by Brian Aldiss
“Go fast, remember enmities. Retreat to safety of the wooden thing afloat on the drowning world, kill all Sons of Freyr. Stay safe there against the running of the Beasts-we-were. Be valiant. Be large. Hold horns high!”
The tiny voice fled to lands beyond knowing. They thanked the great-grandstallun with a deep churring in their throats.
They would obey its word. For the voice was his and the voice was theirs and there was no difference. Time and opinion had no place in their pale barneys.
They advanced slowly on the beached ship.
It was an alien thing to them. The sea was their dread. Water swallowed and extinguished them. The ship was outlined against the smouldering orange of Freyr, snoring just below the horizon, ready to leap from its hiding place in that same hungry sea.
They clutched their spears and moved with reluctant step towards the New Season.
The sand crunched beneath their tread. All the while, their twitching ears picked up the thunder of the approaching flambreg.
To one side lay the icebergs, no taller than the runt which walked close to its gillot. Some icebergs clung to the sides of the vessel; some, as if possessed by a mysterious will, described slow intricate figures over the still sea, ghostly in the dim light, their reflections caught as if in tether in the water.
As the sand spit narrowed, so the ancipital group had to narrow its front. Finally, two stalluns led the rest. The ship loomed above them without movement.
Things clattered and broke beneath the feet of the stalluns. They tried to halt, but those behind pushed them forward. More breaking, more clattering. Looking down, they saw the thin white shards beneath their feet, and the whiteness stretching cracked all the wav to the ship’s hull.
“There is ice and it breaks,” they said to each other, using the continuous present tense of Native Ancipital. “Go back or we fall into the drowning world.”
“We must kill all Sons of Freyr, as it is said. Go forward.”
“That we cannot do with the drowning world protecting them.”
“Go back. Hold horns high.”
Crouching by the rail of the New Season, Luterin Shokerandit and
Toress Lahl watched their enemies shuffle back to the shore and seek for shelter by the rock.
“They may return. We have to get the ship afloat as soon as possible,” Shokerandit said. “Let’s see how many of the crew have survived.”
Toress Lahl said, “Before we leave the coast, we should kill some flambreg if they get within range. Otherwise everyone is going to starve.”
They looked uneasily at each other. The thought crossed their minds that they sailed with a cargo of the dead and the mad.
Standing with their backs to the mainmast, they set up a great shout, which rolled away across the wastes of water and land. After a pause, an answering cry came. They called again.
A man appeared from the forecastle, staggering. He had undergone the metamorphosis, and presented the typical barrel-figure of a survivor. His clothes were ill-fitting, his once boney face now broad and presenting a curiously stretched appearance. They hardly recognised him as Harbin Fashnalgid.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” Shokerandit said, going towards him.
The transformed Fashnalgid put out a warning hand and sat down heavily on the deck.
“Don’t come near me,” he said. He covered his face with his hands.
“If you are fit enough, we need help in getting the ship on course again,” Shokerandit said.
The other gave a laugh without looking up. Shokerandit saw that there was blood caked on his hands and clothes.
“Leave him to recover,” Toress Lahl said. At this Fashnalgid uttered a harsh cackle and started to shout at them, “ ‘Leave him to recover!’ How can a man recover? Why should he recover… I’ve been through the last few days eating raw arang—yes, and killing a man for the privilege of doing so … Entrails—everything… And now I find Besi’s dead. Besi, the dearest, truest girl there ever was… Why do I want to recover? I want to be dead.”
“You’ll feel better soon,” said Toress Lahl. “You scarcely knew her.”
“I’m sorry about Besi,” Shokerandit said. “But we have to get the ship on course.”
Fashnalgid glared up at him. “That’s typical of you, you skerming conformist! No matter what happens, do what you’re supposed to do. Let the ship rot, for all I care.”
“You’re drunk, Harbin!” He felt morally superior to this abject figure.
“Besi’s dead. What else matters?” He sprawled on the deck.
Toress Lahl motioned to Shokerandit. They crept away.
They took fire hatchets to break into cabins and went below.
As Shokerandit reached the bottom of the companionway, a naked man threw himself on him. Shokerandit went down on one knee and was seized by the throat. His attacker—an Odim relation— snarled, more like a maddened animal than a human being. He clawed at Shokerandit without any coherent attempt to overcome him. Shokerandit stuck two knuckles in the man’s eyes, straightened his arm, and pushed hard. As the man fell away, he kicked him in the stomach, jumped on him, and pinned him to the deck.
“Now what do we do? Throw him to the phagors?”
“We’ll tie him up and leave him in a cabin.”
“I’m not taking any chances.” He picked up the hatchet he had dropped and clouted the prone man across the temple with the handle. The man went limp.
They tackled the captain’s cabin in the stern. The lock broke under their assault, and they burst in. They found themselves in a comfortably appointed quarter galley with windows opening above the water.
They drew up short. A man with an old-fashioned bell-mouthed musket was sitting with his back to the windows, aiming the gun at them.
“Don’t shoot,” Shokerandit said. “We intend no harm.”
The man rose to his feet. He lowered the weapon.
“I would have blasted you if you were loonies.”
He was proportioned in the unaccustomed thickset way. He had passed through the Fat Death. They recognised him then as the captain. His officers lay about the cabin, their hands tied. Some were gagged.
“We’ve had a high old time here,” said the captain. “Fortunately, I was the first to recover, and we have lost only the first mate—for eating purposes, that was, excuse the expression. A few more hours and these officers will be back in action.”
“Then you can leave them and see to the rest of your ship,” said Shokerandit sharply. “We’re beached, and there’s a threat from phagors ashore.”
“How’s Master Eedap Mun Odim?” asked the captain, as he accompanied them from the cabin, his gun under his arm.
“We haven’t found Odim yet.”
They found him later. Odim had locked himself in his cabin with a supply of water, dried fish, and ship’s biscuits as he felt the first fever upon him. He had undergone the metamorphosis. He was now a few inches shorter, and of much more rounded bulk than before. His characteristic straight-backed stance had disappeared. He wore a floppy sailor’s garb, his own clothes having become too tight for him. Blinking, he emerged on deck like a hibernatory bear from its cave.
He looked round quickly frowning, as they hailed him. Shokerandit approached slowly, well aware that it was he who had passed the Fat Death to all aboard. He humbly reminded Odim of his name.
Ignoring him, Odim went to the rail and gestured over the side of the ship. When he spoke, his voice choked with rage.
“Look at this barbarism! Some wretch has thrown my best plate overboard. It’s an atrocity, fust because there’s illness on the ship, it doesn’t excuse… Who did it? I demand to know. The culprit is not going to sail with me.”
“Well…” said Toress Lahl.
“Er…” said Shokerandit. He took a grip on himself and said, “Sir, I have to confess that I did it. We were being attacked by phagors at the time.”
He pointed to where phagors could be seen by the rock.
“The ship has no weapons with which to defend itself. We saw that the phagors were going to attack— they will try again if they get desperate. I threw the plate over the side deliberately, to cover the sand spit. As I expected, the fuggies believed they were treading on thin ice, and retreated. I’m sorry about your porcelain, but it saved the ship.”
Odim said nothing. He stared down at the deck, up at the mast. Then he brought a little black notebook out of his pocket and perused it. “That service would have fetched a thousand sibs in Shivenink,” he said in low tones, darting swift glances at them.
“It has saved all the rest of the porcelain on the ship,” Toress Lahl said. “Your other crates are intact. How is the rest of your family?”
Muttering to himself, Odim made a pencilled note. “Perhaps more than a thousand… Thank you, thank you … I wonder when such fine ware will again be manufactured? Probably not until the spring of next Great Year, many centuries in the future. Why should any of us care about that?”
He turned bemusedly, to shake hands with Shokerandit while looking elsewhere. “My gratitude for saving the ship.”
“Now we’ll get it afloat again,” said the captain.
The noise of the flambreg herd was louder now. They turned to see the animals pour by, not more than a mile inland. Odim disappeared unnoticed.
Only later did they discover the reason for his slightly eccentric behaviour. It was not his dear Besi’s death alone which had unsettled Odim. Of his three children, only the eldest boy, Kenigg, had survived the ravages of the Fat Death. His wife was also dead. Little was found of her bar skull, torso, and a pile of bones.
The flotation was not to come about for several hours. With the captain and a few crew on their feet again, some attempt was made to bring the ship back into order. Those still sick were settled as com- fortably as possible in the surgeon’s cabin. The injured were tended. The convalescent were brought to fresh air. The dead were wrapped in blankets and lined up in a row on the upper deck. The dead numbered’ twenty-eight. The survivors were twenty-one in number, including the captain and eleven of his crew.
When everyone had been accounted for and order prevailed, the fit assembled for a service of thanksgiving for their survival to God the Azoiaxic, who ordered all things.
In their innocent hymns, they did not see that the complexity of their survival was beyond the capacity of any local deity.
Helliconia was at this period receding towards something like the original conditions which had existed before its parent sun Batalix became locked into the gravitational field of the A-type supergiant. The planet had then carried a remarkable number of phyla, ranging in size from viruses to whales, while being denied the energy levels or the complexity to support beings with that intensity of cellular organisation required as building blocks for higher mental functions—the thinking, deducing, perceiving functions associated with full consciousness. The ancipitals were Helliconia’s supreme effort in this respect.
The ancipitals were a part of the integrated living system of Helliconia’s biosphere. One of the functions of that systemic gestalt—of which, needless to say, its component parts were entirely unaware— was to maintain optimum conditions for the survival of all. As the yellow-striped fly could not live without the flambreg, so ultimately, the flambreg could not live without the yellow-striped fly. All life was interdependent.
The capture of Batalix by the supergiant was only an event of the first magnitude and not a catastrophe for Helliconian life, although it was catastrophic for many phyla and many individuals. The impact of the capture was gradual enough for the biosphere to sustain it. The planet looked after its own. Its moon was lost; its vital processes continued, although through a disruption which brought storms and blizzards raging for hundreds of years.
The fierce output of high-energy radiation from the new sun caused more damage. More phyla were eradicated, while others survived only through genetic mutation. Among the new species were some which were, in evolutionary terms, hastily developed; they survived in the new environment only at some cost to themselves. The assatassi in the sea, which were born as maggots from the decaying bodies of their parents; the yelk and biyelk, necrogenes which resembled mammals but were without wombs; and human stock; these were among the new creatures which rose to abundance under the energy-rich conditions which came about eight million years before the present.
The new creatures were products of the biospheric striving for unity, and cobbled into it at the time of maximum change. Before its capture by Freyr, Helliconia’s atmosphere had contained a large amount of carbon dioxide, protecting its life with a greenhouse effect, and producing a mean temperature of —7° C. After capture, the atmospheric carbon dioxide was much reduced, combining at periastron with water to form carbonate rocks. Oxygen levels increased to amounts suitable for the new creatures: humans could not live in the oxygen-scarce Nyktryhk, as phagors did. In the seas, greater concentrations of macromolecules led to stepped-up activity all along the food chain. All these new parameters for existence came within the regulatory functions of Helliconia’s biosphere.
The humans, as the most complex life form, were the most vulnerable. However they might rebel against the idea, their corporate lives were never more than part of the equipoise of the planet to which they belonged. In that, they were no different from the fish, the fungi, or the phagors.
In order that they might function at optimum efficiency in Helliconia’s extremes, evolutionary pressure had introduced a system for regulating the masses of the humans. The pleomorphic helico virus had as its vector a species of arthropoda, a tick, which transferred itself readily from phagor to human. The virus was endemic during two periods of the Helliconian year, in the Spring and in the late Autumn of the Great Year, with minor epicycles between these cycles. These two pandemics were known as bone fever and the Fat Death.
Sexual dimorphism between the sexes was negligible; but both sexes showed seasonal dimorphism. Male and female could be said to average approximately one hundred and twelve pounds over an entire Great Year. But spring and autumn brought dramatic variations in body weight.
Survivors of the spring scourge of bone fever weighed a lanky ninety-six pounds, and presented a skeletal appearance to those who were brought up to the old way of things. This decreased body weight was an inheritable factor. It persisted throughout the generations as a crucial survival trait during the increasing heat. But the effect slowly became less apparent, until populations achieved the median of one hundred and twelve pounds.
Towards winter, the virus returned, partly in obedience to glandular signals. Survivors of these attacks increased in bulk, rather than losing it, generally gaining an average of about fifty percent body weight. For a few generations, the population averaged one hundred and sixty-eight pounds. They had transformed from ectomorph at one extreme to endomorph at the other.
This pathological process performed a vital function in preserving the human stock, with a side effect which benefitted the entire biosphere. As the expanding energy quota of the spring planet demanded a much more variegated biomass for efficient systemic working, so the contracting energy quota of winter required a decrease in total biomass. The virus culled the human population to conform with the total food- chain organisation of the biosphere.
Human existence was not possible without the virus, just as the flambreg herds would have ceased ultimately to exist without the curse of the yellow-striped fly.
The virus destroyed. But it was a life-giving destruction.
VIII
THE RAPE OF THE MOTHER
The stiff breeze blew off the coast. The clouds parted, revealing Batalix overhead. The sea sparkled, tossing up foam made of finest pearl. The New Season raced west by southwest, with music in her shrouds.
Along the Loraj c
oast on the north stood the Autumn Palaces, terrace after terrace of them. The dreams of forgotten tyrants were imprisoned in their stone, extending along the shore in distance and time. According to legend, King Denniss had once lived within their hallowed walls. Since the days of their fashioning, the Palaces, like some inconclusive human relationship, had never been entirely occupied or entirely deserted. They had proved too grandiose for those who created them and for those who followed after. Yet they were used still, long after whatever autumn had first seen the rise of their towers above the granite strand. Human beings—whole tribes of beings—lived in them like birds under neglected eaves.
The learned, who are always attracted to the past, lodged also in the Autumn Palaces. For them, the Palaces were the greatest archaeological site in the world, their ruinous cellars taproots to an earlier age of man. And what cellarage! Mazes of almost infinite depth stretched down into
the rock, as if to syphon up warmth from the heart of Helliconia. Here were reckonings inscribed on stone and clay, pot shards, skeletons of leaves from vanished forests, skulls to be measured, teeth to be fitted to jawbones, middens, weapons dissolving in rust… the history of a planet patiently awaiting interpretation, yet as tantalisingly beyond complete comprehension as a vanished human life.
The Palaces lay pallid with distance, and the New Season passed them far to starboard.