*

My route back to the College strays through an administrations corridor. There are few businesses here, all down at heel, customers and proprietors alike in ragged clothes. Deputies in short, belted leather jackets creak superciliously through the often thickly packed warrens with menacing ease.

The Succentor’s subalterns are selected for their uncommon knack with emotion weapons, although most of these are never used and may not even be taught any more. It is not usual for persons who have had any dealings with the deputies, in their official capacity—and most of these deputies are fantastically devoted to their work and seldom allow themselves any respite in its pursuit even when invited, even when ordered to, by their superiors—to bear away with them any clear impression or recollection of them. A surprisingly dense mass of unshiftable complacency or satisfaction seems to set in, and it takes unpleasant, determined effort to claw through it to the real memories. The deputies move through the city at will, for the most part safe behind an indifference repulsion, and no one is the wiser who does not recognize the equivocal signs of the procedure. The deputy is brisk, smiling quietly to himself and going about his business. Citizens are pushed back and aside without taking offense; they are unwittingly darted with a infusion of obliging helpfulness, and it would seem to them a shame or even an outrage that anyone should mar this picture of happy efficiency, represented by the deputy in the flesh. Nothing is more important than that things should operate smoothly, with cheery smiles; anyone who disrupts this smooth operation in any one place threatens to send out friction ripples that will ...?

Emotion weapons are precisely aimed with focussing ways, like artillery; heavy guns are aimed by calculating the arc of trajectory required to hit the target and then carving away all remaining space in excess of that arc so that it, the ball, may only go along that arc: just so, the emotion weapon will have no effect unless certain questions are, and even the occasion of questioning is, carved away, so no one asks what it really is that the disruptive individual disrupts, or why friction is so wholly to be avoided, and smoothness elevated to holiness. Of all considerations in the use of emotion weapons the principal is to cause inversion, or the transferral of hostility to the victim, so that he or she is rebuffed for causing trouble. Uniformed in their repulsion, the deputies glide through the city without the slightest effort, leaving behind them smooth wakes of assiduously busy citizens.