The building does not differ much from others we have devised in similar conditions on several of our colonized planets.
With what dislike I enter these places you know full welclass="underline" and yes, I have, believe me, understood why I find myself in them so often. I have even mastered myself to the extent of contributing somewhat to the science: I shall shortly come to the Department of Rhetorical Logic which I devised.
I have to report that Incent is in a bad way. I found him in Basic Rhetoric, for he has not progressed beyond it. This ward is at the front of the building, on balconies built over continual crashing, moaning, or murmuring waves. The winds whine and roar all day and all night. To augment this we have arranged background music of the most debilitating kind, largely originating from Shikasta. (See History of Shikasta, Nineteenth Century Emoters and Complainers: Music.) Most of the patients – a good many of them our agents, for it will not have escaped your notice how many are succumbing during this phase of heady partisan enthusiasms – have advanced beyond this basic and infantile condition and were in other wards, so poor Incent was by himself. I found him gazing out over the ocean, where a morbid sunset tinted the waves scarlet, his inner condition aptly expressed by a robe of red-and-pink silk, its luxu-riousness emphasized and made striking by his soldierly bandaged arm. Tears flooded down his pale and tragic face. You will recall that his choice was for large black soulful eyes, an indication we might have taken more notice of (it comes into my mind for the first time that perhaps you did). But it was a bad sign... Yes, large tragic black eyes mourned over the wastes of water – a sentence I might have found in the book that lay open on his knee, again from Shikasta, entided The Hero of a Lost Cause. He was not looking at the screen on which was being projected his medication for the day, which happened to be a programme I am rather proud of: Shikasta again! How invaluable is that poor planet to our Canopean treatment for these conditions! Two vast armies, equipped for killing to the limits of current technology, fight each other for four Shikastan years with the utmost heroism and devotion to duty and in the most vile and brutal conditions, for aims that are to be judged as stupid, self-deluding, and greedy by their own immediate descendants a generation later, urged on by words used to inflame violent rival nationalism, each nation convinced, hypnotized by words to believe that it is in the right. Millions die, weakening both nations irreparably.
'Incent,' said I, 'you are not taking your medicine!'
'No,' he cried, and he started up and clutched a pillar of the balcony with both hands, gazing with streaming eyes into the crashing and booming waters that flung spray up as high as the hospital windows. 'No, I can't stand it. I can't and I won't! I cannot endure the horror of this universe! And as for sitting here hour after hour and watching this record of tragic loss and waste – '
'Well,' I remarked, 'you are not actually throwing yourself into the sea, are you?'
This was a mistake, Johor. I had underestimated his demoralization, for I was just in time to catch him by the arm as he flung himself over.
'Really,' I heard myself scolding him, 'how irresponsible can you get? You know quite well you would only have to come back and do it again! You know how much it costs, having to refit you with a new outfit, getting you into the right place at the right time...' I record this little tirade to show you how quickly I was affected by the general atmosphere; are you sure I am really suitable for this work? But he at once collapsed into self-pity and self-accusation, said he was fit for nothing (yes, I have seen the echo here -thanks!), not up to it, and unworthy of Canopus. Yes, he was prepared to agree, if I insisted, because he knew I could not be wrong, that Shammat was evil; but it was merely an intellectual assent, his emotions were at odds with his thoughts, he could not believe that he would ever be a whole person again... All this to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky and Wagner.
I switched on a particularly therapeutic programme illustrated by newsreels of a recent disturbance on a planet situated on the very edge of the Sirian Empire where it borders the Puttioran Empire. Constantly invaded by one or the other of the two Great Powers, sometimes described as Sirian and sometimes as Puttioran, the inhabitants of Polshi, because of these continual strains and tensions and persecutions, because of the efforts they have always had to make to preserve their planetary identity and their sense of being Polshan, have evolved a dashing, heroic, audacious planetary character for which they have long been famous. Throughout two vast Empires (I do not mention our own) the Polshans are known for this peculiarly dramatic and even self-immolating nature. Their more prudent neighbours criticize them for it, notably those most firmly under the heel of (forgive me) Puttiora or Sirius; but they are admired by other, less pressured, planets, usually in inverse proportion to their distance from centres of power and oppression. Thus, 'the Polshan cause' tends to be celebrated most passionately in planets like Volyen, which has not itself been recently invaded.
The wars and massacres that have always afflicted Polshi have recendy been absent, long enough for a generation to grow up with no personal experience of anything but the verbal stimulations of Sirian Rhetoric, the ideas generated by Sirian Virtue. And these most admirably brave people announced to Sirius that, by definition, Sirian Virtue and the custodians of it must admire planetary self-determination, justice, freedom, democracy (and so on and so forth). Therefore, Polshi intended forthwith to take control of its own affairs. At the same time, these intrepid ones invited all the neighbouring Sirian colonies to follow the roads of self-determination, democracy, justice, Virtue (and so on 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.
'Klorathy!' demanded Incent, his eyes streaming, 'are you saying that tyranny should never be resisted?'
'When have you ever heard me say so?'
'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?'
'Incent, would you not agree that the outcome of this particular heroic episode was not all that hard to foresee?'
'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.'
'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.