The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

klorathy on volyenadna, to johor.

I had hoped to meet Calder with his colleagues. He sent a message that he would come alone, to a place that turned out to be a settlement of a few clans in a cold valley far from the capital. Grey stone houses, or huts, and a grey tundra rising all around us to a grey sky.

It was a miners' club, but at an hour when they were at work. A woman served us the thin, sour beverage of Volyenadna and went out saying she had to prepare a meal for her children.

This is the conversation that took place.

He was in that condition of irritable gloominess that indicates, in this species, an extreme of suspicion.

'Calder, would you describe this tyranny you live under as an efficient one?

He slammed his great fist onto the table and exploded: 'Tyranny, you say! You can say that again! Filthy exploiting callous swine who...' He went on for some minutes, until he ran into silence. 'But you know what they are like,' he added.

'What I asked was, is it efficient?'

He sat blinking at me, confused; then feeling himself attacked growled, 'You forget, I've never been out of this planet. How can I make comparisons? But I take it you can. You tell me, then, is it efficient or not? From where we sit, it is efficient enough: it drains all that we make with the sweat of our brow and leaves us...as you can see for yourself.' And he sat there triumphant, as if he had made a good point in a debate, even shooting glances to either side as if to check up on the reactions of an audience.

But I could see that his need to speechify was fed, temporarily at least; and that now we could profit from his attention to me. For he was sitting there, leaning a little forward, his grey, flat eyes searching my face. A solid, heavy, slow man, his thoughts slowly at work in a mind that had learned only distrust.

I said, 'Calder, it is an inefficient tyranny. And has been for a long time now – for all your life, certainly. It is inefficient, as tyrannies are in their last stages.' I stopped to let this sink in.

'I haven't noticed signs of their deciding to leave us in peace!'

'When the Volyens first came, they knew of everything you thought, planned, let alone did. They were everywhere. And where are the nearest Volyen police to us today?'

He nodded. 'Still, they do well enough.'

'But not for long...'

'So you say!'

'Tell me – a specific question. If the rocks, let us say these flat rocks lying all around us on the hillside, were to change colour from grey to a dull red, do you think the Volyen administration would notice it?'

Here he heaved with laughter, again sharing the joke with the invisible audience at the expense of my stupidity.

'No, I don't think they would, no. I can say that much.' And he pulled out a pipe and lit it, slowly and with emphasis.

'I can offer you a form of food that would make you independent. It is a kind of plant, like one of your lichens. It grows on rock. A few spores scattered on the rocks of this valley, and they would all be covered with it very quickly. You can eat it raw. You can cook it as a vegetable. It can be fermented in various ways, which will change its nature. With this plant you could be self-sufficient on Volyenadna.'

He had slowly leaned back in his chair, and it was as if his eyes had become half their size. A sceptical grin stretched his lips, between which hung the pipe emitting narcotic smoke. He had such command of his invisible audience that he had even sent them conniving glances. He was a solid block of cold, rejecting suspicion. Then he gave a snort of contemptuous laughter, and then a summoning shout, and the woman came from next door and, as he snapped his fingers, said, 'Yes, at once,' and refilled our glasses.

'Food,' he said, heavily. 'Well, if it was as simple as that.'

At the word food, the woman gave us a rapid, clever glance that took in everything about us; until that moment she had not given us much of her attention, being obviously harried with family problems. And now I saw her shadow hovering on the wall beyond the half-open door. Very well, I thought, I had not planned on this, but let us see...

'It is as simple as that.'

'We have a saying on this planet – '

'Yes, I know. It is this: 'Never trust strangers when they come bearing gifts.'

'How did you know?'

'Because every planet has a version of this saying. But is it really so useful a guide, useful under every set of circumstances?'

'Oh, well,' he said, wagging his head knowingly, 'it's good enough for us!'

'Calder, you are a very sensible individual. I was looking forward to this talk, an exchange with a straightforward, sensible, no-nonsense person. I can call you that because of these hard lives of yours – and you have no idea how terribly hard and deprived and bare they are, Calder, since you have nothing to compare your conditions with – it is because of your bard lives that you are sensible and down-to-earth. No room for the nonsense I find when, for instance, I am on Volyen.'

'Yes, well, I see your point. Some of my mates went there on a delegation. A rotten lot there, I'd say.'

'Well. But I had hoped I would be able to say a few simple, straightforward things to you, and that you would listen.'

He sat silent, slumped forward, looking down at his glass, which was already empty. He seemed to go loose all over. Receptive. For a few moments at least.

'Your situation on Volyenadna is this. You produce only minerals. All your food has to be imported – at this time, by your masters, the Volyens. You are completely at their mercy. You cannot rebel, or even bargain, for the meagreness of your food resources cripples you. Except for the period when you yourselves were a piratical Empire and grabbed food from – '

'You say that we were an Empire and as bad as the Volyens, but why should we believe you?' he shouted.

'Oh, Calder, given the chance, every planet will become an Empire. It is a stage of growth this galaxy has reached. It is a question of what kind of Empire – if you are interested, we can discuss that...'

'Let's get back to this food of yours.'

'It grows very fast. Spreads. Yet there are means of controlling it. It will make you independent, Calder.'

'You sit there, and just let drop – as it might be, between one glass and another – that there's a plant that will change our entire situation...just like that. Well, why did we never hear of it before?'

'Who was to tell you?'

He maintained a kind of stylized sneer on his face, but he was thinking hard. 'Krolgul never mentioned it.'

'He has never heard of it. Shammat has as yet to get its hands on this plant. It is called Rocknosh, by the way.'

'Shammat! Canopus! You might be a Sirian spy, for all I know.'

'And if I were? You would soon find out, by experimenting, whether the plant was of any use to you.'

'The place is suddenly crawling with Sirian spies. Every second person, they say, is a Sirian spy.'

'With good reason, Calder. The Volyen Empire is at its end. Sirius is about to overrun it.'

'We shall fight them,' he shouted, as I had expected, for he is programmed for it. 'We shall fight them on the sands, we shall fight them on the cliffs, we shall fight them street by street of our cities, we shall fight them on the tundras – '

'Yes, yes, yes,' I said. 'Though why you should care whether it's Volyen or Sirius...Whether it's one or the other, without this plant I am offering you, you are helpless. Whether it is Volyen or Sirius, with the plant you can feed yourselves. You can bargain.'

'Why have you – someone – not given us this plant before?'

'Because it is only recently that conditions on this planet have made it possible for it to grow here.'

'I don't like it,' he said heavily, full of grief, of suffering. The long, dark, heavy history of his planet was weighing on him. He sat there, looking back through his life, the long struggle of it, and thinking too, as I could see, of past generations of deprivation, hunger, the harshness of Volyen rule.

'What have you got to lose, Calder?'

'How do I know what we might lose by it?'

At this point the woman came in from next door with her jug of the beverage, filled up our glasses, and stood there quietly, looking out the door at the sodden dark hillside, where rain was falling.

'I am at my wit's end to find food for the children,' she remarked. 'There's hardly anything in the shops. The radons have been cut again. And the last Volyen consignment was half the usual.'

He was hardly listening. 'Yes, yes,' he said to her, in the kindly, fatherly way they use with their females when the females are playing their allotted role, which is to work even harder than their men.

'I suppose you haven't had any news, Comrade Calder, of the next Volyen food consignment?'

'No, but it's late. My wife was grumbling about it.'

'Strange, I wonder why she'd do that?' She went out slowly. To stand just outside the door, while I watched Calder inwardly writhing in the toils of his suspicion of me.

I said, 'In a very short time you will be overrun by Sirius. Yes, whether you fight or not. And then, almost at once, there will be no Sirians, because their Empire is at its peak and is about to collapse.'

'How do you know all this? Oh, yes, you say Canopus, Canopus, as if that's an answer to it all.'

'From your point of view it is...Shall I go on? The Sirian conquest of Volyen will be brutal and inefficient, as I have been using the word, for Sirius itself is riven with debate, conflict, indecision. There have been times in Sirian history when a conquest of a planet was efficient. I mean, Calder, organized with certain aims in view, and carried out in accordance with a plan. This will not happen as Volyen is overrun. Because first one, then another group comes to the top on the Sirian senior planet itself, and on all the planets of the Sirian Empire. There is no consistent plan now. The conquest of Volyen will take place almost by accident, because of a temporary ascendancy of a certain viewpoint within the current – temporary – alignment of some planets. And you will be overrun, not by Sirian Mother Planet soldiers, but a mix of armies who will quarrel among themselves, who will never agree about anything, and who will not carry out orders.'

'Oh, this poor Volyenadna,' Calder brought out heavily. Tears stood in his eyes, in accordance with this convention in 'the Volyens' that tears are a sign of superior sensibility, and even of superior thought. They will make sure you have noticed that they are evidencing these signs of sensibility to a situation, and therefore Calder turned his head slightly so that I could see water glistening in his eyes. 'How long will it all last?'

'Not long at all,' I said, 'because the armies that overrun you will bring hardly enough food for themselves. And will not bring food for you. When they notice that you are starving, they will appeal to the Sirian HQ on Volyen for supplies, but inadequate supplies will arrive, and then none...'

'How do you know all this, sitting there so calmly, announcing this, that, and the other thing as if you can see it?'

'Why should we have to see it? It is enough to know the nature of the species, the races, the individuals involved. The armies that will overrun this little planet – this very little, unimportant planet, Calder – will be in a blind panic, because they will have understood that the Sirian Empire is collapsing around them and that they may find themselves marooned here, forgotten, on a planet that – forgive me – is not the most inviting in the Galaxy.'

'О unfortunate planet, planet doomed to misery, to hardship, to...'

'Rubbish, Calder. It is not doomed at all. You could have your own food supplies long before then. You could bribe the rabble of soldiery to leave, with food, for there won't be much of it anywhere, I promise you, not even on Volyen, given the mess the Sirians will be making of everything. In fact, if you plan intelligendy, you will be able to use your supplies of Rocknosh to buy yourselves not only independence from the Sirians, but real independence for yourselves. You will be able to govern yourselves, use your minerals yourselves, export what you choose to whom you choose.'

'There is just one little thing you have overlooked,' brought up Calder triumphantly. 'It is this. What makes you think that Volyen will let us get away with it? What? You tell me that, now!' And he subsided, chuckling, shaking his head from side to side over my foolishness, and sending glances at that audience of his for whom he had been performing all his life.

'Did I not begin by saying they wouldn't even nodce it? You could cover the rocks of half the planet with a dull-reddish furry plant, and they wouldn't know it.'

'Oh, that's what you say!'

'Anticipating that you have become such slaves by habit, I had planned to get hold of Governor Grice so that he could obtain official permission for the introduction of this food. There are plenty of people in the Colonial Administration of Volyen who sympathize with you about your treatment. And Governor Grice is exactly the right man to do it, but...'

'And now you've gone completely off the rails, as far as I am concerned.'

'It would have been almost the simplest way – for the simplest and easiest would have been for you to agree and to do it yourselves. But Grice is not himself at the moment, I am afraid.'

'And another thing: I'm not sitting here to listen to yon call me a slave.'

And he got up, conscious of a hundred pairs of eyes for whom his demeanour, enduring modestly heroic, was intended. Without looking at me, he shouted out: 'The Sirian gentleman will pay.' As the woman came in, he grinned at her, like a child who has won a point over another, made a grimace towards me that categorized me as a hopeless lunatic, slapped her across her large buttocks as a way of reestablishing his balance, and went out.

The woman stood looking at me. Like all their females, she is a rock and a stone, all strength and ability to withstand. She came slowly across and stood by Calder's empty chair.

The following is a full record of the conversation I had with this female of Volyenadna.

'You say there is this food?'

'Yes. I have spores of it here.'

'When I plant it, how do I look after it?'

'You don't. It will grow on any rock. Here is a list of the methods you can use for preparing it.'

'Thank you.'