harsh, and those who did not adapt died.

The history of this planet, then, not so unlike that of Volyendesta, exemplifies the power of the natural environment. This is a dour and melancholy people, slow to move, but with terrible rages and fits of madness, and even now, in the wary turn of a head, the glare of eyes that seem to listen as much as to look, you can see how their ancestors waited for sounds that could never be anything but warnings and threats – the whining howl of the wind, the creak of straining ice, the thud of snow massing on snow.

The latest conquest, by Volyen, has worsened conditions. Because of the planet’s abundant minerals, everywhere you look are factories, mines, whole cities that exist only to extract and process minerals for the use of Volyen. The natives who work these mines live in slave conditions, and die young of diseases caused mostly by poverty or dusts and radiations resulting from the processing of the minerals. The ruling class of the planet lives either on Volyen or in the few more favoured areas of this moon supported and maintained by Volyen; its members do their best not to know about the terrible lives of their compatriots.

So extreme are the conditions on Volyenadna that I think it is permissible to call it a slave planet, and this, as I am sure you are not surprised to hear, is how Krolgul apostrophizes it: ‘O slave planet, how long will you bear your chains?’

I arrived on a grim and grey day near a grim and grey city, walked into the central square and found Krolgul addressing a grey, grim, and silent crowd: ‘O slave planet, O Volyenadna, how long will you bear your chains?’

There was a long groan from the crowd, but then it fell silent again. Listening.

Krolgul was standing on a plinth, that supported an imposing statue of a miner holding up clenched fists and glaring over the heads of the crowd; he was deliberately copying this pose – a famous one, for the statue is used as a symbol for the workers’ movements. Near Krolgul, his nervous, agitated stance in sharp contrast to Krolgul’s, stood Incent, sometimes smiling, sometimes scowling, for he was not able to find or maintain a satisfactory public pose. Krolgul saw me, as I intended. In this crowd of heavy, slow people, there were three who stood out: me, basic Canopean, but here seen as ‘Volyen,’ as anything alien has to be; Incent, so slight and lithe and nervous; and Krolgul, though he does everything to look Volyenadnan.

You may remember Krolgul as a large, not to say fleshy, easygoing, affable goodfellow, all eagerness to please: his adaptation on this planet is quite a triumph of self-discipline, for he has created a dedicated, brooding, heroic personal known to live in a bare room on less than a worker’s wage, he has a smile so rare that it has inspired ballads.

… Volyen’s minions fired.

Our dead lay on the ground.

Krolgul frowned.

‘We shall march,’ we cried,

In accents stern and wild.

And Krolgul smiled.

The trouble here is that these people are so slow to move, and Krolgul has been given little occasion for smiling. What he wants them to do is ‘rise all at once, once and for all’ and take over everything.

What is preventing this is the basic common sense of the Volyenadnans, who know from the bitterest experience that the Volyen armies are efficient and ruthless.

So Krolgul started to build up a head of hate, at first directed towards ‘all Volyen,’ and then, this proving too general a target to be effective, at Lord Grice, the Volyen Governor, whose name has acquired, like additional titles, epithets such as Greasy, Gross, Greatfat, Greenguts. To such a point that a citizen may be heard saying something like ‘Lord Grice Greatfat visited so-and-so yesterday,’ but so much a matter of habit has this become that he himself might not be aware of it. And even Lord Grice, so the rumour has it, was once heard to introduce himself on a ceremonial visit to a local governor, ‘I’m Grice the Greasy, don’t you know……’

As a matter of fact, he is a tall, dry, rather weedy fellow, of a natural melancholy much enhanced by the rigours of this planet, and full of doubts as to his role as Governor.

This genuine representative of Volyen was at a window of the Residency that stands on the square, listening to Krolgul and making no attempt at all to conceal himself.

He was a threat to Krolgul’s oratory, because the people in the square had only to turn their heads to see this criminal …

‘And what are we to say about that arch-charlatan Grice the Greedy! In one person we see embodied the whole villainy of the Volyen tyranny! Sucking the blood of the …’ And so on.

The crowd had begun to growl and stir. These lethargic, stolid people were at last showing signs of action.

Krolgul, however, did not want them actually to storm the Residency. He intended to use Grice as a means for a good while yet. Therefore, he skilfully swung them into song. We will march, We will march, We will overthrow … and the mass roared into song.

A few youths at the back of the crowd, longing for action, turned towards the Residency, saw in a window on the first floor a solitary figure, swarmed up onto the balcony, and confronted this observer with shouts of ‘We’ve come to get him! Don’t try to hide him. Where’s Grice the Guts?’

‘Here,’ said Grice, coming forward with modest alacrity.

At which the louts spat at him, aimed a kick or two in his direction, and told him to warn Grice-Guts they were ‘coming to do him.’ They then jumped back into the crowd and joined in the singing.

The singing was less fervent, however, than Krolgul wanted. The faces I looked at, while entranced by the singing, were still patient, even thoughtful.

I went into a little eating place on the square and watched the crowds disperse.

Down from the plinth came Krolgul, smiling and acknowledging homage (comradely greetings) from the crowd. With him Incent, eyes flashing, aroused, palpitating, but doing his best to present the stern and dedicated seriousness appropriate to the military look he aspired to. Like two soldiers they came towards the café, followed by the usual adoring females and some younger males.

They had seated themselves before Incent saw me. Far from showing guilt, he seemed delighted. He came, first running, and then, remembering his new role, striding across. ‘Wasn’t that just the most moving thing you have ever seen?’ he demanded, and sat down opposite me, beaming.

Newspapers were brought in. Headlines: ‘Inspiring … Moving … Inspirational …’ Incent seized one, and although he had for the past several hours been involved in this meeting, sat poring over an account of it.

Krolgul, who had seen me, met my eyes with a sardonic, almost cynical smile, which he instantly abolished in favour of his revolutionary sternness. There he sat, in the corner, positioned so that he could watch through the windows how the crowd dispersed, and at the same time survey the interior of the café. Into which now came a group of the miners’ leaders, headed by Calder, who sat down in a corner, having nodded at Krolgul, but no more.

Incent did not notice this. He was gazing at the men with such passionate admiration that Krolgul directed towards him a cold, warning stare.

‘They are such marvellous, wonderful people,’ said Incent, trying to attract the attention of Calder, who at last gave him a friendly nod.

‘Incent,’ I said.

‘Oh, I know, you are going to punish me. You are going to send me back to that dreadful hospital!’

‘You seemed to me to be rather enjoying it.’

‘Ah, but that was different. Now I am in the thick of the real thing.’

The café was packed. Everyone in it was a miner; Volyenadnans every one, except for three – me, Incent, Krolgul. All foreigners are assumed to be of the Volyen administration, or spies from either Volyen or – but these suspicions were recent – Sirius. The miners, fifty or so of them, here after the rally to discuss their situation, to feel their plight, were obviously wondering how they came to be represented by Krolgul and by his shadow, Incent.

Krolgul, sensing how people were looking at him, occupied himself in earnest, frowning discussion with a young woman from this town, a native, and in moving papers about, the image of efficiency.

But it was easy to see that Calder was not satisfied. He exchanged a few words with his associates and stood up.

‘Krolgul,’ he said. It was not a large place, and by standing and speaking, he unified it.

Krolgul acknowledged him with a modification of the fist-high salute: he lifted a loose fist from the table to half shoulder height, and opened it and shut it once or twice like a mouth.

‘I and the mates here are not altogether happy with the way things are going,’ Calder said.

‘But we concretized the agreed objectives,’ said Krolgul.

‘That is for us to say, isn’t it?’

Given this confrontation, for it was one, Krolgul could only agree; but Incent was half up, holding on to his chair, his face dimmed by disappointment. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘but that was the most moving … the most … the most moving …’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Calder. ‘But I don’t think it was entirely on the lines we agreed.’

‘But in our analysis of the situation we decided –’ began Krolgul, and was stopped by Calder’s, ‘This one here, is he a friend of yours?’

Meaning, of course, me. Fifty pairs of eyes focused on me – hard, grey, distrustful eyes.

‘Well, I think I could say that,’ said Krolgul, with a heaving of silent laughter that could have been taken various ways, but which Calder took badly.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said he to me.

‘No, I am not a friend of Krolgul’s,’ I said.

‘Visiting here, perhaps?’

‘He’s a friend of mine, a friend of mine,’ shouted Incent, and then wondered if he had done right; with a gasp and a half smile, he subsided back into his seat.

‘Yes, I am visiting.’

‘From Volyen, perhaps?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘A friend of this lad here, who is a friend of Krolgul, but not a friend of Krolgul,’ said someone sardonically, and everyone laughed.

‘You are here to write a travel book?’ Laughter. ‘An analysis of our situation?’ Laughter. ‘A report for –’

‘For Canopus,’ I said, knowing that the word would sound to them like an old song, a fable.

Silence.

Krolgul could not hide his shock: he knew then, for the first time, that my being here was serious, that we account his activities at this time serious. It is a strange thing that people engaged in his kind of half-mocking, half-experimental, wholly theatrical intrigues often lose the capacity for seeing themselves and their situation. Enjoyment of manipulation, of power, of watching themselves in a role, dims judgment.

I looked round slowly from face to face. Strong, grey faces that showed all the exhaustion of their lives. Faces like stones. In their eyes, grey, slow eyes, I saw that they were remembering, trying to remember.

Calder, still on his feet, his great hand on his chair-back, the miners leader whose desperation had allowed him to become subject to the manipulations of Krolgul, looked hard and long at me and said, ‘You can tell them, where you come from, that we are very unfortunate people.’

And at this there was a long involuntary groan, and then silence.

This, what was happening now, was of a different kind and quality from anything that had happened in the square, or anything that emanated from Krolgul. I was looking at Incent, since, after all, he was the key to the situation, and saw him impressed and silent, even thoughtful.

And Krolgul too knew the moment was crucial. He slowly, deliberately got to his feet. He held out both clenched fists in front of him. And now the eyes of everyone had turned to him.

‘Unfortunate!’ he said in a low, only just audible voice, so that people had to strain to listen. ‘Yes, that is a word we may say and say again …’ His voice was rising, and slowly his fists were rising too. ‘Misfortune was the inheritance of your fathers, misfortune is what you eat and drink, and misfortune will be the lot of your children!’ He had ended on a shout, and his fists had fallen to his sides. He stood there, appealing to them with the brave set of his body, his pale face, with eyes that actually managed to look sunken and hungry.

But he had miscalculated: he had not taken them with him.

‘Yes, I think we are all aware of it,’ said Calder, and turned to me. ‘You, from – where did you say it was? but never mind – what do you have to say?’ This was a half-jeer, but let us say a hopeful jeer, and now all the eyes had shifted back to me, and they leaned forward waiting.

‘I would say that you could begin by describing your actual situation, as it is.’

This chilled them, and Incent’s face, turned towards me suddenly, looked as if I had hit him deliberately, meaning to hurt. Johor: it is not going to be easy for Incent. It is the hardest thing in the Galaxy, if you have been the plaything of words, words, words, to become independent of their ability to intoxicate.

‘I think we are all able to,’ said Calder dryly, sitting down again and half turning away from me, back to his mates. But not entirely. He still kept half an eye on me, and so did all the others.

Krolgul was seated again, staring hard at Incent. Incent, feeling this gaze, was shifting about, uneasy and in terrible conflict. I was sensing him as a vacuum from which the powers of Canopus were being drained and sucked out by Krolgul. Incent might be sitting there with me, at my table, my ‘friend,’ but he was in the power of Krolgul. Now that Krolgul could see how he had lost the allegiance – though, he hoped, temporarily – of the Volyenadnans, Incent was what he had left. It was like watching blood being emptied from a victim as he gasps and shrinks, but it wasn’t blood that Incent fed, is feeding, Krolgul.

Calder was my only hope.

I stood up, so that everyone could see me.

‘You’re leaving?’ asked Calder, and he was disappointed.

But I had hoped for what then happened. Calder said, ‘Perhaps we could have the benefit of an outside view, an objective opinion?’

‘I have a suggestion,’ I said. ‘You get together as many of you as you can, and we will meet, with Krolgul here, and talk it all out.’

They didn’t agree at once, but in the end they did. Krolgul had no alternative, though he hated it.

Of course, we could have done it all where we were, in the café, but I was concerned with Incent.

I did not order him to follow me as I left the café, but he came with me. Physically, he came with me.

I took him to my lodgings in a poor part of the town. A miner’s widow, with children to support, let out rooms. Almost the first thing she had said to me was, ‘We are unfortunate people,’ and it was with a calm sense and dignity that could be, I hope, what would save them all from Krolgul.

She agreed to give us some supper in my room.

It wasn’t much; they are indeed poor people.

Over bread and some fruit, Incent and I sat opposite each other.

‘Incent?’ I said to him. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ And it was far from rhetorical.

‘You’re going to punish me, you’re going to punish me,’ he kept groaning, but with the enjoyment he has learned from Krolgul.

‘Yes, of course you will be punished. Not by me, not even by Canopus, but by the inherent laws of action and interaction.’

‘Cruel, cruel,’ he sobbed, and fell asleep, all his emotional apparatus in disarray, his intellectual machineries in subjection to this disorder. But he is strong enough physically; that is something.

Leaving him asleep, and asking the woman of the house to keep an eye on him, I spent the night in the bars of the town and its suburbs. Everywhere unrest, even a sense of impending upheaval. Hard to determine whether this was mainly because of worsening conditions on the planet, or because of the efforts of Krolgul … who, interestingly, was talked of much less than Incent. No wonder Incent is exhausted. He seems to have travelled to all the main centres of Volyenadna, and to most of the smaller ones as well. To extract the essence of what people have found in him: it is that he is noticed. He has impressed himself. In city after city he has moved from one meeting place to another: cafés, miners’ clubs, women’s clubs, and his right to be everywhere has been his conviction that his cause must make him welcome. He brings no credentials. On the rare occasions he is challenged, he impatiently, even contemptuously, rejects the need for it, as if his interlocuters are showing pettiness and worse, and after a few hours of earnest exhortation – which clearly exhaust his hearers, who betray, even after several days’ interval, all the signs of nervous strain – he leaves for the next appointment with destiny.

Can I say he is not trusted? It is more interesting than that …

There is a type of revolutionary always to be seen at times when there is potential for change. At first tentative, even timid, then amazed that this burning conviction of his can convince others, he soon becomes filled with contempt for them. He can hardly believe that he, that small unit, and an unworthy one (for, at least at the beginning, he may possess some view of himself as a fallible individual), can be taken seriously by those older than he, more experienced – persons sometimes of worth, who may be representatives of masses of people. Yet he, this torch of righteous conviction, armed with no more than his own qualities, is able to come close to them, persuades, convinces, has them in his power. He asks for trust – that first of all – for money, for the use of their influence. In no time he has nests of people in every place doing his bidding, embroiled with one another, willing to listen. To listen, that’s the thing. One may observe him, this burning-eyed, coiled spring of a youth, leaning forward at a café table, in the corner of a house, anywhere, fixing his prey with his eyes in a conviction of shared purpose, of conspiracy, of – always – being united in some small purpose against enormous odds. Yet almost at once this small purpose has burgeoned so remarkably. Finding it so easy to talk in terms of limited ends, the creation of a local institution perhaps, a meeting place, a modest petition, suddenly he – no less than others – is surprised to find that what is being talked about is citywide, then planetary, even interplanetary movements. ‘We shall sweep the stars for our support!’ Incent cried from a platform in one town, and when someone called out from the body of the hall, ‘Hold on, lad, let’s start with something more modest,’ the laughter was no more than friendly. Of course! If you have been able to rise so far and so fast from such a humble base – in this case, on this planet, that the people generally are very worn down, tired, drained, and they wish for better – then why not ‘sweep the stars’ and ‘transform everything’?

‘Is not the present moment dynamic?’ cried Incent from platform after platform, his whole person radiating dynamism, so that the poor tired people listening to him felt dynamic too; though not for long, for it is odd how they feel even more tired, more drained, when he has moved on to the next place that he has decided to stir into action.

‘The new forms of life will become dynamically dramatic,’ he has shouted, though only a moment before he was dealing with a question from the floor about raising wages by means of a petition to Volyen (through Greasy-guts Grice).

Well, such a person does not, as we know, ‘sweep the stars,’ but he does set in motion a great many people who even while under his spell feel uneasy. And yet feel uneasy that they do. How dull they have become! How enfeebled by life! How far they are from the flaming days of their youth, which they see before them again in the shape of this noble, inspirational youth, who seems, when he leans forward to hold their eyes with his own, to gather their whole life and pose it before them in the shape of a question.

‘What have you become?’ those dramatic, those languishing, those shameless eyes demand. For, of course, this young hero, without even knowing it, will use all the means he has to unlock the various forms of resistance he faces, including sex, maternal and paternal love: Oh, if only my son were like this, this very flame of promise and action, if only I had chosen such a one as a husband.

But uneasy they are. It might be for a good cause, but how they are being manipulated! And how is it possible that not only one’s unworthy (of course) self is being played on by this man – this youth, not much more than a child, really – but also one’s respected and revered colleagues?

This operator has understood from the first, and by instinct (it is nearly all instinct, this, not calculation: our hero is working on a wavelength of pure guess-and-feel, he has never sat down to say, ‘How can I get this poor sucker under my thumb?’), that of course one must use one ‘name’ to impress another. ‘I saw Hadder today,’ he lets fall confidentially and, as it were, by the way, ‘and he said to me he would talk to Sev, and when I dropped in on Bolli yesterday she said she knew how to lay her hands on …’ Some large, almost incredible sum seems to materialize; both the inspired youth and the hypnotized victim contemplate it, in silence. ‘Ye-e-es …’ murmurs the victim at last, ‘I see, yes …’ And on both faces there appears fleetingly a small self-conscious smile that acknowledges absurdity.

Alone he does it. It is he who possesses the flair, the spark, the drive, the energy, it is he who can set in motion these people or cadres. He – who? Who am I? he may mutter in some moment of panic, seeing puppets twitch and dangle everywhere he looks. But how is it possible …? All these skilled, intelligent, experienced people? Doing his bidding?

He feels as if he were himself twitching over an empty space. Moments of panic recur, are evaded, avoided, fled from … He works harder, faster, runs from place to place, sleeps hardly at all, eats only as part of this process of convincing and manipulating people: ‘No, only a sandwich please, I don’t …’ ‘Perhaps a glass of water, I don’t …’ But meanwhile things are happening. They indubitably are. Not exactly on the scale envisaged at the ‘sweeping the stars’ stage of the game. But certainly not, either, as he imagined in those first timid (cowardly?) moments. No, when he first felt those divine wings of rightness and conviction begin to lift, he thought, ‘Oh, perhaps I may be able to make them see just a little bit of what …’ No, he is very far from that. Into real, actual existence – paid-up memberships, funds, brochures, letterheads, meetings – have come organizations. They function. Oddly enough, his name is never there. Why not? Simply because the magnitude of his presence, his demand, his command, cannot be contained in anything so paltry as a letterhead, a list of sponsors. Though perhaps his name might appear in the smallest of type somewhere as an assistant secretary or something of the sort. And besides, there is always something a little fishy about these operations. His contempt for the people he operates, his always growing amazement as he promises and persuades, leads him into statements about sums of money that never existed, statements that so-and-so said something which will turn out to be untrue; behind this real, actual, to-be-felt-and-touched thing, the organization, the meetings, the sponsors, the aims, is a whole mirage of lies.

Lies, lies, lies. Flattery and sycophancy and lies.

At some point or other, and sometimes not till years later, the victims will suddenly find themselves muttering, Yes, that fellow – what’s his name? – the fact is, he was crazy, wasn’t he?

In the meantime, our hero has probably had a spell of actual madness, of the kind that necessitates doctors, or has gone to live in another planet.

It is as if his part in that flurry and favour of activity never was. His name is not mentioned, or hardly ever, and this is not only because by now the people he made dance are ashamed and wish they could obliterate their part in it all. It is also because there is something that doesn’t fit. Just as it wasn’t easy to put that dazzling name on a letterhead, or as the signature to a pamphlet full of facts and figures (written stuff of this kind has on the whole to be more accurate than what is said), simply because that burning presence was out of phase with all the other, more humdrum, individuals, so if one is looking back, it is hard to accommodate him into sober and thoughtful memory. This and that event certainly did happen – perhaps even now a society or party still exists, moribund, all the life fled from it – but do you mean to say that it was brought into being by that psychopath?

So it comes about that history does not record the names of these heroes. One may search in vain in records of events one has experienced on a day-to-day basis, knowing exactly what went on, and nowhere appear the names of the wonder-workers without whom these events would never have taken place.

Incent, like the others of his sort, will not appear in the history books. Meanwhile, everyone is talking about him.

‘Yes, he was here last week. He had us up all night listening to him. He’s sincere, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes, you could say that, he’s sincere, all right.’

‘It was the most moving occasion I can remember,’ someone else may say thoughtfully. ‘Yes …

When I returned to my lodgings, in the early morning, I found that Incent had already gone out. He had kept the woman of the house up listening to him nearly all night, so that she had a flattened and drained look.

‘He is a very feeling young one,’ she said, or murmured, out of semi-sleep. ‘Yes. Not like those Sirians. You and he come from the same place, he said. Is that so?’

And that is what I have to contend with.

When he returned at midday he was so intoxicated with himself he did not know me. He had visited Krolgul and Calder, and paid a flying visit to a near town which ‘is ready for the truth,’ and when he came striding into the little room at the top of the house where I sat waiting for him, it was with a clenched-fist salute and fixed, glazed eyes.

‘With me, against me,’ he chanted, and went striding about the room, unable to check the momentum which had been carrying him for days.

‘Incent,’ I said, ‘do sit down.’

‘Wi’ me, ‘gainst me!’

‘Incent, this is Klorathy.’

“me, ‘nst me.’

‘Klorathy!’

‘Oh, Klorathy, greetings, servus, all power to the … Klorathy, I didn’t recognize you there, oh, wonderful, I have to tell you …’And he passed out on my bed, smiling.

I then went out. I had arranged with Calder and his friends that our ‘confrontation’ should take place in one of the miners’ clubs or meeting places; but on the insinuation of Krolgul, Incent had, not consulting Calder but simply informing him, booked one of the trial rooms of the legislature for the occasion. This is where, usually, the natives are tried and sentenced by Volyens for various minor acts of insubordination. He had distributed all kinds of pamphlets and leaflets everywhere around the town announcing ‘A Challenge to Tyranny.’

I myself went to Calder, and found him with a group of men in his house. He was angry, and formidable.

I said to him that in my view the ‘confrontation’ should be cancelled, and that we – he, I, Incent and Krolgul, and perhaps ten or so of the miners’ representatives – should meet informally in his house or in a café.

But since I had seen him, he had been immersed in Rhetoric. Furious that ‘the powers that be’ had ‘tricked’ him by substituting for one of their clubs a venue associated by them with the Volyen hegemony, furious with himself for being swayed by Incent, whom, when he was out of his company, Calder distrusted, angry because of Krolgul, who had sent him a message saying he had nothing to do with Incent’s recent manoeuvrings, he now saw me as an accomplice of Incent.

‘You and he come from the same place,’ he said to me, as I sat there faced with a dozen or so steady, cold, angry pairs of Volyenadnan eyes.

‘Yes, we do. But that doesn’t mean to say I support what he does.’

‘You are telling us that you and he come from that place, very far away it is too, and you don’t see eye to eye with him on what he is doing here?’

‘Calder,’ I said, ‘I want you to believe me, I have had nothing to do with these new arrangements. I think they are a mistake.’

But it was no good: he, they all, had been subjected to burning sincerity from Incent for some hours.

‘We’ll meet you in that Volyen place. Yes. We’ll meet you there, and let truth prevail,’ shouted Calder, bringing a great fist down on the table in an obvious ritual for putting an end to discussion.

And so that is what is about to happen.

Krolgul is keeping modestly out of sight. Incent is still asleep, but tossing and starting up, smiling and emitting fragmented oratory, and falling back, smiling, to dream of the ‘confrontation’ – which I am afraid is hardly likely to go well.

And this is what happened.

Towards the end of Incent’s long sleep, its quality changed and he became inert and heavy. He woke slowly, and was dazed for some minutes. Clearly, he could not remember at once what had happened. Where was the ‘dynamic,’ vibrant, passionate conspirator? At last he pulled himself up off the bed and muttered, ‘Krolgul, I must get to Krolgul.’

‘Why?’

He looked at me in amazement. ‘Why?’

‘Yes, why? There is no need for you ever to have anything to do with Krolgul.’

He subsided again on the bed, staring.

‘In a few minutes we have to make our way to the Hall of Justice, room number three, in order to talk to Calder and his mates,’ I said.

He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge buzzing thoughts.

‘Arranged by you,’ I said.

‘Klorathy,’ he asked from his old self, tentative, stubborn honest, ‘I have been a bit crazy, I think?’

‘Yes, you have. But please try to hold on to what you are now, for we must go to this so-called trial or confrontation.’

‘What are you going to do with me?’ he asked.

‘Well, if you can maintain yourself as you are now – nothing. Otherwise, I’m afraid you must undergo Total Immersion.’

‘But that’s terrible, isn’t it?’

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’

The council chamber or judgment room of the Volyen administration is arranged to demonstrate the principles of justice: right and wrong; good and bad; punisher and punished. On one side of the circular chamber, which is panelled with some shiny brown stone so that the movements of the individuals inside the chamber are reflected in the gleams of dull colour, stands the apparatus of judgment itself: an imposing chair or throne, subsidiary but similar thronelike chairs, boxes for the accusers and witnesses – most of them bound to be hostile to the pitiful representatives of the natives on the other side of the court, where a dozen bare benches are ranged.

Two focuses of opinion is what this Volyen court is designed to hold; if opinion can possibly be the word for what always ends in the imprisonment and torture or execution of the people on one side of the court, whereas those on the other side go off to their homes to be refreshed and made ready for another day of determining justice.

But we were three focuses of opinion, and instinctively, without need for argument, we made our way to the area where the lowly benches stood, ignoring the pomp of the court itself, and arranged them into a rough triangle. Calder and those with him took their places on one side. Krolgul, though with hesitation that looked rather like an attractive diffidence, sat all by himself on another. As usual, he was wearing clothes assembled to seem like a uniform that summed up a situation: a sober tunic in grey, baggy service trousers, and a grey-green scarf around his neck, of the kind used by everyone here to shield his eyes from the glare that comes off the still-unmelted glaciers and snow fields. He looked the picture of responsible service.

But really he was confused. That was because of his creature Incent, who was tagging along with me in a dulled, exhausted condition that made it seem as if he had been drugged or hypnotized. And that was what not only Krolgul but also the Volyenadnans thought had happened. Calder, in fact, did not at once recognize the glossy and persuasive Incent in this pale, slow youth who slumped beside me on the bench. And it certainly did not suit me either, for it was Incent whom I wanted to put forward a point of view not Krolgul’s.

Just as Krolgul had wanted Incent to speak for him.

And so there we were, sitting quietly on our benches, and no one spoke.

Nor was this a situation without danger, since the use of this court for such a purpose was of course not allowed. Incent had shouted, entirely on impulse, from some platform in the poor part of the city, ‘We shall take our cause to the heart of Volyen itself!’

So ‘Volyen itself’ could be expected to show up at any moment, in the shape of the police, if not the army.

At last Calder stood up, though there was no need for anyone to stand: he stood because he had been taught by the Volyens that he must stand in the presence of superiors. A great slab of a man, dense and heavy in texture as the schists and shales and compacted clays he worked with, he looked at Incent and remarked, ‘Our young hero doesn’t seem to have much to say for himself today.’

I said, without standing, that Incent, as he and all the Volyens knew, had had plenty to say, in fact had not stopped talking for days, if not weeks, and had keeled over exhausted only a few hours ago. I said this in a low, humorous voice, to match the quiet, almost ironical tones of Calder.

‘Well, then?’ demanded Calder. I noted with pleasure how he sat down again.

‘May I suggest,’ I said, ‘that you state the position. After all, it is you and your people who would suffer the consequences of any action.’

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ came a chorus from the men behind Calder. And I saw that this was indeed what they had all been saying to one another: ‘It is all right for him, isn’t it, but it is us who’ll be going to prison for it.’

I had taken a risk, of course, because I did not want Krolgul to stand up and launch himself into oratory. I wanted the tone kept low and sensible. He was lounging there on his bench, watching everything without seeming to, and trying to make Incent meet his eyes so that he could once again get the boy under his influence.

I could feel Incent beside me as a blank, a void. He was not Krolgul’s then, nor was he himself; he was not acting as a conduit for the strengths and powers of the planet so that Krolgul could tap them; he was not letting the virtues of Canopus drain away through him. He was nothing. And I hoped I could keep him so until the healing powers of Canopus could begin to work.

Krolgul maintained silence. He was banking on getting Incent back under his will.

Calder, after consulting briefly with his fellows, remarked in a bluff but angry voice: ‘We are here because you people invited us – Volyen or Sirius or Canopus, it’s all the same to us. Our situation has become intolerable, and we’ll listen to any suggestion.’

‘Neither Volyen, nor Sirius, nor Canopus – but Shammat,’ I said. ‘Krolgul of Shammat.’

I risked a great deal in saying this. For if Canopus was not much more than the reminder of long-ago tales and legends, then Shammat was nothing, no more than curses and expletives whose source they had forgotten.

‘Shammat, is it?’ said Calder, and he was getting angry. His mechanisms were being overloaded; he could not take it all in. ‘Well, whoever it is, we are here, to listen. So which of you will start?’

I said softly, ‘Why not you, Calder?’

Calder said angrily, standing up to do so, ‘Our situation is this, that we all of us work, day and night, for all of our lives, which are short and difficult and painful, and the results of our work go to Volyen. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘And,’ I prompted, ‘according to Krolgul of Shammat, you ought to remedy this by rising, though how this “rising” is to be done is not specified, and by murdering Grice the Governor-General? That’s it, isn’t it? And your troubles will then be at an end.’

When they heard it stated like this, there was a stirring and murmuring among the men around Calder. Who stood up and said, for the benefit of invisible recorders and spies: ‘I have never said that, or anything like it, nor has any one of us.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but that has been the theme of certain recent speeches. And I have said that there might be alternative things to do. And I am prepared to put them forward.’

And now Krolgul acted. He did no more than, as it were, murmur or remark to himself, ‘Greasy-guts Grice. Grice the Greedy.’ And remained seated, hands locked around his knees, smiling as if listening to some secret music.

At this Incent stirred and came to himself. ‘That’s it,’ he shouted, or half-shouted, the smile that goes with his self-hypnosis back on his face, ‘Grice … Grim-guts … Greasy …’ And subsided again.

‘Well, our young master has woken up, it seems,’ remarked Calder.

Meanwhile, I had observed that straight ahead of where I sat, high on the brown wall, was reflected a pale patch where there had been nothing. A glance behind me and up showed a small opening above the throne of judgment, and in it was Grice’s face, as pallid, as sick, as suffering as it had been yesterday when he was listening to the oratory in the square.

But so far no one else had noticed it.

I said, loudly and firmly, ‘I will now make a short summary of what I think you might do –’

But Krolgul was on his feet, in the posture of the worker’s emblem, and he was shouting: ‘Death to the tyrant, death to Grice, death to …’ And Incent had come to life again, and was standing there beside me smiling. ‘Death,’ he was stuttering, but his voice was gathering force, ‘death to the Volyen bully, death …

Is it possible, Johor, that we sometimes tend – I put it no stronger than that – to overestimate the forces of reason? I emphasize here that Calder is a solid, sensible man, whose life is spent in exact assessments, judgments, in measure.

And certainly, as Incent stood there, swaying a little, still deadly pale but strengthening fast, Calder was smiling in a half-pitying embarrassment.

I asked, in a low, calm voice, ‘Calder, am I to have my say?’

‘If they will let you,’ said Calder, with a half-derisive, half-admiring laugh, and nodded at the two, Incent and Krolgul, in their heroic stances, chanting, ‘Death to …

‘Only you can stop them,’ I remarked.

Calder said, ‘Let him speak …

Krolgul at once stopped, with a sardonic, contemptuous shrug, and sat down again in his familiar posture that managed to suggest a modest and unassuming personal worth and at the same time an ineffable superiority.

Incent chanted on, until Calder half stood up and said to him, ‘Sit down, lad; let the opposition have its say.’ And Incent, gasping, sat, giving me appalled, apologetic looks, and then Krolgul looks of apology and of complicity.

I said: ‘What you have to do is diversify your economy.’

I knew this would be inflammatory, because of its simplicity and because it was unexpected.

Volyenadna was a mining planet. That was what it was. That was what it had been, for as long as the history allowed by Volyen recorded.

A silence. And then Krolgul allowed himself, first of all a long, silent heave of laughter, and then a burst of laughter. Now laughter from the Volyenadnans. From Incent, a blank, heavy look and a loose jaw. I was particularly concerned for him: after all, if I could not save him, return him to himself again, then …

‘Let him speak,’ said Calder, but on his face was a heavy sneer.

I said: ‘You are a slave planet, as Krolgul says you are. A rich planet, whose wealth goes elsewhere.’

‘To Greasy-guts,’ remarked Krolgul, in a low, as it were meditative voice.

‘No,’ I said. ‘For generations the results of your labours have been taken from you. But it was not always thus. Have you forgotten that before you were the subjects of Volyen, you were the subjects of the planet Maken, and before that of planet Slovin, and both took from you the minerals you mined? But before that you were the conquerors. There was a time when you dominated Volyendesta and Volyen itself –’

‘With what?’ inquired Krolgul. ‘Ice and snow?’

‘As the ice retreated, and you spread over the tundra, you multiplied, and did not find enough to eat or to keep you warm. You stole spaceships from Slovin, who landed here on a foraging trip, and you used them to travel to Maken and to Volyen, and you made others, and you terrorized four planets and took from them, just as now everything is taken from you …

Calder listened to this with some derision. ‘You are saying that we were blood-sucking imperialists, just as Volyen is now?’

‘I am saying that you have not always been slaves and the providers of riches for other people.’

‘And you are suggesting that …

‘You are a rich prize for Volyen, and you will be for whoever succeeds Volyen, since empires rise and fall, fall and rise. Volyen will disappear from this planet, just as Maken and Slovin grew weak and disappeared, and just as you grew weak and were overthrown from the planets you had conquered. But whoever succeeds Volyen’ – I could not, of course, even hint at Sirius here, for that was a word that could be breathed only to Ormarin, he was as yet the only one strong enough to hear it, and Krolgul himself does not know how soon Volyen will collapse in on itself and become a subject – ‘whoever will come after Volyen will use you in the same way, if you don’t make sure they won’t. But you could make yourselves stronger. You could become farmers as well as miners and –’

Krolgul was laughing, sobbing with laughter. ‘Farmers,’ he cried, while Calder’s followers laughed. ‘Farmers – on this ice lump of a place.’ But his contempt for the planet suddenly showed too plainly, and Calder did not like it.

‘Farm what?’ he asked me, directly.

‘If you will listen to me, you and your people, I will show you. Yours is not the only planet with these conditions.’

‘And what makes you think that Volyen will allow us? She wants to keep us as we are; she’s interested in our minerals, and nothing more.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘you have a Governor-General who in my view would listen to you.’

And at this Krolgul was shouting, ‘Grice the Greasy-guts, Governor-General Guts, Greenguts …

And suddenly Incent was on his feet, once again alive and alert and Krolgul’s creature.

‘Down with Grice,’ he was shouting. ‘Get rid of Grice and …

I, across the din, looked hard at Calder and said, ‘Remember, Calder, I can help you. Remember I said this.’

Calder did not allow his eyes to meet mine: always a sign that you have ceased to be real for these people. And, indeed, for a few minutes I felt as if I had suddenly become invisible, for all those hard, antagonistic grey eyes from the workers’ benches, and of course Incent’s passionate black eyes, avoided me, were directed at one another. As for Krolgul, he lowered his head as if gazing thoughtfully at the floor, while in fact keeping a heavy-lidded, hypnotic pressure on Incent, now again his subject.

‘It is quite evident,’ Incent was saying, or chanting, in a low voice that gathered power, ‘that we are here at the fulcrum of a dynamic! What perspectives stretch before us as we stand with one foot in the shameful and turgid past and the other in the future where the forms of life will become ever more vibrant and luminous and where, grasping opportunities in hands that have lost timidity, we build happiness where nothing is now but sullen misery …

Calder’s group began to emit angry noises, and Calder shouted, ‘Come on, lad, let’s hear your concrete proposals.’

Incent, brought up short, stood smiling vaguely, his Rhetoric jumping and jolting through him so that his hands twitched, and so did his mouth.

Krolgul said in a low voice: ‘A concrete proposal! You ask for an action, an act! I’ll tell you what act waits for you to –’

‘– to fill it with the inevitability of history …’ said Incent, almost tentatively, for his impetus had been checked and he could not regain it.

‘Yes,’ said Krolgul, more loudly. ‘An act which will speak for you to the tyrants who –’

‘– fatten on your anguish!’ shouted Incent.

Krolgul: ‘Grice the Guts, Volyen’s minion, Volyen’s symbol, he stands here among you as Volyen; seize him and –’

‘Grab Grice!’ shouted Incent, jumping up and down. ‘Drag him before the … before the …

‘Bar of History,’ prompted Krolgul. And, with an almost unnoticeable gesture of his hand, he made Incent keep quiet, so that Incent stood with his mouth loose, his eyes half closed: the image of a sleeper, or of someone in a trance.

Suddenly from the band of workers came the shout, ‘Yes, that’s it, drag him to judgment, let’s try him …

‘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.

I do not remember your mentioning Tafta’s school on Shikasta. It had two main branches, one disguised as a theological seminary, one as a school of politics. The first building was ornate, grandiose, providing every kind of gratification for the senses; the second was unadorned and functional. In the first, students used robes and accoutrements of great richness and variety; in the second, clothing was austere. But the kinds and types of speech used in the two apparently so different seminaries were almost identical, so that students could, and indeed were encouraged to, translate the religious into the political and vice versa, a process that usually needed no more than the substitution of a few words in a passage of declamation.

It was not possible to copy this exactly on Volyen, because Volyen’s ‘aspirations for higher things’ have always been identical with its political aspirations. But there are two main branches of Rhetoric, and the buildings that express them are quite different, one being severe in style and the other using all the aids of a sensuous kind you can imagine, from the artifices of lighting and colour to indoor plant-growing and culture. Sound is of course fully exploited. Thus a visit to the branch of Rhetoric described by them vulgarly as ‘with-all-the-tricks’ has the effect of reminding you of the Religious Seminary on Shikasta; while the one housed in a spare, undecorated building, full of students in plain clothing, induces comparisons with Shikasta of a different kind. If you remember, it was enough for a politician of the most crassly power-seeking sort to wear simple clothes and employ the speech of the common people to impress the muddleheads with ‘honesty’ and ‘sincerity.’

But since politics has accommodated, and still does, all Volyen yearnings for the better, it really is ‘as rich as life itself,’ to quote the slogan painted over the entrance to Krolgul’s School. Volyen has been a subject planet several times in the past: its thoughts and beliefs are full of the vestiges of the Rhetoric of slaves. It has been an independent planet, using minimum contact with its planetary neighbours: the language of proud and self-sufficient isolation is still in use, even though self-sufficiency is long past. It has been a rapidly growing and ruthless Empire: songs, poems, heightened and emphatic speech of all kinds, still in use, remain as evidence of this phase. It is an Empire falling apart and disconsolate in its present state: but its language has not caught up with its condition. It is soon to be a Sirian colony: well, it will not have to invent new means of expression, for the commonplaces of its epochs of servitude will only have to come forward again and find new life.

But the recital of this cycle, I see, is beginning to induce in me symptoms of Ormarin’s complaint, and I shall desist.

It turned out that I arrived at the school at a good time, for examinations were being held. I found Krolgul with some fellow examiners sitting behind a table at the end of a large hall, while students came forward one after another to show what they could do.

The examination hall is a simple rectangle, white, with no means of exciting the emotions by form, colour, scent, or any type of sound. In order accurately to test the effects of speech on the subjects, any other stimulus has been ruled out.

As I entered, I passed through a lobby crowded with the anxious examinees. They were from Volyen, Volyenadna, Volyendesta, and the two outside planets Maken and Slovin. Among them were several of our agents, notably 23 and 73 – but you will already have had my reports on them. Since they were so young in the Service when they were captured by Shammat, they never had time to become fully Linked, and therefore are of no use to Shammat. Krolgul does not understand at all why his attentions to these two, who are just as enthusiastic as Incent, have no results. Because, the conflict in them being less, they seem to be so much more stable and consistent, he expects from them more than he does from poor Incent … There is luckily so much Krolgol does not understand!

I greeted our two (temporarily) lost members and received their embarrassed greetings. For in their hearts they know themselves to be of Canopus, and in some devious way believe that their service with Shammat is still service with Us. The other agents did not recognize me.

As I entered, a young examinee had just failed. Krolgul and his associates had signalled to have her disconnected from the apparatus when he saw me; he jumped off the platform and came to greet me.

Beaming. Krolgul is always pleased to see me! Surprised? I was, and had to think it out. For one thing, our presence seems to him a guarantee of the importance of what he, what Shammat, is doing. On planets where they have been at work sometimes for millenniums without our – apparently – knowing it, they get quite downcast and wonder whether their efforts are worth it. No, my arrival in the Volyen ‘Empire’ gave them all a great boost.

And the other thing is that they know quite well how partial their information is, and that our plans for any planet are based on blueprints that are far beyond them. Krolgul, working with considerable skill for a mass uprising ‘all over the Volyens, all at the same moment – and that’s all and that’s enough,’ to quote from a recent speech, knows in his heart of hearts that my expectations are almost certain to be quite different, because of what we know.

He hurried towards me with his hand out, grinning a welcome, looking rather apelike, and this pleasure was genuine.

He was wearing another semi-uniform. These are not uniforms of or for anything in particular, but most young people throughout the Volyen ‘Empire’ wear self-invented uniforms. This is because they have been conditioned by recent wars and colonial uprisings, which were all fought in uniform. Every army, even if no more than a guerrilla group, used uniforms, imposing uniformity down to the last fastening and belt and neck opening, and any infringement, even the slightest, earned penalties, sometimes death. In fact, it is no longer possible for them to think of war except in terms of uniforms. This mental set now infects every aspect of their lives. There is a certain type of covering for the lower limbs, in thick, unyielding cloth, always of the same colour, and very tight, emphasizing the buttocks and the genitals. It is not only worn in every corner of the ‘Empire,’ but has spread to the near planets of Sirius as well. A young person who for some reason or another does not own this garment will regard himself or herself as an outcast, and will be so regarded by others.

This particular uniform of Krolgul’s is original in that the lower part consists of a skirt, similar to that worn by unskilled labourers – usually foreigners – on Volyen. On them it is hitched up between the legs into a waistband, but Shammat legs are too hairy and knotted to be displayed, so it is left to hang free. Also, it is coloured; the real reason is that Shammat loves strong colours, but the excuse is that ‘to wear black, the colour of the working clothes of the working masses, is a false identification.’ Over scarlet, blue, green, yellow flimsy cotton skirts are worn crisp brown tailored tunics whose main feature is that they are crammed with buttoned pockets all over the front and at the lower back. This gives the impression of a person who needs two free hands, probably to hold a gun of some sort.

Krolgul wore a bright-blue skirt, and his tunic was bulging with papers and writing instruments and various electronic devices.

‘Servus,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘You are welcome. Do you want to listen?’

‘Do you think I have much to learn?’ I teased him.

‘Who knows?’ he said, pleased. ‘We flatter ourselves that … but you will see for yourself.’ He signalled for the entrance of the next candidate, but stood beside me, giving me quick, almost pleading glances, of which he seemed to be unconscious.

‘You are wanting to ask me about Incent?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, all eagerness, but trying to sound offhand.

‘He is by no means recovered,’ I said. Krolgul brightened. Extraordinary, when his own personality is not being governed by some impersonation or other, how transparent he becomes, how easy to read. ‘Nor, to my mind, will he recover soon. It is a very great strain on him, as of course you know, when you use him as a conduit as you do.’ Here there were a variety of flickering glances at me, doubtful, triumphant, apologetic, even embarrassed. For Krolgul seemed to believe that we did not know of Incent’s importance to them in the battle between us, between Canopus and Shammat, though all our actions, both Shammat’s and mine, since my visit here began, proclaimed it. ‘You risk making him very ill,’ I said. ‘At this moment he is undergoing treatment.’

‘Well, he is just one of your agents, as far as we are concerned,’ said Krolgul, in a bluff liar’s style which even he knew was hardly convincing. And he took out a pipe and lit it.

‘Krolgul,’ I said, I hope temperately, and with the ‘humour’ without which one cannot survive a day in this place, ‘you are giving us an awful lot of trouble.’ At this he brightened, flattered again, jerking and writhing a little with pleased laughter. ‘But you really are on the wrong track, you know.’ I said this to observe how discouragement took possession of his whole person, and how suddenly, so that there stood this visibly dismayed person who, without any outward feature’s betraying it, reminded me so often of the ape, the animal; a blinking, open-mouthed Krolgul, Shammatian Overlord for the Volyen Empire, stood drooping beside me, and his eyes a single craving plea: Tell me, tell me, tell me.

But the attendants had wired up the examinee, and Krolgul had to return to his place on the platform. I refused to go with him, but stood near the wall by myself.

It was a young male from Volyenadna, a stocky grey-green stolid creature, who showed no sign of nervousness, but began at once, raising his hand carefully so as not to disturb the wiring of the monitors.

‘Comrades! Friends. I know I may call you friends, because of what we are going to undertake together.’

The graphs and print-outs showing his emotional responses to what he was saying were displayed, not where he could see them and perhaps become influenced by them, but behind him, on a large, high screen. I, and the examiners on the platform, could watch him and, at the same time, note the precise condition of his emotional apparatus.

It was already evident that this one could not last for long, despite his apparent heaviness and stolidity: at the word friends every part of his organism had responded, and undertake together had lifted him almost to the limit.

‘… No, you are not asking yourself, “And what is that?”, for you already know. We already know …

But the young man had already failed. On this we his voice had cracked with feeling; and the Failed buzzer went.

He was replaced by a strong, handsome young woman, from Volyendesta, full of assurance and calm smiles for us all.

She survived the first passage, with that dangerous and deliberately planted friends, very well; she went past that we while the machines registered hardly a flicker of response. But then it began to build up in her ‘… If we do not agree on the reasons for what has come to pass, then we shall on the cure. We stand together here united in one thing, that the situation cannot go on like this. Why are we surrounded by gross inequalities, by appalling injustice, by dreadful poverty and cynical wealth …’ Her voice had acquired a timbre that meant tears were in her throat, and she could not last long. But she persisted, although we could see by the impatience and irritation with herself on her face, that she knew she was defeated ‘… Why are we afflicted as we are by the bumbling stupidities of a bureaucracy groaning under the weight of its incompetence? Why in one street do we see the faces of young people who have never known what it is to open their own pay packet for their own honest work …

Her voice cracked on work; the buzzer went. She strode off, bravely, but in tears of disappointment.

The next was one of the frail, pale citizens of Slovin, who always have so much difficulty in getting the solid, stolid, robust denizens of the other planets to believe in their strength. Tough and enduring and with a nervous system much less susceptible to emotional inflammation than most, they are in fact, once one has experienced them, much prized. The platform expected great things of this apparently fragile revolutionary; and in fact she went easily past all the trigger words that had undone the others. ‘ … honest work, and in the next sicken at the sight of the overindulged and the purposeless. Why? Why?’ These two whys caused all her recordings to rise almost to danger level, but she recovered herself. ‘Why? We all know why! But what is to be done? We know. Again we know. Do we not? Our situation is bad. It is dreadful. But it is not hopeless. What we need, what we must have, is sacrifice.’ And she was over the top. But so sudden was the swoop upwards of the recording needles that the platform conferred, and said to her that she could go off, rest, and come back for another try. (In fact, she then succeeded easily.)

The nest was a Volyen indigenous worker. They are not the most attractive breed, being a dingy putty colour, and built heavily and on the whole without much grace. But they are known for their lack of emotional volatility. The needles flickered badly at friend, work, sacrifice, but recovered. ‘Yes. Sacrifice. And what is being asked of us is not only a tightened belt, though that is being asked; not only that we should work eighteen hours a day, even twenty-four hours a day, but also that we should agree to sink our separate and pitiful little individual wills and thoughts in the great whole, the great Will, the great purpose, the great Decision … that we must agree once and for all that things cannot be allowed to go on like this. Yes, once and for all, comrades … brothers … sisters … friends …’ Up swept the needles. The examinee himself put up a hand and begged for a later rehearing. It was granted.

The next was another Volyen. ‘And where shall we begin? Where? Why, with ourselves! How can we build a new world with old hearts and old wills? We need new, clean, young hearts …’ Hearts is where that unfortunate was lost. But all those who survived that far were granted a second chance.

There followed several who failed very early on, at the first testing words. Then, at last, one survived the whole course. It was another of the silvery, fragile, apparently so vulnerable Slovins. ‘We are surrounded by the heights of colossal events, in the light of which future generations will view their own fate. There cries out in the merged thunder of the times the present fate of planets. We need clear eyes and an unflinching purpose. We shall begin and complete our work to the sound of workers’ hymns and songs. Your work is not slave labour, but high service to the fatherland of all the decent people. Sacrifice! A united will! Only on this road shall we find the way out, to salvation, warmth, contentment. Sacrifice. And clean hearts. Clean hands. Love …’

This first wholly successful candidate retired, full of the shy modesty that is the convention here for people who have succeeded, and then the platform conferred. I could see that there was going to be a break. And I knew it was because Krolgul had been sitting up there biting his fingers and crouching in his seat, leaving the actual work of attending to the prowess of the examinees to his associates, while he brooded about what I had said. He wanted to come back to me and to press and to wheedle, until I told him what I knew. Until he knew what the plans of Canopus were, what the information of Canopus was …

But at this moment something unexpected happened. Into the examination hall walked – quietly enough, dressed unremarkably in a variation of local administrative-class dress – Incent. He saw me sitting there and made a gesture to me: Do not worry.

He did not meet my eyes, though. A bad sign; this meant that nothing I could say would affect him. I settled back so that what must happen, could …

Krolgul had leaped up at the sight of him, all renewed energy and purpose. Then, having cried out, ‘Incent …,’ he remembered my presence and glanced towards me, but in the same way as Incent, not allowing his eyes to meet mine.

Incent’s manner with Krolgul was – there is only one word for it – lordly. He stood in the examinee’s place and signalled to the attendants to wire him up.

‘I intend to pass this examination,’ he said, in the calm, almost indifferent way of his illness; for of course he was ill, though this need not be obvious to the examiners. He was depleted of emotion still; he was empty, after such an excess of it. No one recovers from Total Immersion in a few days, or even many. His emotional reservoirs were low; therefore he seemed calm; therefore did he give this appearance of benign urbanity.

When he was standing upright there, all the wires and leads in place, he smiled confidently at me.

‘I am ready,’ he said.

Well, it was very bad.

‘Comrades. Friends …’ I think Krolgul expected him to be lost at that very first trip-word, but what happened was much more alarming. Behind Incent, on the monitors, we could see that the needles, far from registering alarming peaks and jags and heights of emotion, were often out of sight at the bottom of the scale. So low was Incent that his whole system had gone into reverse. The word friends, which of course he spoke at the right interval after comrades, so that the nerves of the auditors had to vibrate in expectation, only caused what little emotion that was left in him to drain suddenly away. The needles flickered back into sight again at the bottom of the graphs. He was speaking in a flat, almost amiable way, though he got all the tones and intervals perfectly. He went through the gross inequalities and the injustice and so on very well, though there was literally no fuel left in him at all. I could see the examiners stirring and whispering. Krolgul was frightened out of his wits, looking at me the whole time: he had never seen anything like this, and had not known the condition existed. He was afraid I was going to punish him.

But Krolgul, of all the creatures in our galaxy, is not likely to understand free will. Not yet, at least; not for a long time.

Incent was droning on. ‘Sacrifice. Yes, sacrifice …’ And suddenly he fell, the wires pulling free.

I went over to him and brought him to himself.

He did not inquire where he was, for he knew at once, and stood up, weak but himself.

He looked at me with such shame, and said: ‘You had better take me back to the hotel, Klorathy. I’ve made a real fool of myself.’

And to Krolgul: ‘All right. But I haven’t done with you all yet. I was going to show you that I could pass your test and then reason with you on the basis of being immune to …’ And he wept, but the tears of weakness and emptiness, small, weak, painful tears.

Krolgul was running round us as we went to the door, panting and exclaiming: ‘But … but … I hope you aren’t going to hold us to account; I knew nothing about Incent’s coming here, I absolutely absolve myself of any responsibility.’

Incent was too weak to leave the building at once. We sat in an antechamber for a while, watching the examinees prepare themselves for the Examination in Rhetoric, which they did by using one another as sounding boards and checks on themselves in a piece which, for emotive words and general tone, was more taxing than the set piece in the actual examination hall.

‘What, then, is it that we are aiming at? What? Why, nothing less than the whole, perfect, radiant future of us all and our children! What is there to prevent this paradise? We all know there is nothing! In our soil lies the wealth of harvests and of minerals. In our seas and in the air, food. In our own hearts, love and the need to live happily in a happy world where sorrow is forgotten! What is it in the past that has given birth to sorrow, has bred unkindness? Why, only the lack of the will to abolish these things. And now everything has changed, for we have the will, and we have the means. Forward, and let us lay our hands on our rightful heritage – happiness. Happiness and love.’

Incent listened to this not totally without emotion: which I was pleased to see was scorn.

‘What horrible drivel,’ he was muttering.

‘I’m glad to hear you say it. I hope you will continue to think so.’

‘Well, I would have got through the test piece if I hadn’t passed out, wouldn’t I?’

‘Yes, but Shammat has words-of-power they didn’t use there at all.’

‘Have they? What? No, don’t tell me, or I suppose I’ll succumb. I really do feel so awfully ill, Klorathy. I’m giddy. I must lie down.’

He lay face down on a bench, his hands over his ears, and I continued to watch the lively scene. Not – as you can imagine, Johor – without mixed emotions! What an attractive lot they were, these chosen ones from all over the Volyen ‘Empire.’ Chosen, first of all, because they were for the most part from the privileged: the poor and deprived seldom have the energy to will for themselves positions of power. Chosen because they had natural ability. Chosen because natural abilities are matched with opportunity; plentiful opportunities now, with the ‘Empire’ falling apart. Young, for the most part; educated as far as such backward corners of the Galaxy understand the word; lively; full of the determination to succeed. Of the candidates I watched, while Incent lay there trying to recover his inner and outer balances, few succeeded in getting to the end of the difficult piece they set themselves. Fewer would pass the examination itself. But all would return to enrol for further sessions of study in Krolgul’s school: they believe in themselves, and the future that Krolgul promises them.

Shammat prowls through ‘the Volyens’ – to use the colloquialism – watching every public gathering for signs of talent. Some young person, who has perhaps leaped up to orate because of a genuine anguish over the lot of the unfortunate, because of a real vision of radiant futures, finds at his side this personage who understands him and his innermost thoughts, dreams, aspirations. ‘How wonderful you are,’ say the eloquent, compassionate eyes of this new friend. ‘How your beautiful ideas do you credit! Please go on …

This chosen one, chosen now by Shammat, finds efforts encouraged, speeches applauded, above all in every word the implication that these two, these new comrades, these friends, understand where others do not; finds that he is considered to be of finer, nobler, braver substance than most. Oh, how cleverly Shammat uses the instincts for evolution towards the better that are implanted in every creature in the Galaxy! But while a generous and imaginative understanding supports this neophyte, there is also judicious and intelligent criticism. ‘You might have phrased that a little better,’ breathes Krolgul, if it is indeed he, and it often is, for his energy is superb. ‘Perhaps if I might suggest …’ Only too happy is this aspiring one to find a genuine friendship, which is able to teach as well as to support. And so a career develops that has no future in the existing order, but relates only to an idea; the aspiring one, as he or she looks about at the chaos, the ugliness, the disorder of a time of disintegration, sees beyond it some infinitely noble society ruled by himself. But Shammat has never said, in any of these competent criticisms, ‘You aspire to power over your fellows.’ Only ‘You yearn to serve.’ With Shammat at their side, these young people learn the business of arousal by Rhetoric to the point where, judged ripe, they are offered a course of training …

‘You are very good at this,’ says Krolgul, with that modest and comradely complicity in which Shammat specializes, and which indicates in every look, smile, touch of the hand, You and I together against those others out there, the others without understanding. ‘Would you like to be even better? We can teach you, you know. We? Let us say, friends. But you have a handicap – do you mind my mentioning it? It is a wonderful thing, it is great, it is truly inspirational to watch you carry others away, watch you being carried away to such heights of fervour, to watch you becoming drunk on your own visions. But if you want to ascend to the control of real professionalism, that is a stage you must leave behind!’ And here Shammat cushions the shock, cradles in understanding the neophyte’s moment of disillusion. For throughout ‘the Volyens’ – Volyen itself and its colonies – thanks to the influence of Volyen, emotion is much prized. It stems from the hypocrisies of Empire, from the predominant emotion of the ruling class of that ruling planet. (Though from our point of view this rule has been so short, it has been long enough to infect a group of planets with the malady.) This emotion: ‘We are sacrificing ourselves, we Volyens, to bring to you, our children, the infinite advantages of our guidance in your development.’ Unreal emotions breed others: to weep, to emote, to show that you are weeping and emoting, these monstrous perversions are prized. Even by the lively and rebellious young people who see through the hypocrisies of ‘guidance’ and wish only to free themselves ‘for ever’ from Volyen. To hear that they must learn to separate in themselves their yearnings for a perfect world, and their verbal expression of it, from their cool and observant minds … no, it is hard to take, and Shammat knows it. ‘No, no,’ murmurs Krolgul, all sympathy, ‘I do not ask you to feel less for the sufferings of others. Can you believe that of me, now that you have come to know me so well? Perish the thought! Never! But to be effective, to become an instrument of the upward strivings of the Galaxy, to address the infinite and legitimate hungers of the poor, the suffering, the unfree – then you must learn to use words but not be used by them.’

Oh yes, it is with the wriest of thoughts that I have heard – so very often, for I have been present when Shammat is at its work, though Shammat has had no suspicion of it – this caricature of Canopus, this shabby mimicry.

And it is because Shammat can use words that sound so similar to Ours that so many of our own were among those aspirants for a degree from Krolgul’s School of Rhetoric that day. I noted them. I spoke to the two who knew me, using our own quiet words that might remind them, that will remind them, when the time comes that they are not Shammat’s, that their future is not to become one of the power-hungry of the Galaxy.

What Shammat does, in short, is to allow ‘life itself’ to throw up its material, encourage ‘life itself’ to develop it, and then, when these people are already well accustomed to assaults of Rhetoric both from others and as used by themselves, they are taken into Krolgul’s school, where they have to learn to become immune to it, so that they may control crowds by the most passionate, violent, emotional language possible, without ever being affected by it.

And never, during the preparations ‘in life itself’ or in the school, does Shammat say to its disciples: ‘This is a school for the use of power over others, for the crude manipulation of the lowest instincts.’

How easy it is for the unprepared, for the innocent, to lose their way: when Incent at last rolled over from his prone position on the bench beside me, he said, ‘Klorathy, I have been thinking, why not enrol me in Krolgul’s school? He need never know that I am here simply to learn what I need.’

‘And what do you need?’

‘How not to be manipulated by words. What else?’

‘And you really cannot see any difference in the methods we use to harden you against Rhetoric, and Shammat’s?’ He was lying there, our Incent, moodily elongated, arms behind his head, legs straight, black eyes brooding, very pale because of his condition. Meanwhile a young Slovin orated, ‘What, then, is it that we are aiming at? What? Why, nothing less than …

‘They certainly seem to have a much more enjoyable time of it than we do,’ he grumbled.

‘Indeed they do. Enjoyable, that’s the word. What is more enjoyable than power or the promise of it? When do we ever flatter you, Incent?’

A short, bitter laugh. ‘No, you can’t be accused of that, Klorathy. Well, perhaps I choose to learn what I need in Krolgul’s school and not with you! At least Krolgul won’t make me feel as if I’m a contemptible worm without a redeeming feature.’

‘No, but you will be a contemptible worm without a redeeming feature. If you go through Krolgul’s school, Incent, you’ll come out a first-class little tyrant, I promise you, able to stand on any plinth or platform anywhere, reducing crowds to tears or arousing them to murder, having them under your will, and not feel a flicker of remorse or compunction. Oh, Krolgul’s school is very efficient, and I was certainly planning for you to see it in operation so that you could make certain comparisons, but only when you were internally strong enough to be able to make the comparisons.’

Incent lay there, looking at me: dark eyes, the blankness behind than showing that his degree of exhaustion, though improved, was still severe.

‘Some of our people are there, with Krolgul. One of them is reciting now. Agent 73, I know her.’

‘Yes, and when they’ve come to understand, through life itself, what they have become, do you imagine it will be an easy task to build them up inwardly, to restore to them what has been stolen? Incent, you are at risk. More than, perhaps, some of the others. Your temperament, your physical tendencies, your capacity for self-projection –’

‘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.’

‘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 contraction, 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.

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 …

And where was Grice in this spectrum of loyalties, or disloyalties, according to how you look at it?

‘Grice,’ I said, ‘if I told you that Sirius would be invading Volyen very soon, what would you do?’

‘Do? I’d throw myself off the nearest high building.’ But this was said with such painful relish that I waited awhile. ‘What difference would it make to a Volyenadnan – or a Volyendestan, for that matter, from what I hear of the place? Would the Sirian rule be worse than ours?’

‘You could of course improve yours. Is there any chance of your colleagues’ listening to you?’

‘Them? They don’t give a damn for their colonized planets!’

And suddenly he sat straight up and looked at me tragically, lips quivering.

‘And they don’t give a damn for me. Not one of them. And neither do the others.’

By this he meant the young groups. They had rebuffed him.

You will note that their not giving a damn for him was what really reached him.

‘Yes, but do any of them care about Volyenadna?’

‘If you told some of them to go out there and join the revolution, they might listen to that.’

‘You are referring to Incent, I suppose? To Krolgul?’

‘If they would have me, I’d go like a shot and throw in my lot with them, with Calder! But they don’t want me! No one does. It’s always been like that, Klorathy! Ever since I was small. I’ve never really fitted in. I’ve never been wanted. I’ve never been …

And he flung himself down and wept, loudly and painfully.

I could see we can expect nothing from him, so I told the hotel to send medical assistance, and came back here to Vatun.

It is my belief that I myself should, as Canopus, try what I can do with Calder. I put this forward as an official request.

KLORATHY ON VOLYENADNA, TO JOHOR.

I had hoped to meet Calder with his colleagues. He sent a message that he would come alone, to a place that turned out to be a settlement of a few clans in a cold valley far from the capital. Grey stone houses, or huts, and a grey tundra rising all around us to a grey sky.

It was a miners’ club, but at an hour when they were at work. A woman served us the thin, sour beverage of Volyenadna and went out saying she had to prepare a meal for her children.

This is the conversation that took place.

He was in that condition of irritable gloominess that indicates, in this species, an extreme of suspicion. ‘Calder, would you describe this tyranny you live under as an efficient one?’

He slammed his great fist onto the table and exploded: ‘Tyranny, you say! You can say that again! Filthy exploiting callous swine who …’ He went on for some minutes, until he ran into silence. ‘But you know what they are like,’ he added.

‘What I asked was, is it efficient?’

He sat blinking at me, confused; then feeling himself attacked growled, ‘You forget, I’ve never been out of this planet. How can I make comparisons? But I take it you can. You tell me, then, is it efficient or not? From where we sit, it is efficient enough: it drains all that we make with the sweat of our brow and leaves us … as you can see for yourself.’ And he sat there triumphant, as if he had made a good point in a debate, even shooting glances to either side as if to check up on the reactions of an audience.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.