Doris Lessing - The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

Krolgul wore a bright-blue skirt, and his tunic was bulging with papers and writing instruments and various electronic devices.

‘Servus,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘You are welcome. Do you want to listen?’

‘Do you think I have much to learn?’ I teased him.

‘Who knows?’ he said, pleased. ‘We flatter ourselves that … but you will see for yourself.’ He signalled for the entrance of the next candidate, but stood beside me, giving me quick, almost pleading glances, of which he seemed to be unconscious.

‘You are wanting to ask me about Incent?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, all eagerness, but trying to sound offhand.

‘He is by no means recovered,’ I said. Krolgul brightened. Extraordinary, when his own personality is not being governed by some impersonation or other, how transparent he becomes, how easy to read. ‘Nor, to my mind, will he recover soon. It is a very great strain on him, as of course you know, when you use him as a conduit as you do.’ Here there were a variety of flickering glances at me, doubtful, triumphant, apologetic, even embarrassed. For Krolgul seemed to believe that we did not know of Incent’s importance to them in the battle between us, between Canopus and Shammat, though all our actions, both Shammat’s and mine, since my visit here began, proclaimed it. ‘You risk making him very ill,’ I said. ‘At this moment he is undergoing treatment.’

‘Well, he is just one of your agents, as far as we are concerned,’ said Krolgul, in a bluff liar’s style which even he knew was hardly convincing. And he took out a pipe and lit it.

‘Krolgul,’ I said, I hope temperately, and with the ‘humour’ without which one cannot survive a day in this place, ‘you are giving us an awful lot of trouble.’ At this he brightened, flattered again, jerking and writhing a little with pleased laughter. ‘But you really are on the wrong track, you know.’ I said this to observe how discouragement took possession of his whole person, and how suddenly, so that there stood this visibly dismayed person who, without any outward feature’s betraying it, reminded me so often of the ape, the animal; a blinking, open-mouthed Krolgul, Shammatian Overlord for the Volyen Empire, stood drooping beside me, and his eyes a single craving plea: Tell me, tell me, tell me.

But the attendants had wired up the examinee, and Krolgul had to return to his place on the platform. I refused to go with him, but stood near the wall by myself.

It was a young male from Volyenadna, a stocky grey-green stolid creature, who showed no sign of nervousness, but began at once, raising his hand carefully so as not to disturb the wiring of the monitors.

‘Comrades! Friends. I know I may call you friends, because of what we are going to undertake together.’

The graphs and print-outs showing his emotional responses to what he was saying were displayed, not where he could see them and perhaps become influenced by them, but behind him, on a large, high screen. I, and the examiners on the platform, could watch him and, at the same time, note the precise condition of his emotional apparatus.

It was already evident that this one could not last for long, despite his apparent heaviness and stolidity: at the word friends every part of his organism had responded, and undertake together had lifted him almost to the limit.

‘… No, you are not asking yourself, “And what is that?”, for you already know. We already know …

But the young man had already failed. On this we his voice had cracked with feeling; and the Failed buzzer went.

He was replaced by a strong, handsome young woman, from Volyendesta, full of assurance and calm smiles for us all.

She survived the first passage, with that dangerous and deliberately planted friends, very well; she went past that we while the machines registered hardly a flicker of response. But then it began to build up in her ‘… If we do not agree on the reasons for what has come to pass, then we shall on the cure. We stand together here united in one thing, that the situation cannot go on like this. Why are we surrounded by gross inequalities, by appalling injustice, by dreadful poverty and cynical wealth …’ Her voice had acquired a timbre that meant tears were in her throat, and she could not last long. But she persisted, although we could see by the impatience and irritation with herself on her face, that she knew she was defeated ‘… Why are we afflicted as we are by the bumbling stupidities of a bureaucracy groaning under the weight of its incompetence? Why in one street do we see the faces of young people who have never known what it is to open their own pay packet for their own honest work …

Her voice cracked on work; the buzzer went. She strode off, bravely, but in tears of disappointment.

The next was one of the frail, pale citizens of Slovin, who always have so much difficulty in getting the solid, stolid, robust denizens of the other planets to believe in their strength. Tough and enduring and with a nervous system much less susceptible to emotional inflammation than most, they are in fact, once one has experienced them, much prized. The platform expected great things of this apparently fragile revolutionary; and in fact she went easily past all the trigger words that had undone the others. ‘ … honest work, and in the next sicken at the sight of the overindulged and the purposeless. Why? Why?’ These two whys caused all her recordings to rise almost to danger level, but she recovered herself. ‘Why? We all know why! But what is to be done? We know. Again we know. Do we not? Our situation is bad. It is dreadful. But it is not hopeless. What we need, what we must have, is sacrifice.’ And she was over the top. But so sudden was the swoop upwards of the recording needles that the platform conferred, and said to her that she could go off, rest, and come back for another try. (In fact, she then succeeded easily.)

The nest was a Volyen indigenous worker. They are not the most attractive breed, being a dingy putty colour, and built heavily and on the whole without much grace. But they are known for their lack of emotional volatility. The needles flickered badly at friend, work, sacrifice, but recovered. ‘Yes. Sacrifice. And what is being asked of us is not only a tightened belt, though that is being asked; not only that we should work eighteen hours a day, even twenty-four hours a day, but also that we should agree to sink our separate and pitiful little individual wills and thoughts in the great whole, the great Will, the great purpose, the great Decision … that we must agree once and for all that things cannot be allowed to go on like this. Yes, once and for all, comrades … brothers … sisters … friends …’ Up swept the needles. The examinee himself put up a hand and begged for a later rehearing. It was granted.

The next was another Volyen. ‘And where shall we begin? Where? Why, with ourselves! How can we build a new world with old hearts and old wills? We need new, clean, young hearts …’ Hearts is where that unfortunate was lost. But all those who survived that far were granted a second chance.

There followed several who failed very early on, at the first testing words. Then, at last, one survived the whole course. It was another of the silvery, fragile, apparently so vulnerable Slovins. ‘We are surrounded by the heights of colossal events, in the light of which future generations will view their own fate. There cries out in the merged thunder of the times the present fate of planets. We need clear eyes and an unflinching purpose. We shall begin and complete our work to the sound of workers’ hymns and songs. Your work is not slave labour, but high service to the fatherland of all the decent people. Sacrifice! A united will! Only on this road shall we find the way out, to salvation, warmth, contentment. Sacrifice. And clean hearts. Clean hands. Love …’