‘Well, I think I could say that,’ said Krolgul, with a heaving of silent laughter that could have been taken various ways, but which Calder took badly.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said he to me.

‘No, I am not a friend of Krolgul’s,’ I said.

‘Visiting here, perhaps?’

‘He’s a friend of mine, a friend of mine,’ shouted Incent, and then wondered if he had done right; with a gasp and a half smile, he subsided back into his seat.

‘Yes, I am visiting.’

‘From Volyen, perhaps?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘A friend of this lad here, who is a friend of Krolgul, but not a friend of Krolgul,’ said someone sardonically, and everyone laughed.

‘You are here to write a travel book?’ Laughter. ‘An analysis of our situation?’ Laughter. ‘A report for –’

‘For Canopus,’ I said, knowing that the word would sound to them like an old song, a fable.

Silence.

Krolgul could not hide his shock: he knew then, for the first time, that my being here was serious, that we account his activities at this time serious. It is a strange thing that people engaged in his kind of half-mocking, half-experimental, wholly theatrical intrigues often lose the capacity for seeing themselves and their situation. Enjoyment of manipulation, of power, of watching themselves in a role, dims judgment.

I looked round slowly from face to face. Strong, grey faces that showed all the exhaustion of their lives. Faces like stones. In their eyes, grey, slow eyes, I saw that they were remembering, trying to remember.

Calder, still on his feet, his great hand on his chair-back, the miners leader whose desperation had allowed him to become subject to the manipulations of Krolgul, looked hard and long at me and said, ‘You can tell them, where you come from, that we are very unfortunate people.’

And at this there was a long involuntary groan, and then silence.

This, what was happening now, was of a different kind and quality from anything that had happened in the square, or anything that emanated from Krolgul. I was looking at Incent, since, after all, he was the key to the situation, and saw him impressed and silent, even thoughtful.

And Krolgul too knew the moment was crucial. He slowly, deliberately got to his feet. He held out both clenched fists in front of him. And now the eyes of everyone had turned to him.

‘Unfortunate!’ he said in a low, only just audible voice, so that people had to strain to listen. ‘Yes, that is a word we may say and say again …’ His voice was rising, and slowly his fists were rising too. ‘Misfortune was the inheritance of your fathers, misfortune is what you eat and drink, and misfortune will be the lot of your children!’ He had ended on a shout, and his fists had fallen to his sides. He stood there, appealing to them with the brave set of his body, his pale face, with eyes that actually managed to look sunken and hungry.

But he had miscalculated: he had not taken them with him.

‘Yes, I think we are all aware of it,’ said Calder, and turned to me. ‘You, from – where did you say it was? but never mind – what do you have to say?’ This was a half-jeer, but let us say a hopeful jeer, and now all the eyes had shifted back to me, and they leaned forward waiting.

‘I would say that you could begin by describing your actual situation, as it is.’

This chilled them, and Incent’s face, turned towards me suddenly, looked as if I had hit him deliberately, meaning to hurt. Johor: it is not going to be easy for Incent. It is the hardest thing in the Galaxy, if you have been the plaything of words, words, words, to become independent of their ability to intoxicate.

‘I think we are all able to,’ said Calder dryly, sitting down again and half turning away from me, back to his mates. But not entirely. He still kept half an eye on me, and so did all the others.

Krolgul was seated again, staring hard at Incent. Incent, feeling this gaze, was shifting about, uneasy and in terrible conflict. I was sensing him as a vacuum from which the powers of Canopus were being drained and sucked out by Krolgul. Incent might be sitting there with me, at my table, my ‘friend,’ but he was in the power of Krolgul. Now that Krolgul could see how he had lost the allegiance – though, he hoped, temporarily – of the Volyenadnans, Incent was what he had left. It was like watching blood being emptied from a victim as he gasps and shrinks, but it wasn’t blood that Incent fed, is feeding, Krolgul.

Calder was my only hope.

I stood up, so that everyone could see me.

‘You’re leaving?’ asked Calder, and he was disappointed.

But I had hoped for what then happened. Calder said, ‘Perhaps we could have the benefit of an outside view, an objective opinion?’

‘I have a suggestion,’ I said. ‘You get together as many of you as you can, and we will meet, with Krolgul here, and talk it all out.’

They didn’t agree at once, but in the end they did. Krolgul had no alternative, though he hated it.

Of course, we could have done it all where we were, in the café, but I was concerned with Incent.

I did not order him to follow me as I left the café, but he came with me. Physically, he came with me.

I took him to my lodgings in a poor part of the town. A miner’s widow, with children to support, let out rooms. Almost the first thing she had said to me was, ‘We are unfortunate people,’ and it was with a calm sense and dignity that could be, I hope, what would save them all from Krolgul.

She agreed to give us some supper in my room.

It wasn’t much; they are indeed poor people.

Over bread and some fruit, Incent and I sat opposite each other.

‘Incent?’ I said to him. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ And it was far from rhetorical.

‘You’re going to punish me, you’re going to punish me,’ he kept groaning, but with the enjoyment he has learned from Krolgul.

‘Yes, of course you will be punished. Not by me, not even by Canopus, but by the inherent laws of action and interaction.’

‘Cruel, cruel,’ he sobbed, and fell asleep, all his emotional apparatus in disarray, his intellectual machineries in subjection to this disorder. But he is strong enough physically; that is something.

Leaving him asleep, and asking the woman of the house to keep an eye on him, I spent the night in the bars of the town and its suburbs. Everywhere unrest, even a sense of impending upheaval. Hard to determine whether this was mainly because of worsening conditions on the planet, or because of the efforts of Krolgul … who, interestingly, was talked of much less than Incent. No wonder Incent is exhausted. He seems to have travelled to all the main centres of Volyenadna, and to most of the smaller ones as well. To extract the essence of what people have found in him: it is that he is noticed. He has impressed himself. In city after city he has moved from one meeting place to another: cafés, miners’ clubs, women’s clubs, and his right to be everywhere has been his conviction that his cause must make him welcome. He brings no credentials. On the rare occasions he is challenged, he impatiently, even contemptuously, rejects the need for it, as if his interlocuters are showing pettiness and worse, and after a few hours of earnest exhortation – which clearly exhaust his hearers, who betray, even after several days’ interval, all the signs of nervous strain – he leaves for the next appointment with destiny.

Can I say he is not trusted? It is more interesting than that …

There is a type of revolutionary always to be seen at times when there is potential for change. At first tentative, even timid, then amazed that this burning conviction of his can convince others, he soon becomes filled with contempt for them. He can hardly believe that he, that small unit, and an unworthy one (for, at least at the beginning, he may possess some view of himself as a fallible individual), can be taken seriously by those older than he, more experienced – persons sometimes of worth, who may be representatives of masses of people. Yet he, this torch of righteous conviction, armed with no more than his own qualities, is able to come close to them, persuades, convinces, has them in his power. He asks for trust – that first of all – for money, for the use of their influence. In no time he has nests of people in every place doing his bidding, embroiled with one another, willing to listen. To listen, that’s the thing. One may observe him, this burning-eyed, coiled spring of a youth, leaning forward at a café table, in the corner of a house, anywhere, fixing his prey with his eyes in a conviction of shared purpose, of conspiracy, of – always – being united in some small purpose against enormous odds. Yet almost at once this small purpose has burgeoned so remarkably. Finding it so easy to talk in terms of limited ends, the creation of a local institution perhaps, a meeting place, a modest petition, suddenly he – no less than others – is surprised to find that what is being talked about is citywide, then planetary, even interplanetary movements. ‘We shall sweep the stars for our support!’ Incent cried from a platform in one town, and when someone called out from the body of the hall, ‘Hold on, lad, let’s start with something more modest,’ the laughter was no more than friendly. Of course! If you have been able to rise so far and so fast from such a humble base – in this case, on this planet, that the people generally are very worn down, tired, drained, and they wish for better – then why not ‘sweep the stars’ and ‘transform everything’?

‘Is not the present moment dynamic?’ cried Incent from platform after platform, his whole person radiating dynamism, so that the poor tired people listening to him felt dynamic too; though not for long, for it is odd how they feel even more tired, more drained, when he has moved on to the next place that he has decided to stir into action.

‘The new forms of life will become dynamically dramatic,’ he has shouted, though only a moment before he was dealing with a question from the floor about raising wages by means of a petition to Volyen (through Greasy-guts Grice).

Well, such a person does not, as we know, ‘sweep the stars,’ but he does set in motion a great many people who even while under his spell feel uneasy. And yet feel uneasy that they do. How dull they have become! How enfeebled by life! How far they are from the flaming days of their youth, which they see before them again in the shape of this noble, inspirational youth, who seems, when he leans forward to hold their eyes with his own, to gather their whole life and pose it before them in the shape of a question.

‘What have you become?’ those dramatic, those languishing, those shameless eyes demand. For, of course, this young hero, without even knowing it, will use all the means he has to unlock the various forms of resistance he faces, including sex, maternal and paternal love: Oh, if only my son were like this, this very flame of promise and action, if only I had chosen such a one as a husband.

But uneasy they are. It might be for a good cause, but how they are being manipulated! And how is it possible that not only one’s unworthy (of course) self is being played on by this man – this youth, not much more than a child, really – but also one’s respected and revered colleagues?

This operator has understood from the first, and by instinct (it is nearly all instinct, this, not calculation: our hero is working on a wavelength of pure guess-and-feel, he has never sat down to say, ‘How can I get this poor sucker under my thumb?’), that of course one must use one ‘name’ to impress another. ‘I saw Hadder today,’ he lets fall confidentially and, as it were, by the way, ‘and he said to me he would talk to Sev, and when I dropped in on Bolli yesterday she said she knew how to lay her hands on …’ Some large, almost incredible sum seems to materialize; both the inspired youth and the hypnotized victim contemplate it, in silence. ‘Ye-e-es …’ murmurs the victim at last, ‘I see, yes …’ And on both faces there appears fleetingly a small self-conscious smile that acknowledges absurdity.

Alone he does it. It is he who possesses the flair, the spark, the drive, the energy, it is he who can set in motion these people or cadres. He – who? Who am I? he may mutter in some moment of panic, seeing puppets twitch and dangle everywhere he looks. But how is it possible …? All these skilled, intelligent, experienced people? Doing his bidding?

He feels as if he were himself twitching over an empty space. Moments of panic recur, are evaded, avoided, fled from … He works harder, faster, runs from place to place, sleeps hardly at all, eats only as part of this process of convincing and manipulating people: ‘No, only a sandwich please, I don’t …’ ‘Perhaps a glass of water, I don’t …’ But meanwhile things are happening. They indubitably are. Not exactly on the scale envisaged at the ‘sweeping the stars’ stage of the game. But certainly not, either, as he imagined in those first timid (cowardly?) moments. No, when he first felt those divine wings of rightness and conviction begin to lift, he thought, ‘Oh, perhaps I may be able to make them see just a little bit of what …’ No, he is very far from that. Into real, actual existence – paid-up memberships, funds, brochures, letterheads, meetings – have come organizations. They function. Oddly enough, his name is never there. Why not? Simply because the magnitude of his presence, his demand, his command, cannot be contained in anything so paltry as a letterhead, a list of sponsors. Though perhaps his name might appear in the smallest of type somewhere as an assistant secretary or something of the sort. And besides, there is always something a little fishy about these operations. His contempt for the people he operates, his always growing amazement as he promises and persuades, leads him into statements about sums of money that never existed, statements that so-and-so said something which will turn out to be untrue; behind this real, actual, to-be-felt-and-touched thing, the organization, the meetings, the sponsors, the aims, is a whole mirage of lies.

Lies, lies, lies. Flattery and sycophancy and lies.

At some point or other, and sometimes not till years later, the victims will suddenly find themselves muttering, Yes, that fellow – what’s his name? – the fact is, he was crazy, wasn’t he?

In the meantime, our hero has probably had a spell of actual madness, of the kind that necessitates doctors, or has gone to live in another planet.

It is as if his part in that flurry and favour of activity never was. His name is not mentioned, or hardly ever, and this is not only because by now the people he made dance are ashamed and wish they could obliterate their part in it all. It is also because there is something that doesn’t fit. Just as it wasn’t easy to put that dazzling name on a letterhead, or as the signature to a pamphlet full of facts and figures (written stuff of this kind has on the whole to be more accurate than what is said), simply because that burning presence was out of phase with all the other, more humdrum, individuals, so if one is looking back, it is hard to accommodate him into sober and thoughtful memory. This and that event certainly did happen – perhaps even now a society or party still exists, moribund, all the life fled from it – but do you mean to say that it was brought into being by that psychopath?

So it comes about that history does not record the names of these heroes. One may search in vain in records of events one has experienced on a day-to-day basis, knowing exactly what went on, and nowhere appear the names of the wonder-workers without whom these events would never have taken place.

Incent, like the others of his sort, will not appear in the history books. Meanwhile, everyone is talking about him.

‘Yes, he was here last week. He had us up all night listening to him. He’s sincere, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes, you could say that, he’s sincere, all right.’

‘It was the most moving occasion I can remember,’ someone else may say thoughtfully. ‘Yes …

When I returned to my lodgings, in the early morning, I found that Incent had already gone out. He had kept the woman of the house up listening to him nearly all night, so that she had a flattened and drained look.

‘He is a very feeling young one,’ she said, or murmured, out of semi-sleep. ‘Yes. Not like those Sirians. You and he come from the same place, he said. Is that so?’

And that is what I have to contend with.

When he returned at midday he was so intoxicated with himself he did not know me. He had visited Krolgul and Calder, and paid a flying visit to a near town which ‘is ready for the truth,’ and when he came striding into the little room at the top of the house where I sat waiting for him, it was with a clenched-fist salute and fixed, glazed eyes.

‘With me, against me,’ he chanted, and went striding about the room, unable to check the momentum which had been carrying him for days.

‘Incent,’ I said, ‘do sit down.’

‘Wi’ me, ‘gainst me!’

‘Incent, this is Klorathy.’

“me, ‘nst me.’

‘Klorathy!’

‘Oh, Klorathy, greetings, servus, all power to the … Klorathy, I didn’t recognize you there, oh, wonderful, I have to tell you …’And he passed out on my bed, smiling.

I then went out. I had arranged with Calder and his friends that our ‘confrontation’ should take place in one of the miners’ clubs or meeting places; but on the insinuation of Krolgul, Incent had, not consulting Calder but simply informing him, booked one of the trial rooms of the legislature for the occasion. This is where, usually, the natives are tried and sentenced by Volyens for various minor acts of insubordination. He had distributed all kinds of pamphlets and leaflets everywhere around the town announcing ‘A Challenge to Tyranny.’

I myself went to Calder, and found him with a group of men in his house. He was angry, and formidable.

I said to him that in my view the ‘confrontation’ should be cancelled, and that we – he, I, Incent and Krolgul, and perhaps ten or so of the miners’ representatives – should meet informally in his house or in a café.

But since I had seen him, he had been immersed in Rhetoric. Furious that ‘the powers that be’ had ‘tricked’ him by substituting for one of their clubs a venue associated by them with the Volyen hegemony, furious with himself for being swayed by Incent, whom, when he was out of his company, Calder distrusted, angry because of Krolgul, who had sent him a message saying he had nothing to do with Incent’s recent manoeuvrings, he now saw me as an accomplice of Incent.

‘You and he come from the same place,’ he said to me, as I sat there faced with a dozen or so steady, cold, angry pairs of Volyenadnan eyes.

‘Yes, we do. But that doesn’t mean to say I support what he does.’

‘You are telling us that you and he come from that place, very far away it is too, and you don’t see eye to eye with him on what he is doing here?’

‘Calder,’ I said, ‘I want you to believe me, I have had nothing to do with these new arrangements. I think they are a mistake.’

But it was no good: he, they all, had been subjected to burning sincerity from Incent for some hours.

‘We’ll meet you in that Volyen place. Yes. We’ll meet you there, and let truth prevail,’ shouted Calder, bringing a great fist down on the table in an obvious ritual for putting an end to discussion.

And so that is what is about to happen.

Krolgul is keeping modestly out of sight. Incent is still asleep, but tossing and starting up, smiling and emitting fragmented oratory, and falling back, smiling, to dream of the ‘confrontation’ – which I am afraid is hardly likely to go well.

And this is what happened.

Towards the end of Incent’s long sleep, its quality changed and he became inert and heavy. He woke slowly, and was dazed for some minutes. Clearly, he could not remember at once what had happened. Where was the ‘dynamic,’ vibrant, passionate conspirator? At last he pulled himself up off the bed and muttered, ‘Krolgul, I must get to Krolgul.’

‘Why?’

He looked at me in amazement. ‘Why?’

‘Yes, why? There is no need for you ever to have anything to do with Krolgul.’

He subsided again on the bed, staring.

‘In a few minutes we have to make our way to the Hall of Justice, room number three, in order to talk to Calder and his mates,’ I said.

He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge buzzing thoughts.

‘Arranged by you,’ I said.

‘Klorathy,’ he asked from his old self, tentative, stubborn honest, ‘I have been a bit crazy, I think?’

‘Yes, you have. But please try to hold on to what you are now, for we must go to this so-called trial or confrontation.’

‘What are you going to do with me?’ he asked.

‘Well, if you can maintain yourself as you are now – nothing. Otherwise, I’m afraid you must undergo Total Immersion.’

‘But that’s terrible, isn’t it?’

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’

The council chamber or judgment room of the Volyen administration is arranged to demonstrate the principles of justice: right and wrong; good and bad; punisher and punished. On one side of the circular chamber, which is panelled with some shiny brown stone so that the movements of the individuals inside the chamber are reflected in the gleams of dull colour, stands the apparatus of judgment itself: an imposing chair or throne, subsidiary but similar thronelike chairs, boxes for the accusers and witnesses – most of them bound to be hostile to the pitiful representatives of the natives on the other side of the court, where a dozen bare benches are ranged.

Two focuses of opinion is what this Volyen court is designed to hold; if opinion can possibly be the word for what always ends in the imprisonment and torture or execution of the people on one side of the court, whereas those on the other side go off to their homes to be refreshed and made ready for another day of determining justice.

But we were three focuses of opinion, and instinctively, without need for argument, we made our way to the area where the lowly benches stood, ignoring the pomp of the court itself, and arranged them into a rough triangle. Calder and those with him took their places on one side. Krolgul, though with hesitation that looked rather like an attractive diffidence, sat all by himself on another. As usual, he was wearing clothes assembled to seem like a uniform that summed up a situation: a sober tunic in grey, baggy service trousers, and a grey-green scarf around his neck, of the kind used by everyone here to shield his eyes from the glare that comes off the still-unmelted glaciers and snow fields. He looked the picture of responsible service.

But really he was confused. That was because of his creature Incent, who was tagging along with me in a dulled, exhausted condition that made it seem as if he had been drugged or hypnotized. And that was what not only Krolgul but also the Volyenadnans thought had happened. Calder, in fact, did not at once recognize the glossy and persuasive Incent in this pale, slow youth who slumped beside me on the bench. And it certainly did not suit me either, for it was Incent whom I wanted to put forward a point of view not Krolgul’s.

Just as Krolgul had wanted Incent to speak for him.

And so there we were, sitting quietly on our benches, and no one spoke.

Nor was this a situation without danger, since the use of this court for such a purpose was of course not allowed. Incent had shouted, entirely on impulse, from some platform in the poor part of the city, ‘We shall take our cause to the heart of Volyen itself!’

So ‘Volyen itself’ could be expected to show up at any moment, in the shape of the police, if not the army.

At last Calder stood up, though there was no need for anyone to stand: he stood because he had been taught by the Volyens that he must stand in the presence of superiors. A great slab of a man, dense and heavy in texture as the schists and shales and compacted clays he worked with, he looked at Incent and remarked, ‘Our young hero doesn’t seem to have much to say for himself today.’

I said, without standing, that Incent, as he and all the Volyens knew, had had plenty to say, in fact had not stopped talking for days, if not weeks, and had keeled over exhausted only a few hours ago. I said this in a low, humorous voice, to match the quiet, almost ironical tones of Calder.

‘Well, then?’ demanded Calder. I noted with pleasure how he sat down again.

‘May I suggest,’ I said, ‘that you state the position. After all, it is you and your people who would suffer the consequences of any action.’

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ came a chorus from the men behind Calder. And I saw that this was indeed what they had all been saying to one another: ‘It is all right for him, isn’t it, but it is us who’ll be going to prison for it.’

I had taken a risk, of course, because I did not want Krolgul to stand up and launch himself into oratory. I wanted the tone kept low and sensible. He was lounging there on his bench, watching everything without seeming to, and trying to make Incent meet his eyes so that he could once again get the boy under his influence.

I could feel Incent beside me as a blank, a void. He was not Krolgul’s then, nor was he himself; he was not acting as a conduit for the strengths and powers of the planet so that Krolgul could tap them; he was not letting the virtues of Canopus drain away through him. He was nothing. And I hoped I could keep him so until the healing powers of Canopus could begin to work.

Krolgul maintained silence. He was banking on getting Incent back under his will.

Calder, after consulting briefly with his fellows, remarked in a bluff but angry voice: ‘We are here because you people invited us – Volyen or Sirius or Canopus, it’s all the same to us. Our situation has become intolerable, and we’ll listen to any suggestion.’

‘Neither Volyen, nor Sirius, nor Canopus – but Shammat,’ I said. ‘Krolgul of Shammat.’

I risked a great deal in saying this. For if Canopus was not much more than the reminder of long-ago tales and legends, then Shammat was nothing, no more than curses and expletives whose source they had forgotten.

‘Shammat, is it?’ said Calder, and he was getting angry. His mechanisms were being overloaded; he could not take it all in. ‘Well, whoever it is, we are here, to listen. So which of you will start?’

I said softly, ‘Why not you, Calder?’

Calder said angrily, standing up to do so, ‘Our situation is this, that we all of us work, day and night, for all of our lives, which are short and difficult and painful, and the results of our work go to Volyen. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘And,’ I prompted, ‘according to Krolgul of Shammat, you ought to remedy this by rising, though how this “rising” is to be done is not specified, and by murdering Grice the Governor-General? That’s it, isn’t it? And your troubles will then be at an end.’

When they heard it stated like this, there was a stirring and murmuring among the men around Calder. Who stood up and said, for the benefit of invisible recorders and spies: ‘I have never said that, or anything like it, nor has any one of us.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but that has been the theme of certain recent speeches. And I have said that there might be alternative things to do. And I am prepared to put them forward.’

And now Krolgul acted. He did no more than, as it were, murmur or remark to himself, ‘Greasy-guts Grice. Grice the Greedy.’ And remained seated, hands locked around his knees, smiling as if listening to some secret music.

At this Incent stirred and came to himself. ‘That’s it,’ he shouted, or half-shouted, the smile that goes with his self-hypnosis back on his face, ‘Grice … Grim-guts … Greasy …’ And subsided again.

‘Well, our young master has woken up, it seems,’ remarked Calder.

Meanwhile, I had observed that straight ahead of where I sat, high on the brown wall, was reflected a pale patch where there had been nothing. A glance behind me and up showed a small opening above the throne of judgment, and in it was Grice’s face, as pallid, as sick, as suffering as it had been yesterday when he was listening to the oratory in the square.

But so far no one else had noticed it.

I said, loudly and firmly, ‘I will now make a short summary of what I think you might do –’

But Krolgul was on his feet, in the posture of the worker’s emblem, and he was shouting: ‘Death to the tyrant, death to Grice, death to …’ And Incent had come to life again, and was standing there beside me smiling. ‘Death,’ he was stuttering, but his voice was gathering force, ‘death to the Volyen bully, death …

Is it possible, Johor, that we sometimes tend – I put it no stronger than that – to overestimate the forces of reason? I emphasize here that Calder is a solid, sensible man, whose life is spent in exact assessments, judgments, in measure.

And certainly, as Incent stood there, swaying a little, still deadly pale but strengthening fast, Calder was smiling in a half-pitying embarrassment.

I asked, in a low, calm voice, ‘Calder, am I to have my say?’

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The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

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