Helliconia Summer h-2

by Brian Aldiss

  JandolAnganol turned back towards his kneeling son. “You know your grandfather is now one with the gossies?”

  “He was tired. I saw his grave yawn.”

  “I do my best, sir, but really I need a slave to assist me…”

  “He died in his sleep—an easy death, for all his sins.”

  “I said he was tired. Self-demented, mother-tormented, granddad-fermented… that’s three blows you’ve struck. Where next?”

  The king folded his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits. “Three blows! You child—they’re my one wound. Why do you plague me with nonsense? Stay and comfort me. Since you’re unfit to marry even a Madi, stay.”

  Roba put his hands on the dirt before him and began slowly to get to his feet. The guard seized his chance to say, “They don’t copulate any more, sir. Only among themselves, each cageful, as a way of passing time.”

  “Stay with you, Father? Stay with you as Grandfather stayed, in the bowels of the palace? No, I’m going back to the—”

  As he was speaking, the guard shuffled forward in supplicatory fashion and interposed himself between JandolAnganol and his son. The king struck him a blow which sent him staggering into a bush. The captives began a great to-do, hammering on their bars.

  The king smiled, or at least showed his teeth, as he attempted to approach his son. Roba backed away. “You’ll never understand what your grandfather did to me. You’ll never understand his power over me—then—now—perhaps for ever—because I have no power over you. I could succeed only by putting him away.”

  “Prisons flow like glaciers in your blood. I’m going to be a Madi, or a frog. I refuse to be human as long as you claim that title.”

  “Rob, don’t be so cruel. See sense. I—am about to—have to—marry a Madi girl soon. That’s why I came to inspect the Madi here. Please stay with me.”

  “Trittom your Madi-slave woman! Count progeny! Measure, make notes! Write it down, suffer, lock up the fertile ones, and never forget that there is one running loose about Helliconia fit to send you to an eternal prison…”

  As he spoke, the youth was backing away, fingers trailing on the ground. Then he turned and darted away into the bushes. A moment later, the king spied his figure climbing over the quarry cliff. Then he was gone.

  The king went and leaned against the trunk of a tree, closing his eyes.

  It was the whimpering of the guard which roused him. He went over to where the old man sprawled, and assisted him to his feet.

  “Sorry for that, sir, but perhaps a small slave, now I’m getting past it…”

  Rubbing his forehead with a weary gesture, JandolAnganol said, “You can answer some questions, slanje. Tell me, please, which way is it that Madi women prefer copulation? From the rear, like animals, or face to face like humans? Rushven would have told me.”

  The guard rubbed his hands on his tunic and laughed. “Oh, both ways, sir, to my observation, and I’ve seen it many times, working here with no help. But mainly from the rear, as do the Others. Some say as they mate for life, others as they are promiscuous, but cage life is different.”

  “Do the Madi sexes kiss each other on the lips like humans?”

  “I’ve not seen that, sir, no. Only humans.”

  “Do they lick genitals before congress?”

  “That is prevalent in all cages, sir. A lot of licking. Licking and sucking mostly, I’d say, very dirty.”

  “Thank you. Now you may release the prisoners. They have served their purpose. Set them free.”

  He left the quarry with a slow step, one hand on his sword, one on his brow.

  Soft bars of shadow cast by the rajabarals moved across him as he headed back for the palace. Freyr was near to setting. The sky was yellow. Concentric haze aurioles of brown and orange, created by volcanic dust particles, encompassed the sun. It lay near the horizon like a pearl in a corrupt oyster. And the king said to Lapwing, “I can’t trust him. He’s wild, just as I was. I love him but I’d be better advised to kill him. If he had the sense to work with his mother forming an alliance in the scritina against me, I’d be finished… I love her, but I’d be better advised to kill her, too…”

  The hoxney made no response. It moved towards the sunset with no ambition but to get home.

  The king became aware of the vileness of his own thoughts.

  Looking up at the flaring sky, he saw there the evil his religion taught him to see. “I must chasten myself,” he said. “Aid me, O All-Powerful One!”

  He stuck a spur in Lapwing’s flank. He would go and see the First Phagorian Guard, They raised no difficult moral issues. With them he felt at peace.

  The brown aureoles triumphed over the yellow. As Freyr disappeared, the oyster became ashen from its extremities inwards, changing minute by minute as the Batalix sunlight caught it. Its beauty lost, it became just a cloud formation among jumbled cloud as Batalix itself sloped westward. Akhanaba could be saying—and in no enigmatic fashion—that the whole complex scheme of things was about to end.

  JandolAnganol returned to his silent palace, to find there an envoy from the Holy Pannovalan Empire. Alam Esomberr, all smiles, awaited his pleasure.

  His bill of divorcement had arrived at last. He had but to present it to the queen of queens and he would be free to marry his Madi princess.

  XVI

  The Man Who Mined a Glacier

  Summer of the small year had yielded to autumn in the southern hemisphere. The monsoons were gathering along the coasts of Hespagorat.

  While on the pleasant northern coast of the Sea of Eagles Queen MyrdemInggala swam in the blue waters with her dolphins, on the dull southern coast of that same sea, where it merged with the waters of the Scimitar Sea, the Avernian prize-winner, Billy Xiao Pin, lay dying.

  The port of Lordryardry was sheltered from open sea by the Lordry islands, two dozen in number, some of which were used as whaling stations. On these islands, and along the low-lying coasts of Hespagorat, marine iguanas lived in dense colonies. Wattled, warted, armoured, these inoffensive beasts grew to twenty feet in length and were sometimes to be seen swimming out to sea. Billy had observed them as the Ice Captain’s Lordryardry Lady brought him to Dimariam.

  Ashore, the beasts swarmed over rocks and marshes and each other. Something in their slothful movements and sudden scurries marked them out as conspirators with the soggy weather which closed in on the Dimariamian shores at this time of small year; where cold air flowed northwards from the polar ice cap to meet the warm air above the oceans, banks of fog formed, enveloping everything in humid overcast.

  Lordryardry was a small port of eleven thousand people. It owed its existence almost entirely to the enterprise of the Muntras family. One of its noteworthy features was that it lay at a latitude of 36.5° South, a degree and a half outside the wide tropical zone. Only eighteen and a half degrees farther south lay the polar circle. Beyond that circle, in the realms of eternal ice, Freyr was never to be seen during the long centuries of summer. In the Great Winter, Freyr would reappear, to remain for many lifetimes dominating the vacant world of the pole.

  This Billy was told as he was driven by a traditional sledge from the ship to the ice captain’s house. Krillio Muntras recounted such facts with pride, though he fell silent as his home drew near.

  The room of the house to which Billy was carried was white. Its windows were framed with white curtains. As he lay locked in illness, Billy could look through trees, over town roofs, to a prospect of white mist. In that mist, an occasional mast loomed.

  Billy knew he was shortly to embark on another mysterious journey. Before his ship sailed, he was tended by Muntras’s self-effacing wife, Eivi, and by his formidable married daughter, Immya. Immya, he was told, had a high standing in the community as a healer.

  After a day’s rest, Eivi’s and Immya’s ministrations took effect, or else Billy enjoyed a remission. The encroaching stiffness partially left him. Immya wrapped him in blankets and helped him into the sledge. Four
giant horned dogs, asokins, were harnessed up, and the family drove Billy inland to see the famous Lordryardry Glacier.

  The Lordryardry Glacier had carved itself a bed between two hills. The leading face of the glacier fell into a lake which drained into the sea.

  Billy observed that Krillio Muntras’s manner changed subtly in the presence of his daughter. They were affectionate together, but the respect he showed Immya was not entirely matched by the respect in which she held him—so Billy judged, going less by the way they spoke than by the way Muntras held his backbone and drew in his broad stomach in Immya’s presence, as if he felt he must contain himself when her sharp eyes were on him.

  Muntras began to describe the workings at the glacier face. When Immya modestly prompted him on the number of men working there, he asked her without rancour to give the account herself. Which she did. Div stood behind his father and his sister, scowling; though he, as the son, was to inherit the ice company, he had nothing to contribute to the narrative, and soon slunk off.

  Immya was not only the chief medical practitioner of Lordryardry; she was married to the chief lawyer of the town the Muntras clan had founded. Her husband, referred to always as Lawyer in Billy’s presence, as if that had been his baptismal name, stood as the spokesman and justice of the town against the capital, Oiishat. Oiishat lay to the west, on the frontier between Dimariam and Iskahandi. Oiishat cast envious eyes on the prosperous new Lordryardry, and devised ways of securing some of its wealth by taxation—schemes which Lawyer constantly foiled.

  Lawyer also foiled Muntras’s local laws, which had been improvised to benefit the Muntras family rather than their workers. So Krillio was of two minds about his son-in-law.

  Krillio’s wife evidently felt differently. She would hear no complaint about her daughter or the Lawyer. Though submissive, she was impatient with Div, whose behaviour—adversely affected by his mother’s dislike—became loutish in the home. “You should reconsider,” she told Muntras one day, when they were both standing by Billy’s bedside, after another example of Div’s awfulness. “Hand over the company to Immya and Lawyer, and then everything will prosper. Under Div, it will be in ruin within three years. That girl has a proper grasp of things.”

  Certainly, Immya had a grasp of things Hespagoratean. She had never ventured beyond the confines of the continent on which she was born, despite frequent opportunities to do so, as if she preferred to have her front doorstep guarded by the myriad scaley watchdogs which patrolled the shores of Dimariam. But locked in her broad bosom were metaphorical maps, histories, and compass bearings of the southern continent.

  Immya Muntras had a good plain square face built like her father’s, a face capable of confronting glaciers. She stood foursquare to the ice face as she delivered her account of the family trade, in which she took great pride.

  At this spot, they were far enough inland to be free of the coastal fog. The great wall of ice to which Muntras owed his wealth glittered in the sun. Where the glacier lay more distant, Batalix created in its hollows caverns of sapphire. Even its reflection in the lake at its foot gave off diamond glints.

  The air was hard, fresh, and alive. Birds skimmed over the lake surface. Where the pure waters yielded to banks of blue flowers, insects were busy in their thousands.

  A butterfly with a head shaped like a man’s thumb settled on the three-faced watch on Billy’s wrist. He stared at it with uncertain gaze, trying to interpret the meaning of the creature.

  Things roared overhead, he knew not what. He could hardly look up. The virus was in his hypothalamus, in his brain stem. It would, multiply irresistibly; no poultice could check it. Soon he would be locked immobile, like a phagor ancestor in tether.

  He felt no regret. Regret only for the butterfly, leaving his hand and making off. In order to live a real life, of a kind his Advisor would not understand, sacrifices were called for. He had glimpsed the queen of queens. He had lain with beautiful Abathy. Even now, incapacitated, he could see distant bays of glacier where the light, conjuring powder- and thunder-blues, made of the ice more a colour than a substance. The excellence of nature had been tasted. Of course it had a price.

  And Immya was explaining about the great blocks of ice which rattled overhead. At the ice face, men worked on scaffolding, cleaving the ice with saws and axes. They were Lordryardry’s glacier miners. As the blocks fell off, they fell into an open funnel, and from there slipped into the shoot. The shoot, timber-built, was constructed with sufficient slope to keep the blocks of ice moving.

  Great tombstones of ice travelled slowly down the shoot, which rumbled in every section as they passed over its stressed wooden legs. The tombstones made their way along two miles of shoot to the docks of Lordryardry.

  At the docks, the tombstones were sawn into smaller blocks, and loaded into the reed-insulated hulls of the ships of the company’s fleet.

  So the snows which had once fallen in the polar regions south of 55°, to be compressed and squeezed sluggishly down into the narrow temperate zone, were made to serve the useful purpose of cooling those who lived in far tropics. Here was where nature stopped and Captain Krillio Muntras took over.

  “Please take me home,” Billy said.

  Immya’s ready flow of figures ceased. Her tale of tonnages, the length of various voyages, the demand-related costings upon which their little empire was founded; these stopped. She sighed and said something to her father, but a fresh ice-load rumbling overhead erased her words. Then the lines of her face relaxed and she smiled.

  “We’d better take Billy home,” she said.

  “I saw it,” he said indistinctly. “I saw it.”

  And when almost half a Great Year had passed, when Helliconia and its sister planets had journeyed far from Freyr and were once again facing the slow furies of another winter, Billy’s huddled form in the old wooden sledge was seen by millions of people on distant Earth.

  Billy’s presence on Helliconia represented an infringement of terrestrial orders. Those orders had stated that no human being was to land on Helliconia and disrupt the web of its cultures.

  Those orders had been formulated over three thousand years earlier. In terms of cultural history, three thousand years was a long period of time. Since then, understanding had deepened—thanks largely to an intensive study of Helliconia undertaken by most of the population. There was a much better grasp of the unity—and therefore the strength—of planetary biospheres.

  Billy had entered the planetary biosphere and had become part of it. The terrestrials saw no conflict. Billy’s elements comprised the atoms of dead star matter no different from the elements comprising Muntras or MyrdemInggala. His death would represent a final union with the planet, a merging without dissolution. Billy was mortal. The atoms of which he was constituted were indestructible.

  There would be a measured sorrow for the winking out of another human consciousness, for the loss of another identity, unique, irreplaceable; but that was hardly a cause for tears on Earth.

  The tears were shed long before that on the Avernus. Billy was their drama, their proof that existence existed, that they themselves had the ancient power of biological organisms to be moved in response to the environment. Tears and cheers were the order of the day.

  The Pin family, in particular, abandoned their usual passivity and threw a small family storm. Rose Yi Pin, by turns laughing and howling, was the centre of passionate attention. She had a marvellous time. The Advisor was mortified.

  The fresh air visited Billy’s body and bathed his lungs. It allowed him to see every detail of the flashing world. But its vividness, its sounds, were too much. He shut his eyes. When he managed to open them again, the asokins were moving briskly, the sledge bumped, and coastal pallors had begun to veil the view.

  To compensate for earlier humiliations, Div Muntras insisted on driving the sledge. He threw the reins over his right shoulder, gripping them under his left arm while clutching the sledge handle with his left hand. In his righ
t hand he flourished a whip, which he cracked above the asokins.

  “Go steady, Div, lad,” Muntras growled.

  As he spoke, the sledge struck a hummock of coarse grass and overturned. They were travelling under the shoot, where the ground was marshy. Muntras landed on his hands and knees. He snatched up the reins, looking blackly at his son but saying nothing. Immya, forming her mouth into the shape of a stretcher, straightened the sledge and lifted Billy back into it. Her silence was more expressive than words.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” said Div, pretending to have hurt his wrist. His father took up the reins and silently motioned his son round to the back runners. They then proceeded at a sedate pace home.

  The rambling Muntras house was built on one floor only. That floor was on many levels connected by steps or short flights of stairs, owing to the rocky terrain. Beyond the room in which Muntras and Immya placed Billy was the courtyard in which Muntras paid his workers every tenner.

  The courtyard was ornamented with smooth boulders, carved from polar mountains which no human had ever seen and delivered to the coast via the glaciers. Compressed into the striations of each stone was a past chthonic history everyone in Lordryardry was too busy to decipher—though electronic eyes aboard the Avernus had done so. Beside each boulder grew tall trees whose trunks forked close to the ground. Billy could see these trees from his couch.

  Muntras’s wife, Eivi, greeted them on their return and fussed round her husband, as now she fussed about Billy. He was glad when she left him alone in the bare wooden room, to stare out at the bare outlines of the trees. His eyesight became fixed. The slow madness crept on him, moving his limbs, twisting his arms outward until they stretched above his head as rigidly as the wooden branches outside.

  Div entered the room. The lad came in cautiously, pushing the door shut behind him and moving quickly to Billy’s side. He stared down wide-eyed at Billy in his locked posture. The hand of Billy’s left arm was bent back on itself, so that the knuckles almost touched the forearm and his watch cut into his skin.