by Brian Aldiss
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 recognised 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 realised 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 enorm
ous 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 reinforced 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 link-ships, 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 modernised. 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 poor crazed Roba wandering in the wilderness, were consumed by envy of his freedom.
The intermittent arrival of link-ships merely emphasised 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 Helliconia.
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 ritualised 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.
The Chancellor of Borlien, SartoriIrvrash, went to his musty room and smoked a veronikane, concealing his anger from the king.
This occasion would lead to ill things. He had not arranged it. The king had not consulted him.
Being a solitary man, SartoriIrvrash conducted a solitary kind of diplomacy. His inward belief was that Borlien should not be drawn further into the orbit of powerful Pannoval by an alliance with it or with Oldorando. The three countries were already united by a common religion which SartoriIrvrash, as a scholar, did not share.
There had been centuries when Borlien was dominated by Oldorando. The chancellor did not want to see them return. He understood better than most how backward Borlien was; but falling under Pannoval’s power would not cure that backwardness. The king thought otherwise, and his religious advisors encouraged him so to think.
The chancellor had introduced strict laws into Matrassyl to govern the comings and goings of foreigners. Perhaps his solitariness included a touch of xenophobia; for he banned Madis from the city, while no foreign diplomat was allowed to enjoy sexual intercourse with a Matrassylan woman, on pain of death. He would have introduced laws against phagors had not the king flatly intervened.
SartoriIrvrash sighed. He desired only to pursue his studies. He detested the way power had been thrust upon him; in consequence, he became a tyrant in petty ways, hoping to steel himself to be bold when the stakes were high. Uncomfortable wielding the power he had, he wished for total power.
Then they would not be in this present dangerous situation, where fifty or more foreigners could lord it in the palace as they liked. He knew with cold certainty that the king intended to bring in change and that a drama was in store which would affect the reasonable tenor of his life. His wife had called him unfeeling; SartoriIrvrash knew it was truer to say that his emotions centred round his work.
He hunched his shoulders in a characte
ristic way; possibly the habit made him look more formidable than he was. His thirty-seven years – thirty-seven years and five tenners, in the precise way the Campannlatians measured age – had told on him, wrinkling his face round his nose and whiskers to make him resemble an intelligent vole.
‘You love your king and your fellow men,’ he instructed himself, and left the refuge of his chambers.
Like many similar strongholds, the palace was an accumulation of old and new. There had been forts in the caves under the Matrassyl rock during the last great winter. It grew or shrank, became stronghold or pleasure dome, according to the fortunes of Borlien.
The distinguished personages from Pannoval were disturbed by Matrassyl, where phagors were allowed to walk in the street without molestation – and without causing molestation. In consequence, they found fault with JandolAnganol’s palace. They called it provincial.
JandolAnganol, in the years when fortune was less against him and his marriage to MyrdemInggala still new, had brought in the best provincial architects, builders, and artists to patch the ravages of time. Particular care had been lavished on the queen’s quarters.
Although the general atmosphere of the palace tended towards the military, there was none of the stifling etiquette which marked the Oldorandan and Pannovalan courts. And in places, some kind of higher culture flourished. The apartments of Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, in particular, provided a rat’s nest of arts and learning.
The chancellor moved grudgingly on his way to consult with the king. To his mind came thoughts which were pleasanter than affairs of state. Only the previous day he had solved a problem which had long puzzled him, an antiquarian problem. Truth and lies were more easily distinguished in the past than the present.
The queen approached him, wearing one of her flame-red gowns, accompanied by her brother and the Princess Tatro, who ran and clutched his leg. The chancellor bowed. Despite his absorption he saw by the queen’s expression that she too was anxious about the diplomatic visit.