Doris Lessing - The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

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.

‘Just a minute,’ said Calder, disgusted by him, ‘where’s your bodyguard?’

‘They don’t know I’m here. I gave them the slip,’ he said with pride. ‘I’ve been attending your meetings in disguise. Not as often as I’d like – I have so much to learn, don’t you know! But I’m your greatest fan, Calder. I simply love what you do. I’m on your side.’

Incent had collapsed. He was sitting on his bench, staring at this villain, and I could see he was in a state of clinical shock. I had to do something with him. I got up and pulled him to his feet.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ I said to Calder, who was conferring with his colleagues. As I left, dragging Incent with me, I heard Calder saying to Grice, in a disgusted irritated voice: ‘Now, you run along back to your palace, Governor. And be quick about it. We don’t want it to be said we’ve been kidnapping you, or something like that.’

I took Incent back to our lodgings. He was really in a pitiable condition, fevered with Rhetoric, for he had not been able to let loose all the words that were in him.

I sat him down and said to him, ‘I am sorry, Incent, but I have to do it.’

‘I know I deserve it,’ he said, with satisfaction.

Total Immersion it had to be, then. ‘I shall cause you actually to live through the horrors of the events I described to Calder in the court,’ I said.

I made him a metalworker in Paris, not in the depths of poverty, of course, because it is essential for a revolutionary of a certain type to be free from the worst of hunger and cold and the responsibilities of a family. The most energetic revolutionaries are always middle-class, since they can give their full time to the business. He met with others like himself in a hundred poor places, foundries, cafés, dens of every sort, made speeches and listened to them, ran through the streets with mobs shouting out words: Death … Blood … Liberty … Freedom … Down with … To the Guillotine with … He greedily assimilated every bit of news about the King and the Queen, the court, the priests. He was like a conduit for words, words, words, he was in a permanent high fever of Rhetoric, he fell under the spell of all the wonder-workers, the hypnotizers of the public. Then, as words took power completely, and the madness of words had all Paris in its grip, he ran with tumbrils to the places of ritual murder, he shouted filth and abuse at King, Queen, aristocrats, he screamed hatred at former allies like Madame (We-can-be-reborn-only-through-blood) Roland, and soon he was screaming with the mob as former idols fell. It was he who was the loudest, the most vociferous, as Paris exulted in the details of cruelty. When the Parisians, on the call of the Commune, broke into the nine prisons and for five days killed in cold blood fourteen hundred people, it was he who carried Danton’s message when told of this: ‘To hell with the prisoners, they must look after themselves.’ And he killed, and killed, always chanting as he did, ‘To the death with … death death death …’ After the killing had exhausted itself, and people were sickened, he sang sentimental songs about the fate of the murdered, and ran about the city like a rat or a beetle because running and shouting had him in their power and he was unable to stop. And when the new tyrant took power, he ran and shouted and praised, ‘Up with … Glory to …’ He struggled and lied his way into the armies of the tyrant, for he was now no longer a fervent, handsome, eloquent youth, but a rather fat man bloated with words and indulgence and cruelties, and he marched with armies into country after country, murdering and raping. And, finally, he went with the armies on the tyrant’s last war of conquest, which failed, and he died of starvation in the snow with thousands of others, still mouthing words, abuse of the people whose country he had invaded.

And returned to himself, sitting in the chair opposite me, blinking and staring as the reality of his present situation became stronger than the life he had just left.

He began to weep. First almost silently, sitting there with blank, frantic eyes, water pouring from them, and then with abandon, lying in his chair, his face in the crook of his arm.

I left him there and went out into the streets. Everything seemed as usual. That is to say, the better places of the city – gardens, restaurants, cafés – were full of Volyens, and the Volyenadnans crowded the back streets, with their cafés and clubs. There seemed no more of the armed patrols than usual. In the Residency, a single light burned high up.

I looked in at Incent: he was asleep in his chair.

I walked across the square to the Residency and asked to see Governor-General Grice. I was informed that he had unexpectedly left for Volyen.

I left messages for Calder in all the places I knew he frequented that I was available if he wanted to talk to me, and waited for several days; nothing happened. I listened to Incent, who needed to tell me about the life he had just lived: the fever had – only temporarily, I am afraid – left him. Nothing burning and inspired about these halting, fumbling, painful words. He was shuddering and trembling, sometimes rigid with horror at what he had seen and at what he had done.

But I need to go to Volyen itself, that is clear. I cannot give Incent any more time to recover. Giving him choice – as, of course, I have to do, even when it would be so dangerous for him now to make the wrong one-I told him that he could go with me or stay with Krolgul. But at Krolgul’s name he shuddered.

We are leaving at once.

I dropped in here on my way to Volyen, to see Ormarin.

The Sirian presence is very strong. Roads, bridges, harbours are everywhere being built. Everywhere are the camps of the slave labourers. In the skies are positioned Sirian craft of all kinds. There is nothing to be heard but talk of the coming Sirian invasion. Sirius, Sirius, they say. But who is Sirius? While I was there the spacecraft all vanished, leaving the skies empty, and reappeared the next day. Some shift of power on the Mother Planet. But they know nothing on Volyendesta of the struggle there; for them it is simply ‘Sirius.’

Ormarin, our main hope, is in hospital! A setback! His medication could have been better judged. They subjected him to Benign Immersion, choosing five different historical episodes, all aspects of the conquest of the weaker by Empires at the height of their outward sweep. All short-lived Empires, and all from Shikasta at the time of their numerous and so short-lived Empires based in the Northwest fringes. Since it was Benign Immersion, he was not a participator in events, only an observer, but I am sorry to say that this course of treatment has plunged him into a state of mind that is only slightly better than Incent’s condition of Undulant Rhetoric. Ormarin sits at the top of the hospital, gazing out over the desert weeping, and in the grip of a severe attack of What Is the Point-ism, or The Futility of All Effort.

‘Come, take hold of yourself, man!’ I exhorted. ‘Pull yourself together! You know quite well the Sirians, or somebody, will attack soon, and here you are in such a feeble condition.’

‘I don’t care,’ said he. ‘What is the point? We will fight them – or not; we will struggle against them once they are here – or not; we will die in our thousands – millions – in any case. Those poor wretches, the Sirian slave labourers, will die in their millions, since that is their function. We Volyendestans will die. And then the Sirian Empire will collapse, since all Empires do sooner or later –’