agreed.’
‘But in our analysis of the situation we decided –’ began Krolgul, and was stopped by Calder’s, ‘This one here, is he a friend of yours?’
Meaning, of course, me. Fifty pairs of eyes focused on me – hard, grey, distrustful eyes.
‘Well, I think I could say that,’ said Krolgul, with a heaving of silent laughter that could have been taken various ways, but which Calder took badly.
‘Speak for yourself,’ said he to me.
‘No, I am not a friend of Krolgul’s,’ I said.
‘Visiting here, perhaps?’
‘He’s a friend of mine, a friend of mine,’ shouted Incent, and then wondered if he had done right; with a gasp and a half smile, he subsided back into his seat.
‘Yes, I am visiting.’
‘From Volyen, perhaps?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘A friend of this lad here, who is a friend of Krolgul, but not a friend of Krolgul,’ said someone sardonically, and everyone laughed.
‘You are here to write a travel book?’ Laughter. ‘An analysis of our situation?’ Laughter. ‘A report for –’
‘For Canopus,’ I said, knowing that the word would sound to them like an old song, a fable.
Silence.
Krolgul could not hide his shock: he knew then, for the first time, that my being here was serious, that we account his activities at this time serious. It is a strange thing that people engaged in his kind of half-mocking, half-experimental, wholly theatrical intrigues often lose the capacity for seeing themselves and their situation. Enjoyment of manipulation, of power, of watching themselves in a role, dims judgment.
I looked round slowly from face to face. Strong, grey faces that showed all the exhaustion of their lives. Faces like stones. In their eyes, grey, slow eyes, I saw that they were remembering, trying to remember.
Calder, still on his feet, his great hand on his chair-back, the miners leader whose desperation had allowed him to become subject to the manipulations of Krolgul, looked hard and long at me and said, ‘You can tell them, where you come from, that we are very unfortunate people.’
And at this there was a long involuntary groan, and then silence.
This, what was happening now, was of a different kind and quality from anything that had happened in the square, or anything that emanated from Krolgul. I was looking at Incent, since, after all, he was the key to the situation, and saw him impressed and silent, even thoughtful.
And Krolgul too knew the moment was crucial. He slowly, deliberately got to his feet. He held out both clenched fists in front of him. And now the eyes of everyone had turned to him.
‘Unfortunate!’ he said in a low, only just audible voice, so that people had to strain to listen. ‘Yes, that is a word we may say and say again …’ His voice was rising, and slowly his fists were rising too. ‘Misfortune was the inheritance of your fathers, misfortune is what you eat and drink, and misfortune will be the lot of your children!’ He had ended on a shout, and his fists had fallen to his sides. He stood there, appealing to them with the brave set of his body, his pale face, with eyes that actually managed to look sunken and hungry.
But he had miscalculated: he had not taken them with him.
‘Yes, I think we are all aware of it,’ said Calder, and turned to me. ‘You, from – where did you say it was? but never mind – what do you have to say?’ This was a half-jeer, but let us say a hopeful jeer, and now all the eyes had shifted back to me, and they leaned forward waiting.
‘I would say that you could begin by describing your actual situation, as it is.’
This chilled them, and Incent’s face, turned towards me suddenly, looked as if I had hit him deliberately, meaning to hurt. Johor: it is not going to be easy for Incent. It is the hardest thing in the Galaxy, if you have been the plaything of words, words, words, to become independent of their ability to intoxicate.
‘I think we are all able to,’ said Calder dryly, sitting down again and half turning away from me, back to his mates. But not entirely. He still kept half an eye on me, and so did all the others.
Krolgul was seated again, staring hard at Incent. Incent, feeling this gaze, was shifting about, uneasy and in terrible conflict. I was sensing him as a vacuum from which the powers of Canopus were being drained and sucked out by Krolgul. Incent might be sitting there with me, at my table, my ‘friend,’ but he was in the power of Krolgul. Now that Krolgul could see how he had lost the allegiance – though, he hoped, temporarily – of the Volyenadnans, Incent was what he had left. It was like watching blood being emptied from a victim as he gasps and shrinks, but it wasn’t blood that Incent fed, is feeding, Krolgul.
Calder was my only hope.
I stood up, so that everyone could see me.
‘You’re leaving?’ asked Calder, and he was disappointed.
But I had hoped for what then happened. Calder said, ‘Perhaps we could have the benefit of an outside view, an objective opinion?’
‘I have a suggestion,’ I said. ‘You get together as many of you as you can, and we will meet, with Krolgul here, and talk it all out.’
They didn’t agree at once, but in the end they did. Krolgul had no alternative, though he hated it.
Of course, we could have done it all where we were, in the café, but I was concerned with Incent.
I did not order him to follow me as I left the café, but he came with me. Physically, he came with me.
I took him to my lodgings in a poor part of the town. A miner’s widow, with children to support, let out rooms. Almost the first thing she had said to me was, ‘We are unfortunate people,’ and it was with a calm sense and dignity that could be, I hope, what would save them all from Krolgul.
She agreed to give us some supper in my room.
It wasn’t much; they are indeed poor people.
Over bread and some fruit, Incent and I sat opposite each other.
‘Incent?’ I said to him. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ And it was far from rhetorical.
‘You’re going to punish me, you’re going to punish me,’ he kept groaning, but with the enjoyment he has learned from Krolgul.
‘Yes, of course you will be punished. Not by me, not even by Canopus, but by the inherent laws of action and interaction.’
‘Cruel, cruel,’ he sobbed, and fell asleep, all his emotional apparatus in disarray, his intellectual machineries in subjection to this disorder. But he is strong enough physically; that is something.
Leaving him asleep, and asking the woman of the house to keep an eye on him, I spent the night in the bars of
