The Sentimental Agents In The Volyen Empire (1984) - Plot & Excerpts
'After I left the hotel, through a lobby all excitement and noise – a trade delegation from the Sirian HQ on their planet Motz were just leaving, looking pleased with themselves – I walked straight into the park opposite. Some freely wandering gazelles came to greet me. They originate, as it happens, from Shikasta, stolen by Sirius and presented as part of a state gift. They licked my hands and nuzzled them, and I knew my emotional apparatus was nearly at Overload. Plant life in every stage of growth. The songs of birds. In short, the usual assault on one's stabilizing mechanisms. So hard did I find it to keep my emotional balance that I nearly went back into the hotel to join Incent.Oh, the glamour of the natural life! The deceptions of the instinctual! The beguilements of all that pulses and oscillates! How I do yearn for Canopus and for its... but enough of that. Forgive my weakness.I already suspected that the Canopean Empire was not as altruistic as it at first appeared, but in the fifth and final book of the series it also becomes apparent that its agents are fallible. The usual dispassionate stance of Canopus towards members of lesser species can be rocked, as its agents sometimes fall into a state where they are overtaken by emotion and easily swayed by rhetoric. When this happens agents are admitted to a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases to undergo treatment designed to bring their emotions back into check and stop them from being affected so powerfully by words. In this book Klorathy, who previously appeared in "The Sirian Experiments", guides the inhabitants of Volyen, its inhabited moons and neighbouring planets through the break-up of the Volyen Empire, while helping a junior agent called Incent through illness, relapses and recovery, and just about warding off the illness himself. This isn't my favourite book in the series, although this book's stance against rhetoric and the power of words to rouse emotion and sway people to behave unreasonably was though-provoking. Incent's constant relapses and his alternating attraction to and shamed rejection of Shammat soon became tedious, although I was interested in the inhabitants of the Volyen system as they faced the break up of the Volyen Empire and invasion by Sirius and their reaction to the manipulation by Canopus.
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