The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire by Doris Lessing Page A

gesture to me: Do not worry.
    He did not meet my eyes, though. A bad sign; this meant that nothing I could say would affect him. I settled back so that what must happen, could …
    Krolgul had leaped up at the sight of him, all renewed energy and purpose. Then, having cried out, ‘Incent …,’ he remembered my presence and glanced towards me, but in the same way as Incent, not allowing his eyes to meet mine.
    Incent’s manner with Krolgul was – there is only one word for it – lordly. He stood in the examinee’s place and signalled to the attendants to wire him up.
    â€˜I intend to pass this examination,’ he said, in the calm, almost indifferent way of his illness; for of course he was ill, though this need not be obvious to the examiners. He was depleted of emotion still; he was empty, after such an excess of it. No one recovers from Total Immersion in a few days, or even many. His emotional reservoirs were low; thereforehe seemed calm; therefore did he give this appearance of benign urbanity.
    When he was standing upright there, all the wires and leads in place, he smiled confidently at me.
    â€˜I am ready,’ he said.
    Well, it was very bad.
    â€˜Comrades.
Friends …
’ I think Krolgul expected him to be lost at that very first trip-word, but what happened was much more alarming. Behind Incent, on the monitors, we could see that the needles, far from registering alarming peaks and jags and heights of emotion, were often out of sight at the bottom of the scale. So low was Incent that his whole system had gone into reverse. The word
friends
, which of course he spoke at the right interval after
comrades,
so that the nerves of the auditors had to vibrate in expectation, only caused what little emotion that was left in him to drain suddenly away. The needles flickered back into sight again at the bottom of the graphs. He was speaking in a flat, almost amiable way, though he got all the tones and intervals perfectly. He went through the gross inequalities and the injustice and so on very well, though there was literally no fuel left in him at all. I could see the examiners stirring and whispering. Krolgul was frightened out of his wits, looking at me the whole time: he had never seen anything like this, and had not known the condition existed. He was afraid I was going to punish him.
    But Krolgul, of all the creatures in our galaxy, is not likely to understand free will. Not yet, at least; not for a long time.
    Incent was droning on. ‘Sacrifice. Yes, sacrifice …’ And suddenly he fell, the wires pulling free.
    I went over to him and brought him to himself.
    He did not inquire where he was, for he knew at once, and stood up, weak but himself.
    He looked at me with such shame, and said: ‘You had better take me back to the hotel, Klorathy. I’ve made a real fool of myself.’
    And to Krolgul: ‘All right. But I haven’t done with you all yet. I was going to show you that I could pass your test and
then
reason with you on the basis of being immune to …’ And he wept, but the tears of weakness and emptiness, small, weak, painful tears.
    Krolgul was running round us as we went to the door, panting and exclaiming: ‘But … but … I hope you aren’t going to hold us to account; I knew nothing about Incent’s coming here, I absolutely absolve myself of any responsibility.’
    Incent was too weak to leave the building at once. We sat in an antechamber for a while, watching the examinees prepare themselves for the Examination in Rhetoric, which they did by using one another as sounding boards and checks on themselves in a piece which, for emotive words and general tone, was more taxing than the set piece in the actual examination hall.
    â€˜What, then, is it that we are aiming at? What? Why, nothing less than the whole, perfect, radiant future of us all and our children! What is there to prevent