Дорис Лессинг – The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (страница 2)

NOTE BY ARCHIVIST. Klorathy arrived in the Volyen ‘Empire’ when its two planets and Sirian PE 70 and PE 71 were in revolt and rebellion against Volyen, and before Sirius invaded.

KLORATHY TO JOHOR, FROM MOON II OF VOLYEN, VOLYENDESTA.

Apologies. I have been engaged in cultivating Shammat on Volyen’s planets, found myself afflicted by brief attack of Shammatis, put myself into Restorative Detention while it lasted, and came out to deal with Incent, as a priority. This because of the key role he is now in with Shammat. I told you Incent was hospitalized for a flesh wound. I had him transferred to the Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases, and went to visit him there.

I positioned this hospital on Volyendesta because of probability forecasts that Volyen itself, as its ‘Empire’ collapses, will be savagely overrun, whereas Volyendesta will be little affected. As indication of the healthy state of Volyendesta: Agent 23 was able to have the hospital built and equipped by the rebellious party that is led by a rather remarkable character, one Ormarin, of whom more later, on whose comparative freedom from illusions I am learning to rely. The concept of the hospital, as I explained it to him, amounting to a (for him) completely new outlook on (as he put it, in the current Volyen mode) ‘the nature of the class struggle’ – but we must not expect too much too soon – caused in him a sharp but fortunately short attack of Elation. You will of course have seen that his agreement to build this hospital was partly due to a misunderstanding of our purposes. By the time he had really understood, the place was up and in use. There followed the routine riots and protests. But the effort at attempting to understand this hospital, the discussions and debates, some of them violent: this process itself caused the creation of a new faction, political in expression, which came to support and strengthen Ormarin.

Volyendesta is a watery planet, with a large, rapidly circumgyrating moon afflicting its inhabitants with a vast variety of unstable moods; but the sheer effort needed to cope with these conditions has evolved a breed (partly originating, as you will recall, from the Volyen stock) able to withstand rapid changes of emotional condition while ostensibly succumbing to them. On my first visit to this planet I was disheartened by its inhabitants’ violent reactions to everything, but soon came to see that these could be regarded, rather, as surface storms over a comparatively untouched interior. And I saw that a few of the inhabitants had even been able to use this condition of constant stimulation to evolve and strengthen inner calm. Ormarin is one.

I went straight to the Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases. This, on advice from Ormarin which Agent 23 was quick to take, is called by them the Institute for Historical Studies. I was in the guise of a lecturer visiting the place to judge whether I wished to take up an appointment.

The site was chosen after consultation with their geographers to provide the maximum opportunities for natural stimulation. It is on a short and very high peninsula on a stormy coast, where the ocean is permanently in a tumultuous roar, and where its moon has full effect. Immediately behind the peninsula the mainland affords, within achievable limits, extremes of terrain. On one side rise grandiose and gloomy mountains, full of the graves of overambitious mountaineers. On the other reach vast and ancient forests, guaranteed to bring on thoughts of age, the passing of time, inevitable decay. And, extending almost to the hospital itself, a ridge of barren, rocky sand which, if followed, leads to the beginnings of a desert so very hot, cold, bleak, blistering, and hostile; so full of escarpments emphasizing skies sometimes scarlet, sometimes lilac, often a sulphurous yellow, but always changing; so thickly piled with sands, shales, gravels, and dusts incessantly moved from place to place by ever-shifting winds, that reflections on the futility and vanity of all effort are automatically provoked – leading, if the sufferer persists in his stumblings through and over dried bones, bits of stick that were once forest, or the remains of ships (for this desert was once, fortuitously, the bed of an ocean), and rocks in which one may find entombed the imprints of long-dead species, to a most satisfactory and salubrious reaction. This has been named by our Agent 23 as the Law of Instant Reversal, describing what happens when, in the words of the inhabitants themselves, ‘there is too much of a good thing,’ causing a stubborn inward strengthening which they express thus: And so what? One still has to eat!

I surveyed all this terrain by Space Traveller, comfortably and with enjoyment, and was set down on the ridge of sand far enough from the hospital to enable me to say I had been conducted thither by local means of transport.

Large parts of the building still lie unused. I told Ormarin that the intensifying crisis in the ‘Empire’ would fill them soon enough, and he kept his followers quiet with excuses about faulty planning, unreliable contractors. Who was paying for it? He told them a cock-and-bull story about Sirian spies who were offering money for secret support, and this is close enough to things actually happening for it to be believed. His supposed cleverness in outwitting the Sirians has gone to his credit.

The building does not differ much from others we have devised in similar conditions on several of our colonized planets.

With what dislike I enter these places you know full well: and yes, I have, believe me, understood why I find myself in them so often. I have even mastered myself to the extent of contributing somewhat to the science: I shall shortly come to the Department of Rhetorical Logic which I devised.

I have to report that Incent is in a bad way. I found him in Basic Rhetoric, for he has not progressed beyond it. This ward is at the front of the building, on balconies built over continual crashing, moaning, or murmuring waves. The winds whine and roar all day and all night. To augment this we have arranged background music of the most debilitating kind, largely originating from Shikasta. (See History of Shikasta, Nineteenth Century Emoters and Complainers: Music.) Most of the patients – a good many of them our agents, for it will not have escaped your notice how many are succumbing during this phase of heady partisan enthusiasms – have advanced beyond this basic and infantile condition and were in other wards, so poor Incent was by himself. I found him gazing out over the ocean, where a morbid sunset tinted the waves scarlet, his inner condition aptly expressed by a robe of red-and-pink silk, its luxuriousness emphasized and made striking by his soldierly bandaged arm. Tears flooded down his pale and tragic face. You will recall that his choice was for large black soulful eyes, an indication we might have taken more notice of (it comes into my mind for the first time that perhaps you did). But it was a bad sign … Yes, large tragic black eyes mourned over the wastes of water – a sentence I might have found in the book that lay open on his knee, again from Shikasta, entitled The Hero of a Lost Cause. He was not looking at the screen on which was being projected his medication for the day, which happened to be a programme I am rather proud of: Shikasta again! How invaluable is that poor planet to our Canopean treatment for these conditions! Two vast armies, equipped for killing to the limits of current technology, fight each other for four Shikastan years with the utmost heroism and devotion to duty and in the most vile and brutal conditions, for aims that are to be judged as stupid, self-deluding, and greedy by their own immediate descendants a generation later, urged on by words used to inflame violent rival nationalism, each nation convinced, hypnotized by words to believe that it is in the right. Millions die, weakening both nations irreparably.

‘Incent,’ said I, ‘you are not taking your medicine!’

‘No,’ he cried, and he started up and clutched a pillar of the balcony with both hands, gazing with streaming eyes into the crashing and booming waters that flung spray up as high as the hospital windows. ‘No, I can’t stand it. I can’t and I won’t! I cannot endure the horror of this universe! And as for sitting here hour after hour and watching this record of tragic loss and waste –’

‘Well,’ I remarked, ‘you are not actually throwing yourself into the sea, are you?’

This was a mistake, Johor. I had underestimated his demoralization, for I was just in time to catch him by the arm as he flung himself over.

‘Really,’ I heard myself scolding him, ‘how irresponsible can you get? You know quite well you would only have to come back and do it again! You know how much it costs, having to refit you with a new outfit, getting you into the right place at the right time …’ I record this little tirade to show you how quickly I was affected by the general atmosphere; are you sure I am really suitable for this work? But he at once collapsed into self-pity and self-accusation, said he was fit for nothing (yes, I have seen the echo here – thanks!), not up to it, and unworthy of Canopus. Yes, he was prepared to agree, if I insisted, because he knew I could not be wrong, that Shammat was evil; but it was merely an intellectual assent, his emotions were at odds with his thoughts, he could not believe that he would ever be a whole person again … All this to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky and Wagner.