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

him: after all, if I could not save him, return him to himself again, then …
    â€˜Let him speak,’ said Calder, but on his face was a heavy sneer.
    I said: ‘You are a slave planet, as Krolgul says you are. A rich planet, whose wealth goes elsewhere.’
    â€˜To Greasy-guts,’ remarked Krolgul, in a low, as it were meditative voice.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘For generations the results of your labours have been taken from you. But it was not always thus. Have you forgotten that before you were the subjects of Volyen, you were the subjects of the planet Maken, and before that of planet Slovin, and both took from you the minerals you mined? But before that you were the conquerors. There was a time when you dominated Volyendesta and Volyen itself –’
    â€˜With what?’ inquired Krolgul. ‘Ice and snow?’
    â€˜As the ice retreated, and you spread over the tundra, you multiplied, and did not find enough to eat or to keep youwarm. You stole spaceships from Slovin, who landed here on a foraging trip, and you used them to travel to Maken and to Volyen, and you made others, and you terrorized four planets and took from them, just as now everything is taken from you …
    Calder listened to this with some derision. ‘You are saying that we were blood-sucking imperialists, just as Volyen is now?’
    â€˜I am saying that you have not always been slaves and the providers of riches for other people.’
    â€˜And you are suggesting that …
    â€˜You are a rich prize for Volyen, and you will be for whoever succeeds Volyen, since empires rise and fall, fall and rise. Volyen will disappear from this planet, just as Maken and Slovin grew weak and disappeared, and just as you grew weak and were overthrown from the planets you had conquered. But whoever succeeds Volyen’ – I could not, of course, even hint at Sirius here, for that was a word that could be breathed only to Ormarin, he was as yet the only one strong enough to hear it, and Krolgul himself does not know how soon Volyen will collapse in on itself and become a subject – ‘whoever will come after Volyen will use you in the same way, if you don’t make sure they won’t. But you could make yourselves stronger. You could become farmers as well as miners and –’
    Krolgul was laughing, sobbing with laughter. ‘Farmers,’ he cried, while Calder’s followers laughed. ‘Farmers – on this ice lump of a place.’ But his contempt for the planet suddenly showed too plainly, and Calder did not like it.
    â€˜Farm what?’ he asked me, directly.
    â€˜If you will listen to me, you and your people, I will show you. Yours is not the only planet with these conditions.’
    â€˜And what makes you think that Volyen will allow us? She wants to keep us as we are; she’s interested in our minerals, and nothing more.’
    â€˜But,’ I said, ‘you have a Governor-General who in my view would listen to you.’
    And at this Krolgul was shouting, ‘Grice the Greasy-guts, Governor-General Guts, Greenguts …
    And suddenly Incent was on his feet, once again alive and alert and Krolgul’s creature.
    â€˜Down with Grice,’ he was shouting. ‘Get rid of Grice and …
    I, across the din, looked hard at Calder and said, ‘Remember, Calder, I can help you. Remember I said this.’
    Calder did not allow his eyes to meet mine: always a sign that you have ceased to be real for these people. And, indeed, for a few minutes I felt as if I had suddenly become invisible, for all those hard, antagonistic grey eyes from the workers’ benches, and of course Incent’s passionate black eyes, avoided me, were directed at one another. As for Krolgul, he lowered his head as if gazing thoughtfully at the floor, while in fact keeping a heavy-lidded, hypnotic pressure on Incent, now again his subject.
    â€˜It is quite