The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (26 page)

Grice looked very much better. He was sallow and hollow-faced still, but knew at once who we were, and greeted us cheerfully.

‘This planet is about to be invaded,' I said.

‘Wouldn't you know it,' he moaned, relapsing. ‘Of course, as soon as I get here, where I can feel it's doing me good, then naturally Sirius is going to invade. What else could you expect?'

‘I'm afraid you are far from cured,' I said. ‘But it isn't going to be Sirius. So cheer up.'

‘Oh, you mean about my being a spy!' he said, sulking. ‘Well, I've been thinking quite a bit about it. If a spy is one who betrays his country's interests, and if it turns out that actually, by some quirk or other of history – sorry, I mean dynamic of history – or by the logic of events, the said country is in the long run benefited by his actions …

‘You could feed the question into your Rhetorical Computers,' I said.

But he will be all right.

The planet Motz, demoralized, confused, unable to prescribe remedies for itself, remembers Grice, who sat in the stolen library reading, Grice talking of socio-economic laws, Grice, who they thought was a madman.

They want to invite him back as an adviser on Comparative Planetology. I shall advise him to accept.

Since Ormarin is still away, I am taking the opportunity to ‘dry out.' It is no good pretending that I have been unaffected by the plu-super-emotionality of recent events. Incent too feels in need of a respite. We shall become voluntary patients in Basic Rhetoric, Withdrawal-of-All-Stimuli Department. The tall, dim, silent, isolated room in the hotel on Volyen is inspired by it.

My information is that you are on Volyendesta. I received this news with considerable lightening of my spirits. It is no
use disguising from you that I am deeply perturbed by certain rumours of which I am sure you must have cognizance. I refer, of course, to those concerning a possible invasion of this planet. I acknowledge freely that you have been warning me of this eventuality, and I and my colleagues have been taking every step within our power to make our defences viable. But recently our agents have been sending in reports of advance formations of skyborne troops which have been seen more than once over the Inland Desert Area. That is to say, formations
of individual
soldiers who, if the reports can be credited, arrive by sky-freighter and subsequently are released to become airborne
under their own power. I
would very much value your galactic advice. I was under the impression I knew all the different species under the Sirian hegemony – which I understand in any case is not what it was? – yet neither I nor any of my colleagues have heard of a species with wings.

This letter showed me that, no matter how much Ormarin had changed while becoming – in fact, if not in name – ruler of the planet, he had not become any less of an official.

It showed me too that I have been careless, have not taken the trouble to reflect on how the PE 70 (Maken) armies must be experienced here. In what is for us such a short time, for them such a long one, PE 70 have made a change in their functioning which amounts to a social, if not a genetic, leap forward in evolution. A species of flying creature, hardy and adaptable, and widespread all over PE 70, have been taken by them into a partnership or social osmosis. PE 70 is poor in transport and working animals.
They lack a species that can be deliberately evolved in this direction. The flying Pipisaurus supplies this lack, carrying loads over long distances, supplying them with skins, which they use for clothing and for a variety of domestic products, and with a glandular secretion that has extended the not-very-prolific foods of the planet, so that you may find in some areas that they eat and drink nothing but this secretion, prepared in various ways. So close and so harmonious is the partnership between the two species that an infant of the superior species is given his or her own pipisaur at birth, and the two grow up together, sharing sleeping and living space, though not often food. The Pipisaurus is by nature a bird- and insect-eater, and therefore these animals cannot be allowed to breed unchecked: there was a time when Maken had almost no birds or insects left, because of the great flocks of pipisaurs. The practice of supplying each infant with an infant pipisaur, but allowing no more, serves as a check on numbers. You will easily imagine the closeness of the bond, and, if one or the other of the partner dies, how great is the loss; often the survivor will languish and die, or kill itself.

Under Volyen, Maken was regarded mainly as a supplier of pipisaurian products for the dites of the Volyen ‘Empire.' It was also a favourite holiday place, bring regarded as backward and primitive: the effete ruling classes of Volyen enjoyed visiting planets whose inhabitants could be seen in close relation to primary physical mechanisms, and stories and pictures of the ‘barbarians' and their flocks were of great sentimental interest.

Under Volyen, the planet was not allowed an army. The truth is, Volyen was afraid of soldiers who can operate on land and in the air with equal ease. Secretly, however, an army was trained. The practice that each pipisaur had its place beside its mistress or master, living in the same dwelling, meant that the training and the arming of guerrilla troops was almost invisible to the Volyen overlords.

It was Maken that first overthrew Volyen, and did it easily, because of the effectiveness of its armies. Maken assisted Slovin to expel Volyen, and then, you will not be surprised to hear, stayed on Slovin to ‘assist': in other words, Maken is now the effective ruler of Slovin. Maken is at the beginning of its career as an Empire, an Empire that will conquer the near planets, now in a state of chaos and civil war, that were so recently subjects of Sirius. But Maken does not know this, has no such plans. Maken sees itself as virtuous, as indeed an embodiment of Virtue, the heir of Sirian Virtue.

The faction on Maken that overthrew the Volyen forces there called itself ‘Sirius.' Maken has no knowledge at all of the ruthlessness of Sirius, of the arbitrary, capricious cruelty that characterizes its last days. Maken's idealistic young had heard tales of this ‘Virtue,' had been captivated by the language of nobility, by the rumours of a golden age, by Justice, by Liberty, by Freedom, by – of course – the Logics of History, and the rest. It was with songs of Sirian Virtue that Maken freed, and then captured Slovin. As the armies of Maken train in the skies over Maken and over Slovin – and recently, daringly, in the deserts of Volyendesta – they sing of Virtue, and their war cries promise Peace and Plenty.

But I had not given myself time to think of how all this must strike poor Ormarin, who had never seen flying animals larger than his hand or his head, has never imagined animals as colleagues – more, friends, blood friends, for when an infant is given his or her pipisaur, and this before either can properly walk, the adults cut a vein on both, so that the blood may flow between them.

I went to meet Ormarin in a slave camp, on a plain between mountains where grew plantations of a certain berry that they use as a stimulating beverage. The slaves provide the labour for the plantations. The camp, consisting of identical rows of small single-room dwellings, each with a
boxlike outbuilding for the disposal of bodily wastes, stretched out of sight in every direction. I stood there in its centre, waiting. The slaves, or ex-slaves, were all from Sirian Planet 181, and have never bred with any but their own kind, so that in the camps you see only these very tall, lithe, long-limbed creatures, of a uniform pale yellow: their height and their immensely long arms are of use in picking the berries. S 181 is a planet that has not been invaded, and its inhabitants have evolved uniformly. Standing there, I felt an unfamiliar sensation that I diagnosed as the dullness resulting from lack of variety or stimulus. Everywhere around me these tall, yellow, spindly people with their black eyes, so alike. As I waited for Ormarin to come to me, I reflected that in the streets of this planet's cities you may watch its people passing for hours, and never see a face repeated or a bodily shape the same as another. So long has Volyendesta been invaded, settled, ‘protected,' so long has it invaded other planets, so long and thoroughly have the genes been stirred and mingled and added to and inspired and excited by new material, that the natives have no general type or sort; they are tall and thin and blue-eyed and fair-haired, they are short and fat and dark-haired and black-eyed, they are of every skin colour from creamy white to glossy black, they are of every conceivable mix of these characteristics. I never tire of sitting in a Volyendestan public place and watching the infinite inventiveness of our galaxy. And it is not only the natives: Volyen's settlers are just as varied, because Volyen itself has bean conquered and invaded, has invaded and conquered. The Volyen settlers and the natives have bred together for fifteen V-centuries. These two planets, Volyen and Volyendesta, have as variegated inhabitants as any I have encountered anywhere in the Galaxy. An inhabitant of Volyendesta will take it for granted that he will never, or hardly ever, see two individuals who resemble each other; if two are alike, then it is a matta for comment.

The slaves from S 181, the other slaves imported by Volyen, the slaves used by Sirius on road-building and spacecraft landing places, are kept in camps by themselves and are hardly seen by ordinary people.

And I began to understand, standing there, the unease, even the repugnance, often expressed by the Volyendestans. ‘They are as if stamped out of the same material by the same mould,' is the complaint.

But what of the Makens? What were the Volyendestans going to see when they invaded?

Ormarin came to meet me through the huts of the camp, by himself. I knew that these days he was seldom without a group of ‘colleagues,' his entourage, so I knew that he was still afraid I might be taken for a Sirian spy.

He was smoking his pipe and had on his face a friendly comradely grin.

This business of the pipe: admiration for Ormarin has spread the practice of pipe-smoking. From end to end of this planet, the inhabitants have had small stiff wooden objects in their mouths that emit smoke. Volyendesta has not as many forests as it would like; as wood became short, other substances have been used. An outward sign of inner calm, solidity, and sense ceases to be of use when an entire population employs it, so a law has been passed that only officials above a certain rank may smoke pipes. So now you may pick out the higher-ranking officials in any crowd by the pipes they smoke. Smoking has become, you will not be surprised to hear, a secret ritual in the camps of the slaves. All kinds of statements are made by the way a pipe is lit, held, filled with weed; the way the smoke is allowed to emerge from the bowl of the pipe. A superior will show his good will or benevolence by inviting an inferior to join in a ritual of smoking on a special occasion.

‘Will you smoke?' was the first thing Ormarin asked me, and we stood there together, surrounded by the ugly little dwellings of the S 181 slaves, he smoking, I not.

This large bluff personage, when examined, showed only signs of unease.

‘Ormarin,' I said, ‘I will now describe your situation to you. Stop me if I go wrong … You have been travelling all over your planet, uniting slaves and citizens, Volyendestans and former Volyens, refugees and Sirian officials who have settled here – you have united the planet in a single-minded, passionate determination to defend yourselves against invasion.'

‘Right!' he said, standing foursquare, his grey eyes full on mine, his mouth gripped tight over his jetting pipestem, while the embers in it glowed red and then faded, glowed, and faded.

‘You are about to defend yourselves against Sirius –'

‘It was you who said Sirius would invade.'

‘In the name of Sirius you will be invaded, by troops who will use nothing that Sirius made to facilitate invasion – they will not use roads, or even spaceports.'

He nodded. ‘You made a mistake, then?'

‘If I had known exactly which planet was going to invade you, then there is no preparation I could have advised that could help you except a psychological one.'

As he stood thinking soberly, his pipe, which he did not actually enjoy, dangled from his hand at his side.

‘Well, at least we've united the planet,' he said, ‘if nothing else.'

‘And you are going to fight to the last drop of everybody's blood?'

‘What else?' he demanded, again puffing furiously so that he stood in a swirling cloud. ‘I suppose whichever planet it is this time is just as bad as the Sirians? Don't tell me we've got to put up with all that guff about the Virtue again?'

‘I'm afraid so.'

‘Do you know, I think I'd settle for a boss planet that described itself as bloody-minded, ruthless, and only out
for what it could get. I think one more dose of all that Virtue will do me in.'

‘What's in a word?' I asked, not without a certain moral weariness.

‘At any rate, we won't have to learn a new vocabulary for the new rulers.'

‘Why do you take it for granted you will be defeated?' I asked.

‘I don't know – it's because of the reports of those,
what are they
, Klorathy? Half man, half bird? I've never even imagined … I can tell you, I'm scared stiff! I'll admit it to you, though I wouldn't to my mates, of course …' And he looked quite exhausted with terror, shrunken with it. ‘I know we inhabitants of the Galaxy run to some pretty queer shapes and sizes. I mean, it took me a while to get used to this lot …' And we looked, together, at people from S 181 standing all around us, watching curiously but with that passive, withdrawn, waiting look that marks a subordinate population biding its time. The tall, immensely thin creatures, with this dull yellow skin, their round black glistening eyes… ‘Compared with bird-men, this lot here are our twins!'