The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. Doris Lessing

complicated by the fact that I didn’t want him to apply it to me, where it doesn’t apply.

      I found him on an official occasion: he was standing on a low hillside, with a group of associates, watching a section of road being built by a Sirian contractor. The road, an admirable construction, a double highway, is to stretch from capital to seaport. Sirius flies in continually renewed supplies of labour from her Planets 46 and 51, houses them in adequate compounds, oversees and guards them. These unfortunates are permitted no contact with the locals, on the request of the Volyendestan government. And thus it was that I approached Ormarin in yet another of the ambiguous roles that characterize him: he and his mates could not possibly approve of the use of this slave labour or of how they were treated, and yet they were there to applaud the ‘gift’ of the road. As I approached, all the male officials took out pipes and began to smoke them, and the two females hastily hid some attractive scarves and jewellery of Sirian origin. I was just in time to hear Ormarin’s speech, which was being broadcast for the benefit of the workers, their guards, and the Sirian delegation.

      ‘Speaking on behalf of the working men and women of this planet, I have the great pleasure to open this section of the highway and to express gratitude to our generous benefactors the Sirian …’ etcetera. Ormarin had seen who it was by then.

      Ormarin likes me and is always pleased to see me. This is because he knows he does not have to disguise himself from me. Yet he suspects me of being a Sirian spy, or sometimes does; or of being some kind of a spy from somewhere, the central Volyen government perhaps. He jokes sometimes that he ‘should not be associating with spies,’ giving me looks that compound the ‘frank honest modesty’ of his public persona with the inner uneasiness of his role. Or roles …

      I joke that at any given time among his associates there is at least one spy from the Volyen central government, one from the Volyendestan central government, probably one each from Volyenadna, PE 70, and PE 71, and several from Sirius. He jokes that if that were true then half of his associates at any given time would be spies. I joke that he surely understands that this is an accurate statement of his position. He puts on the look obligatory at such moments, when one is forced to admit impossible truths – that of a wry, worldly-wise regret, tinged with a scepticism that makes it possible to dismiss the necessity of doing anything about it.

      He is in fact surrounded by spies of all kinds, some of them his most efficient associates. Spies who have certain talents for, let’s say, administration, and who are in administration for the purposes of espionage, often enjoy this secondary occupation and even rise to a high position, at which point they may regret that they didn’t start off in a career of simple ‘public service,’ as this kind of work is styled, and they suffer private sessions of ‘Oh, if only I had seen early enough that I was fit for real work, and didn’t have to settle for spying.’ But that is another story.

      Ormarin soon ended the official part of the occasion; his colleagues went off; he shed his public self with a small smile of complicity with me; and we sat down together on the hilltop. On the hilltop opposite us the Sirian contingent were heading back to their spacecraft. The several hundred Sirian workers swarmed over and around the road, and we could hear the barks and yelps of the supervisors.

      This planet’s weather is unstable, but one may enjoy intervals without needing to adjust to unpleasant heat, cold, or assaults of various substances from the skies.

      We watched, without comment, one of the men who had just been with us running to join the group of Sirians: a report on me and my arrival.

      I was relieved that Ormarin decided against a ritual lament along the lines of ‘Oh, what a terrible thing it is to have to work with deceivers …’ and so on. Instead, he said to me, on a questioning note, ‘That’s a very fine road they are making down there?’

      ‘Indeed it is. If there is one thing the Sirians know how to do, it is road-building. This is a first-class, grade I road, for War, Type II, Total Occupation.’

      This was deliberate: I wanted him to ask at last, But where are you from?

      ‘I am sure it could be used for any number of purposes!’ said he hastily, and looked about for something neutral to comment on.

      ‘No, no,’ I said firmly. ‘When Sirius builds, she builds to an accurately defined purpose. This is for the purposes of Total Occupation, after Type II War.’

      Was he now going to ask me? No! ‘Oh, come come, you don’t have to look all gift horses in the mouth.’

      ‘Yes, you do. Particularly this one.’

      Alas, I had miscalculated my stimulus, for he assumed a heroic posture, seated as he was on a small rock beside a rather attractive flowering bush, and declaimed: ‘We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the roads, we shall fight them in the air …’

      ‘I don’t think you’ll get very far, fighting Sirius in the air,’ I said in a sensible voice, designed to dissolve this declamatory mode into which all of them fall so easily.

      A silence. He kept sending me short anxious glances. He didn’t know what to ask, though. Rather, he didn’t want to ask me the key question, and perhaps it was just as well. The trouble is, ‘Canopus’ has become a concept so dense with mythic association that perhaps he would not have been able to take it in, or not as fast as I needed.

      I made it easy for him to think of me as Sirian, at least temporarily. ‘I’ve seen this type of road on a dozen planets before a takeover.’

      A silence.

      ‘Oh, no, no,’ he said, ‘I really can’t accept it. I mean, we all know that Sirius has quite enough trouble as it is, keeping her outlying planets in subjection; she’s not going to add to her troubles … and anyway … they needn’t think they are going to prevail over …’ There followed a few minutes in the ritual patriotic mode.

      After which, since I said nothing, he said, in a different voice, low, appalled: ‘But I can’t face it; I really don’t think I would want to live under Sirian occupation.’

      I recited a portion of the history of Volyendesta, as it appears in our annals.

      ‘Of the fourteen planets of Star P 79 three are inhabited, Planet 3 and its two moons. The central feature of their history is that they have been invading and settling one another for millenniums. The longest stable period was of several thousand millenniums, when Moon II overran and conquered the other two and maintained by a particularly savage despotism –’

      He interrupted, as I wanted him to: ‘Excuse me, Moon II, is that this planet or …?’

      ‘You. Volyenadna is Moon I.’

      It was wonderful to see the look of satisfied pride, which he was unaware of. ‘We, Volyendesta, administered all three planets? Volyen was an underdog then?’

      ‘As you so graphically put it, Volyen and your brother planet Volyenadna were underdogs.’

      He became conscious that his reaction of exulting pride was hardly becoming to an opponent of Empires, adjusted his expression, and said, ‘There is nothing of that in our history. And besides …’ The opponent of Empires was struggling for the appropriate words. ‘The locals here, the natives, they are pretty backward. I mean, it is not their fault’ – and here he cast fearful glances right and left, in case he might have been overheard – ‘there are sound historical reasons for it, but they are just a little, let us say …’

      ‘Backward,’ I said firmly, and he looked relieved.

      ‘As always happens,’ I went on, ‘there came a time when the peoples of your two enslaved planets grew strong and self-reliant through overcoming hardships, and they evolved in secret the methods and technologies to overthrow – not you, but your predecessors, who were almost entirely wiped out. A rather unpleasant race, they were. Not much loss, or at least so it was felt by those whom they had subjugated. But one may still see traces of them in these natives here, if one knows how to look.’

      ‘Extraordinary,’