The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘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.’