Читать книгу The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire - Doris Lessing - Страница 11

If you were to pay a visit to Volyen now, Johor, I wonder if you would be struck most by the changes, or the lack of change? You were here when Volyen reached its peak as an Empire, having just conquered PE 70 and PE 71, and before it began falling back in on itself. It was very rich, self-satisfied, proud, complacent. Its public note, or tone, was the liturgic chant of self-praise characteristic of Empires at that stage. New wealth poured in from PE 70 and PE 71; Volyenadna and Volyendesta were already well integrated into the economic whole. The cities of Volyen itself grew and fattened with explosions of population due to an increase of general well-being: Volyen had been poor and backward for a long time, after having been sucked dry during its previous colonial period under Volyenadna. But the cities were horrible contrasts of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, for even at its richest Volyen was not able, was not willing, to keep its labouring classes in decency. These millions came into existence because of an improvement in conditions; but they were not allowed to live any longer than was useful to the privileged classes who employed them.

This was perhaps the most striking part of your Report, Johor, and one which was used in the Colonial Service classes I was teaching that to illustrate an Empire can be described as wealthy; can increase its wealth many times in a century through loot and plunder; can present an image of itself, far and wide through a galaxy, of splendour and prosperity and growth; yet the bulk of its citizens may still be living as meanly and hopelessly as the most neglected of slaves. These, the poorest classes of Volyen, were worse off than slaves.

Your Report came out just at the time I was on leave on Canopus, and had undertaken to teach the course on Comparative Empires: Sirius, whose Empire had lasted almost as long as ours; and Volyen’s, whose Empire in comparison is an affair of moments, provided my material. Your Report made the strongest impression on my students, and on me. I was able to base not only single lectures but also subsidiary courses on a single sentence. For instance:

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

What riches we found in that, Johor!

Well, the complacent rulers of Volyen certainly believed in the image they projected. They saw themselves as kindly, parentally concerned instructors, bringing civilization to the backward populations they were engaged in enslaving and despoiling. And this made them blind to the real feelings that were boiling up under their so tender rule.

I remember how various stages of the Sirian Empire were used as illustration. In the earliest stage of all, they plundered and stole, murdered and destroyed, and this was done in the name only of the good of the Sirian Mother Planet. No pretence about it! (In the very earliest days of Canopus, we too took what we wanted, and blundered, and wondered why it was everything we touched went wrong and at length failed and collapsed, until we discovered the Necessity and were able to do what we should.) But as Sirius developed, not having found the Necessity, that Empire developed Rhetoric. Each new planet, each attractive new morsel of property, was swallowed to the accompaniment of words, words, words, describing theft as a gift, destruction as development, murder as public hygiene. The patterns of words, ideas, changed as Sirius grew a conscience and agonized through its long ages of change, expanding, then contracting, maintaining a sort of stability; then expanding or contracting again, always, always justifying what they did with new patterns of words. These word patterns never were anything like this: We are taking this planet because we need its wealth of minerals or soil, or labour. No, one way or another the conquest was always described in terms of the benefit to the planet itself.

The lying Rhetoric of invaders can therefore from one point of view, be looked upon as a tribute to morality …

I remember that I used Puttiora and its pirate subsidiary, Shammat, as an illustration of the opposite, a frankness about motive that was even attractive compared with this:

The people of (let’s say) Volyenadna, having voluntarily and enthusiastically agreed to our instructing them in the superior ways of our civilization, basely and treacherously rose against us, and had to be taught a salutary lesson by our heroic soldiers.

Shammat’s style is, always has been, more this:

Those dirty rats the Volyenadnans saw us loading up our cargo ships with their new harvest and they tried to set fire to it and murdered our men. So we taught them a jolly good lesson, and they won’t do that again.

The Volyen cities you described were full of new dignified, imposing public buildings, new prosperous suburbs, newly built forms of public transport, bridges, canals, places of amusement – were full of a self-confidence and vitality, all based on this view of Volyen at that time as ‘the greatest in the Galaxy,’ and this consciousness of possession and dominance was shared even by the poorest female labourer, then likely to die a third of the way through her normal life span because of hard work and overuse as a breeder. A loud, bustling, crude vitality; and, for the most part, these cities were inhabited by people of Volyen stock, amalgams of the original stock, which had bred with Volyenadnans, Volyendestans, the peoples of PE 70 and 71 (Maken and Slovin), to make up ‘We Volyens.’

What I saw when I went out from the tall room where Incent lay recuperating was, at first sight, not very different from your picture. The great public buildings of Volyen’s proud ‘Empire’ are still there, though shabbied by time. The parks and gardens are generously everywhere, but if you look close the trees are mostly old, and neglect shows in eroding earth and in the dirty waters of lakes and ponds. The prosperous suburbs are now parts of the inner city, for Vatun has spread out and abroad into new, smaller suburbs and meaner dwellings; and the dwellings of the inner city no longer hold single families with complements of servants, but several families each. The factories and workshops of Volyen’s greatness decline, and many stand empty. The general mood is not of unthinking and loud confidence, but, rather, of a puzzled and even querulous uncertainty. And everywhere you see how the Volyens who not so long ago held most positions of public importance are not replaced, often, by the citizens of their subject colonies; and this goes from some of the most prominent to the shopkeepers in the large and the little streets: trade was the motive power of Volyen at its peak, and now it is, increasingly, Volyenadnans and Volyendestans who own shops and organize trade.

As the ‘Empire’ grew uncertain, and resistance by the subject planets made ruling difficult and in some places impossible; as conditions worsened in the subject planets – so large numbers of their population came ‘home’ to Volyen to share in the wealth that had been plundered from them. As you walk through the streets and parks and squares of Vatun, you see as many aliens as you see Volyens. And perhaps that is the most immediately striking difference that you would see, Johor. As for the other differences, the primary ones, they are less easily described.

To say: This is an Empire in collapse – that is easy, and we have seen it all a thousand times before. To say: As an Empire collapses, those people who have been displaced and deprived tend to be sucked into the centre – nothing new about that. But each collapsing Empire has its own ‘feel,’ its atmosphere, which cannot be conveyed simply by talking of an uncertainty of will.

And in this case, of course, it is an Empire that will shortly fall apart as it is taken over by Sirius in a phase of its own implosion – and this brings me to the next and perhaps most important part of this, my Report to you.

As a consequence of a long contact with us, our slow education of Ambien II, the Sirian Empire developed a crisis of self-examination and questioning about its role, its motives, its function: it trembled on the edge of the real question, the only question: What are we for? The Sirian Empire, in one of its stages of contraction, so that its physical size was a fraction of what it had been at its height, was riven into two main factions, one supporting Ambien II in exile and the other Four who had followed her there. (That ex-ruling junta, the Five, have been in exile not far from here, on their Planet 13, for two S-years, fifty V-years.) This faction demanded an approach to us, to Canopus, with a request for an education in fundamentals, an understanding of the Necessity. Meanwhile, a decision to inquire into the possibilities of acquiring Virtue (their name for it) led to a premature conviction that they were already in possession of the real qualities. This faction, during the (brief) period it was on top, enthusiastically expanded, overrunning not only planets Sirius had previously colonized and abandoned, but planets previously not colonized because they were not thought to be of enough value. But in this new mood of ‘Virtue,’ in which they saw themselves as the bringers of benefits, even second-class and third-class planets have been forced to become reluctant members of the Sirian Empire.

While Sirius has been seeing itself as the bringer of new benefits, because of its new description of itself, its victims have been unable to distinguish between this fresh expansion of Empire and previous expansions, for all have been accompanied by torrents of self-lauding words, and in fact there has been no difference at all in practice. You will already have noted, of course, that this faction on Sirius illustrates the law to which you drew our attention: A governing class that are victims of their own Rhetoric are not likely to survive for long. The faction opposed to the exiled and imprisoned Five, whose ideas exerted powerful influence even though they, the Five, were unable to see any channels of communication whatever, were not able to combat these ideas, and from one end of the Empire to the other, everyone was chanting slogans about Necessity, and Virtue. But it soon became evident to nearly everyone that nothing had changed: the Empire was in a phase of expansion, and planets were falling victim to savage exploitation, as usual to the accompaniment of Rhetoric. The opponents of the Five, who had been conferring without cease as to the choice of the right words with which to discredit the Five, found that the Five were discredited by life itself, for talking about Virtue had not changed anything. The Five, together again in exile on their Planet 13, understood that they, again and for the thousandth time, had been deceived by their own verbal formulations. This time, however, there was a new influence, namely ours on Ambien II, and this did not cease because we were not in actual physical communication. The Five in their enforced isolation and contemplation of events, came to understand that by being responsible for the use of words that distorted and perverted what Canopus stands for, they had been responsible, because of their misguided and premature advocacy of Canopus, for the discrediting of Canopus; but that this fact did not, could not, change the nature of Canopus and what Canopus could offer. The Five learned to hold fast to the truth that when Sirius was up to it, Canopus was there, would remain ready to instruct. And the Five left it at that, refusing to issue new manifestoes, proclamations, theses, analyses of the situation, which they were always being pressured to do because every kind of clandestine messenger and envoy kept arriving on their planet from dissident groups everywhere in their Empire, and of course there were – and are – plentiful spies as well from the Opposition, mostly wanting to get formulations that can be used for their own purposes, and of course wanting too the benefit of the Five’s many thousands of years of experience. There are also historians, archivists, recorders, and Memories of every sort. So the isolation of the Five is relative.

But not a word can be got from them of an excitatory, inspirational, provocative, rhetorical kind.

It might be said – is said, and often enough by the Five – that this is slamming the reactor door after the electrons have escaped.

For meanwhile, the whole Sirian Empire is in a fervour of words and phrases and slogans, all originating from the Five in their idealistic and Virtuous phase, now disowned by them; all of Sirius is word-fevered, and it expands desperately, frantically, partly because the sober and tempered guidance of the Five is now absent, and their successors are supported only by an idea of themselves as Rulers, an idea with nothing solid underpinning it, partly because expansions of Empires have their own momentum, partly because the present rulers of Sirius-a hotchpotch and a rag-bag and a miscegeny and a rag-galaxy if ever there was one-are the prisoners of their own Rhetoric and can no longer distinguish between fact and their own fictions.

And the word formulations they use are all, because of the period when the influence of the Five conduced to convictions of Virtue, of the most high-flown, simpering, sentimental, nauseating kind you can bring to mind, all based on the rewards of Virtue. I must say that I thought, before this visit to Volyen, I had suffered the worst that was possible in the line of verbal effluvia.

At the time of your visit – so recently, even in Volyen terms – the young of the expanding upper and middle classes all were educated for, dreamed of, and found a place in the administrative machinery of the Empire. Education matched expectation, expectation matched achievement.

But for the last thirty years, since the last war, when Volyen fought a dissident group from Sirius which planned to use this weakening Empire as a possession from which to begin its own adventure in Empire – fought and won, but at heavy cost, because that ‘victory’ in fact weakened it and left it unable to recover – since then, the educated youth have had to face a very difficult future. Yet the education is still largely based on the past: that is, on a conviction of Volyen moral superiority over lesser breeds. Year after Volyen year, the youngsters emerge from the training establishments with all the equipment, practical but mostly moral, for running, administering, advising, ruling others, and find their occupation gone. Also, because of the savagery of the war with the Sirian dissident group, because of the lying propaganda on both sides, so soon to be exposed by ‘life itself,’ these successive generations of the youth have had a valuable but painful education in de-conditioning, in the use of their minds in analyzing propaganda, that of their own side as well as that of any enemy.

It was as a result of that war that a new mode or pitch or style came to characterize the training establishments of the young on Volyen, one that would previously have been impossible. It was a savage and angry criticism of their own elders, but a cynical criticism as if nothing else could be expected. It was a sneer expressed not only in the tones of a voice, but in characteristic shrugs of the shoulders, a superior tightening of the lips accompanied by a nod and the lowering of eyelids, as if to shield the associate or accomplice from the tedium of thoughts whose banality of course was not one degree better than has to be expected. The flavour of course pervaded these interchanges. Of course this incompetence, this indifference to public good, this venality, this corruption; of course the lies of skilled and cynical propagandists had to be expected. But not endured … For over the horizon, no farther than the next star and its friendly planets, was Sirius. Sirius the new civilization. Sirius the great and the good, the hope of the Galaxy. For the absolute readiness to see nothing but evil in Volyen was matched by a need to see everything good in Sirius.

And the Sirian agents, everywhere even then, noted this new mood among the youth, the future class of public administrators (though few of them would in fact find such work in the dwindling Empire of Volyen), and reported to the representatives of Sirius on the near planets, who then reported to Sirius (in the hands of the junta who had supplanted the Five) that the entire youth of Volyen, sickened by the flagrant corruption of the ruling class, revolted by the depredations of their Empire (you will recall that Sirius was again in the grip of fantasies about its own nature as a ruling power, and saw itself only as a source of virtues), were only too ready to betray their planet and become agents of Sirius. This without money, for the most part; without reward, other than that of a conviction of Duty well done; and purely out of idealism and love of Progress and Future Harmonious Development, not only of local galactic populations, but of peoples through the Universe … You will forgive me if from time to time I seem infected by the style.

That war of thirty V-years ago was truly horrible. A developing technology introduced new and awful weapons. The Sirian Rhetorics, and the Rhetorics used as counterforces by Volyen, were sickening. On Volyen there is a time when the young are able to see through local Rhetorics, though this is usually for only a short period before they have to earn a living and thus to conform; before they can be accepted as members of a governing class – and thus must conform; and now, when there is so small a governing class to belong to, before they join one or another of the innumerable political groups, each with its own Rhetoric, which they cannot afford to criticize, for if they do they will forfeit membership in the group, which is their social base, the only base they have for friendship. For Volyens, evolved so recently from animal groupings, for the most part cannot function outside groups, packs, herds, and each of these has its own verbal formulations which are sacred; they can be changed, but only with difficulty, and while they are being accepted cannot be questioned.

Rhetoric rules these youngsters again, when they have sought to escape from it. Shedding the Rhetoric of Empire, which they are prepared to analyze with acumen and to reject with scorn and contempt, they become prisoners of the Rhetoric of oppositional groups whose only aim is to become, in their turn, rulers who will govern through Rhetoric. Through the formulation and manipulations of words.

Sirius, skilled in group psychology, in manipulation, in the uses of ideology, knew how to subvert the young people at just that moment in their lives when they had turned their powerful youthful scorn on the Rhetorics they were refusing.

On Volyen these youngsters became Sirian agents in considerable numbers. This, long before it became part of the public consciousness that Sirius was a real physical threat, might actually physically invade and conquer; though why it was so difficult for Volyens to accept that it is hard to say, since they had themselves overrun and stolen other planets so recently. No, how these young people saw themselves was not ‘I am paving the way for an invasion by Sirius,’ which struck them as a laughable idea; but ‘I stand for the noble true, and beautiful ideas of Sirius, which will transform this shoddy and pitiful and corrupt and lying Volyen into something not far from a paradise. These ideas will abolish the already disintegrating Empire of Volyen, and the sooner the better, for empires are wicked and disgusting. Sirius stands for the ever-upward march of evolving galaxies. Sirius means Justice! Truth! Freedom!’ (And so on ad nauseam.)

While hundreds of thousands of ‘the flower of Volyen youth’ have been dreaming of the virtues of Sirius, the fact is that this Empire is at this stage as brutish a tyranny as we have ever seen. At various times of expansion in the past, Sirius has simply decided that a certain planet would suit its purposes, sent in its armies, established a ruling base, exterminated those who resisted, and adjusted the economic conditions to its advantage. But under the influence of all this ‘Virtue,’ the pattern has become more like this. A planet lying somewhere in the path of expansion becomes next in the line of conquest. Agents and spies enter it in all kinds of guises and spread information about the advantage of Sirian rule. This operation is a mixture of purest cynicism and purest muddleheadedness and creates maniacs by the planet-load, for it is necessary both to know that the conditions you are describing conform to the classic descriptions of tyranny anywhere at any time, and yet to believe that these constitute ‘Virtue.’ Local populations ‘believe’ at first in these fairy tales about Sirius to a greater or lesser extent. When Sirius invades, there is a core of believers ready to commit any crimes against their own people for the sake of ‘Virtue.’ They form part of the new ruling machinery. Some, if not most, soon become disillusioned as they see what horrors are being perpetrated around them, and these are at once murdered. Others, blinding themselves, become willing tools of Sirius. The wealth of the colonized planet becomes available to Sirius. This process, of course, is nothing like the well-planned, thought-out processes during the times of the Five, who at least understand long-term planning of an economic kind, if nothing higher. No, all is muddle, confusion, inefficiency. Miserable exploited populations, refused any means of protesting, have to listen to the chants of self-praise of the Sirians and their local captive minds. Anyone who tries to use language accurately to describe what is in fact happening vanishes into torture rooms and prisons or, diagnosed as mad, into mental hospitals. There is soon a sharp division between the masses and the small, obedient governing class, one living in direct poverty, the other given every advantage. A major occupation is the fabrication of verbal formulations to disguise this very ancient organization of a country and to describe it as some sort of Utopia; a large part of the time and energy of the administration is concerned with nothing else.

That is the truth of all the Sirian colonies near Volyen. They can be described as prison planets. If this Report were to be stretched to twenty times its length, I could not begin to give an idea of the suffocating, lying, claustrophobic atmospheres of such planets: the poverty, the misery, the exploitation of every possible resource for the benefit of Sirius.

Meanwhile, on Volyen, a thousand groups of energetic, educated youngsters base their hopes for the future on the Sirian rule; and, as every year the training establishments spill out their occupants, they form new groups, new societies, new parties, all with one idea, to make Volyen ‘like Sirius,’ though each group chooses a different example from the near planets to use as inspiration. For, of course, information comes out from the Sirian slave planets about their real condition; unable to jettison the dream, these groups will at once change the formulations and announce that such-and-such a planet has unfortunately ‘left 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.