The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

as a vacuum from which the powers of Canopus were being drained and sucked out by Krolgul. Incent might be sitting there with me, at my table, my ‘friend,’ but he was in the power of Krolgul. Now that Krolgul could see how he had lost the allegiance – though, he hoped, temporarily – of the Volyenadnans, Incent was what he had left. It was like watching blood being emptied from a victim as he gasps and shrinks, but it wasn’t blood that Incent fed, is feeding, Krolgul.
    Calder was my only hope.
    I stood up, so that everyone could see me.
    â€˜You’re leaving?’ asked Calder, and he was disappointed.
    But I had hoped for what then happened. Calder said, ‘Perhaps we could have the benefit of an outside view, an objective opinion?’
    â€˜I have a suggestion,’ I said. ‘You get together as many of you as you can, and we will meet, with Krolgul here, and talk it all out.’
    They didn’t agree at once, but in the end they did. Krolgul had no alternative, though he hated it.
    Of course, we could have done it all where we were, in the café, but I was concerned with Incent.
    I did not order him to follow me as I left the café, but he came with me. Physically, he came with me.
    I took him to my lodgings in a poor part of the town. A miner’s widow, with children to support, let out rooms. Almost the first thing she had said to me was, ‘We are unfortunate people,’ and it was with a calm sense and dignity that could be, I hope, what would save them all from Krolgul.
    She agreed to give us some supper in my room.
    It wasn’t much; they are indeed poor people.
    Over bread and some fruit, Incent and I sat opposite each other.
    â€˜Incent?’ I said to him. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ And it was far from rhetorical.
    â€˜You’re going to punish me, you’re going to punish me,’ he kept groaning, but with the enjoyment he has learned from Krolgul.
    â€˜Yes, of course you will be punished. Not by me, not even by Canopus, but by the inherent laws of action and interaction.’
    â€˜Cruel, cruel,’ he sobbed, and fell asleep, all his emotional apparatus in disarray, his intellectual machineries in subjection to this disorder. But he is strong enough physically; that is something.
    Leaving him asleep, and asking the woman of the house to keep an eye on him, I spent the night in the bars of the town and its suburbs. Everywhere unrest, even a sense of impending upheaval. Hard to determine whether this was mainly because of worsening conditions on the planet, or because of the efforts of Krolgul … who, interestingly, was talked of much less than Incent. No wonder Incent is exhausted. He seems to have travelled to all the main centres of Volyenadna, and to most of the smaller ones as well. To extract the essence of what people have found in him: it is that
he is noticed.
He has impressed himself. In city after city he has moved from one meeting place to another:cafés, miners’ clubs, women’s clubs, and his right to be everywhere has been his conviction that his cause must make him welcome. He brings no credentials. On the rare occasions he is challenged, he impatiently, even contemptuously, rejects the need for it, as if his interlocuters are showing pettiness and worse, and after a few hours of earnest exhortation – which clearly exhaust his hearers, who betray, even after several days’ interval, all the signs of nervous strain – he leaves for the next appointment with destiny.
    Can I say he is not trusted? It is more interesting than that …
    There is a type of revolutionary always to be seen at times when there is potential for change. At first tentative, even timid, then amazed that this burning conviction of his can convince others, he soon becomes filled with contempt for them. He can hardly believe that he, that small unit, and an unworthy one (for, at least at the beginning,