The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘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. (#ulink_a5f18f47-ecda-51bb-8ac1-1e2f26daf391)

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.