The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

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 …