Helliconia Winter h-3

by Brian Aldiss

  “That’s far too sweeping,” Shoyshal said. “Admittedly, over most of the globe in those times one sex dominated the other—”

  “Possessed them as slaves.”

  “Well, dominated them, you argumentative hunk. But there were also societies where sex became just good clean fun, without any spiritual or possessive connotations, where ‘liberation’ was the watchword, and—”

  Trockern shook his head. “Darling, you prove my point. That minority was rebelling against the predominant ethos, so they too treated —were forced to treat—love as a political act. ‘Liberation’ or ‘free love’ was a statement, therefore political.”

  “I don’t suppose they thought like that.”

  “They didn’t see clearly enough to think like that. Hence their perpetual unease. My belief is that even their wars were welcome as an escape from their personal predicaments…” Seeing that Shoyshal was about to argue, he went on hastily, “Yes, I know war was also linked to territory. That sense of territorially extended from the land to the individual. You were supposed to be proud of your native land and to fight for it, and equally you were supposed to be proud of and fight for your lover. Or wife, as they then called it. Do you imagine I am proud of you or would fight for you?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” Ermine asked, smiling.

  “Look, take an example. This obsession the old race had with ownership. Slavery was a common condition on Earth up to and including the Industrial Revolution. Long after that, in many places. It was just as bad as we witness it on Helliconia. It gave you power to possess another person—an idea now almost past belief to us. It would bring us only misery. But we can see how the slave owner also becomes enslaved.”

  As Trockern raised both his left hand and his voice for emphasis, the old man sleeping away the afternoon on a nearby bunk muttered irritably, snorted, and rolled over onto his other side.

  “Again, darling, there were plenty of societies without slaves,” Shoyshal said. “And plenty of societies which abhorred the idea.”

  “They said they abhorred it, but they kept servants when they could

  —possessed them as far as possible. Later they employed androids. Officially nonslave societies went in for multiple possessions instead. Possessions, possessions … It was a form of madness.”

  “They were not mad,” Shoyshal said. “Just different from us. They’d probably find us pretty strange. Besides, it was the adolescence of mankind. I’ve listened to your preaching often enough, Trockern, and can’t deny I’ve enjoyed it—more or less. Now listen to what I am going to say.

  “We’re here because of astonishing luck. Forget about the Hand of God, about which the Helliconians are always agonising. There’s just luck. I don’t mean only luck that a few humans survived the nuclear winter—though that’s a part of it. I mean by luck the series of Earth’s cosmic accidents. Think of the way plantlike bacteria released oxygen into an otherwise unbreathable atmosphere. Think of the accident of fish developing backbones. Think of the accident of mammals developing placenta—so much cleverer than eggs—though eggs, too, were winners in their day. Think of the accident of the bombardment which altered conditions so sharply that the dinosaurs failed, to give mammals their chance. I could go on.”

  “You always could,” said her sister half-admiringly.

  “Our old adolescent ancestors feared accident. They feared luck. Hence gods and fences and marriage and nuclear arms and all the rest. Not your possessiveness, but the fear of accident. Which eventually befell them. Perhaps such prophecies are self-fulfilling.”

  “Plausible. Yes. I’ll agree, if you will allow that possessiveness itself might have been a symptom of that fear of accidents.”

  “Oh, well, Trockern, if you’re going to agree, let’s get back to the subject of sex.” They all laughed. Outside their windows, the mobile city could be seen trundling on its inelegant way, drinking egonicity from the white polyhedrons.

  Ermine put an arm about her sister’s shoulder and stroked her hair.

  “You talk about one person possessing another- I suppose you would say that the old institution of marriage was like that. Yet marriage still sounds rather romantic to me.”

  “Most squalid things are romantic if you get far enough away from them” Shoyshal said. “Anything seen through a haze… But marriage is the supreme example of love as a political act. The love was just a pretence, or at best an illusion.”

  “I don’t see what you mean. Men and women did not have to marry, did they?”

  “It was voluntary in a way, yes, but there was the pressure of society to marry. Sometimes moral pressure, sometimes economic pressure. The man got someone to work for him and have sex with. The woman got someone to earn money for her. They pooled their cupidities.”

  “How awful!”

  “All those romantic postures,” continued Shoyshal, enjoying herself. “Those raptures, those love songs, that sticky music, that literature they so prized, the suicide pacts, the tears, the vows—all just social mating displays, the baiting of the trap they couldn’t see they were setting or falling into.”

  “You make it sound awful.”

  “Oh, it was worse than that, Ermine, I assure you. No wonder so many women chose prostitution. I mean, marriage was another version of the power struggle, with both husband and wife battling for supremacy over the other. The man had the bludgeon of the purse strings, the woman the secret weapon between her legs.”

  They all burst out in laughter. The old man on the other bunk, Sartorilrvrash by name, began to snore in self-defence.

  “It’s a long while since yours was secret,” Trockern said.

  When a city became too crowded for someone’s liking, it was not difficult to change to another geonaut and head off in a new direction. There were many other cities, other alternatives. Some people liked to follow the long light days; others travelled to enjoy spectacular scenery; others developed longings to view the sea or the desert. Every environment offered a different kind of experience.

  And those kinds of experience were of a different order from the kinds that once had been. No longer did the people cry out. Their agile brains had at last led their emotions to accept a role of modesty, subor- dinate but never acquiescent to Gaia, spirit of Earth. Gaia did not seek to possess them, as their imagined gods had once done. They were themselves part of that spirit. They had a vision.

  In consequence, death ceased to play the leading role of Inquisitor in human affairs, as once it had done. Now it was no more than an item in the homely accounting which included mankind: Gaia was a common grave from which fresh increment continually blossomed.

  There was also the dimension of a real involvement with Helliconia. From watchers, men and women had graduated to participators. As the images failed to arrive from the Avernus, as the mere pictures died in the shell-like auditoria, so the empathic link was forged ever more strongly. In a sense, humankind— humanmind—leaped across space to become the eye of the Original Beholder, to lend strength to their distant fellows on the other planet.

  What the future might bring to that spiritual extension of being was a matter for expectation.

  By accepting a role proper and comfortable to them, the terrestrials had again entered the magic circle of being. They had forsworn their old greeds. Theirs was the world, as they were the world’s.

  When it was growing dark, Ermine said, “Talking about love as a political act. It takes a little getting used to. But what was that legalistic arrangement the old race suffered when a marriage broke up? Jandol-Anganol had one? Oh, a divorce. That was a quarrel over possessions, wasn’t it?”

  “And over who possessed the children,” Shoyshal said. “That’s an example of love all entangled in economics and politics. They didn’t understand that the random cannot be escaped. It’s one of the caprices by which Gaia keeps herself up to date.”

  Trockern glanced out the window and gestured at the geonaut. “I wouldn’t be surprised
if Gaia hasn’t sent that object to supersede us,” he said, with an air of mock gloom. “After all, geonauts are more beautiful and more functional than we are—present company excepted.”

  As the stars came out, the three climbed down onto the earth and walked by the side of their slow- trundling room. Ermine linked arms with the other two.

  “We can judge from the example of Helliconia how many lives of the old race were ruined by territoriality and the lust to possess those who were loved. No matter that it killed love. At least the nuclear winter freed our race from that sort of territoriality. We have risen to a better kind of life.”

  “I wonder what else is wrong with us that we don’t know about?” Trockern said, and laughed.

  “In your case we know,” said Ermine, teasingly. He bit her ear. Inside the room, Sartorilrvrash stirred on his bunk and grunted, as if in approval, as if he would have relished biting that pink lobe himself. It was about the hour when he generally decided to wake and enjoy the hours of tropical darkness.

  “That reminds me,” Shoyshal said, looking up at the stars. “If my randomness theory is in any way correct, it might account for why the old race never found any other life forms out there, except on Helli- conia. Helliconia and Earth were lucky. We were accident-prone. On the other planets, everything went according to some geophysical plan. As a result, nothing ever happened. There was no story to tell.”

  They stood looking up into the infinite distances of the sky.

  A sigh escaped Trockern. “I always experience intense happiness when I look up at the galaxy. Always. On the one hand, the stars remind me that the whole marvellous complexity of the organic and inorganic universe resolves itself down to a few physical laws awesome in their simplicity—”

  “And of course you are happy that the stars provide a text for a speech…” She imitated his posturing.

  “And on the other hand, darling, and on the other hand… Oh, you know, I’m happy that I’m more complex than a worm or bluebottle, and thus able to read beauty into those few awesome physical laws.”

  “All those age-old rumours about God,” Shoyshal said. “You can’t help wondering if there isn’t something in them. Perhaps the truth is that God’s a real old bore you wouldn’t want to be seen dead with…”

  “…Sitting brooding for ever over planets piled with nothing but sand…”

  “…And counting every grain,” finished Ermine. Laughing, they had to run to catch up with their room.

  The years went by. It was simple. All one had to do was haul on the chains, and the years passed. And the Wheel moved through the starry firmament.

  Despair gave way to resignation. Long after resignation came hope, flooding in without fanfares, like dawn.

  The nature of the graffiti on the encompassing outer wall changed. There were representations of nude women, hopes and boasts about grandchildren, fears about wives. There were calendars counting down the final years, the figures growing larger as the tenners shrank.

  Yet still there were religious sayings, sometimes repeated obsessively on every few metres of wall until, after many tenners, the writer grew tired. One such which Luterin read musingly was

  ALL THE WORLD’S WISDOM HAS ALWAYS EXISTED: DRINK DEEP OF IT THAT IT MAY INCREASE.

  Once, as he hauled on his chains with the rest of the unseen host, as trumpets blew and the whole structure shrieked on its pinions, Luterin Shokerandit was aware of a faint luminosity in his cell. He worked. Every hour hauled the mass of the Wheel under 10 centimetres forward, but every hour increased the luminosity. An halosis of yellow twilight crept in.

  He thought himself in paradise. Throwing off his furs, he tugged at the ten-link chain with extra vigour, shouting for his unhearing fellows to do the same. Near the end of the twelve-and-a-half-hour work period, the cell’s leading wall slipped forward to reveal the merest slit of light. The cell became filled with a holy substance which flickered and flowed into the least corner of the cell. Luterin fell down on his knees and covered his eyes, crying and laughing.

  Before the work period ceased, all of the slit was contained within his outer wall space. It was 240 millimetres wide—and there was now half a small year to go before Luterin had hauled his cell once more to the exit under Bambekk Monastery. Concisely engraved lettering in the granite read:

  YE HAVE BUT HALF A YEAR LEFT AWAY FROM THE WORLD: SEE YE BENEFIT FROM IT.

  The window was cut deep into the rock. It was difficult to see how far it extended before it became a window to the outside. Bars were secured over it at the far end. Through the bars a distant tree could be seen, a caspiarn blowing before a storm wind.

  Luterin stared out for a long while before going to sit on his bunk to contemplate the beauty about him. The cleft by which the daylight entered was silted with rubble. Through it filtered a precious quality which brimmed the entire volume of the cell with transforming fluids of beauty. All the light in the world seemed to him to be pouring blessing on his head. Before him lay both the brightest of illuminations, as well as exquisite shadows which painted the corners of the modest room with such gradations of tone as he had never observed in the world of freedom. He drank the ecstasy of being a living biological creature again.

  “Insil!” he cried into the twilight. “I shall be back!” He did not work the next day, but watched the life- giving window being moved by others across the outer wall. On the following day, when again he refused to work, the window moved again and all but disappeared. Even the crack remaining was sufficient to spill an exquisite pearly luminosity into his confinement. When, on the fourth workday, even that vanished— presumably to charm the inmate of the following cell—he was disconsolate.

  Now began a period of self-doubt. His longing to be free changed to a fear of what he would find. What would Insil have done with herself? Would she have left the place she hated?

  And his mother. Perhaps she was dead by now. He resisted the impulse to sink into pauk and find out.

  And Toress Lahl. Well, he had set her free. Perhaps she had made her way back to Borldoran.

  And what of the political situation? Was the new Oligarch carrying out the old Oligarch’s edicts? Were phagors still being slain? What of the quarrel between Church and State?

  He wondered how he would himself be treated when he emerged into the world. Perhaps a party of execution would await him. It was the old question, still unanswered over almost ten small years: was he saint or sinner? A hero or a criminal? Certainly he had forfeited any claim to the position of Keeper of the Wheel.

  He began talking to an imagined woman, achieving an eloquence that was never his when he was face to face with anyone else.

  “What a maze life is to humans! It must be so much simpler to be a phagor. They aren’t tormented by doubt or hope. When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvellous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents’ limitations, meet a wonderful woman, and be capable of being wonderful to her.

  “At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility, in all the forests of conflicting opinion, there is a vital something that can be known—known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. So that then one’s true life—the point of everything—will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension.

  “But it isn’t like that at all. But if it isn’t, where did the idea come from, to torture and unsettle us? All the years I’ve spent here—all the thought that’s gone by…”

  He tugged mightily at each heavy chain that presented itself in that endless succession of chains. The days on the stone calendar dwindled. That impossible day would be upon him when he would be free again to move among other human beings. Whatever happened, he prayed to the Azoiaxic that he might make love to a woman again. In his imagination, Insil was no longer remote.

  The wind blew from the north, carrying with it the taint of the pe
rmanent ice cap. Very few things could live within its breath. Even the tough leaves of the caspiarns furled themselves like sails against the trunks of the trees when the wind blew.

  The valleys were filling with snow. The snow was packing down. Year by small year, the light grew less.

  There was now a covered way to the small chapel of King Jandol-Anganol. It was roughly built of fallen branches, but it served to keep a path clear to the sunken door.

  For the first time in many centuries, someone lived in the chapel. A woman and a small boy crouched over a stove in one corner. The woman kept the door locked, and screened the stove so that its light could not be seen from outside. She had no right to be here.

  All round the chapel she had set traps which she found rusting in the vestry of the chapel. Small animals were caught in her traps, providing food enough. Only rarely did she dare show herself in the village of Kharnabhar, although she had a kind friend there who had established a store to sell fish brought up from the coast—for the old route she had once travelled was kept open, whatever the weather.

  She taught her son to read. She drew the letters of the alphabet in the dust, or carried him to see the letters painted on the walls in various texts. She told him that the letters and words were pictures of ideal things, some of which existed or could exist, some of which should not exist. She tried to instil morality with his reading, but she also invented silly stones for him which made them both laugh.

  When the child was asleep, she read to herself.

  It was a perpetual source of wonder to her that the presiding presence in this building was a man from her own city of Oldorando. Their lives were united in a curious way, across miles and centuries. He had retreated to this place to be in seclusion and to do penance for his sins. Late in life, he had been joined by a strange woman from Dimariam, a distant country of Hespagorat. Both had left documents, through which she wandered by the hour. Sometimes she felt the king’s restless spirit by her side.