by Brian Aldiss
“In my studies—all destroyed by the great King JandolAnganol—I had noted that even phagors preserved one or two legends. They could hardly be expected to make sense. In particular, there is a legend which says Helliconia once had a sister body circling about it, just as Batalix circles about Freyr. This sister body flew away as Freyr arrived and as mankind was born. So the legend goes. And the name of the escaping body in Native is T’Sehn-Hrr.
“Why should ‘tennhrr’ and ‘T’Sehn-Hrr’ be virtually the same word? That was the question I asked myself.
“A gillot’s tennhrr occurs ten times in a small year—every six weeks. We may therefore assume that this heavenly eye or moon served as a timing mechanism for the periods. But did the moon ‘T’Sehn-Hrr’, supposing it existed, circle Helliconia once every six weeks? How to check on something which happened so long ago that human history has no record of it?
“The answer lay in Tatro’s story.
“Her story says that the silver eye in the sky opened and shut. Possibly that means it grew bigger or smaller, according to distance, as does Freyr. It became wide open or full ten times a year. That was it. Ten times again. The pieces of the puzzle fitted.
“You understand the unmistakable conclusion to which I was drawn?”
Gazing at his audience, SartoriIrvrash saw that indeed many of them did not understand. They waited politely for him to be done. He heard his voice rise to a shout.
“This world of ours once had a moon, a silver moon, which was lost at a time of some kind of disturbance in the heavens. It sailed away, we don’t as yet know how. The moon was called T’Sehn-Hrr—and T’Sehn-Hrr is a phagor name.”
He looked at his notes, he conferred briefly with Odi, as the listeners stirred. He resumed his discourse with a note of asperity in his voice.
“Why should the moon have only an ancipital name? Why is there no human record of this missing body? The answer leads us into the mazes and botherations of antiquity.
“For when I looked about, I found that missing moon. Not in the sky, but shining forth from our everyday speech. For how is our calendar divided? Eight days in a week, six weeks in a tenner, ten tenners in a year of four hundred and eighty days… We never question it. We never question why a tenner is called a tenner, because there are ten of them in a year.
“But that is not the whole truth. Our word ‘tenner’ commemorates the time when the silver eye was open and the moon was full. It does so because humanity adopted the phagor word ‘tennhrr’. ‘Tenner’ is ‘tennhrr’ is ‘T’Sehn-Hrr’.”
The murmurings from the crowd were louder. Sayren Stund was plainly uncomfortable. But SartoriIrvrash held up Tatro’s book and called for silence. So engrossed was he that he failed to see the trap opening before him.
“Hear the whole conclusion, my friends. There stands King JandolAnganol among you, and he must hear the truth as well—he who has so long encouraged the noxious ahumans to breed on his territories.”
But no one was interested in JandolAnganol at present. Their angry faces turned to SartoriIrvrash himself.
“The conclusion is clear, inescapable. The ancipital race, to which we can ascribe many of our human difficulties over the ages, is not a race of new invaders, like the Driats. No. It is an ancient race. It once covered Helliconia as flambreg cover the Circumpolar Regions.
“The phagors did not emerge out of the last Weyr-Winter, as the Sibornalese call it. No. That story is based on ignorance. The real story, the fairy story tells the truth. Phagors long preceded mankind.
“They were here on Helliconia before Freyr appeared—possibly long before. Mankind came later. Mankind depended on the phagors. Mankind learned language from the phagors and still uses phagor words. ‘Khmir’ is the Native word for ‘rut’. ‘Helliconia’ itself is an old ancipital term.”
JandolAnganol found his voice at last. The speech was such an onslaught on his religious sensibilities that he had stood as if in a trance, his mouth open, more resembling fish than eagle.
“Lies, heresy, blasphemy!” he shouted. The cry of blasphemy was taken up by other voices. But Sayren Stund had ordered his guard to see that JandolAnganol did not interrupt. Burly men closed in on him—to be met by JandolAnganol’s captains with drawn swords. A struggle broke out.
SartoriIrvrash raised his voice. “No, you see your glory diminished by the truth. Phagors preceded mankind. Phagors were the dominant race on our world, and probably treated our ancestors as animals until we rebelled against them.”
“Let’s hear him. Who dares say the man is wrong?” shrilled Queen Bathkaarnet-she. Her husband struck her in the mouth.
The hubbub from the audience rose. People were standing and shouting or kneeling to pray. Fresh guards ran to the scene, while some court ladies tried to escape. A fight had broken out round JandolAnganol. The first stone was thrown at SartoriIrvrash. Brandishing his fist, he continued to speak.
In that courtly crowd, now moved to fury, there was at least one cool observer, the envoy Alam Esomberr. He was detached from the human drama. Unable to be deeply moved by events, he could derive only amusement from their effects.
Those on Earth, distant in time and space, viewed the scene on King Sayren Stund’s lawn with less detachment. They knew that SartoriIrvrash spoke truth in general, even if his details were sometimes incorrect. They also knew that men did not love truth above all things, as he claimed. Truth had constantly to be fought for, for it was constantly being lost. Truth could sail away like a silver eye, never to be seen again.
When T’Sehn-Hrr sailed away, no human being had witnessed the event. Cosmologists on the Avernus and on Earth had reconstructed the event, and believed they understood it. In the great disruptions which had overtaken the system eight million Earth years previously, the gravitational forces of the star now called Freyr, with a mass 14.8 times that of the Sun, had wrenched T’Sehn-Hrr away from Helliconia’s pull.
Calculations indicated that T’Sehn-Hrr had a radius of 1252 km, against Helliconia’s 7723 km. Whether the satellite had been capable of supporting life was doubtful.
What was certain was that the events of that epoch had been so near catastrophic that they had remained etched in the eotemporal minds of the phagors. The sky had fallen in and no one had forgotten it.
More impressive to human minds was the way in which life on Helliconia had survived even the loss of its moon and the cosmological events which had caused that loss.
“Yes, I know. This sounds like sacrilege and I am sorry,” shouted SartoriIrvrash, as Odi moved close to him and the noise grew. “What is true should be said—and heard. Phagors were once the dominant race and will become so again if allowed to live. The experiments I conducted show, I believe, that we were animals. Genethlic divinities bred mankind from Others—Others who were ancipital pets before the upheaval. Mankind developed from Others as phagors developed from flambreg. As phagors developed from flambreg, they may again cover the earth one day. They are still waiting, wild, with kaidaws, in the High Nktryht, to descend in vengeance. They will wipe you out. Be warned then. Increase the drumbles. Intensify them. Ancipitals must be wiped out in the summer, when mankind is strong. When winter comes, the wild kaidaws return!
“My final word to you: We must not waste energy fighting each other. We should fight the older enemy—and those humans who protect them!”
But the humans were already fighting each other. The most religious members of the audience were often those, like Crispan Mornu, who were most in favour of drumbles. Here was an outsider offending their deepest religious principles, yet encouraging their violent instincts. The first one to throw a stone was attacked by his neighbour. Missiles were flying all over the garden. Soon the first dagger bit into flesh. A man ran among the flower beds, bleeding, and fell on his face. Women screamed. Fighting became more general as tempers and fears mounted. The awning collapsed.
As Alam Esomberr quietly left the scene, a miniature history of warfare was enacted on the p
alace lawn.
The chief cause of the commotion looked on aghast. It was beyond belief how people responded to scholarship. Holy idiots! A flying stone caught him in the mouth, and he collapsed.
Odi Jeseratabhar threw herself on SartoriIrvrash, crying and trying to ward off more stones.
She was dragged aside by a group of young monks, who punched her and then began to beat and kick the prostrate ex-chancellor. They at least refused to hear the name of Akhanaba defiled.
Crispan Mornu, in fear that matters were getting so out of hand, stepped forward and raised his arms, opening the black wings of his keedrant. It was slashed by a sword blade. Odi turned and ran; her garments were seized by a woman as she passed, and next moment she was struggling for her life amid a dozen angry women.
The clamour grew, a clamour that before the hour was out would spread into the city. Indeed the monks themselves spread the clamour. Before very long, they emerged bloodstained from the precincts of the palace, bearing above their heads the broken corpses of SartoriIrvrash and his Sibornalese companion, screaming as they went, “Blasphemy is dead! Long live Akhanaba!”
After the fighting in the garden, there was a rush to the streets, and more scuffles there, while the dead bodies were paraded down Wozen Avenue before finally being thrown to the dogs. Then a terrible quiet fell. Even the First Phagorian in the park seemed to be waiting.
Sayren Stund’s plan had terribly misfired.
SartoriIrvrash had intended merely to be revenged on his ex-master and to have the First Phagorian slain. That was his conscious aim. His love of knowledge for its own sake, his hatred of his fellow men, had betrayed him. He had failed to understand his audience. As a result, religious belief was set at an intolerable crisis—and that on the day before the Emperor of Holy Pannoval, the great C’Sarr Kilandar IX, was to arrive in Oldorando to bestow the unction of Akhanaba upon the faithful.
The most living words spring from dead martyrs. The monks unwittingly propagated the heresies of SartoriIrvrash, which found ready soil on which to grow. Within a few days, it would be the monks themselves who were under attack.
What had goaded the crowd into such fury was the aspect of his disclosures to which SartoriIrvrash himself was blind. His listeners would make a connection through their faith of which, with his limited sympathies, SartoriIrvrash was incapable.
They perceived that the rumour long suppressed by the Church now confronted them nakedly. All the world’s wisdom had always existed. Akhanaba was—and they themselves, and their fathers before them, had spent their lives in the worship of—a phagor. They prayed to the very beast they persecuted. “Ask not therefore if I am man or animal or stone,” said the scriptures. Now the comfortable enigma fell before the banal fact. The nature of their vaunted god, the god that held the political system together, was ancipital.
Which should the people now deny in order to make their lives tolerable? The intolerable truth? Or their intolerable religion?
Even the servants of the palace neglected their duties, asking each other, “Are we slaves of slaves?” Over their masters, a spiritual crisis prevailed. Those masters had taken it for granted that they were masters of their world. Suddenly the planet had become another place—a place where they were comparative newcomers, and lowly newcomers at that.
Heated debates took place. Many of the faithful threw out SartoriIrvrash’s hypothesis entirely, affecting to dismiss it as a tissue of lies. But, as ever in such situations, there were others who subscribed to it and added to it, and even claimed they had known the truth all along. The torment mounted.
Sayren Stund took only a practical interest in faith. It was not to him the living thing it was to JandolAnganol. He cared for it only as oil which smoothed his rule. Suddenly, everything was in question.
The hapless Oldorandan king spent the rest of the afternoon shut in his wife’s compartments, with preets twittering round his head. Every so often, he sent Bathkaarnet-she out to attempt to discover where Milua Tal might be, or received messengers who spoke of shops being broken into and a pitched fight being held in one of the oldest monasteries.
“We’ve no soldiers,” wept Sayren Stund.
“And no faith,” said his wife, with some complacency. “You need both to keep order in this terrible city.”
“And I suppose JandolAnganol has fled to escape being killed. He should have stayed for the execution of his son.”
That thought cheered him until the arrival of Crispan Mornu in the evening. The advisor’s aspect showed that he had unsuspected reserves of gauntness in him. He bowed to his sovereign and said, “If I diagnose the confused situation correctly, Your Majesty, the central issue has shifted away from JandolAnganol. It now focusses on our faith itself. We must hope that this afternoon’s intemperate speech will soon be forgotten. Men cannot long endure to think of themselves as lower than phagor brutes.
“This might be a convenient time to see that JandolAnganol is removed altogether from our attention. In canon law, he remains undivorced, and this morning we exposed his pretentions for what they are. He is a spent force.
Therefore, we should remove him from the city before he can speak to the Holy C’Sarr—perhaps through Envoy Esomberr or Ulbobeg. The C’Sarr is going to have to face a larger issue, the problem of a spiritual crisis. The question of your daughter’s marriage is also one we can settle, with suitable parties.”
“Oh, I know what you’re hinting at, Crispan,” chirped Bathkaarnet-she. Mornu, in his oblique way, had been reminding his majesty that Milua Tal should be speedily married to Prince Taynth Indredd of Pannoval; in that way, a tighter religious grip over Oldorando could be established.
Crispan Mornu gave no sign that he had heard the queen’s remark.
“What will you do, Your Majesty?”
“Oh, really, I think I’ll take a bath…”
Crispan Mornu brought an envelope from the recesses of his dark gown.
“This week’s report from Matrassyl suggests that various problems there may come shortly to a head. Unndreid the Hammer, the Scourge of Mordriat, has died in a fall from his hoxney during a skirmish. While he threatened Borlien, some unity was preserved within the capital. Now with Unndreid dead and JandolAnganol away…” He let the sentence dangle and smiled with a cutting edge. “Offer JandolAnganol a fast ship, Your Majesty—two if necessary—to get himself and his Phagorian Guard back down the Valvoral as speedily as possible. He may accept. Urge on him that we have here a situation we cannot control, and that his precious beasts must be removed or massacred. He prides himself on going with circumstances. We will see that he does go.”
Sayren Stund mopped his forehead and pondered the matter.
“JandolAnganol will never take such good advice from me. Let his friends put it to him.”
“His friends?”
“Yes, yes, his Pannovalan friends. Alam Esomberr and that contemptible Guaddl Ulbobeg. Have them summoned while I have myself voluptuously bathed.” Addressing his wife, he asked, “Do you wish to come and enjoy the voluptuous sight, my dear?”
The mob was in action. Its gathering could be traced from the Avernus. Oldorando was full of idle hands. Mischief was always welcome. They came out of taverns, where they had been harmlessly occupied. They locked up shops and picked up sticks. They rose from outside churches, where they had been begging. They wandered along from hostels and billets and holy places. Just to have a share in whatever was going on.
Some hrattock had said they were inferior to fuggies. Those were fighting words. Where was this hrattock? Maybe it was that slanje standing talking over there…
Many Avernian watchers regarded the brawling, and the pretext for brawling, with contempt. Others who reflected more deeply saw another aspect of it. However preposterous, however primitive the issue that SartoriIrvrash had raised, it had its parallels aboard the Earth Observation Station—and there no rioting would solve it.
“Belief: an impermanence.” So it said in the treati
se. “On the Prolongation of One Helliconian Season Beyond One Human Lifetime.” The belief in technological progress which had inspired the building of the Avernus had, over the generations, become a trap for those aboard it, just as the accretion of beliefs called Akhanabaism had become a trap.
Settled into an introspective quietism, those who ran the Avernus saw no escape from their trap. They feared the change they most needed. Patronizing though their attitude was to the unwashed who ran through Goose Street and Wozen Avenue, the unwashed had a hope denied those far above them. Hot with fight and drink, a man in Goose Street could use his fists or shout before the cathedral. He might be confused, but he did not endure the emptiness the advisors among the six families endured. Belief: an impermanence. It was true. Belief had largely died on the Avernus, leaving despair in its place.
Individuals despair, but not peoples. Even as the elders looked down on, and transmitted wearily back to Earth, scenes of confusion which seemed to reflect their own futility, another faction was taking bold shape on the station.
That faction had already named itself the Aganippers. Its members were young and reckless. They knew there was no chance for them to return to Earth or—as the recent example of Billy Xiao Pin had effectively demonstrated—to live on Helliconia. But on Aganip there was a chance for them. Avoiding the ever watching lenses, they accumulated their stores and marked out a shuttle they could appropriate which would transport them to the empty planet. In their hearts was a hope as bright as any to be found in Goose Street.
The evening grew slightly cooler. There was another earth tremor, but it passed almost unnoticed among the general excitements.