The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. Doris Lessing

was not all that hard to foresee?’

      ‘I don’t want to think about it! I can’t bear it! I wish I was dead! I don’t want to know! Switch that beastly thing off.’

      ‘Incent,’ I said, ‘you are going to have to take it from me that you are very ill. But you will recover, I assure you.’

      I withdrew, leaving him sobbing and wringing his hands, then stretching out his arms to the waves as if he needed to embrace the ocean itself.

      On consultation with doctors, I discovered that no one before had ever resisted such treatment for so long. I could see they were at a loss. After all, this intense variety of homoeopathic medicine is the best – or worst – we can do. We have never, in short, had a case like Incent’s. In every other acute case the stage of ‘So what!’ followed by rapid recovery, has been reached fairly quickly.

      The doctors having said they had no suggestions, I reassured them that I would think it all over and take responsibility.

      I then briefly visited the Department of Rhetorical Logic, which works on the opposite principle, withdrawal of emotional stimulus.

      High in the wing of the building away from the ocean, overlooking the beginnings of the desert, with the mountain peaks on one side and the dark stillness of the forest on the other, we have built rooms of stark white that are kept silent except for the clicking and ticking of the computers, into which are fed by remote control historical propositions such as capitalism equals injustice, communism equals injustice, a free market equals progress, a monarchy is the guarantee of stability, the dictatorship of the proletariat must be followed by the withering away of the state. And so on.

      But this ward was empty: its time has not yet come.

      I did not take Agent 23 with me to visit Ormarin. He reported unmistakable symptoms of Rhetoric, asked to be put into curative custody, and then showed that the disease had indeed set in seriously by ceasing to see that he was ill and announcing with much emotion that the elevated language of the Constitution of the Volyen ‘Empire,’ which promises happiness, freedom, and justice to every one of its citizens as inherent, inalienable rights, seemed to him the ‘most moving’ thing he had ever encountered. He is drying off in Mild Rhetoric and will soon be normal.

      Ormarin.

      I can most quickly characterize him by saying that he embodies a number of contradictions: his situation is one of high tension, and this is his strength as well as his weakness.

      You will recall that when Volyen conquered Volyendesta, the indigenous inhabitants were murdered or enslaved, and their land was taken from them. You might not remember, because of its basic improbability, that this cruel process was accomplished to the tune of Rhetoric claiming that it was for the benefit of the said natives. The ability to disguise truth by the processes of Rhetoric is of course one in which our Canopean Historical Psychologists are particularly interested in connection with the Sirian Empire, but I feel that they have overlooked the extremities of this pathological condition as exemplified in the Volyen ‘Empire.’ At any rate, I am drawing attention to this now because it is of vital importance to what I am finding out as I move (for the most part secretly) about Volyen and its four colonies.

      Ormarin has all his life represented ‘the underdog,’ though this does not mean the miserable semi-slaves but, rather, the less fortunate of the conquering minority. As an intelligent being he is well aware of the anomaly and, to compensate, is capable, at the slightest stimulus, of providing floods of compassionate and sorrowing words describing their condition. This ability to, as it were, mourn verbally is appreciated by his fellow settlers, who demand from him on ceremonial occasions set pieces of grief on behalf of the exploited, beginning with words such as these: ‘And now I want to say that the condition of our fellow beings who are workers like ourselves is always in the forefront of my mind …’ And so on.

      That, then, is the first and worst contradiction in Ormarin.

      The next is that, while he represents the worse-off of the settlers, some of whom are indeed deprived, his own way of living can hardly be described as lacking in anything. His tastes are those of the fortunate minority everywhere in the Volyen ‘Empire’; but he has to conceal this. There was a period when he saw this as hypocrisy and went through some uneasy reversals: making a point of living at one time on the basic wage of the poor, at another on his wage as an employed official; at yet another time making speeches saying that although his position necessitated his living better than the average, this was only to demonstrate what was possible for everyone – and so on. But then there entered another factor – you will have guessed what and who – Shammat, the Father of Lies, in the person of Krolgul. Up and down and around the five units of this ‘Empire’ went Krolgul, as he still does, at his work of making black white, white black.

      He is a personable creature, with all the attractions of a robust and unconscious vitality, and he won Ormarin over by his rumbustious enjoyment in putting in clear and unlikable terms the uneasy compromise of which Ormarin’s life is composed.

      ‘You’ve got to face it,’ said he. ‘In the times in which we have to live, bad luck for us all, we must go with the tide and adapt ourselves to circumstances.’

      He evolved for Ormarin a persona that would reassure the people who kept him in power, actually an image of themselves, or of how they like to see themselves. Ormarin was taught to present himself as a solid, reliable, affable man – genially tolerant of his own deficiencies with regard to the fleshpots – though these were not allowed to be visible as more than the merest peccadilloes – humorous, slow-speaking, full of common sense.

      In fact, in the case of Ormarin the picture is not wildly inaccurate: Ormarin does possess many of these qualities. But Krolgul has been creating these personae by the score, all over the ‘Empire,’ so that everywhere you go you meet representatives of ‘the workers’ or ‘the people’ who are affable, solid, et cetera, and who all, without exception, smoke a pipe and drink beer and whisky (in moderation, of course), these habits being associated with sound and reliable behaviour.

      Ormarin soon stopped pointing out that he loathed pipes and beer, did not care for whisky, and preferred a certain brand of cigarettes captured by space raiders from Sirian cargo ships, along with Sirian (Mother Planet) nectar similarly acquired. He is uneasy about his acquired personality, and apologizes for it if he thinks you are likely to be critical. This, then, is a second strain, or contradiction.

      Third, he is of Volyen stock, yet all his life has resisted – verbally – Volyen domination, though he is at the same time a welcome visitor on Volyen, where his children were educated. Volyen drains wealth from its four colonies while presenting itself as their benefactor under such slogans as ‘Aid to the Unfortunate’ and ‘Development for the Backward.’ Ormarin, then, is continually involved with schemes to ‘advance’ Volyendesta, originating from Volyen, but he protests continually, in magnificent speeches that draw tears from every eye (even my own if I don’t watch myself, and yes, I am conscious of the dangers), that these schemes are hypocritical.

      Fourth. Sirius. Because Volyen itself is comparatively resistant, with a high morale among the population, who are well fed and well housed and educated, compared with the four colonies, Sirius ignores it (except for infiltrating Volyen with spies) and is putting its pressure first and foremost on the colonies, particularly Volyendesta. Ormarin, hating the ‘crude imperialism’ of Volyen – which is how he, on behalf of his constituents, has always described Volyen, the birthplace of some of his recent forebears – is able more easily than the inhabitants of Volyen itself to be sympathetic to Sirius, whose approaches are always in terms of ‘aid’ or ‘advice,’ and of course in interminable and highly developed rhetorical descriptions of the colonial situation of Volyendesta.

      Volyendesta, like Volyenadna, like Maken and Slovin, is short of hospitals, physical and emotional, short of every kind of educational institution, lacking in amenities Volyen takes for granted – and these Sirius offers, ‘without strings.’

      Sometimes, among the proliferations of Volyen Rhetoric, we find pithy and accurate phrases. One