The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. Doris Lessing

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 …’

      This first wholly successful candidate retired, full of the shy modesty that is the convention here for people who have succeeded, and then the platform conferred. I could see that there was going to be a break. And I knew it was because Krolgul had been sitting up there biting his fingers and crouching in his seat, leaving the actual work of attending to the prowess of the examinees to his associates, while he brooded about what I had said. He wanted to come back to me and to press and to wheedle, until I told him what I knew. Until he knew what the plans of Canopus were, what the information of Canopus was …

      But at this moment something unexpected happened. Into the examination hall walked – quietly enough, dressed unremarkably in a variation of local administrative-class dress – Incent. He saw me sitting there and made a gesture to me: Do not worry.

      He did not meet my eyes, though. A bad sign; this meant that nothing I could say would affect him. I settled back so that what must happen, could …

      Krolgul had leaped up at the sight of him, all renewed energy and purpose. Then, having cried out, ‘Incent …,’ he remembered my presence and glanced towards me, but in the same way as Incent, not allowing his eyes to meet mine.

      Incent’s manner with Krolgul was – there is only one word for it – lordly. He stood in the examinee’s place and signalled to the attendants to wire him up.

      ‘I intend to pass this examination,’ he said, in the calm, almost indifferent way of his illness; for of course he was ill, though this need not be obvious to the examiners. He was depleted of emotion still; he was empty, after such an excess of it. No one recovers from Total Immersion in a few days, or even many. His emotional reservoirs were low; therefore he seemed calm; therefore did he give this appearance of benign urbanity.

      When he was standing upright there, all the wires and leads in place, he smiled confidently at me.

      ‘I am ready,’ he said.

      Well, it was very bad.

      ‘Comrades. Friends …’ I think Krolgul expected him to be lost at that very first trip-word, but what happened was much more alarming. Behind Incent, on the monitors, we could see that the needles, far from registering alarming peaks and jags and heights of emotion, were often out of sight at the bottom of the scale. So low was Incent that his whole system had gone into reverse. The word friends, which of course he spoke at the right interval after comrades, so that the nerves of the auditors had to vibrate in expectation, only caused what little emotion that was left in him to drain suddenly away. The needles flickered back into sight again at the bottom of the graphs. He was speaking in a flat, almost amiable way, though he got all the tones and intervals perfectly. He went through the gross inequalities and the injustice and so on very well, though there was literally no fuel left in him at