Читать книгу The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire - Doris Lessing - Страница 9

I dropped in here on my way to Volyen, to see Ormarin.

The Sirian presence is very strong. Roads, bridges, harbours are everywhere being built. Everywhere are the camps of the slave labourers. In the skies are positioned Sirian craft of all kinds. There is nothing to be heard but talk of the coming Sirian invasion. Sirius, Sirius, they say. But who is Sirius? While I was there the spacecraft all vanished, leaving the skies empty, and reappeared the next day. Some shift of power on the Mother Planet. But they know nothing on Volyendesta of the struggle there; for them it is simply ‘Sirius.’

Ormarin, our main hope, is in hospital! A setback! His medication could have been better judged. They subjected him to Benign Immersion, choosing five different historical episodes, all aspects of the conquest of the weaker by Empires at the height of their outward sweep. All short-lived Empires, and all from Shikasta at the time of their numerous and so short-lived Empires based in the Northwest fringes. Since it was Benign Immersion, he was not a participator in events, only an observer, but I am sorry to say that this course of treatment has plunged him into a state of mind that is only slightly better than Incent’s condition of Undulant Rhetoric. Ormarin sits at the top of the hospital, gazing out over the desert weeping, and in the grip of a severe attack of What Is the Point-ism, or The Futility of All Effort.

‘Come, take hold of yourself, man!’ I exhorted. ‘Pull yourself together! You know quite well the Sirians, or somebody, will attack soon, and here you are in such a feeble condition.’

‘I don’t care,’ said he. ‘What is the point? We will fight them – or not; we will struggle against them once they are here – or not; we will die in our thousands – millions – in any case. Those poor wretches, the Sirian slave labourers, will die in their millions, since that is their function. We Volyendestans will die. And then the Sirian Empire will collapse, since all Empires do sooner or later –’

‘In this case, very much sooner than later,’ I interrupted.

‘And then? Another example for the history books of a failed enterprise, a uselessness, something accomplished in blood and suffering which would have been better never attempted …

He went on like this for some time, and I listened appreciatively, for seldom have I been able to hear such a classic case of this condition, with all the verbal formulations that are the most easily recognized symptoms, so beautifully and elegantly expressed.

In fact, I was having the interview recorded for the use of the doctors.

But what I had been hoping was that I could take him with me to Volyen to assist me with poor Incent.

The doctors assure me that Ormarin will soon be himself again, and ready to play his part in our celestial charade – a phrase he repeats over and over again. I find it quite an attractive one, appealing to those aspects in me which I know my immersion in these events is designed to cure or at least to make more easily controllable.

‘This celestial theatre of yours,’ said Ormarin, his honest face full of the exhaustion that is the result of an overindulgence in irony, ‘this peep show for the connoisseurs of futility! This play staged by planets and constellations for the benefit of, one presumes, observers whose palate needs ever and ever stronger stimulation by the absurd –’

‘Ormarin,’ I said, ‘you may be ill, our good doctors may have overdone things a bit with you, but I do have to congratulate you on at the very least an increase of overall understanding, a widening of perspective. I look forward very much to working with you when you are a bit better.’

He nodded sombrely, his eyes fixed on visions of ghostly conquering armies destroying all before them, these armies almost at once being swept away and vanishing, to be replaced by …

I remember I myself suffered a prolonged and intense attack of this condition, and while it caused those responsible for me – you among them, of course, Johor – a lot of trouble, I can report that it is not without its consolation. There is a proud, locked-in melancholy that accompanies the contemplation of what must appear to the infant-mind as futility, which is really quite pleasurable. Very well, then, remarks this philosophical spectator of cosmic events, immobilized by cosmic perspective, and addressing the Cosmos itself; very well, then, if you are going to be like that, be it on your own head, then! And you fold your arms, lean back in your chair, fix a sardonic smile on your face, and half close your eyes, ready to watch a comet crash into a pleasant enough little planet, or another planet engulfed by – let’s say – a Sirian moment of expansion due to a need for some mineral or commodity, a mistaken need, as it turns out, the whole thing a miscalculation on the part of the economists.

‘I’ll see you soon, Ormarin,’ I said. ‘On the whole I’m very pleased with you. You are coming along nicely.’

But he has brought himself to ask, ‘Very well, then! If you are not Volyen, if you are not Sirius, who are you, with your authoritative ways?’ When I mention Canopus – rarely – his eyes slide: he doesn’t want, finally and definitely, to know.