The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire Read Free Page A

and so forth). Sirius (in this case the Conservers) watched all this without surprise, since rebellion is the main thing they study and what they expect, and did nothing whatsoever, refraining from intervention until that moment when the heroes were on the verge of setting up a government that repudiated Sirian Virtue in favour of their own. And then the Sirians moved in. By delaying as they did, they allowed every individual with the potential for Subversion/Self-determination/Heroism/Sedition/ Anti-Sirian feelings / Polshan Virtue (and so on and so forth) to expose himself or herself, and were thus enabled to arrest, destroy, isolate, and make harmless the possible opposition. For that generation, at least.
    â€˜Klorathy!’ demanded Incent, his eyes streaming, ‘are you saying that tyranny should never be resisted?’
    â€˜When have you ever heard me say so?’
    â€˜Ah, what nobility! What self-sacrifice! What daring! What reckless heroism! And you stand there dry-eyed, Klorathy! Empires rise and Empires fall, you say, and I remember your cool exposition of the subject in our classes on Canopus. But they fall, surely, because subject peoples rebel?’
    â€˜Incent, would you not agree that the outcome of this particular heroic episode was not all that hard to foresee?’
    â€˜I don’t want to think about it! I can’t bear it! I wish I was dead! I don’t want to know! Switch that beastly thing off.’
    â€˜Incent,’ I said, ‘you are going to have to take it from me that you are very ill. But you will recover, I assure you.’
    I withdrew, leaving him sobbing and wringing his hands, then stretching out his arms to the waves as if he needed to embrace the ocean itself.
    On consultation with doctors, I discovered that no one before had ever resisted such treatment for so long. I could see they were at a loss. After all, this intense variety of homoeopathic medicine is the best – or worst – we can do. We have never, in short, had a case like Incent’s. In every other acute case the stage of ‘So what!’ followed by rapid recovery, has been reached fairly quickly.
    The doctors having said they had no suggestions, I reassured them that I would think it all over and take responsibility.
    I then briefly visited the Department of Rhetorical Logic, which works on the opposite principle, withdrawal of emotional stimulus.
    High in the wing of the building away from the ocean, overlooking the beginnings of the desert, with the mountain peaks on one side and the dark stillness of the forest on the other, we have built rooms of stark white that are kept silent except for the clicking and ticking of the computers, into which are fed by remote control historical propositions such as capitalism equals injustice, communism equals injustice, a free market equals progress, a monarchy is the guarantee of stability, the dictatorship of the proletariat must be followed by the withering away of the state. And so on.
    But this ward was empty: its time has not yet come.
    I did not take Agent 23 with me to visit Ormarin. He reported unmistakable symptoms of Rhetoric, asked to be put into curative custody, and then showed that the disease had indeed set in seriously by ceasing to see that he was ill and announcing with much emotion that the elevated language of the Constitution of the Volyen ‘Empire,’ which promises happiness, freedom, and justice to every one of itscitizens as inherent, inalienable rights, seemed to him the ‘most moving’ thing he had ever encountered. He is drying off in Mild Rhetoric and will soon be normal.
    Ormarin.
    I can most quickly characterize him by saying that he embodies a number of contradictions: his situation is one of high tension, and this is his strength as well as his weakness.
    You will recall that when Volyen conquered Volyendesta, the indigenous inhabitants were murdered or enslaved, and their land was taken from