The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (7 page)

Incent chanted on, until Calder half stood up and said to him, ‘Sit down, lad; let the opposition have its say.' And Incent, gasping, sat, giving me appalled, apologetic looks, and then Krolgul looks of apology and of complicity.

I said: ‘What you have to do is diversify your economy.'

I knew this would be inflammatory, because of its simplicity and because it was unexpected.

Volyenadna was a mining planet. That was what it was. That was what it had been, for as long as the history allowed by Volyen recorded.

A silence. And then Krolgul allowed himself, first of all a long, silent heave of laughter, and then a burst of laughter. Now laughter from the Volyenadnans. From Incent, a blank, heavy look and a loose jaw. I was particularly concerned for him: after all, if I could not save him, return him to himself again, then …

‘Let him speak,' said Calder, but on his face was a heavy sneer.

I said: ‘You are a slave planet, as Krolgul says you are. A rich planet, whose wealth goes elsewhere.'

‘To Greasy-guts,' remarked Krolgul, in a low, as it were meditative voice.

‘No,' I said. ‘For generations the results of your labours have been taken from you. But it was not always thus. Have you forgotten that before you were the subjects of Volyen, you were the subjects of the planet Maken, and before that of planet Slovin, and both took from you the minerals you mined? But before that you were the conquerors. There was a time when you dominated Volyendesta and Volyen itself –'

‘With what?' inquired Krolgul. ‘Ice and snow?'

‘As the ice retreated, and you spread over the tundra, you multiplied, and did not find enough to eat or to keep you
warm. You stole spaceships from Slovin, who landed here on a foraging trip, and you used them to travel to Maken and to Volyen, and you made others, and you terrorized four planets and took from them, just as now everything is taken from you …

Calder listened to this with some derision. ‘You are saying that we were blood-sucking imperialists, just as Volyen is now?'

‘I am saying that you have not always been slaves and the providers of riches for other people.'

‘And you are suggesting that …

‘You are a rich prize for Volyen, and you will be for whoever succeeds Volyen, since empires rise and fall, fall and rise. Volyen will disappear from this planet, just as Maken and Slovin grew weak and disappeared, and just as you grew weak and were overthrown from the planets you had conquered. But whoever succeeds Volyen' – I could not, of course, even hint at Sirius here, for that was a word that could be breathed only to Ormarin, he was as yet the only one strong enough to hear it, and Krolgul himself does not know how soon Volyen will collapse in on itself and become a subject – ‘whoever will come after Volyen will use you in the same way, if you don't make sure they won't. But you could make yourselves stronger. You could become farmers as well as miners and –'

Krolgul was laughing, sobbing with laughter. ‘Farmers,' he cried, while Calder's followers laughed. ‘Farmers – on this ice lump of a place.' But his contempt for the planet suddenly showed too plainly, and Calder did not like it.

‘Farm what?' he asked me, directly.

‘If you will listen to me, you and your people, I will show you. Yours is not the only planet with these conditions.'

‘And what makes you think that Volyen will allow us? She wants to keep us as we are; she's interested in our minerals, and nothing more.'

‘But,' I said, ‘you have a Governor-General who in my view would listen to you.'

And at this Krolgul was shouting, ‘Grice the Greasy-guts, Governor-General Guts, Greenguts …

And suddenly Incent was on his feet, once again alive and alert and Krolgul's creature.

‘Down with Grice,' he was shouting. ‘Get rid of Grice and …

I, across the din, looked hard at Calder and said, ‘Remember, Calder, I can help you. Remember I said this.'

Calder did not allow his eyes to meet mine: always a sign that you have ceased to be real for these people. And, indeed, for a few minutes I felt as if I had suddenly become invisible, for all those hard, antagonistic grey eyes from the workers' benches, and of course Incent's passionate black eyes, avoided me, were directed at one another. As for Krolgul, he lowered his head as if gazing thoughtfully at the floor, while in fact keeping a heavy-lidded, hypnotic pressure on Incent, now again his subject.

‘It is quite evident,' Incent was saying, or chanting, in a low voice that gathered power, ‘that we are here at the fulcrum of a dynamic! What perspectives stretch before us as we stand with one foot in the shameful and turgid past and the other in the future where the forms of life will become ever more vibrant and luminous and where, grasping opportunities in hands that have lost timidity, we build happiness where nothing is now but sullen misery …

Calder's group began to emit angry noises, and Calder shouted, ‘Come on, lad, let's hear your concrete proposals.'

Incent, brought up short, stood smiling vaguely, his Rhetoric jumping and jolting through him so that his hands twitched, and so did his mouth.

Krolgul said in a low voice: ‘A concrete proposal! You ask for an action, an act! I'll tell you what act waits for you to –'

‘– to fill it with the inevitability of history …' said
Incent, almost tentatively, for his impetus had been checked and he could not regain it.

‘Yes,' said Krolgul, more loudly. ‘An act which will speak for you to the tyrants who –'

‘– fatten on your anguish!' shouted Incent.

Krolgul: ‘Grice the Guts, Volyen's minion, Volyen's symbol, he stands here among you as Volyen; seize him and –'

‘Grab Grice!' shouted Incent, jumping up and down. ‘Drag him before the … before the …

‘Bar of History,' prompted Krolgul. And, with an almost unnoticeable gesture of his hand, he made Incent keep quiet, so that Incent stood with his mouth loose, his eyes half closed: the image of a sleeper, or of someone in a trance.

Suddenly from the band of workers came the shout, ‘Yes, that's it, drag him to judgment, let's try him …

‘Down with him,' shouted Incent. ‘We will drag him from his palace, we will make him stand here among us all-'

‘Among the
people
,' prompted Krolgul – and Incent was lost. Standing there among us, his arms raised above his head, he seemed to flicker and shine with the life that Krolgul was feeding into him. No check there now; Incent was his, and everyone in that courtroom leaned towards him in a kind of yearning, a hunger. And, Johor, I must tell you that I was affected myself. Oh, how small and meagre and pitiful suddenly seemed to me all our efforts, above all our language, so cool and measured and
chosen.
I saw myself as, I knew, those miners saw me at that moment: a figure apart from them, their lives, their efforts, an alien figure sitting quietly on a bench, indifferent and passionless.

But simply because of my distance, and because anything I said must seem so wrong, even brutal, I knew they would listen, and I remarked, with no raising of the voice, no show of willing self-immolation and sacrifice: ‘And once you have
dragged Grice from the Residency, and even killed him, what difference will that make to Volyen? You will have a new Governor at once, and possibly one much worse.'

A growl, a groan from the men, who looked, as if at their own lost potentiality, at the exalted Incent. But Calder did allow his eyes to flicker over me, just once, with a look of dislike that I was weak enough to find painful.

‘And,' I inquired, ‘just how do you propose to drag him from his palace?'

Krolgul said: ‘We shall go out into the streets and the meeting places and we shall say to the people, Come with us … And that's all we shall need.'

‘I think perhaps not quite all,' I remarked, in the same flat voice. Meanwhile I had turned my head just enough to see that Grice was visible to anyone who chose to glance up at the little window. He was leaning forward, gazing with sombre passion down at us. And particularly at Incent, the ennobled youth, who was chanting softly to himself: ‘Freedom or death, death or freedom.'

I laughed. Oh, yes, it was a laugh as calculated as anything Krolgul went in for.

Through the mutters, then the shouts of indignation, I said to Calder, who alone of the miners was still sufficiently his own master to keep a connection with me, ‘Shall I tell you the last time I heard that cry, freedom or death? Calder, would you like to hear?'

Still those stony grey eyes refused actually to engage with mine, went past me again, and I said, ‘Calder, do I have the right to speak?'

With the same dislike he at last looked at me and nodded.

‘Go ahead, then,' he said.

And while Incent chanted, ‘Liberty or death!' I said, ‘It was on another planet. The people of a certain country were impoverished and the economic conditions chaotic. They wished to rid themselves of a variety of parasites who lived off them, one of these being a something called a church,
which at least you have never heard of here. While they debated and conspired and conferred, always at great risk, certain professional revolutionaries took charge, using words like Liberty or Death, We can be reborn only through blood –'

‘Reborn through blood …' chanted Incent, and it was as if the words were feeding strength into him. He seemed positively to float there on the power of the words he was using, or which used him.

‘The King and the Queen, who were in fact quite well meaning and responsible people, were used as scapegoats, and the revolutionaries directed popular rage and resentment against them. The lies and the calumnies created a picture of monstrous personal self-indulgence that was strong enough to last centuries. The revolutionaries murdered the King and the Queen and the people around them as representatives, and then as the populace became more and more inflamed with words, words, words, the murdering became indiscriminate and soon the revolutionaries were killing one another. An orgy of killing went on, as the degenerates and criminals who always flourish at such times became powerful and could do as they liked. In the frenzies of killing and revenge, and the orgies of words, words, words, that everyone took part in, the reason for the revolution, which had been to change the economic conditions and to make the country strong and wealthy, became forgotten. Because in every one of us lies, only just in control, the brute, the brute that in this planet here was so recently one that ate raw flesh and drank raw blood and who had to murder to live at all. The energies of the poor country had gone into killing for killing's sake, into the enjoyment of words –'

Incent was chanting: ‘Kill, kill, kill …

‘And soon there was chaos. Into this chaos came a tyrant, using inflammatory words, uniting the disunited people by words, and he took control, reinstated the class that had
fattened on the poor and even added to it, and then set about conquering all the neighbouring countries. He too, having risen by the power of words –
lies
– fell again, having murdered and plundered and destroyed. And the country where the words Liberty or Death had seemed so noble and so fine was in the hands again of a hereditary ruling caste that controlled wealth. All that suffering, killing, heroism, all those words, words, words, for nothing.'

Calder and the miners now had their attention fully on me. They were taking no notice of the unfortunate Incent, who still stood there chanting. They did not look at Krolgul, who was inwardly conceding victory to me and quietly working out plans for another day. A modest figure, with his chin in his hand, he was watching the scene with an ironic smile: the best he could do.

‘Calder,' I said, ‘there are those who exist on words. Words are their fuel and their food. They live by words. They make groups of people, armies of people, nations, countries,
planets
their subjects, through words. And when all the shouting and the chanting and the speeches and the drunkenness of words is done, nothing has changed. You may “rise” if you like, you may drag Grice or some other puppet to the bar of history or geography or “revolutionary inevitability,” and you can make yourselves and your entire people drunk on shouting, and at the end of it all, nothing will have changed. Grice is about as guilty as a –'

At that moment I noticed everyone was looking, not at me, but past me. I noticed that the pale blur on the high shining wall had disappeared. I saw Incent's face change from the exaltation of his
Blood … Death … Liberty …
into a perfectly genuine scowl of hatred. Grice was standing there among us, beside Incent. As exalted as he, as pale, as ennobled, in the same pose of willing suffering, arms raised, palms forward, chin lifted, eyes shining, he said, ‘I'm Grice. I'm Grice the Guilty.'

‘Rubbish,' I said. ‘You are nothing of the kind. You are a
person who has been doing his job, and not too badly. Don't get inflated ideas about yourself.'

There was by now an uncomfortable silence. Even Incent had stopped his chant. The actual physical presence of Grice was a shock. No one had seen him except half invisible behind the various kinds of Volyen uniform, all designed to obliterate the individual. Of course, everyone knew that he was not some corpulent monster stuffed with the blood and flesh of his victims, but what they were actually looking at now was hard to assimilate. Grice is a weedy individual, pale, unhealthy, with a face ravaged by undirected introspection, weakened by unresolved conflict.

Grice said, with dignity, ‘Subjectively I can say I am not guilty. I do not stuff myself; in fact, I have been on a diet recently. I do not care about clothing. I am not interested in luxury, and power bores me. But objectively, and from a historical perspective, I am guilty. Do with me what you will!'

And, spreading his arms wide, he stood there before us, waiting for some apotheosis of fate.