I shall now make an abstract of a very long Report from Agent AM S.
It is a V-year since Grice was kidnapped by the Motzans, who have now come to regret the act. Every attempt to provoke Volyen into publicity for their cause fails. They hint at torture, and worse – no reaction. Above all, Motzans understand loyalty to their own, for everyone on Motz is 'of us.' That the rulers of Volyen seem to have forgotten one of their officials: Motzans have given up trying to think about such an incomprehensibility. Grice is still a 'prisoner'; the library is his prison, but he is there because he wants to be. This collection of books was pirated from a provincial town on Volyen by the Motzans some time ago – again, to earn publicity. They succeeded. Outrage! Everyone on Volyen talked of nothing but the stolen library, and then forgot about it. How is it possible, wonder the Motzans, that the Volyens can care about books more than about an official? It happens that this library contains the results of research done on Volyens as a species by Volyens. In the high imperial days of Volyen, the subject planets were much studied, and the researchers got into the useful habit of seeing species and races of peoples as they would types of animal, studying them with the same – or almost -dispassion we use on similar studies of genera and species. It occurred to them at some point that although they observed others dispassionately, they had not made the attempt to do the same for their own patterns of living, but saw themselves always from within their own subjectivity. They turned their tools of research in on themselves, trying -though this is always hard enough – to see themselves as others see them. This provincial library was full of the results.
Grice has spent his time reading. His prior education was largely designed to equip him for ruling, particularly to inculcate the conviction of superiority that in one way or another the administrators of Empire must have. He has had no idea at all of the richness of information available about his own species. You may ask how it is that, once equipped with so much information, the Volyens have not hastened to put it into useful practice, have not taught it to their young – just as Grice is asking. Probably when the historians get to work on this particular epoch, the time before the Volyen 'Empire' falls to Sirius, this will be the fact they will single out as the most remarkable: with so much knowledge about the mechanisms that govern them as individuals, groups, conglomerates, why did they never use it? Well, they are a lethargic lot. With much-compartmented minds.
Grice is riven, split, fragmented. No sooner had he decided to give his wholehearted allegiance to the simplicities of the Motzans than he found himself every day acquiring facts that made singlemindedness difficult. His mind is exploding with new ideas, suppositions, possibilities; he lives in a fever which he cools by having loving thoughts of his new comrades, so stern, so austere, so dedicated, so restfully and admirably single-minded.