The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

by Doris Lessing

  On this planet, Volyendesta, halfhearted attempts were made to live as on Maken. But it was not the same. For one thing, the atmosphere was not identical, and the Makens felt lethargic. And then, while the Makens enjoyed the idea that other planets thought them terrifying, they did not seem to themselves terrifying, and it was awkward to try to enjoy themselves with so many Volyendestans gawking and staring: not with terror, it was true, but, rather, as if they found them, the Makens, repulsive or in some way unlikeable. And then, the Makens felt the obverse for the Volyendestans of what the Volyendestans felt for them: at first they could not believe, and then they could not become used to crowds of people who were all so different from one another. Wasn’t there something off-putting … no, unpleasant, even wrong about it? How could there be any fellow-feeling, any real togetherness, among people who, when they looked at one another must see something so different from themselves that surely they must carry around mirrors to look in so as to reassure themselves that their own appearances were as valid, as good, as right as what they saw? How awful – thought the Makens – it must be to belong to a planet so constituted that there was no pleasant, easy-going, natural, and right similarity of appearance. How awful it must be always to be adjusting yourselves to differences, instead of reposing comfortably in the knowledge that everyone was of the same kind. And some Makens even took to sneaking off to the slave camps, to rest their sight on masses of people who looked like one another. And again there was this business of having these satisfactory, right people shut away together in camps as slaves, as if they were worse than the so wildly various and differentiated ones.

  When asked, Ormarin said it was not so, they were no longer slaves now that Volyen had gone, now that the Mother Planet of Sirius – yes, yes, we know you have inherited the mantle of the Virtue, but Sirius brought in these slaves, they were not our invention – now we are ourselves again, and independent, slavery will not be tolerated.

  At this information, that the – surely? – conquered planet of Volyendesta considered itself independent, the conquerors again applied to Maken itself for instructions, and were told to establish an occupying force, to liberate any species that might prove useful, and to return home. Only too thankfully, the Maken armies did this. Speeches, celebrations, even a few embraces. Not all Volyendestans found all Makens repulsive. There would soon be a strain of Maken in the planet’s genetic inheritance; a pleasant thought for them all, and even more pleasant now that they had learned how sad a state of affairs it is when a planet’s inhabitants can all look alike.

  And the spaceships came and stood everywhere over Volyendesta, and the Makens put on their fur suits and their beaked headdresses and leaped onto their animals’ backs, and again the sky was filled with the terrible double-headed beasts whose wings made the air flutter and beat and vibrate so that the ears hurt, and up they flew in their hundreds to the spaceships, and small black dots could be seen vanishing one after another into the black holes in the bellies of the craft. And then the spaceships were gone, the skies of Volyendesta were empty.

  The ‘occupying force,’ not at all pleased at being left here in this polyglot, overfriendly, difficult little planet, nevertheless soon made comfortable circumstances for themselves, slept and ate with (and off) their beasts, continued their games and sports and entertainments, and soon found the place not so bad after all. Yes, perhaps it had been a bit limiting never to see anyone but people exactly like yourself, always to be part of a symbiosis with pipisaurs.

  Quite soon, Maken more or less forgot about Volyendesta. The Makens on Volyendesta ceased to be Makens.

  The roads, the spaceports, all the amenities created by Sirius for its own use, made Volyendesta rich and prosperous. Of the four colonized planets of Volyen, this was the planet that enjoyed the longest period of peace, independence, and prosperity before – as always happened during that phase of galactic history – it lost its independence to a stronger planet. But that is not part of this history.

  KLORATHY TO JOHOR,

  FROM HIS SPACE TRAVELLER,

  EN ROUTE TO SHAMMAT.

  Unfortunately I was overoptimistic about poor Incent, who has had a relapse. Convinced that it is his mission to reform Krolgul, he …

  About the Author

  DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  Briefing for a Descent into Hell

  The Summer Before the Dark

  Memoirs of a Survivor

  Diary of a Good Neighbour

  If the Old Could …

  The Good Terrorist

  The Fifth Child

  Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

  Love, Again

  Mara and Dann

  The Fifth Child

  Ben, in the World

  The Sweetest Dream

  The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

  The Cleft

  ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series

  Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

  The Sirian Experiments

  The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

  Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

  ‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence

  Martha Quest

  A Proper Marriage

  A Ripple from the Storm

  Landlocked

  The Four-Gated City

  OPERAS

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (Music by Philip Glass)

  The Making of the representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

  SHORT STORIES

  Five

  The Habit of Loving

  A Man and Two Women

  The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

  Winter in July

  The Black Madonna

  This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)

  The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)

  To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

  London Observed

  The Old Age of El Magnifico

  Particularly Cats

  Rufus the Survivor On Cats

  The Grandmothers

  POETRY

  Fourteen Poems

  DRAMA

  Each His Own Wilderness

  Play with a Tiger

  The Singing Door

  NON-FICTION

  In Pursuit of the English

  Going Home

  A Small Personal Voice

  Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

  The Wind Blows Away Our Words

  African Laughter

  Time Bites

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Under My Skin: Volume 1

  Walking in the Shade: Volume 2

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  A selection of other books by Doris Lessing

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  The Good Terrorist

  Love, Again

  The Fifth Child

  The Grass is Singing:

  Chapter 1

  MURDER MYSTERY

  By Special Correspondent

  Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The ho
useboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered.

  It is thought he was in search of valuables.

  The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.

  And then they turned the page to something else.

  But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.

  To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would have never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.

  Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.

  And then it was that someone used the phrase ‘poor whites’. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. ‘Poor whites’ were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.

  Though the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.

  Thus the district handled the Turners, in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves ignored. They apparently did not recognize the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.

  The more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary the case becomes. Not the murder itself; but the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.

  For instance, they must have wondered who that ‘Special Correspondent’ was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder. One could say that he practically controlled the handling of the case, even taking precedence over the Sergeant himself. And people felt that to be quite right and proper. Whom should it concern, if not the white farmers, that a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned? It was their livelihood, their wives and families, their way of living, at stake.

  But to the outsider it is strange that Slatter should have been allowed to take charge of the affair, to arrange that everything should pass over without more than a ripple of comment.

  For there could have been no planning: there simply wasn’t time. Why, for instance, when Dick Turner’s farm boys came to him with the news, did he sit down to write a note to the Sergeant at the police camp? He did not use the telephone.

  Everyone who has lived in the country knows what a branch telephone is like. You lift the receiver after you have turned the handle the required number of times, and then, click, click, click, you can hear the receivers coming off all over the district, and soft noises like breathing, a whisper, a subdued cough.

  Slatter lived five miles from the Turners. The farm boys came to him first, when they discovered the body. And though it was an urgent matter, he ignored the telephone, but sent a personal letter by a native bearer on a bicycle to Denham at the police camp, twelve miles away. The Sergeant sent out half a dozen native policemen at once, to the Turners’ farm, to see what they could find. He drove first to see Slatter, because the way that letter was worded roused his curiosity. That was why he arrived late on the scene of the murder. The native policemen did not have to search far for the murderer. After walking through the house, looking briefly at the body, and dispersing down the front of the little hill the house stood on, they saw Moses himself rise out of a tangled ant-heap in front of them. He walked up to them and said (or words to this effect): ‘Here I am.’ They snapped the handcuffs on him, and went back to the house to wait for the police cars to come. There they saw Dick Turner come out of the bush by the house with two whining dogs at his heels. He was off his head, talking crazily to himself, wandering in and out of the bush with his hands full of leaves and earth. They let him be, while keeping an eye on him, for he was a white man, though mad, and black men, even when policemen, do not lay hands on white flesh.

  People did ask, cursorily, why the murderer had given himself up. There was not much chance of escape. But he did have a sporting chance. He could have run to the hills and hidden for a while. Or he could have slipped over the border to Portuguese territory. Then the District Native Commissioner, at a sundowner party, said that it was perfectly understandable. If one knew anything about the history of the country, or had read any of the memoirs or letters of the old missionaries and explorers, one would have come across accounts of the society Lobengula ruled. The laws were strict: everyone knew what they could or could not do. If someone did an unforgivable thing, like touching one of the King’s women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment, which was likely to be impalement over an ant-heap on a stake, or s
omething equally unpleasant. ‘I have done wrong, and I know it,’ he might say, ‘therefore let me be punished.’ Well, it was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are ‘fine’ (Yet the fashion is changing: it is permissible to glorify the old ways sometimes, providing one says how depraved the natives have become since.)

  So that aspect of the affair was dropped, yet it is not the least interesting, for Moses might not have been a Matabele at all. He was in Mashonaland; though of course natives do wander all over Africa. He might have come from anywhere: Portuguese territory, Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa. And it is a long time since the days of the great king Lobengula. But then native commissioners tend to think in terms of the past.

  Well, having sent the letter to the police camp, Charlie Slatter went to the Turners’ place, driving at a great speed over the bad farm roads in his fat American car.

  Who was Charlie Slatter? It was he who, from the beginning of the tragedy to its end, personified Society for the Turners. He touches the story at half a dozen points; without him things would not have happened quite as they did, though sooner or later, in one way or another, the Turners were bound to come to grief.