The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (14 page)

Unable to make anyone in his own generation listen to him, Grice is now approaching one after another of the revolutionary groups that are his generation's successors.

I at last met up with him in a small town in the north of Volyen. He sent invitations to the Virtuous Party, the Party of Real Virtue, the Party for the Support of Sirian Virtue, the Party of Opposition to Sirian Virtue, the Friends of Alput (the Sirian CP 93), the Enemies of Alput, the Friends of Motz (the Sirian CP 104). These groups, every one of which is devoted to the future well-being and good government of Volyen, spend all their time quarrelling viciously among themselves.

When I arrived at Grice's hotel room, he thought I was the last of a long stream of young revolutionaries, and simply went on with a speech that he had been delivering for hours.

Striding up and down the room, his lank, pale hair flopping over a face inflamed with emotion, his pale eyes gleaming, gesticulating wildly, he was painting a picture (accurate) of the sufferings of the Volyenadnans, and (inaccurate) of the successes of ‘dedicated experts on colonial revolutions from Sirius.' Meaning Incent.

‘Grice,' I kept having to say. ‘Grice, come down to earth. I am Klorathy. We saw each other there, don't you remember?'

He did and he didn't. He came stooping towards me, blinking and peering, literally vibrating all over from the effects of having to stop in the middle of his verbal self-stimulation. Then he sank into a supine position.

I talked and talked, more or less at random, until he was able to listen, and then I put to him that:

We, Canopus, could cause to arrive in Volyenadna everything necessary to start a new agriculture. In a very short time that poor planet would be enabled to feed itself adequately and be able to export as well. This would have all kinds of important consequences. He, Governor Grice, could cause the Volyen rule to be associated with this beneficial development, but he would have to be quick about getting the approval of his superiors.

He came, minimally, to life – ‘Them? You're joking!' – and slumped back into enjoyable gloom. ‘Rotten, hopeless, decadent …

I let him run on for a while, and said, ‘Very well, but do you want these improvements – which would amount to a revolution of a kind – to be associated with a Sirian influence?'

This caused him to stiffen all over, in fright and shock; then to lift his head cautiously and give me a swift glance, and then lie rigid again.

He said nothing. But he was searching for a suitable formulation.

I had been hoping the shock would bring out of him
some news of his exact involvement with Sirius, but it did not.

At last he said: ‘Well, there'd be plenty of people glad enough if that happened …' And he burst into shrill laughter, then tears. For his conflict over Sirius was profound, even worse than I had feared ‘… You have no idea how many people – I've been meeting them all day and every day since I came. It's strange, isn't it, we know exactly what Sirius is capable of now, but all the same it's as if they don't want to know.' And again the reaction of mixed laughter and tears. ‘Oh, I know what you are thinking, I was taken in by it all long enough, but at least I …

What I want to know, of course, is exactly the hold Sirius has over him. Is he held by blackmail? I think not. It seems to me the ruling class of Volyen, when it discovered the extent of its servants' subordination by Sirius, and how many were being blackmailed, simply took the power out of that threat by telling the same servants: Very well, you come clean about what you've promised Sirius, what hold they have over you, and we will stand by you – that will dish them, in ways they've never even imagined! For
they
are not the sort to stand by their own in similar circumstances, not at all; more likely that any hapless employee of theirs would get a knife in the back some dark night, or a dose of poison. An ‘
accident'
 … No, I can see that Sirius, after so long and so skilled a process of involving hundreds of key Volyens in their plots, and then finding that Volyen had foiled them in this way, must have been at least temporarily nonplussed. Probably admiring too. Yes, I think I can imagine Sirius admiring their opponents' cheek in this game. For what tricks and traps and toils and snares were revealed then! And what nets and snares were left unrevealed! For some agents would have confessed all to Volyen; some part; some not at all; some falsely. Probably some highly placed ones would also have believed that, once they had confessed to youthful folly – ‘Please, I didn't know
what I was doing' – and been forgiven, there was an end to it, only to discover later on that it was not an end at all! Sirius might say, ‘Yes, but you didn't confess
that
to them, did you? What will they think now if you say you simply forgot? You plan to say you didn't know anything about it? How naive you are! Or how culpably careless!' Sirius might say, ‘Yes, but now that we are poised to invade, now that we are all around you, what do you feel about having betrayed
us,
who represent your real allegiances, to them, who are due only a sentimental loyalty? Shortsighted, wouldn't you say? No, no, we go in for the long perspective, the historical view. We'll give you another chance, if you will agree to …' Sirius might say, ‘You thought we'd forgotten all about you! But Sirius never forgets! Very well, but you know all we can do in the ways of punishments, don't you? And you'll feel the full weight of them unless you …

And where was Grice in this spectrum of loyalties, or disloyalties, according to how you look at it?

‘Grice,' I said, ‘if I told you that Sirius would be invading Volyen very soon, what would you do?'

‘Do? I'd throw myself off the nearest high building.' But this was said with such painful relish that I waited awhile. ‘What difference would it make to a Volyenadnan – or a Volyendestan, for that matter, from what I hear of the place? Would the Sirian rule be worse than ours?'

‘You could of course improve yours. Is there any chance of your colleagues' listening to you?'

‘Them? They don't give a damn for their colonized planets!'

And suddenly he sat straight up and looked at me tragically, lips quivering.

‘And they don't give a damn for me. Not one of them. And neither do the others.'

By this he meant the young groups. They had rebuffed him.

You will note that their not giving a damn for hi
m
was what really reached him.

‘Yes, but do any of them care about Volyenadna?'

‘If you told some of them to go out there and join the revolution, they might listen to that.'

‘You are referring to Incent, I suppose? To Krolgul?'

‘If they would have me, I'd go like a shot and throw in my lot with them, with Calder! But they don't want me! No one does. It's always been like that, Klorathy! Ever since I was small. I've never really fitted in. I've never been wanted. I've never been …

And he flung himself down and wept, loudly and painfully.

I could see we can expect nothing from him, so I told the hotel to send medical assistance, and came back here to Vatun.

It is my belief that I myself should, as Canopus, try what I can do with Calder. I put this forward as an official request.

I had hoped to meet Calder with his colleagues. He sent a message that he would come alone, to a place that turned out to be a settlement of a few clans in a cold valley far from the capital. Grey stone houses, or huts, and a grey tundra rising all around us to a grey sky.

It was a miners' club, but at an hour when they were at work. A woman served us the thin, sour beverage of Volyenadna and went out saying she had to prepare a meal for her children.

This is the conversation that took place.

He was in that condition of irritable gloominess that indicates, in this species, an extreme of suspicion.
‘Calder, would you describe this tyranny you live under as an efficient one?'

He slammed his great fist onto the table and exploded: ‘Tyranny, you say! You can say that again! Filthy exploiting callous swine who …' He went on for some minutes, until he ran into silence. ‘But you know what they are like,' he added.

‘What I asked was, is it efficient?'

He sat blinking at me, confused; then feeling himself attacked growled, ‘You forget, I've never been out of this planet. How can I make comparisons? But I take it you can.
You
tell me, then, is it efficient or not? From where we sit, it is efficient enough: it drains all that we make with the sweat of our brow and leaves us … as you can see for yourself.' And he sat there triumphant, as if he had made a good point in a debate, even shooting glances to either side as if to check up on the reactions of an audience.

But I could see that his need to speechify was fed, temporarily at least; and that now we could profit from his attention to me. For he was sitting there, leaning a little forward, his grey, flat eyes searching my face. A solid, heavy, slow man, his thoughts slowly at work in a mind that had learned only distrust.

I said, ‘Calder, it is an inefficient tyranny. And has been for a long time now – for all your life, certainly. It is inefficient, as tyrannies are in their last stages.' I stopped to let this sink in.

‘I haven't noticed signs of their deciding to leave us in peace!'

‘When the Volyens first came, they knew of everything you thought, planned, let alone did. They were everywhere. And where are the nearest Volyen police to us today?'

He nodded. ‘Still, they do well enough.'

‘But not for long …

‘So you say!'

‘Tell me – a specific question. If the rocks, let us say these
flat rocks lying all around us on the hillside, were to change colour from grey to a dull red, do you think the Volyen administration would notice it?'

Here he heaved with laughter, again sharing the joke with the invisible audience at the expense of my stupidity.

‘No, I don't think they would, no. I can say that much.' And he pulled out a pipe and lit it, slowly and with emphasis.

‘I can offer you a form of food that would make you independent. It is a kind of plant, like one of your lichens. It grows on rock. A few spores scattered on the rocks of this valley, and they would all be covered with it very quickly. You can eat it raw. You can cook it as a vegetable. It can be fermented in various ways, which will change its nature. With this plant you could be self-sufficient on Volyenadna.'

He had slowly leaned back in his chair, and it was as if his eyes had become half their size. A sceptical grin stretched his lips, between which hung the pipe emitting narcotic smoke. He had such command of his invisible audience that he had even sent them conniving glances. He was a solid block of cold, rejecting suspicion. Then he gave a snort of contemptuous laughter, and then a summoning shout, and the woman came from next door and, as he snapped his fingers, said, ‘Yes, at once,' and refilled our glasses.

‘Food,' he said, heavily. ‘Well, if it was as simple as that.'

At the word
food,
the woman gave us a rapid, clever glance that took in everything about us; until that moment she had not given us much of her attention, being obviously harried with family problems. And now I saw her shadow hovering on the wall beyond the half-open door. Very well, I thought, I had not planned on this, but let us see …

‘It is as simple as that.'

‘We have a saying on this planet –'

‘Yes, I know. It is this: ‘Never trust strangers when they come bearing gifts.'

‘How did you know?'

‘Because every planet has a version of this saying. But is it really so useful a guide, useful under every set of circumstances?'

‘Oh, well,' he said, wagging his head knowingly, ‘it's good enough for us!'

‘Calder, you are a very sensible individual. I was looking forward to this talk, an exchange with a straightforward, sensible, no-nonsense person. I can call you that because of these hard lives of yours – and you have no idea how terribly hard and deprived and bare they are, Calder, since you have nothing to compare your conditions with – it is because of your hard lives that you are sensible and down-to-earth. No room for the nonsense I find when, for instance, I am on Volyen.'

‘Yes, well, I see your point. Some of my mates went there on a delegation. A rotten lot there, I'd say.'

‘Well. But I had hoped I would be able to say a few simple, straightforward things to you, and that you would listen.'

He sat silent, slumped forward, looking down at his glass, which was already empty. He seemed to go loose all over. Receptive. For a few moments at least.

‘Your situation on Volyenadna is this. You produce only minerals. All your food has to be imported – at this time, by your masters, the Volyens. You are completely at their mercy. You cannot rebel, or even bargain, for the meagreness of your food resources cripples you. Except for the period when you yourselves were a piratical Empire and grabbed food from –'

‘You say that we were an Empire and as bad as the Volyens, but why should we believe you?' he shouted.

‘Oh, Calder, given the chance, every planet will become an Empire. It is a stage of growth this galaxy has reached. It is a question of what kind of Empire – if you are interested, we can discuss that …

‘Let's get back to this food of yours.'

‘It grows very fast. Spreads. Yet there are means of controlling it. It will make you independent, Calder.'

‘You sit there, and just let drop – as it might be, between one glass and another – that there's a plant that will change our entire situation … just like that. Well, why did we never hear of it before?'

‘Who was to tell you?'

He maintained a kind of stylized sneer on his face, but he was thinking hard.