Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter

by Brian Aldiss

  The great lottery prize was designed to counteract this withering of the senses. The youthful hope of the ship – which in magical ways centred about that great object of study disrobing its seasons below them – died, generation by generation, until the enforced imprisonment became voluntary imprisonment. Billy had to go and die that others might live.

  He had to go to where that sloe-eyed queen thrust her body against the breath of the thordotter as she climbed to the castle.

  The speech ceased at last. Billy took his chance.

  ‘Thousand thanks for all your care, Master.’ Bowing. Leaving. Breathing deeper.

  His departure from the Avernus was stage-managed as a great event. Everyone felt strongly about his going. This was the actual proof that Helliconia existed. The six thousand were becoming less able to live imaginatively beyond the station, in spite of all the instruments which were devised to enable them to do so. The prize was a gesture of supreme worth, even to the losers.

  Rose Yi Pin turned her neat small face up to Billy’s and wrapped her arms round him for the last time. ‘I believe you will live for ever down there, Billy. I shall watch you as I grow old and ugly. Just beware of their silly religions. Life here is sane. Down there they are mad in the head with religious notions – even that so beautiful queen of yours.’

  He kissed her lips. ‘Live your orderly life. Don’t fret.’

  Suddenly fury burst from her. ‘Why do you ruin my life? Where’s the order, with you gone?’

  He shook his head. ‘That you must discover for yourself.’

  The automated craft was waiting to take him from purgatory. Billy climbed through the passage into the little shell, and the door hissed shut behind him. Terror gripped him; he strapped himself into the seat and enjoyed the emotion.

  The choice as to whether to make the descent with the windows shuttered or not was his. He pressed a button. Up flew the shutters and he was rewarded with a view of a magical whale from whose flank he was now excommunicated. A belt of irregular stars spread into the distance like the curl of a comet’s tail. Gasping, he realised that these stars were unprocessed rubbish ejected from the Avernus, falling into orbit about the station.

  At one moment, the Avernus was an immensity, its eighteen million tons obscuring the field of vision; at the next, it was dwindling, and Billy forgot to look. Helliconia was in view, as familiar as his own face in a mirror, but now seen more nakedly, with cloud drifting across its lit crescent and the peninsula of Pegovin striking like a club into the central sea. The great southern ice cap dazzled.

  He looked for the two suns of the binary system as the windows darkened to fend off their light.

  Batalix, the nearer sun, was lost behind the planet, only 1.26 astronomical units away.

  Freyr, visible as a grey ball behind the opaqued glass, was immensely bright at 240 astronomical units. When at 236 astronomical units distance, Helliconia would reach perihelion, its nearest point to Freyr; that time was only 118 Earth years away. Then once more Batalix and its planets would be carried away on their orbits, not to come so close to the dominant member of the system for another 2592 Earth years.

  To Billy Xiao Pin, this set of astronomical figures, which he had learned along with his alphabets at the age of three, made a neat diagram. He was about to land where the diagram became an untidy question of history, of crises and challenges.

  His round face elongated at the thought. Although Helliconia had been under constant observation for such a long while, it remained in many ways a mystery.

  Billy knew that the planet would survive perihelion, that temperatures at the equator would soar to 150 degrees but nothing worse; that Helliconia had an extraordinary system of homeostasis, at least as powerful as Earth’s, which would maintain as steady a state of equilibrium as possible. He did not share the superstitious fears of the peasantry that Freyr was about to devour them – though he understood how such fears might arise.

  What he did not know was whether various nations would survive the testing heat. Tropical countries like Borlien and Oldorando were most threatened.

  The Avernus had been in existence and observing since before the spring of the previous Great Year. It had once experienced the slow spread of the Great Winter on the planet below, had witnessed multitudes dying and nations going down. How precisely that pattern would be repeated in the Winter still far distant remained to be seen. The Earth Observation Station would have to function and the six families to exist for another fourteen Earth centuries before that mystery was resolved.

  To this awe-inspiring world, Billy had committed his soul.

  Trembling took Billy in every limb. He was to embrace this world, he was to be born.

  The craft made two orbits of the planet, braking as it did so, and landed on a plateau to the east of Matrassyl.

  Billy rose from his seat and stood listening. At last he remembered to breathe. An android had been sent down with him, an alter ego to defend him. The Avernians felt their vulnerability. The product of generations of soft-bred men, Billy was reckoned to need protection. The android was programmed to be aggressive. It carried defensive weapons. It looked human, and indeed its face was moulded to resemble Billy’s, which it did in all but mobility; its expressions changed sluggishly, giving it a permanent air of gloom. Billy disliked it. He looked at it as it stood expectantly in a recess shaped to its body.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Billy said. ‘Go back to the Avernus with the craft.’

  ‘You need my protection,’ said the android.

  ‘I will manage as best I can. It’s my life now.’ He pressed a delay switch which would ensure automatic liftoff in an hour’s time. Then he activated the door and climbed from the craft.

  He stood on the wished-for planet, breathing its scents, letting a thousand strange sounds come to his ears. The unfiltered air bruised his lungs. Dizziness assailed him.

  He looked up. All above him stretched a sky of most beautiful resonant blue, without feature. Billy was accustomed to looking at space; paradoxically, the arch of sky appeared vaster. The eye was drawn forever into it. It covered the living world and was its most beautiful expression.

  To the west, Batalix in auricles of gold and tan was preparing to set. Freyr, its disc only thirty percent the size of Batalix’s, burned with splendid intensity almost at zenith. All around it swam the great blue envelope which was the first of Helliconia to be seen from space, and the unmistakable imprimatur of it as a life-bearing planet. The visiting life-form lowered his head and passed a hand over his eyes.

  At a short distance stood a group of five trees, overhung with fleshy creepers. Towards them Billy made his way, walking as if gravity had only just been invented. He fell against the nearest trunk, embracing it, to have his hands torn by thorns. Nevertheless, he clung tight, closing his eyes, flinching from every inexplicable sound. He could not move. When the craft lifted for its return to the mother station, he wept.

  Here was the real, with a vengeance. It penetrated all his senses.

  By clinging to the tree, lying on the ground, hiding beside a fallen trunk, he accustomed himself to the experience of being on an immense planet. Distant objects, clouds, and a line of hills, in particular, terrified him with their implications of size and – yes – reality. Just as alarming were all the small live things with random inclinations of their own, whole phyla absent from existence aboard the Avernus. He looked down in anguish as a small winged creature alighted on his left hand and used it as a highway to his sleeve. What was most alarming was the knowledge that all these things were beyond his control; no touch of a switch could tame them.

  There was in particular the problem of the suns, which he had not taken into account. On the Avernus, light and dark were largely matters of temperament; here, one had no choice. As dimday was followed by night, Billy felt for the first time the ancient precariousness of his kind. Long ago, mankind had built huddling places against the dark. Cities had developed, had grown to metropolis
es, and had taken off into space; now he felt himself back at the beginning of history.

  He survived the night. Despite himself, he had fallen asleep, to wake unharmed. Doing his accustomed morning exercises brought him back to a sense of himself. He was enough in control to walk from the shelter of the cluster of trees and to rejoice in the morning. After drinking and eating from his rations, he set off in the direction of Matrassyl.

  Walking along a jungle path, bemused by bird calls, he became aware of a footstep behind him. He turned. A phagor froze to instant immobility, only a few paces away.

  Phagors were part of the mythology of the Avernus. Their portraits and models of them were accessible everywhere. This one, however, had the presence and individuality of life. It chewed as it regarded Billy, saliva leaking from its broad lower lip. Over its bulky figure was a one-piece garment, dyed here and there with saffron. Tufts of its long white hair were similarly dyed, giving it an unhealthy appearance. A dead snake was knotted over one shoulder – evidently a recent catch. In its hand it carried a curved knife. This was neither an idealised museum replica nor a child’s cuddly toy. As it stepped nearer, it exuded a rancid odor which made Billy giddy.

  He faced it squarely and spoke slowly in Hurdhu. ‘Can you give me directions to Matrassyl?’

  The creature went on ruminating. It appeared to be chewing on some kind of scarlet nut; juice of that colour trickled from its mouth. A drop sprayed onto Billy Xiao Pin. He reached up and brushed it from his cheek.

  ‘Matrassyl,’ it said, pronouncing the word leadenly as ‘Madrazzyl.’

  ‘Yes. Which way is Matrassyl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The look in its cerise eyes – impossible to determine whether it was meek or murderous. He wrenched his gaze away, to find that more phagors stood near, bushlike among the befoliaged shadow.

  ‘Can you understand what I say?’ His sentences came from the phrasebook. He was bewildered by the unreality of the situation.

  ‘A taking to a place is within ability.’

  From a creature that had the natural force of a boulder, good sense was hardly to be expected, but Billy was left in little doubt as to its intentions. The creature rolled forward with an easy motion and pushed Billy along the path. Billy moved. The other figures tramped among the undergrowth, keeping pace.

  They reached a broken slope. Here the jungle had been cleared – some trees had been hacked down, and scuttling pigs saw to it that further growth would never reach maturity. Among casual attempts at cultivation were huts or, rather, roofs supported by posts.

  In the shade provided by these huts, lumpish figures lay like cattle. Some rose and came towards the foragers, one of whom sounded a small horn to announce their arrival. Billy was surrounded by male and female ancipitals, creaghs and gillots and runts, glaring up at him inquisitively. Some runts ran on all fours.

  Billy dropped into the Humility position.

  ‘I’m trying to get to Matrassyl,’ he said. The absurdity of the sentence made him laugh; he had to check himself before he became hysterical, but the noise had the effect of making everyone stand back.

  ‘The lower kzahhn has proximity for inspection,’ a gillot said, touching his arm and making a motion of her head. He followed her across a stone-strewn dell, and everyone else followed him. Everything he passed – from tender green shoots to rounded boulders – was rougher than he could have visualised.

  Under an awning set against the dell’s low cliff sprawled an elder phagor, arms bent at impossible angles. It sat up in smooth movements and revealed itself as an ancient gillot, with prominent withered dugs and black hairs sprouting from her coat. A necklace of polished gwing-gwing stones hung about her neck. She wore a face bracelet buckled across the prow of her nose as a mark of rank. This was evidently the ‘lower kzahhn’.

  Remaining seated, she looked up at Billy.

  She spoke to him questioningly.

  Billy had been a junior in the great sociological clan of Pin, and not a conscientious one at that. He worked in the division which studied the family of Anganols, generation by generation. There were those among his superiors who were conversant with the histories of the present king’s predecessors back to the previous spring, some sixteen generations past. Billy Xiao Pin spoke Olonets, the main language of Campannlat and Hespagorat, and several of its variants, including Old Olonets. But he had never attempted the ancipital tongue, Native; nor had he properly mastered the language the lower kzahhn was speaking, Hurdhu, the bridge language used in these times between man and phagor.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, in Hurdhu, and felt a strange sensation when she understood, as if he had stepped from the real world into some strange fairy story.

  ‘Understanding is to me of you being from a far place,’ she said, translating her own language, noun-choked, into Hurdhu. ‘What situation is that far place?’

  Perhaps they had seen the space-craft land.

  He gestured vaguely, and recited a prepared speech. ‘I come from a distant town in Morstrual, where I am the kzahhn.’ Morstrual was even more remote that Mordriat, and safe to name. ‘Your people will be rewarded if they escort me to King JandolAnganol in Matrassyl.’

  ‘King JandolAnganol.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She became immobile, gazing ahead. A stallun squatting nearby passed her a leather bottle from which she drank in slobbering fashion, letting the liquid spill. It smelt pungent and spiritous. Ah, he thought, raffle: a deleterious drink distilled by ancipitals. He had fallen in with a poor tribe of phagors. Here he was, dealing capably with these enigmatic beasts, and on the Avernus everyone would be watching him through the optical system. Even his old Advisor. Even Rose.

  The heat and the short walk over rough ground had taxed him. But a more self-conscious motive made him sit down on a flat stone and spread his legs, resting his elbows on his knees, to stare nonchalantly at the creature confronting him. The most incredible occurrences became everyday when there was no alternative.

  ‘Ancipital race carry much spears for his crusade for King JandolAnganol.’ She paused. Behind her was a cave. In its shade, dim cerise eyes gleamed. Billy guessed that tribal ancestors would be stored there, sinking through tether to pure keratin. At once ancestor and idol, every undead phagor helped direct its successors through the painful centuries when Freyr dominated.

  ‘Sons of Freyr fight other Sons of Freyr each season, and we lend spears.’

  He recognised the traditional phagorian term for humankind. The ancipitals, unable to invent new terms, merely adapted old ones.

  ‘Order two of your tribe to escort me to King JandolAnganol.’

  Again her stillness – and all the others, as Billy looked round, conspiring to that same immobility. Only the pigs and curs trundled about, forever searching for titbits in the dirt.

  The old gillot then began a long speech which defied Billy’s understanding. He had to halt her in the middle of her ramblings, asking her to start again. Hurdhu tasted as pungent as goat’s cheese on his tongue. Other phagors came up, closing round him, choking him with their dense smell – but not as unpleasant as anticipated, he thought – all aiding their leader with her explanation. As a result, nothing was explained.

  They showed him old wounds, backs bereft of skin and fur, broken legs, shattered arms, all exhibited with calm insistence. He was revolted and fascinated. They produced pennants and a sword from the cave.

  Gradually he took their meaning. Most of them had served with King JandolAnganol in his Fifth Army. Some weeks ago, they had marched against Driat tribes. They had suffered a defeat here in the Cosgatt. The tribes had used a new weapon which barked like a giant hound.

  These poor folk had survived. But they dared not go back to the king’s service in case that giant hound barked again. They lived as they could. They dreamed of returning to the cool regions of the Nktryhk.

  It was a long tale. Billy became vexed by it, and by the flies. He took some of their raffel.
It was deleterious, just as the textbooks said. Feeling sleepy, he ceased to listen when they tried to describe the Cosgatt battle to him. For them, it might have happened yesterday.

  ‘Will two of you escort me to the king or will you not?’

  They fell silent, then grunted to each other in Native Ancipital.

  At length, the gillot spoke in Hurdhu to him.

  ‘What gift is from your hand for such escort?’

  On his wrist he wore a flat grey watch, its triple set of flicking figures telling the time on Earth, on Central Campannlat, and on the Avernus. It was standard equipment. The phagors would not be interested in time-telling, for their eotemporal harneys remained set in a temporality which registered only sporadic movement; but they would like the watch as decoration.

  The old lower kzahhn’s mottled face hung over his arm as he extended it to her gaze. Of her horns, one had been broken halfway and its tip replaced with a wooden peg.

  She pulled herself up in a squatting position and called to two of the younger stalluns.

  ‘Do what the thing demands,’ she said.

  *

  The escort stopped when a pair of houses was sighted in the distance. They would go no farther. Billy Xiao Pin removed the watch from his wrist and offered it to them. After contemplating it for a while, they refused to accept it.

  He could not understand their explanation. They seemed to have lapsed from Hurdhu into Native. He grasped that numbers were involved. Perhaps they feared the ever-changing numbers. Perhaps they feared the unknown metal. Their refusal was made without emotion; they simply would not take it; they wanted nothing. ‘JandolAnganol,’ they said. Evidently they still respected the king’s name.

  As he went forward, Billy looked back at them, partly obscured by a spray of flowering creeper hanging from a tree. They did not move. He feared them; he also felt a kind of marvel, that he had been in their company and was still sane.