The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. Doris Lessing
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the correct path’ but that another planet, probably just conquered (so that news of its real condition has not yet come out), is now the inspiration for all.
And the generation of Volyens who became agents for Sirius have become middle-aged or old. Everywhere through the administration of Volyen are people who became agents to one degree or another, and who then, through the processes of ‘life itself,’ saw what a nightmare they had been so anxious to introduce into Volyen. Some fled to one of the Sirian colonies, knowing they would get favoured treatment, even if it was only the comfort and contentment allotted to an imprisoned animal whose function it is to provide some kind of nourishment for its owners. Some were caught and imprisoned. Some were found out – and were not punished; for it was soon discovered how widespread was this weakness of the Volyen governing fabric and how many would have to be exposed, thus advertising everywhere the extent of the weakness. Some were never found out, but lived out their lives – still live out their lives – in dread of being discovered. But the citizens of Volyen are only beginning to suspect how many of their trusted rulers were ready to betray them, to the extent that even their secret services, whose first task, of course, is to keep a watch on the ever-expanding Empire of Sirius, were full of Sirian agents; to the extent that at a certain point the head of these secret services was a Sirian agent …
And so – there it is, this fact that I think is perhaps of the most interest. It is here that we have this phenomenon – I believe unique, for I cannot remember another case of it, either in our Archives or in anything that has come to our notice from Sirius in the past – of an Empire (Volyen) being sapped and weakened by the thousands of its citizens who admire one of the worse tyrannies the Galaxy has ever seen; admire it not for its tyranny, but for its idealism, its ‘Virtue.’ The irony is that Volyen itself – not its colonies, which it has always reduced and enslaved – is rather a pleasant place. The extremes of poverty have been abolished, and you would not see now, Johor, if you were to pay a visit, streets full of people with all the obvious marks on them of hunger and illness. You would not see children ill-fed and cold. Nowhere is to be seen what you wrote of so sorrowfully, the use of children as labour in conditions that meant they must die, the use of females in cruel occupations. No, for just this small space of time, no more than a few of their decades, Volyen has been, still is, a place where there is adequate if not perfect health care, adequate education, enough food for everyone, shelter of some kind for most. And above all, an absence of that immediate oppression that keeps the Sirian colonies in sullen quiet, afraid to use words to describe anything at all as they actually see it.
This rather pleasant, if recently achieved and of course temporary condition, is what their idealistic youth long to overthrow.
And their idealistic ex-youth. Like Governor Grice, who came to adulthood at the height of the recent war and was appalled at the propaganda, first of the Sirian would-be invaders, and then of his own side, for he found it cynical and opportunistic. Who then, looking around him at Volyen’s treatment of her colonies, felt he had been tricked and betrayed – by words cunningly deployed against him. Who then, meeting a member of his peer group who had become a Sirian agent, agreed to ‘give information, but only what I choose to give, mind, and when I choose!’ (This formulation is only possible to a young male member of a ruling caste accustomed to choosing his times and his places.) Who, at last, finding himself deeper and deeper in the toils of Sirius, and learning of the real conditions in one after another of the Sirian near-colonies, gave himself up to his superiors for punishment. ‘Do with me what you will. I deserve it.’ They, recognizing a state of mind that afflicted at least some of their number, reflected, decided it was a pity to waste his real qualities, and made him first a minor functionary in their colonial administration, and then Governor. Thus Governor Grice, Greasy Grice, came into being.
But he has had to be sustained by salutary incidents. Such as visits from a certain Trade Representative, at whom Grice has learned to gaze as if into a horrible mirror, for an attractive and affable companion alternates with another, a writhing misery of a man, who begs Grice for sympathetic understanding. ‘That’s all I want,’ he cries in the moments when he is not being the social adept; it is amazing how fast the two souls can switch places inside the carefully maintained flesh and well-tailored clothes of the spy. ‘All I need is to talk to someone who understands me, and what a hell I live in! But you know what I mean.’
This is a Sirian agent who was trained to undo Volyen in any way he could. Picked as suitable material from an elite school on his own planet and sent to the Sirian Mother Planet for training, he was then instructed to make himself at home on Volyen, to insinuate himself into high places – and so on and so forth, as usual. Energetic, clever, ambitious, and above all dedicated, he pleased his superiors and delighted himself with his accomplishments. Meanwhile, he enjoyed life on Volyen, so agreeable a contrast to the gloomy fanaticisms of Sirian rule. It was some V-years before, as he described it to Grice, ‘all at once and in a single moment’ the scales fell from his eyes. What was he doing, trying to destroy these amiable if feckless people, this pleasant if declining and badly organized society, in order to introduce the hideousness – as he now recognized it – of the Sirian Empire? He broke down. He suffered. Unable to confess to his own side, who would of course have had him murdered at once in the name of the Virtue, he confessed to the secret services of his host country, who were sympathetic with his moral predicament and who, when offered his talents, not to mention his ‘total dedication,’ as a double agent, temporized. Like so many of his opposite numbers in the Volyen services, he was left in a condition of wondering whether he was, or was not, ‘really’ a double agent. Meanwhile, he was indeed being found useful by his confidants, in keeping people like Grice up to the mark.
Grice suffers bad times when he wonders whether he is a big enough person to sustain the ambiguities of his position. A Governor who hates governing; a Volyen who loves Volyen at home but not abroad; an admirer of the Virtue, but only in an abstract, pure, and ideal way, for never yet has the Virtue been applied on any planet in a way that deserves the name; a hater of Sirian Virtue, not to mention the Virtue of the Sirian colonies …
At such moments, when he tells himself that it is all too much for him, a visit from X never fails to convince him his own position is a paradise in comparison. ‘This is your pal, Mr X,’ is how he announces himself to Grice, who has to shudder, not least because he wonders how ‘they’ seem so infallibly to sense when he is low in spirits.
Grice is now on Volyen, demanding to be heard ‘at the highest possible level.’ This high level, recognizing that, indeed, it would probably be to their advantage to see Grice, is engaged in checking him out from the point of view of possible renewed defection: once an agent, always an agent, is how they see it. Besides, it is known to them that he has been observed in disguise at meetings of Calder and his men.
He is sending in one message after another, as he hovers in outside offices. ‘It is Urgent! You should hear me At Once! There is a Critical Situation!’
Krolgul has found all this out and is brooding about how to use the situation for his ends.
Yes, my information confirms yours. We may expect a Sirian invasion of Volyen earlier than we thought, but by which planet?
I have been following Grice, as I did Incent on Volyenadna: Grice has been no less fevered in his efforts. But Grice has been leaving a very different trace. Trying to ascertain from person after person what Grice is planning, I have had to conclude not only that he is disordered mentally, but that everyone can see that he is.
This has meant that his old colleagues, responsible for his being Governor, and who are mostly in the same delicate position vis-à-vis Sirius, have dealt with him by making excuses. Yes, yes, their attitude has been, what brilliant ideas he has brought with him for the well-being of Volyenadna; meanwhile, why doesn’t he enjoy a pleasant holiday away from the provincial tediums of that planet?
Unable to make anyone in his own generation listen to him, Grice is now approaching one after another of the revolutionary groups