The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

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. (#ulink_1a18973a-6105-59bc-b046-c3dcfc8c13da)

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.’