The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (15 page)

‘Krolgul never mentioned it.'

‘He has never heard of it. Shammat has as yet to get its hands on this plant. It is called Rocknosh, by the way.'

‘Shammat! Canopus! You might be a Sirian spy, for all I know.'

‘And if I were? You would soon find out, by experimenting, whether the plant was of any use to you.'

‘The place is suddenly crawling with Sirian spies. Every second person, they say, is a Sirian spy.'

‘With good reason, Calder. The Volyen Empire is at its end. Sirius is about to overrun it.'

‘We shall fight them,' he shouted, as I had expected, for he is programmed for it. ‘We shall fight them on the sands, we shall fight them on the cliffs, we shall fight them street by street of our cities, we shall fight them on the tundras –'

‘Yes, yes, yes,' I said. ‘Though why you should care whether it's Volyen or Sirius … Whether it's one or the other, without this plant I am offering you, you are helpless. Whether it is Volyen or Sirius, with the plant you can feed yourselves. You can bargain.'

‘Why have you – someone – not given us this plant before?'

‘Because it is only recently that conditions on this planet have made it possible for it to grow here.'

‘I don't like it,' he said heavily, full of grief, of suffering. The long, dark, heavy history of his planet was weighing on him. He sat there, looking back through his life, the long
struggle of it, and thinking too, as I could see, of past generations of deprivation, hunger, the harshness of Volyen rule.

‘What have you got to lose, Calder?'

‘How do I know what we might lose by it?'

At this point the woman came in from next door with her jug of the beverage, filled up our glasses, and stood there quietly, looking out the door at the sodden dark hillside, where rain was falling.

‘I am at my wit's end to find food for the children,' she remarked. ‘There's hardly anything in the shops. The rations have been cut again. And the last Volyen consignment was half the usual.'

He was hardly listening. ‘Yes, yes,' he said to her, in the kindly, fatherly way they use with their females when the females are playing their allotted role, which is to work even harder than their men.

‘I suppose you haven't had any news, Comrade Calder, of the next Volyen food consignment?'

‘No, but it's late. My wife was grumbling about it.'

‘Strange, I wonder why she'd do that?' She went out slowly. To stand just outside the door, while I watched Calder inwardly writhing in the toils of his suspicion of me.

I said, ‘In a very short time you will be overrun by Sirius. Yes, whether you fight or not. And then, almost at once, there will be no Sirians, because their Empire is at its peak and is about to collapse.'

‘How do you know all this? Oh, yes, you say Canopus, Canopus, as if that's an answer to it all.'

‘From your point of view it is … Shall I go on? The Sirian conquest of Volyen will be brutal and
inefficient,
as I have been using the word, for Sirius itself is riven with debate, conflict, indecision. There have been times in Sirian history when a conquest of a planet was
efficient.
I mean, Calder, organized with certain aims in view, and carried out
in accordance with a plan. This will not happen as Volyen is overrun. Because first one, then another group comes to the top on the Sirian senior planet itself, and on all the planets of the Sirian Empire. There is no consistent plan now. The conquest of Volyen will take place almost by accident, because of a temporary ascendancy of a certain viewpoint within the current – temporary – alignment of some planets. And you will be overrun, not by Sirian Mother Planet soldiers, but a mix of armies who will quarrel among themselves, who will never agree about anything, and who will not carry out orders.'

‘Oh, this poor Volyenadna,' Calder brought out heavily. Tears stood in his eyes, in accordance with this convention in ‘the Volyens' that tears are a sign of superior sensibility, and even of superior thought. They will make sure you have noticed that they are evidencing these signs of sensibility to a situation, and therefore Calder turned his head slightly so that I could see water glistening in his eyes. ‘How long will it all last?'

‘Not long at all,' I said, ‘because the armies that overrun you will bring hardly enough food for themselves. And will not bring food for you. When they notice that you are starving, they will appeal to the Sirian HQ on Volyen for supplies, but inadequate supplies will arrive, and then none …

‘How do you know all this, sitting there so calmly, announcing this, that, and the other thing as if you can see it?'

‘Why should we have to see it? It is enough to know the nature of the Species, the races, the individuals involved. The armies that will overrun this little planet – this very little, unimportant planet, Calder – will be in a blind panic, because they will have understood that the Sirian Empire is collapsing around them and that they may find themselves marooned here, forgotten, on a planet that – forgive me – is not the most inviting in the Galaxy.'

‘O unfortunate planet, planet doomed to misery, to hardship, to …

‘Rubbish, Calder. It is not doomed at all. You could have your own food supplies long before then. You could bribe the rabble of soldiery to leave, with food, for there won't be much of it anywhere, I promise you, not even on Volyen, given the mess the Sirians will be making of everything. In fact, if you plan intelligently, you will be able to use your supplies of Rocknosh to buy yourselves not only independence from the Sirians, but real independence for yourselves. You will be able to govern yourselves, use your minerals yourselves, export what you choose to whom you choose.'

‘There is just one little thing you have overlooked,' brought up Calder triumphantly. ‘It is this. What makes you think that Volyen will let us get away with it? What? You tell me that, now!' And he subsided, chuckling, shaking his head from side to side over my foolishness, and sending glances at that audience of his for whom he had been performing all his life.

‘Did I not begin by saying they wouldn't even notice it? You could cover the rocks of half the planet with a dull-reddish furry plant, and they wouldn't know it.'

‘Oh, that's what you say!'

‘Anticipating that you have become such slaves by habit, I had planned to get hold of Governor Grice so that he could obtain official permission for the introduction of this food. There are plenty of people in the Colonial Administration of Volyen who sympathize with you about your treatment. And Governor Grice is exactly the right man to do it, but …

‘And now you've gone completely off the rails, as far as I am concerned.'

‘It would have been
almost
the simplest way – for the simplest and easiest would have been for you to agree and to do it yourselves. But Grice is not himself at the moment, I am afraid.'

‘And another thing: I'm not sitting here to listen to you call me a slave.'

And he got up, conscious of a hundred pairs of eyes for whom his demeanour, enduring modestly heroic, was intended. Without looking at me, he shouted out: ‘The Sirian gentleman will pay.' As the woman came in, he grinned at her, like a child who has won a point over another, made a grimace towards me that categorized me as a hopeless lunatic, slapped her across her large buttocks as a way of re-establishing his balance, and went out.

The woman stood looking at me. Like all their females, she is a rock and a stone, all strength and ability to withstand. She came slowly across and stood by Calder's empty chair.

The following is a full record of the conversation I had with this female of Volyenadna.

‘You say there is this food?'

‘Yes. I have spores of it here.'

‘When I plant it, how do I look after it?'

‘You don't. It will grow on any rock. Here is a list of the methods you can use for preparing it.'

‘Thank you.'

The first thing I heard on my return was that Grice had been kidnapped by Motz. No ransom has been demanded. Questions include: Why Grice? Is Motz aware that Grice in his youth became a Sirian agent? If so, is it important? Is this kidnapping designed to frighten all the other ex- or ‘sleeping' Sirian agents on Volyen? In other words, was this kidnapping inspired by some Sirian faction? Does the other nearby Sirian planet, Alput, know of this situation?

I hear that Alput and Motz are in serious disagreement over the invasion of Volyen.

Motz represents an almost pre-Ambien attitude to the effect that a Sirian takeover is by definition an advantage to the taken-over. Might is right. Sirius is good, other planets are all in need of her superior wisdom.

The faction on Alput currently in ascendance debates endlessly about the Virtue.

Waiting for further information about Grice, I paid a visit to Incent. On my way in, our friend the hotelkeeper stopped me to say that he believed, on the basis of sounds coming from the inner room of Incent's convalescence, that Incent was ‘off again.' And so it proved. He was lying on his back in the recliner, and contemplating with giggles, shouts of delight, groans, ecstasies of all kinds, the patterns of the upper part of the room, which he had set into violent motion. Revolving rhombohedrons, tripping tetrahedrons whirled in a dance with oscillating octoids, while Luminosity was set at Full and the Sound Gauge was on Singing of the Spheres, also at Full.

I switched off the apparatus and waited for him to stop writhing and gasping out cries and groans of ‘Wow! Cool! Neat! Right on! Sensational! I am so
moved!'

He lay on his back staring at the now empty space at the top of the room.

‘All right,' he said at last, ‘there's no need to say it.'

‘What are we going to do with you, Incent, what!'

‘The thing is, I really do feel I have it in me to get well again; I really do believe that, Klorathy.'

‘Very well, then. Do you want to stay here – only I might be gone quite a while, because poor Grice is giving us a lot of trouble – or do you want to come with me?'

‘Oh, no, I don't think I could trust myself outside yet. It is wonderful in here. I really was feeling that I was coming to myself again. No, I'll be careful with the mathematicals.'

And so I left him.

Our agent on Motz (AM 5) is trusted by Grice's captors; ironically he was a foundation member of the revolutionary
group that now runs Motz, being at that time in a sentimental condition. He rapidly recovered, and found himself advantageously placed, from our point of view. I am waiting for a report from him.

Salud! Servus, as Krolgul would say – and does say, since here he is, stirring it up. Mind you, he is not having it as easy as he likes, because the situation here is pretty clear-cut, and what the Father of Lies likes is already muddied waters he can muddy even worse. The situation? Onto a barren planet unpopulated by higher animals came a population fleeing from another planet, their own, but taken over forcibly by a species evicted from
their
planet by … but the account of this invasion was sent to the Archivists. Meanwhile, the deserts and marshes of Motz have been made fruitful. They are a clever, industrious people, full of the energy that results from single-mindedness. What are their minds and efforts directed towards? One thing only, to return to their home planet. For Motz, which they have created, have made, is not their home: so their minds have been set. While levelling a mountain or draining a swamp, they are singing: One day we shall go home. Yet the usurpers on their own planet have of course no intention of leaving, unless forcibly ejected. For a long time Motz was not strong enough; recently it has become strong enough. Yet while they talk – dramatically enough – of war, they do nothing about it. The truth is, they have become Motzan, of Motz; they do not really want to ‘go home.' But they can't admit it, at least not publicly. Speeches and ceremonies of all kinds allow them to dream – briefly – of ‘our home.' They decided that their grievance, their just cause, had been forgotten by the Galaxy, and kidnapped Grice to
publicize their cause, counting on Volyen making efforts to recover one who is, after all, a senior colonial official. But Volyen, as you know, has made no more than routine protests; and this is because Grice's past as a Sirian agent (admittedly an ambiguous one) makes it hard for them to know what to do. As for Motzans, that he was, is, an agent serves only for them as a guarantee of worthiness, of Virtue.

Krolgul has told them that Grice was a ‘blood-sucking tyrant, on Volyenadna, and, unable to reconcile these two states of mind, after long and tortuous thought they have concluded that his tyrannical behaviour as Governor was the result of a necessary concealment of his (intrinsically) virtuous nature, so as to make his association with Sirius seem improbable. Because these revolutionaries, who call themselves the Embodiments of Sirian Virtue, believe that, ‘overall and in the long term and looking at the essential situation,' Good equals Sirius, and if anything that opposes Sirius shows any signs of decency, then this can only mean (a) the phenomenon in question is showing, but of course only briefly, Sirian qualities, or (b) it isn't really good and decent at all, ‘looked at from an objective point of view.' This, despite the fact that it was under the aegis of Sirius that their planet was filched from them by conquerors whose own home had been stolen; and that everywhere you look in these Sirian outlying colonies is nothing but confusion, incompetence, lying, and those particularly brutal types of tyranny that result from indecision and conflict at the source: the Mother Planet of Sirius.

These are people who cannot accommodate more than one point of view at a time because of their history, which as I've said is a single-minded concentration on one thing, to return ‘home.' Faced with a fact that does not fit their current view, they attempt to turn it on its head, and, if they fail, simply push it out of sight. Krolgul inadvertently let slip that he has enjoyed perfect freedom on Volyen to run his School of Rhetoric, and since he is currently informing
them that Volyen is a total tyranny, they have decided that if there
is
such a school, then he, Krolgul, must be in the pay of the Volyens.