by Brian Aldiss
He decided to have her taught Olonets, and a good master was employed. No progress was made until the king was inspired to sing to the girl. She sang in response. More language came to her, but she could never speak, only sing.
This shortcoming would have maddened many. It pleased the king. He found that her father had been human and had joined the journey when a youth, running away from slavery.
The king, despite contrary advice, married Bathkaarnet-she, converting her to his faith. Soon she bore him a two-headed son, who died. Then she bore two normal daughters who lived. First Simoda Tal, and then the mercurial Milua Tal.
Prince RobaydayAnganol had heard this story when a boy. Now, as Roba, and dressed as a Madi, he made his way from the Port to one of the gates at the rear of the palace. He wrote a note to Bathkaarnet-she, which a servant bore away.
He stood waiting patiently in the heat, where a nocturnal-flowering zaldal climbed and spread. To the prince, Oldorando was a strange city. Not a phagor was to be seen.
His intention was to learn as much about the Madis as he could from the Madi queen before returning to the Journey. He had determined that he would be the first man to sing the Madi tongue fluently. Before leaving his father’s court, he had often talked to Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, who had inspired in him a love of learning—another reason for his falling out with his father, the king.
Roba waited by the gate. He had kissed the rough cheek of his female, talced with the dust of the roadside, knowing that he could never find her again even when he rejoined the Journey. For then the Look of Acceptance might be flashed by someone else—or, if by her again, how was he to recognize her for sure? He felt strongly that the quality of individuality was a precious thing, granted only to humans and, to a lesser degree, to phagors.
After an hour, he saw the servant returning, watched his self-important human strut, so unlike that Madi shamble which carried them safe across a lifetime. The man walked round two sides of the palace square, under shady cloisters, rather than brave the breath of Freyr in the open.
“Very well, the queen will grant you five minutes’ audience. Be sure to bow to her, you rogue.”
He slipped through the side gate and began to walk across the square, using the Madi shamble, which kept the spine supple. A man was walking towards him with a hesitant kind of arrogance which needed no display. It was his father, King JandolAnganol.
Roba removed his old sack hood and bent down, sweeping the ground with it, using languid but steady strokes. Madi-fashion. JandolAnganol passed him, talking animatedly to another man, and never even gave him a glance. Roba straightened up and continued on his way to the queen.
The lame queen sat in a silver swing. Her toes were brown and ringed. She was rocked by a green-clad lackey. The room in which she greeted Roba was overgrown with vegetation, among which pecubeas flitted and preets sang.
When she discovered who he was, as she soon did, she refused to sing of her earlier life and instead warbled in fulsome terms about JandolAnganol.
This was not to Roba’s taste. A kind of madness came over him, and he said to the queen, “I want to sing the song of your birth-tongue. But your song is of my birth-curse. To know that man you praise, you must become his son. There’s no room for flesh and blood in that man’s heart, only for abstracts. Religion and country. Religion and country, not Tatro and Roba, in his harneys.”
“Kings believe in such matters. I know it. I know they are set above us to dream of grand things we cannot,” the queen sang. “It’s empty where kings live.”
“Grandeur’s a stone,” he said emphatically. “Under that stone he imprisons his own father. And I, his own son—he would imprison me for two years in a monastery. Two years to teach me grandeur! A vow of silence in a Matrassyl monastery, to introduce me to that stone Akhanaba…
“How could I bear it? Am I a rickyback or slug, to crawl beneath a stone? Oh, my father’s heart is stone, so I ran, ran like a footless wind, to join the Ahd of your kind, kind queen.”
Then Bathkaarnet-she began to sing. “But my kind are the scum of the earth. We have no intelligence, only ucts, and in consequence no guilt feelings. What do you call that? No conscience. We can only walk, walk, walk our lives away—except for me who luckily am lame.
“My dear husband, Sayren, has taught me the value of religion, which is unknown to poor ignorant Madis. Fancy to live for centuries and not know that we exist only by the grace of the All-Powerful! So I respect your father for all his religious feelings. He scourges himself every day he is here.”
As the singing voice ceased, Roba asked bitterly, “And what is he doing here? Looking for me, a wandering part of his kingdom?”
“Oh, no, no.” There was fluting laughter. “He has been here conferring with Sayren, and with Church dignitaries from distant Pannoval. Yes, I saw them, they spoke to me.”
He stood before her, in such a way that the lackey had to swing her more gently. “Who confers and never speaks? Who has—and still seeks?”
“Who can tell what kings confer about?” she sang. One of the bright birds fluttered into his face, and he beat it down.
“You must know what they are planning, Your Majesty.”
“Your father has a wound. I see it in his face,” she sang. “He needs his nation to be powerful, to smite his enemies to the dust. For that, he will sacrifice even his queen, your mother.”
“How will he sacrifice her?”
“He will sacrifice her to history. Is not a woman’s life less than a man’s destiny? We are nothing but lame things in the hands of men…”
His ways became dark. He had presentiments of evil. His reason fled. He tried to return to the Madis and forget human treachery. But the Ahd required peace or at least absence of mind. After some days of walking, he left the uct and wandered away into the wilderness, living in forest trees or in dens lions had forsaken. He talked to himself in a language all his own. He lived on fruits and fungi and things that crawled beneath stones.
Among the things that crawled beneath stones was a small crustacean, a rickyback. This little humpbacked creature had a tiny face peering from under its chitin shell, and twenty delicate white legs. Rickybacks congregated under logs and stones in their dozens, all packed snug together.
He lay watching them, playing with them, lying on his side with one arm crooked to support his head, flipping them gently over with a finger. He marvelled at their lack of fear, at their laziness. What was their purpose? How could they exist, doing so little?
But these little creatures had survived through the ages. Whether Helliconia was unbearably hot or unbearably cold—SartoriIrvrash had told him this—the rickybacks remained close to the ground, hiding away, and had probably done nothing more since time began.
They were wonderful to him, even as they lay kicking their dainty limbs in ridiculous attempts to right themselves.
His wonder was replaced by unease. What could they be doing if the All-Powerful had not put them here?
As he lay there, the thought was as powerfully presented to him as if someone spoke the words that he might be mistaken and his father might be right; perhaps there was an All-Powerful directing human affairs. In which case, much that had seemed to him wicked was good, and he was deeply mistaken.
He stood up, trembling, forgetting the insignificant creatures at his feet.
He looked up at the thick clouds in the sky. Had someone spoken?
If there was an Akhanaba, then he must surrender his will to the god. Whatever the All-Powerful decreed must be done. Even murder was justified, if the end was Akhanaba’s.
At least he believed in the original beholder, that mother figure who saw to the earth and all its works. That misty figure, identified with the world itself, took precedence over Akhanaba.
The days went by, and the suns travelled across them, scorching him. He was lost to the wilderness, hardly knowing he was lost, speaking to no one, seeing no one. There were nondads about, evasive as thought
, but he had no business with them. He was listening to the voice of Akhanaba, or the beholder.
As he wandered, a forest fire overtook him. He plunged in a brook full-length, watching the roaring machine of conflagration rush up one slope of a hill and down the other, exhaling energy. In the furnace of its flames he saw the face of a god; the smoke trailing out behind was the god’s beard and hair, grey with cosmic wisdom. Like his father, the vision in its passage left destruction behind it. He lay with half his face in the water and both eyes staring, one under water, one above, seeing two universes lit by the visitant. When the visitant had gone by, he rose, going up the hill as if drawn in the wake of the monster, to stagger among smouldering bushes.
The fire god had left a trail of black. He would see it ahead, still pursuing its course like a whirlwind of vengeance.
Prince RobaydayAnganol began to run, laughing as he went. He was convinced that his father was too powerful to kill. But there were those near him who could be killed, whose deaths would lessen him.
The thought roared into his mind like fire, and he recognized it for the voice of the All-Powerful. No longer did he feel pain; he had become anonymous, like a true Madi.
Caught up in the uct of his own life, RobaydayAnganol saw the stars wheel over his head every night. He saw as he fell asleep YarapRombry’s Comet blazing in the north. He saw the fleet star Kaidaw pass overhead.
Robayday’s keen eyes picked out the phases of Kaidaw when it was at zenith. But it moved rapidly, traversing the sky from south to north. As he watched it hurl itself towards the horizon, it was no longer possible to distinguish the Kaidaw’s disc; it sank to a pinpoint of bright light and then disappeared.
To its inhabitants the Kaidaw was known as the Avernus, Earth Observation Station Avernus. During this period, it was home for some six thousand inhabitants, men, women, children, androids. The human beings were divided into six scholarly families or clans. Each clan studied some aspect of the planet below, or of its sister planets. The information they gathered was signalled back to Earth.
The four planets which circled about the G-class star known as Batalix comprised the great discovery of Earth’s interstellar age. Interstellar exploration—“conquest’, as the peoples of that arrogant age called it—was conducted at enormous expense. The expense became so ruinous that interstellar flight was eventually abandoned.
Yet it yielded a transformation in the human spirit. A more integrated approach to life meant that people no longer sought to exact more than their fair share from a global production system now much better understood and controlled. Indeed, interpersonal relationships took on a kind of sanctity, once it was realized that, of a million planets within reasonable distance from Earth, not one could sustain human life or match the miraculous diversity of Earth itself.
With emptiness the universe was prodigal beyond belief. With organic life, it was niggardly. As much as anything, it was the scale of desolation of the universe which caused mankind to turn with abhorrence from interstellar flight. By then, however, the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system had been discovered.
“God built Earth in seven days. He spent the rest of his life doing nothing. Only in his old age did he stir himself and create Helliconia.” So said one terrestrial wag.
So the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system were of prime importance to the spiritual existence of Earth. And of those planets, Helliconia was paramount.
Helliconia was not unlike Earth. Other human beings lived there, breathed air, suffered, enjoyed and died. The ontological systems of both planets were parallel.
Helliconia was a thousand light-years from Earth. To travel from one world to the other in the most technologically advanced starship took over fifteen hundred years. Human mortality was too frail to sustain such a journey.
Yet a deep need in the human spirit, a wish to identify with something beyond itself, sought to sustain a bond between Earth and Helliconia. Despite all the difficulties imposed by the enormous gulfs of space and time, a permanent watch post was built in orbit about Helliconia, the Earth Observation Station. Its duty was to study Helliconia and send back its findings to Earth.
So began a long one-sided involvement. That involvement exercised one of mankind’s most attractive gifts, the power of empathy. Ordinary terrestrials turned every day—or would turn long hence—to learn how their friends and heroes fared on the surface of the remote planet. They feared phagors. They watched developments at the court of JandolAnganol. They wrote in the Olonets script; many people spoke one or other of the languages. To some extent, Helliconia had unwittingly colonised Earth.
This bond continued long after the end of Earth’s great interstellar age.
Indeed, Helliconia, prize of that age, was another cause of its decline. There it was, this world of splendour and terror, as beautiful as any dream—and to step on it was death for any human. Not immediate, but certain death.
Pervading the atmosphere of Helliconia were viruses which, through long processes of adaptation, were harmless to the natives. At least they were harmless throughout most of the Great Year. But to anyone from Earth, those unfilterable viruses formed a barrier like the sword of the angel who—in an ancient Earth myth—guarded the entrance to the Garden of Eden.
And to many people aboard the Avernus, a garden of Eden was what the planet below them resembled, at least when the slow cruel centuries of the winter of the Great Year had passed.
The Avernus had its parks, with streams and lakes, and a thousand ingenious electronic simulations with which to challenge its young men and women. But it remained an artificial world. Many aboard it felt that their lives remained artificial lives, without the zest of reality.
This sense of artificiality was particularly oppressive in the case of the Pin clan. For the Pin clan was in charge of cross-continuities. Their responsibility was mainly sociological.
The chief task of the Pin clan was to record the unfolding of the lives of one or two families through the generations throughout the 2592 Earth years of the Great Year and beyond. Such data, impossible to collect on Earth, was of great scientific value. It meant also that the Pin family built up an especially close identification with their subjects below.
That proximity was reenforced by the knowledge which shadowed all their days—the knowledge that Earth was irrecoverably far away. To be born on station was to be born into unremitting exile. The first law governing life on the Avernus was that there was no going home.
Computerborgoid ships occasionally arrived from Earth. These linkships, as they were called, always provided emergency accommodation in which humans could travel. Possibly some faint hope existed on Earth that one of the Avernians would be able, as a result of new methods, to return to Earth; more likely, the ships, old-fashioned in design, had never been modernized. The gulf of space and time made the thought of such passage a mockery; even bodies sunk deep in cryogenic sleep fell into decay over one and a half-thousand years.
Helliconia lay incomparably nearer than Earth. Yet the viruses kept Helliconia sacrosanct.
Existence on the Avernus was Utopian—that is to say, pleasant, equable, and dull. There were no terrors to face, no injustices, no shortages, and few sudden shocks. There was no revelatory religion; religious faith hardly commended itself to a society whose duty it was to watch the upheavals on the world below. The metaphysical agonies and ecstasies of individual egos were ruled incorrect.
Yet to some Avernians of every generation, their world remained a prison, its orbit an uct going nowhere. Certain members of the Pin clan, looking down on the poor crazed Roba wandering in the wilderness, were consumed by envy of his freedom.
The intermittent arrival of link-ships merely emphasized their oppression. In earlier days, a link-ship had caused a riot. It had come full of cassettes of news—ancient news of cartels, sports, nations, artefacts, names, all unknown. The leader of the riot had been caught and, in an unprecedented move, sent down to his death on the surface of Hellico
nia.
Everyone on the Observation Station had watched avidly his extraordinary adventures before he succumbed to the virus. They had lived vicariously on the planet on their doorstep.
From that time on, there had to be a safety valve, a tradition of ritualized sacrifice and escape. So the ironically named Helliconia Holiday Lottery came into being. The lottery was held once every ten years during the centuries of the Helliconian summer. The winner of the lottery was allowed to descend to his certain death, and to choose any place at which to land. Some preferred solitude, some cities, some mountains, some the plains. No winner ever refused to go or turned aside from fame and freedom.
Lottery time came round again 1177 Earth years after apastron—the nadir of the Great Year.
The three previous winners had been women. On this occasion, the prizewinner was Billy Xiao Pin. He made his choice without difficulty. He would go down to Matrassyl, capital city of Borlien. There he would gaze upon the face of the queen of queens before the helico virus overcame him.
Death was to be Billy’s prize: a death in which he would mingle richly with the centuries-long orchestration of Helliconia’s Great Summer.
VI
Diplomats Bearing Gifts
King JandolAnganol eventually returned from Oldorando to his queen. Four weeks passed. He ceased to limp. Yet the incident of the Cosgatt was not lost. It was midwinter’s day, and diplomats from Pannoval were expected in Matrassyl.
A dead heat lay over the Borlienese capital, enshrouding the palace on the hill which overlooked the city. The outer walls of the palace shimmered, as if they were a mirage that could be walked through. Centuries ago, in the winter of the Great Year, midwinter’s day had been celebrated in earnest; now it was otherwise. People were too hot to care.
The native courtiers idled in their chambers. The Sibornalese ambassador added ice to his wine and dreamed of the cool women of his home country. Arriving diplomats, loaded with baggage and bribes, sweated under their ceremonial robes and collapsed on couches once the official welcome was over.