by Brian Aldiss
There the tick clings, resisting dislodgement, to drop off only when gorged – unless the questing beak of a cowbird discovers it and gobbles it down as a delicacy.
Multitudinous Embruddocks for the helico virus are provided in the cells of the tick. And there the virus tarries, inert, awaiting a certain harmonic which will draw it into the orchestra of life, although it is sparked to quasi-activity if female phagor hosts are on oestrus. Only twice in the cycle of the great Helliconian year does that harmonic trigger the active phase of the virus.
A chain of events then operates that will eventually decide the fate of whole nations. Wutra, the philosophical might claim, is a helical virus.
Obedient to the external signal, the virus streams forth from the cells of the tick, down its mouthparts, and into the body of a human host, where it makes its way along the bloodstream. As if tracing its own air-octaves, the invading force moves through the body until it reaches its new host’s brain stem and flows into the hypothalamus, causing severe inflammation of the brain, and frequently death.
Once in the hypothalamus, that ancient sector of awareness, the seat of rage and lust, the virus replicates itself with a reproductive fury which may be likened to a storm over the Nktryhk.
The invasion of the human cell represents an incursion of one genetic system into the precincts of another; the invaded cell capitulates and becomes virtually a new biological unit, complete with its own natural history, much as a city may change hands in a prolonged war, belonging first to one side, then to the other.
Invasion, furious replication: then the outward signs of those events. The victim manifests that manic stiffening and tightening in the sinews witnessed by Laintal Ay at the hospice – and many of his kind before him. On the whole, those who witnessed it left no record, for obvious reasons.
These facts had been established by patient observation and careful deduction. The scholarly families of the Avernus were trained in such matters, and supported by superb instrumentation. The disability of being unable to visit the planetary surface was thus to some extent overcome.
But their imprisonment on the Avernus had drawbacks other than the obvious psychological ones. Firsthand verification of hypotheses was not possible.
Their understanding of the incursions of the so-called bone fever had recently become confused by further knowledge. The situation was again open to debate. For the Pin family had pointed out that it was during the time of the twenty eclipses and the incursions of the virus when – in Oldorando at least – a major change of human diet took place. Rathel had gone out of fashion. The brassimip crop, full of vitamins, which had sustained the community throughout centuries of winter, had fallen from general favour. Was it, the Pins suggested, that this dietary change rendered the humans more susceptible to the bite of the tick, or to the tick’s parasite, the virus? The matter was under discussion – often heated. Once more, there were hotheads who voted for an illegal expedition down to the Helliconian surface, despite the dangers.
*
Not all who contracted bone fever died. It was noticeable that those stricken fell in different ways. Some people were aware of the approach of illness, and had time to suffer apprehension or make their peace with Wutra, according to their disposition; others collapsed in the midst of an activity, unwarned – while talking to friends, when walking in the fields, even when lying in love’s embrace. Neither gradual nor sudden succumbing was any warrant for survival. However they sickened, only half recovered. For the rest, it was a lucky corpse – like the patients from Ma Scantiom’s hospice – which found a shallow grave; many in the general terror that assailed any stricken community, were left as carrion, while whole populations fled from their homes towards a pestilence that would embrace them on the road.
So it had been as long as there had been human beings on Helliconia. The survivors of the pandemic lost a third of their normal body weight – although ‘normal’ was here a relative term. They never regained the lost weight, nor did their children, nor their children’s children. Spring had arrived at last, summer was ahead – when adaptation would lie in ectomorphism. The leaner shape persisted throughout many generations, though gradually with less marked effect as subcutaneous fat again built up, the disease remaining latent, carried in the nerve cells of the survivors.
This status quo continued until late summer of the Great Year. Then the Fat Death struck.
As if in compensation for such extreme seasonal dimorphic contrasts, the two sexes on Helliconia were similar in stature and in body and brain weight. Both sexes when adult weighed on average about twelve staynes, to use the old Oldorandan measure. If they lived through bone fever, they would emerge as a lanky eight staynes or less. The next generation adjusted to its new skeletal appearance. Succeeding generations then slowly increased average body weight – until the ravages of the more obscene Fat Death brought about another dramatic change.
Aoz Roon was one who survived the first onslaught of this cycle of the pandemic. After him, many hundreds of thousands were destined to suffer and die or pull through. Some, hidden in remote corners of the world wilderness, might entirely escape the plague. But their descendants would be disadvantaged in a new world, would be treated as freaks, would stand small chance of continuance. The two great diseases, to which the phagor tick played vector, were in reality one disease: and that one disease, that Shiva of diseases, that destroyer and saviour, carried on its bloodied sword survival for mankind in the extravagant conditions of the planet.
Twice in two and a half thousand Earth years, Helliconian humanity had to go through the eye of the needle plied by the phagor tick. It was the price of their survival, of their continued development. From the carnage, from the apparent disharmony, came an underlying harmony – as if, among the screams of agony, a reassurance rose from the deepest springs of being to murmur that all was ineffably well.
Only those who could believe would believe such reassurance.
When the sound of cracking muscle faded, in floated a strange watery music. A principle of fluidity established itself over the barrens of pain, manifest first of all to Aoz Roon’s hearing. All that presented itself to his returning vision was a collection of rounded shapes, speckled, striated, or of dull uniform hue. They had no meaning, nor did he seek for meaning. He simply remained where he was, back arched, mouth open, waiting until his eyeballs ceased jerking and he could focus his sight.
The liquid harmonies helped his return to awareness. Although he was unable to coordinate his body, he became conscious that his arms were in some fashion imprisoned. Random thoughts visited him. He saw deer running, himself running, leaping, striking; a woman laughed, he was astride, sunlight crackled through head-high trees. His muscles gave sympathetic spasms, like those of an old dog dreaming by a camp-fire.
The rounded shapes resolved themselves into boulders. He was wedged among them, as if himself inorganic. A young tree, uprooted far up river and stripped of its bark, was inextricably mingled with boulders and grit; he lay against it, similarly entwined, hands lost somewhere far above his skull.
With painful care, he drew his limbs together. He sat up after a while, arms resting on knees, and looked long at a teeming river. Deep pleasure welled up in him as he listened to its sound. He crawled forward on hands and knees, feeling his skins flap loose about his body, to a strip of beach no wider than his hand. He gazed with vacant gratitude at the ceaseless flood. Night came. He lay with his face on pebbles.
Morning came. The light of two suns struck down upon him. He became warm. He stood up, steadying himself against an upthrust branch.
He turned his shaggy head, delighted by the ease with which the slight movement was accomplished. A few yards away, separated by narrow frothing water, the phagor stood watching him.
‘Zo you come alive again,’ it said.
Back through years and cycles now remote in antiquity, it had been the custom in many parts of Helliconia, and in the continent of Campannlat in partic
ular, to kill the king of any tribe who showed signs of age. Both criteria and mode of despatch had differed with different tribes. Though kings were regarded as set down on earth by Akha or Wutra, their lives were abruptly terminated. Once he showed grey hair, or became unable to sever a man’s head from his body with one blow of an axe, or failed to satisfy the sexual desires of his wives, or could no longer jump a certain stream or chasm – or whatever the tribal criterion might be – then the king was strangled, handed a poison cup, or by other methods disposed of.
In the same way, members of tribes who exhibited symptoms of the killer diseases, who began to stretch and groan, were forthwith despatched. In earlier days, no mercy was known. Burning was often their fate, because of a belief in the healing power of flame, and with the sufferer to the pyre went his family and household. This savage propitiatory rite rarely served to ward off the onslaught of an epidemic, so that the screams of the burning often fell on ears that buzzed already with the first intimations of illness.
Through all adversity, the generations of humankind slowly grew more civilised. This was markedly so if we consider that the first token of civilisation – without which men cannot live together and desperate anarchy prevails – is sympathy for one’s fellows, imaginative warmth for their failings. Now hospitals had come into existence, and doctors, nurses, and priests – all bent on alleviating suffering rather than terminating it brutally.
Aoz Roon had recovered without such aid. Perhaps his rugged constitution helped him. Ignoring the phagor, he staggered to the margin of the grey flood, bent slowly, and scooped water in his two hands to sip.
Some of the water, escaping between his fingers, ran from his lips to his beard where, caught by a breeze, it blew to one side, splashing back into the greater flood, to be reabsorbed. Those neglected drops were observed in their fall. Millions of eyes caught the tiny splash. Millions of eyes followed every gesture of Aoz Roon as he stood, panting with wet mouth, on his narrow island.
Ranked monitors on the Earth Observation Station kept many things under close surveillance, including the Lord of Embruddock. It was the duty of the Avernus to transmit all signals received from the Helliconian surface back to the Helliconian Institute.
The Helliconian Institute’s receiver was situated on Pluto’s moon, Charon, on the extreme margins of the solar system. Much of its financial support came from its Eductainment Channel, through which a continuous saga of Helliconian events was beamed to audiences on Earth and the other solar planets. Vast auditoria stood like conch shells upended in sand in every province; each was capable of housing ten thousands of people. Their peaked domes aspired towards the skies from which the Eductainment Channel was beamed.
On occasions, these auditoria remained almost deserted for years at a time. Then, responding to some new development on the distant planet, audiences would again increase. People came like pilgrims. Helliconia was Earth’s last great art form. Nobody on Earth, from its rulers to its sweepers, was unfamiliar with aspects of Helliconian life. The names of Aoz Roon, Shay Tal, Vry, and Laintal Ay were on everyone’s lips. Since terrestrial gods died, new figures had arrived to take their place.
Audiences received Aoz Roon as a contemporary, removed only to another sphere, like a platonic ideal casting its shadow on the vast cave of the auditorium. Those audiences were again filling the auditoria to capacity. They entered on sandalled feet. Rumours of the forthcoming plague, of the eclipse, spread round Earth almost as they spread round Oldorando, drawing in thousands whose lives were transformed by their wonder and concern for Helliconia.
A few of those pilgrims who watched reflected on the paradox imposed on them by the size of the universe. The eight learned families on the Avernus lived at the same time as the Helliconians. Their lives were contemporaneous in every sense, though the helico virus decreed that they were sundered indefinitely from the Earth-like world they studied.
Yet how much more sundered were the eight families from that distant world they regarded as their native planet! They transmitted signals back to an Earth where not one single auditorium had been constructed, where even the planners of the auditoria were as yet unborn. The signals took a thousand years to cross the compartments of space between the two systems. In that millennium it was not Helliconia alone which changed.
And those who now sat wordless in the auditoria saw the immense figure of Aoz Roon on the holoscreens, saw him sip water which blew from his lips to merge with the flood below, as it was a thousand years ago, a thousand light-years away.
The imprisoned light they watched, even the life they lived, was a technological miracle, a physical construct. And only a metaphysician with omnipresent understanding could say which lived at the moment the drips returned to the river: Aoz Roon or his audiences. Yet it required no great sophistry to deduce that, despite ambiguities imposed by limitations of vision, macrocosm and microcosm were interdependent, laced together by such phenomena as the helico virus, whose effects were ultimately universal, though perceptible only to the phenomenon of consciousness, the eye of the needle through which the macrocosm and microcosm became actual unity. Understanding on a divine scale might resolve the compartments between the infinite orders of being; it was human understanding which brought past and present into their cheek-by-jowl merging.
Imagination functioned; the virus was merely a function.
The two yelk trotted at a brisk rate, necks held horizontally. Their nostrils dilated, for they had been trotting for some while. Sweat shone on their flanks.
Their two riders wore high turn-down boots and long cloaks made of a grey cloth. Their faces were keen and grey, tufted with small beards on their chins. Nobody would have mistaken them for anything but Sibornalans.
The pebbly path they rode was shadowed by a shoulder of mountain. The regular plud-plud-plud of the yelk’s hoofs carried out over an expanse of wilderness threaded with trees and rivers.
The men were scouts belonging to the forces of the warrior-priest, Festibariyatid. They enjoyed their ride, breathing the fresh air, rarely exchanging words, and always keeping a sharp eye for enemies.
Behind them down the trail other Sibornalans followed on foot, leading a group of captured protognostics.
The trail wound down to a river, beyond which the land rose in a rocky promontory. Its sloping cliffs were formed of broken rock strata, displaced almost vertically and studded with stubby trees. Here was the settlement ruled over by Festibariyatid.
The scouts forded the river at a shallow place. Assaying the cliffs, the yelk picked their way cautiously between the strata; they were northern plains animals, and not entirely happy in mountainous ground. They, and others like them, had been brought south with the annual incursion of colonists from the northern continent into Chalce and the regions bordering on Pannoval; hence the presence of yelk so far south.
The rear guard appeared along the trail. Its four members were armed with spears and escorted in their midst some luckless protognostics captured during their patrol. Among the captives, Cathkaarnit-he and Cathkaarnit-she plodded along, still scratching themselves despite weeks as prisoners on the move.
Encouraged by spear point, they waded across the shallow river and were forced to make their way up the cliff path, to the confines of which a scent of yelk still clung, past a sentry, and so to a settlement called New Ashkitosh.
To this ford, and to this perilous point, many weeks later, came Laintal Ay. He was a Laintal Ay that few even of his close friends would have recognised without hesitation. He had lost a third of his body weight, and was lean, skeletal even, with paler skin, with a different expression to his eyes. In particular – the finest of disguises because transparent – he moved his body in a new way. He had suffered and survived bone fever.
On leaving Oldorando, he had struck out to the northeast, across what was later known as Roon’s Moor, in the direction that Shay Tal and her cortege had taken. He wandered and lost the trail. The country he had known in his extreme
youth, when it was covered in white and showed an open face to the skies, had disappeared under a tangle of green.
What had been a solitude was now populated with danger. He was aware of restless movement, not only of harried animals, but of human, semihuman, and ancipital beings, all stirred up by the tide of the seasons. Hostile young faces peered through the bush at every turn. Every shrub had ears as well as leaves.
Gold was nervous in forest. Hoxneys were creatures of the wide open spaces. She grew more and more stubborn, until Laintal Ay dismounted, grumbling, and led the animal.
He found himself at last by a stone tower, to which he had climbed through a seemingly endless forest of birch and fern. He tied Gold to a tree before reconnoitring. All was quiet. He entered the hollow tower, where he rested, feeling ill. When he climbed to the top, he recognised his surroundings; the tower was one he had visited in his carefree wanderings, looking out to bare horizons.
Full of vexation and fatigue, he left the tower. He sank down wearily, stretched, and found himself unable to bring his arms down. Cramps racked him, a fever took him like a blow, and he arched over backwards in delirium, as if he planned to break his spine.
Small dark men and women emerged from hiding and regarded him, creeping stealthily nearer. They were protognostics of the Nondad tribe, hairy creatures who stood no higher than Laintal Ay’s waist. Their hands were eight-fingered, but concealed largely by the thick sandy hair that grew like cuffs from their wrists. Their faces resembled asokins, protruding muzzles giving them the same rather wistful appearance as the Madis.
Their language was a mingling of snorts, whistles, and clicks, in no way resembling Olonets, although a few transfusions from the old language had taken place. They consulted themselves, and finally decided to bear the Freyrian away, since his personal octave was good.