Doris Lessing - The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘You are very good at this,’ says Krolgul, with that modest and comradely complicity in which Shammat specializes, and which indicates in every look, smile, touch of the hand, You and I together against those others out there, the others without understanding. ‘Would you like to be even better? We can teach you, you know. We? Let us say, friends. But you have a handicap – do you mind my mentioning it? It is a wonderful thing, it is great, it is truly inspirational to watch you carry others away, watch you being carried away to such heights of fervour, to watch you becoming drunk on your own visions. But if you want to ascend to the control of real professionalism, that is a stage you must leave behind!’ And here Shammat cushions the shock, cradles in understanding the neophyte’s moment of disillusion. For throughout ‘the Volyens’ – Volyen itself and its colonies – thanks to the influence of Volyen, emotion is much prized. It stems from the hypocrisies of Empire, from the predominant emotion of the ruling class of that ruling planet. (Though from our point of view this rule has been so short, it has been long enough to infect a group of planets with the malady.) This emotion: ‘We are sacrificing ourselves, we Volyens, to bring to you, our children, the infinite advantages of our guidance in your development.’ Unreal emotions breed others: to weep, to emote, to show that you are weeping and emoting, these monstrous perversions are prized. Even by the lively and rebellious young people who see through the hypocrisies of ‘guidance’ and wish only to free themselves ‘for ever’ from Volyen. To hear that they must learn to separate in themselves their yearnings for a perfect world, and their verbal expression of it, from their cool and observant minds … no, it is hard to take, and Shammat knows it. ‘No, no,’ murmurs Krolgul, all sympathy, ‘I do not ask you to feel less for the sufferings of others. Can you believe that of me, now that you have come to know me so well? Perish the thought! Never! But to be effective, to become an instrument of the upward strivings of the Galaxy, to address the infinite and legitimate hungers of the poor, the suffering, the unfree – then you must learn to use words but not be used by them.’

Oh yes, it is with the wriest of thoughts that I have heard – so very often, for I have been present when Shammat is at its work, though Shammat has had no suspicion of it – this caricature of Canopus, this shabby mimicry.

And it is because Shammat can use words that sound so similar to Ours that so many of our own were among those aspirants for a degree from Krolgul’s School of Rhetoric that day. I noted them. I spoke to the two who knew me, using our own quiet words that might remind them, that will remind them, when the time comes that they arenot Shammat’s, that their future is not to become one of the power-hungry of the Galaxy.

What Shammat does, in short, is to allow ‘life itself’ to throw up its material, encourage ‘life itself’ to develop it, and then, when these people are already well accustomed to assaults of Rhetoric both from others and as used by themselves, they are taken into Krolgul’s school, where they have to learn to become immune to it, so that they may control crowds by the most passionate, violent, emotional language possible, without ever being affected by it.

And never, during the preparations ‘in life itself’ or in the school, does Shammat say to its disciples: ‘This is a school for the use of power over others, for the crude manipulation of the lowest instincts.’

How easy it is for the unprepared, for the innocent, to lose their way: when Incent at last rolled over from his prone position on the bench beside me, he said, ‘Klorathy, I have been thinking, why not enrol me in Krolgul’s school? He need never know that I am here simply to learn what I need.’

‘And what do you need?’

‘How not to be manipulated by words. What else?’

‘And you really cannot see any difference in the methods we use to harden you against Rhetoric, and Shammat’s?’ He was lying there, our Incent, moodily elongated, arms behind his head, legs straight, black eyes brooding, very pale because of his condition. Meanwhile a young Slovin orated, ‘What, then, is it that we are aiming at? What? Why, nothing less than …

‘They certainly seem to have a much more enjoyable time of it than we do,’ he grumbled.

‘Indeed they do. Enjoyable, that’s the word. What is more enjoyable than power or the promise of it? When do we ever flatter you, Incent?’

A short, bitter laugh. ‘No, you can’t be accused of that, Klorathy. Well, perhaps I choose to learn what I need in Krolgul’s school and not with you! At least Krolgul won’t make me feel as if I’m a contemptible worm without a redeeming feature.’

‘No, but you will be a contemptible worm without a redeeming feature. If you go through Krolgul’s school, Incent, you’ll come out a first-class little tyrant, I promise you, able to stand on any plinth or platform anywhere, reducing crowds to tears or arousing them to murder, having them under your will , and not feel a flicker of remorse or compunction. Oh, Krolgul’s school is very efficient, and I was certainly planning for you to see it in operation so that you could make certain comparisons, but only when you were internally strong enough to be able to make the comparisons.’

Incent lay there, looking at me: dark eyes, the blankness behind than showing that his degree of exhaustion, though improved, was still severe.

‘Some of our people are there, with Krolgul. One of them is reciting now. Agent 73, I know her.’

‘Yes, and when they’ve come to understand, through life itself, what they have become, do you imagine it will be an easy task to build them up inwardly, to restore to them what has been stolen? Incent, you are at risk. More than, perhaps, some of the others. Your temperament, your physical tendencies, your capacity for self-projection –’

‘Thanks,’ said he, histrionically. ‘What equipment I’ve got, then!’

‘Well, who chose it, Incent? No, I don’t want to hear any complaints that you think free will is a mistake. What do you suppose the difference is between them and us? It is that you choose.’

A long silence, while some youth chanted: ‘And what is there to prevent this paradise? We all know there is nothing! In our soil lies the wealth of harvests and of minerals …

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you’d better keep me under your eye for the time being, hadn’t you?’

I took him back to the hotel, and I do not need to say with what relief we entered the wonderful, all-artificial, cool, stimulus-free white room.

And there we have been resting. Side by side on the recliners. I, on my back, he prone and staring at the dull black of the flooring through the lattices of the chair, we recovered together. It was as silent as in a cave deep under the earth, as silent as if we floated in the black spaces between galaxies. The tall slim room reached up into the building, and at its top was a place of quiet light.

At first you are allowed only glimpses of circles, triangles, squares, all a luminous white on flat white, and the shapes darken, turn grey and then duller grey on a white that begins to shine, though softly. These statements of order remain, so that the eye may travel, but resting, soothed, reassured; soon, however, the mind begins to protest against changelessness, longs for relief, and as you understand that this is your thought – a hunger transmuted from a sharp need into the passionless stuff of the mind – the eye is in movement again because up there, at the very tip of the dim shaft, it is not polygons but polyhedrons you are trying to encompass with your gaze. They stand there, as it were waiting in the air, but their solidity is not yet defined and heavy, and you still believe it is a hexagon or an octagon that is enticing your gaze up into itself. But no, there is mass, and there is weight on the faintly gleaming white. Silence and stillness, no movement at all, for a long time, a long … And then again, when the restless eye begins to demand change, movement there is, tetrahedrons are changing into octahedrons, and then – dazzlingly! – into those charmers icosahedrons, which transform themselves into icosi-dodecahedrons, and it seems as if high above you in the tapering dimnesses of your own mind roll spheres that have within them all the luminaries, solid and plane, so that dodecagons tease star polygons, and a decagon may merge into a dodecahedron which resolves into apentagon which opts, modestly, for the condition of being a cube. Though not for long …