Helliconia Winter

by neetha Napew

  "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 Helliconia. 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 permanent 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 JandolAnganol. 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 stories 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.

  As the years passed, she told the story to her growing son.

  "This naughty King JandolAnganol did a great wrong in the country where your mother was born. He was a religious man, yet he killed his religion. It was a terrible paradox under which he found it hard to live. So he came to Kharnabhar and served in the Wheel for the full ten small years, as now does the one who is your father.

  "JandolAnganol left two queens behind him to come here. He must have been very wicked, though the Sibornalese think him holy.

  "After he emerged from the Wheel, he was joined by the Dimariam woman I told you about. Like me, she was a doctor. Well, she seems to have been other things besides, including a trader of some sort. Her name was Immya Muntras, and she, feeling the call of religion, sought out the king. Perhaps she comforted his old age. She stood by him. That's no ill thing.

  "Muntras possessed learning which she thought precious. See, here is where she wrote it all down, long ago, during the Great Summer, when people thought the world was going to end, just as they do now.

  "This lady Muntras had some information from a man who arrived in Oldorando from another world. It sounds strange, but I have seen so many amazing things in my life that I believe anything. Lady Muntras's bones now lie in the antechapel, beside those of the king. Here are her papers.

  "What she learned from the man from another world concerned the nature of the plague. She was told by the strange man that the Fat Death was necessary, that it brought to those who survived a metamorphosis, a change in bodily metabolism which would enable them best to survive the winter. Without that metamorphosis, humans cannot hope to live through the heart of the Weyr-Winter.

  "The plague is carried by ticks which live on phagors and transfer to men and women. The bite of the tick gives you plague. The plague brings metamorphosis. So you see that man cannot survive the Weyr-Winter without phagors.

  "This knowledge the lady Muntras tried to teach in Kharnabhar, centuries past. Yet still they are killing phagors, and the State does everything in its power to keep the plague at bay. It would be better to improve medicine, so that more people who caught the plague could survive."

  So she used to talk, scanning her boy's face in the semidarkness.

  The boy listened. Then he went to play among the treasures left in the chests which had once belonged to the wicked king.

  One evening, as he was playing and his mother reading by the firelight, there came a knocking at the door of the chapel.

  Like the slow seasons, the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar always completed its revolutions.

  For Luterin Shokerandit, the Wheel at last came full circle. The cell that had been his habitation returned to the opening. Only a wall 0.64 metres thick separated it from the cell ahead, into which a volunteer was even then stepping, to commence ten years in the darkness, rowing Helliconia towards the light.

  There were guards waiting in the gloom. They helped him from his place of confinement. Instead of releasing him, they took him slowly up a winding side stair. The light grew steadily brighter; he closed his eyes and gasped.

  They took him into a small room in the monastery of Bambekk. For a while he was left alone.

  Two female slaves came, regarding him out of the corner of their eyes. They were followed by male slaves, bearing a bath and hot water, a silver looking glass, towels and shaving equipment, fresh clothes.

  "These are by courtesy of the Keeper of the Wheel," said one of the women. " 'Tisn't every wheeler gets this treatment, be sure of that."

  As the scent of hot water and herbs reached him, Luterin realised how he stank, how the methaney odours of the Wheel clung to him. He allowed the women to strip off his ragged furs. They led him to the bath. He lay glorying in the sensation as they washed his limbs. Every smallest event threatened to overwhelm him. He had been as if dead.

  He was powdered and dried and dressed in the thick new clothes.

  They led him to the window to peer out, although the light at first almost blinded him.

  He was looking down on the village of Kharnabhar from a great height. He could see houses buried up to their roofs in snow. The only things that moved were a sledge pulled by three yelk and two birds circling in the sky overhead, creating that eternal spectre of the wheel.

  Visibility was good. A snowstorm was dying, and clouds blew away to the south, leaving pockets of undiluted blue sky. It was all too brilliant. He had to turn away, covering his eyes.

  "What's the date?" he asked one of the women.

  "Why, 'tis 1319, and tomorrow's Myrkwyr. Now, how about having that beard cut off and looking a few thousand years younger?"

  His beard had grown like a fungus in the dark. It was streaked with grey and hung to his navel.

  "Cut it off," he said. "I'm not yet twenty-four. I'm still young, aren't I?"

  "I've certainly heard of people being older," said the woman, advancing with the scissors.

  He was then to be taken before the Keeper of the Wheel.

  "This will be merely a formal audience," said the usher who escorted him through the labyrinth of the monastery. Luterin had little to say. The new impressions crowding in were almost more than he could receive; he could not help thinking how he had once regarded himself as destined to be Keeper.

  He made no response when eventually he was left at one end of what seemed to him an immense chamber. The Keeper sat at the far end on a wooden throne, flanked by two boys in ecclesiastical garb. The dignitary beckoned Luterin to approach.

  He stepped gingerly through the lighted space, awed by the number of paces it required to reach the dais.

  The Keeper was an enormous man who had draped himself in a purple gown. His face seemed about to burst. Like his gown, it was purple, and mottled with veins climbing the cheeks and nose like vines. His eyes were watery, his mouth moist. Luterin had forgotten there were such faces, and studied it as an object of curiosity while it studied him.

  "Bow," hissed one of the attendant children, so he bowed.

  The Keeper spoke in a throttled kind of voice. "You are back among us, Luterin Shokerandit. Throughout the last ten years, you have been under the Church's care - otherwise you would probably have been poisoned by your enemies, in revenge for your act of patricide."

  "Who are my enemies?"

  The watery eyes were squeezed between folds of lid. "Oh, the slayer of the Oligarch has enemies everywhere, official and unofficial. But they were mainly the Church'
s enemies too. We shall continue to do what we can for you. There is a private feeling that ... we owe you something." He laughed. "We could help you to leave Kharnabhar."

  "I have no wish to leave Kharnabhar. It's my home." The watery eyes watched his mouth rather than his eyes when he spoke.

  "You may change your mind. Now, you must report to the Master of Kharnabhar. Once, if you remember, the offices of Master and Keeper of the Wheel were combined. With the schism between Church and State, the two offices are separate."

  "Sir, may I ask a question?"

  "Ask it."

  "There's much to understand ... Does the Church hold me to be saint or sinner?"

  The Keeper endeavoured to clear his throat. "The Church cannot condone patricide, so I suppose that officially you are a sinner. How could it be otherwise? You might have worked that out, I would have thought, during your ten years below... However, personally, speaking ex officio ... I'd say you rid the world of a villain, and I regard you as a saint." He laughed.

  So this must be an unofficial enemy, thought Luterin. He bowed and turned to walk away when the Keeper called him back.

  The Keeper heaved himself to his feet. "You don't recognise me? I'm Wheel-Keeper Ebstok Esikananzi. Ebstok - an old friend. You once had hopes of marrying my daughter, Insil. As you see, I have risen to a post of distinction."

  "If my father had lived, you would never have become Keeper."

  "Who's to blame for that? You be grateful that I'm grateful."

  "Thank you, sir," said Luterin, and left the august presence, preoccupied by the remark regarding Insil.

  He had no idea where he was supposed to go to report to the Master of Kharnabhar. But Keeper Esikananzi had arranged everything. A liveried slave awaited Luterin with a sledge, with furs to protect him from the cold.

  The speed of the sledge overwhelmed him, and the jingle of the animals' harness bells. As soon as the vehicle started to move, he closed his eyes and held tight. There were voices like birds crying, and the song of the runners on the ice, reminding him of something - he knew not what.