by Brian Aldiss
Then he sat and wept.
He dozed. Later, he awoke to find Lex standing over him, his milt flicking up the slots of his nostrils. He had long grown used to the silence of phagors; though he hated the creatures, they were less bothersome than human slaves about the place.
His table clock told him it was near the twenty-fifth hour of the day. He yawned, stretched, and put on a warmer garment. Outside, the aurora flickered over an empty courtyard. The palace was asleep – except perhaps for the king …
‘Lex, we’ll go and speak with our prisoner. Have you fed him?’
The phagor, immobile, said, ‘The prisoner has his food, sir.’ He spoke in a low voice, buzzingly, so that the honorific came out as ‘zzorr’. His Olonets was limited, but SartoriIrvrash, in his abhorrence, refused to learn Hurdhu.
Among the shelves covering most of a long wall stood a cupboard. Lex swung it away from the wall to reveal an iron door. Clumsily, the ancipital inserted a key in the lock and turned it. He pulled the door open; man and phagor entered a secret cell.
This had once been an independent room. In the days of VarpalAnganol, the chancellor had had its external door plastered over. Now the only means of entry lay through his study. Stout bars had been fixed over the window. From outside, the window was lost in the muddle of the castle facade.
Flies buzzed in the room, or hung as if sleeping in the thick air. They crawled over the table, and over the hands of Billy Xiao Pin.
Billy sat on a chair. He was chained to a strong eye anchored in the floor. His clothes were stained with sweat. The stench in the room was overwhelming.
Producing a sachet of scantiom, pellamountain, and other herbs, SartoriIrvrash pressed it to his nose and gestured towards a cessbucket standing in a corner of the room.
‘Empty that.’ Lex moved to obey.
The chancellor took a chair and placed it beyond the reach of any lunge his prisoner might make. He sat down carefully, nursing his back and grunting. He lit a long veronikane before he spoke.
‘Now, BillishOwpin, you have been here for two days. We shall have another discussion. I am the Chancellor of Borlien, and, if you lie to me, it is well within my powers to torture you. You introduced yourself to me as the mayor of a town on the Gulf of Chalce. Then, when I locked you up, you claimed that you were a much grander person, who came from a world above this one. Who are you today? The truth now!’
Billy wiped his face on his sleeve and said, ‘Sir, believe me, I knew of this secret room before I arrived here. Yet I am ignorant of many aspects of your manners. My initial mistake was to pose as someone I am not – which I did because I doubted if you would believe the truth.’
‘I may say without vanity that I happen to be one of the foremost seekers after truth of my generation.’
‘Sir, I know it. Therefore set me free. Let me follow the queen. Why lock me up when I mean no harm?’
‘I lock you up because I may get some good out of you. Stand up.’
The chancellor surveyed his captive. Certainly, there was something odd about the fellow. His physiology was not the attenuated one of a Campannlatian, nor had he the barrel shape of those freak humans, sometimes displayed at fairs, whose ancestors (according to medical thought) had escaped the near-universal bone fever.
His friend CaraBansity in Ottassol would have said that underlying bone structure accounted for the peculiar rounded quality of the captive’s features. The man’s skin texture was smooth, with a notable pallor, though his button nose was sunburnt. His hair was fine.
And there were more subtle differences, such as the quality of the captive’s gaze and its duration. He seemed to look away to listen, and regarded SartoriIrvrash only when he spoke – although fear could account for that. His eyes were often cast upward, instead of down. In particular, he spoke Olonets in a foreign style.
All this the chancellor observed before saying, ‘Give me an account of this world above from which you claim to come. I am a rational man, and I shall listen without prejudice to what you have to say.’ He drew upon his kane and coughed.
Lex returned with an empty bucket and stood motionless against one wall, fixing his cerise glare on an undefined point in the middle distance.
When Billy sat down, his chains rattled. He placed his weighted wrists on the table before him and said, ‘Merciful sir, I come, as I told you, from a much smaller world than yours. A world perhaps of the size of the great hill upon which Matrassyl Castle stands. That world is called Avernus, though your astonomers have long known it as Kaidaw. It lies some fifteen hundred kilometres above Helliconia, with an orbital period of 7770 seconds, and its—’
‘Wait. On what does this hill of yours lie? On air?’
‘There is no air about Avernus. In effect, the Avernus is a metal moon. No, you don’t have that word in Olonets, sir, since Helliconia possesses no natural moon. Avernus orbits Helliconia continually, as Helliconia orbits Batalix. It travels through space, as Helliconia does, and moves continually, as Helliconia does. Otherwise, it would fall under the pull of gravitation. I think you understand this principle, sir? You know of the true relationships between Helliconia on the one hand and Batalix and Freyr on the other.’
‘I understand what you say very well.’ He slapped at a fly crawling over his bald pate. ‘You are addressing the author of “The Alphabet of History and Nature”, in which I seek to synthesise all knowledge. It is understood by few men – but I happen to be one of them – that Batalix and Freyr revolve about a common focus, while Copaise, Aganip, and Ipocrene revolve with Helliconia about Batalix. The haste of our sister worlds in their orbits is commensurate with their stature and their distance from the parent body, Batalix. Furthermore, cosmology informs us that these sister worlds sprang from Batalix, as men spring from their mothers, and Batalix sprang from Freyr, which is its mother. In the realm of the heavens, you will find me suitably informed, I flatter myself.’
He looked up at the ceiling and blew smoke among the flies.
Billy cleared his throat. ‘Well, it’s not quite like that. Batalix and its planets form a relatively aged solar system which was captured by a much larger sun, which you call Freyr, some eight million years ago, as we reckon time.’
The chancellor moved restlessly, crossing and uncrossing his legs, with a peevish expression on his face. ‘Among the impediments to knowledge are the persecutions of those who seek power, the difficulties of investigation, and – this in particular – a failure to recognise what should be investigated. I set all this out in my first chapter.
‘You clearly have some knowledge, yet you betray it by mingling it with falsehood for your own reasons. Remember that torture is a friend of truth, BillishOwpin. I’m a patient man, but this wild talk of millions angers me. You won’t impress me by mere numbers. Anyone can invent figures out of thin air.’
‘Sir, I do not invent. How many people inhabit all Campannlat?’
The chancellor looked flustered. ‘Why, some fifty million, according to best estimates.’
‘Wrong, sir. Sixty-four million people, and thirty-five million phagors. In the time of VryDen, whom you like to quote, the figures were eight million humans and twenty-three million phagors. The biomass relates directly to the amount of energy arriving at the planetary surface. In Sibornal there are—’
SartoriIrvrash waved his hands. ‘Enough – you try to vex me … Return to the geometry of the suns. Do you dare claim there is no blood relationship between Freyr and Batalix?’
From gazing down at his hands, Billy looked askance at the old man who sat beyond his reach. ‘If I tell you what really happened, honoured Chancellor, would you believe me?’
‘That depends whether your tale is within credence.’ He puffed out a cloud of smoke.
Billy Xiao Pin said, ‘I caught only a glimpse of your beautiful queen. So what is the point of my being here, dying here, if I fail to tell you this one great truth?’ He thought of MyrdemInggala passing, glorious in her floating muslins.
And he began. The phagor stood by the stained wall, the old man sat in his creaking chair. The flies buzzed. No sounds came from the outside world.
‘On my way here, I saw a banner saying, in Olonets, “All the world’s wisdom has always existed.” That is not so. It may be a truth for the religious, but for the scientific it is a lie. Truth resides in facts which must be painfully discovered and hypotheses which must be continually checked – although where I come from, facts have obliterated truth. As you say, there are many impediments to knowledge, and to the metastructure of knowledge we call science.
‘Avernus is an artificial world. It is a creation of science and the application of science we call – you have no such word – technology. You may be surprised to hear that the race from which I come, which evolved on a distant planet called Earth, is younger than you Helliconians. But we suffered fewer natural disadvantages than you.’
He paused, almost shocked to hear that charged word, Earth, pronounced in these surroundings.
‘So I shall not lie to you – though I warn you you may find that what I say does not fit into your world-picture, Chancellor. You may be shocked, even though you are the most enlightened of your race.’
The chancellor stubbed out his veronikane on the top of the table and pressed a hand to his head. It ached. The prison room was stifling. He could not follow the young stranger’s speech, and his mind wandered to the king, naked, and the sword embedded dangerously in a beam above them. The prisoner talked on.
Where Billy came from, the cosmos was as familiar as a back garden. He spoke in matter-of-fact tones about a yellow G4-type star which was some five thousand million years old. It was of low luminosity and a temperature of only 5600K. This was the sun now called Batalix. He went on to describe its only inhabited planet, Helliconia, a planet much like distant Earth, but cooler, greyer, older, its life processes slower. On its surface, over many eons, species developed from animal to dominant being.
Eight million years ago by Earth reckoning, Batalix and its system moved into a crowded region of space. Two stars, which he called A and C, were orbiting each other. Batalix was drawn within the massive gravitational field of A. In the series of perturbations which followed, star C was lost, and A acquired a new companion, Batalix.
A was a very different sun from Batalix. Although between only ten and eleven million years old, it had evolved away from the main sequence of stars and was entering stellar old age. Its radius was over seventy times the radius of Batalix, its temperature twice as great. It was an A-type supergiant.
Try as he might, the chancellor could not listen attentively. A sense of disaster enveloped him. His vision blurred, his heart beat with an irregular throb which seemed to fill the room. He pressed his scantiom sachet to his nose to help his breathing.
‘That’s enough,’ he said, breaking into Billy’s discourse. ‘Your kind is known in history, talking in strange terms, mocking the understandings of wise men. Perhaps it is a delusion we suffer from … Small wonder if we do. Only two days ago – only fifty hours – the queen of queens left Matrassyl, charged with conspiracy, and sixty-one Myrdolators were cruelly murdered … And you talk to me of suns swooping here and there as fancy takes them …’
Billy drummed the fingers of one hand on the table and fanned away flies with the other. Lex stood nearby, motionless as furniture, eyes closed.
‘I’m a Myrdolator myself. I’m much to blame for these crimes. Too used to serving the king … as he’s too used to serving religion. Life was so placid … Now who knows what fresh botherations will happen tomorrow?’
‘You are too sunk in your own little affairs,’ Billy said. ‘You’re as bad as my Advisor on the Avernus. He doesn’t entirely believe in the reality of Helliconia. You don’t entirely believe in the reality of the universe. Your umwelt is no larger than this palace.’
‘What’s an umwelt?’
‘The region encompassed by your perceptions.’
‘You pretend to know so much. Is it correct, as I perceive, that the hoxney is a brown-striped animal which wore coloured stripes in the spring of the Great Year?’
‘That is correct. Animals and plants adopt different strategies to survive the vast changes of a Year. There are binary biologies and botanies, some following one star, as previously, some the other.’
‘Now you return to your perambulating suns. In my belief, established over thirty-seven years, our two suns are set in our skies as a constant reminder of our dual nature, spirit and body, life and death, and of the more general dualities which govern human life – hot and cold, light and dark, good and evil.’
‘You say my kind is known in history, Chancellor. Maybe those were other visitors from the Avernus, also trying to reveal the truth, and being ignored.’
‘Revelations through some crazed geometries? Then they perished!’ SartoriIrvrash rose, resting his fingers on the table, frowning.
Billy also laboriously rose, rattling his chains. ‘The truth would free you, Chancellor. Whatever you think, those “crazed geometries” rule the universe. You half-know this. Respect your intellect. Why not go further, break from your umwelt? The life that teems on Helliconia is a product of those crazed geometries you scoff at.
‘That A-type sun you know as Freyr is a gigantic hydrogen fusion-reactor, pouring out high-energy emissions. When Batalix and its planets took up orbits round it, eight million years ago, they were subjected to bombardments of X rays and ultraviolet radiation. The effect on the then-sluggish Helliconian biosphere was profound. There was rapid genetic change. Dramatic mutations occurred. Some new forms survived. One animal species in particular rose to challenge the supremacy previously enjoyed by a much older species—’
‘No more of this,’ cried SartoriIrvrash, waving a hand in dismissal. ‘What is this about species changing into other species? Can a dog become an arang, or a hoxney a kaidaw? Everyone knows at least that every animal has its place, and humans their place. So the All-Powerful has ordained.’
‘You’re an atheist! You don’t believe in the All-Powerful!’
Confused, the chancellor shook his head. ‘I’d prefer to be ruled by the All-Powerful than by your crazed geometries.… I had hoped to make a present of you to King JandolAnganol, but you would drive him madder than he is already.’
Wearily, SartoriIrvrash realised that the king could not be placated at present by rational means. SartoriIrvrash himself felt far from rational. Listening to Billy, he was reminded of another young madman – the king’s son, Robayday. Once a charming child, then overtaken by a kind of mad fancy, espousing the desert like a parched mother, expert at killing game, at times hardly making sense … the plague of his royal parents.
He wondered at his own long struggle to make sense of the world. How was it that such an omnipresent problem oppressed so few?
Billy might be a figment of his tired imagination, the darker side of rationality, sent to plague him.
He turned to the phagor. ‘Lex, guard him. I’ll think how to dispose of him and his umwelts on the morrow.’
In his bedchamber, loneliness overwhelmed the chancellor. The king had seized him and flung him to the floor! He felt the bumps of his bruised spine, felt how ugly his body was growing as the years squeezed it dry. The days contained so much shame.
His slave woman came at his call, looking reluctant as he had looked reluctant when summoned before the king.
‘Massage my back,’ he ordered.
She lay against him, running a rough but gentle hand from his skull to his pelvis. He smelt of veronikane, phagors, and piss. She was Randonanese, with tribal marks cut in her cheeks. She smelt of fruit. After a while, he rolled over to face her, his prodo stirring. There was one comfort given to believers and atheists alike, one refuge from abstraction. The chancellor thrust one hand between the dark exiled thighs and reached with the other into her shift, to clasp the slave woman’s breasts.
She drew him close.
Petit
ions were being signed on the Avernus for a party to descend to the Helliconian surface and rescue Billy Xiao Pin. No serious notice was taken of the petitions. Billy’s contract clearly stated that, whatever difficulties he found himself in, no help would be forthcoming. Which did not prevent many young ladies of the Pin family from threatening to commit suicide if the government did not act at once.
But the work of the station continued as usual, as it had done for the previous thirty-two centuries. Little the Avernians knew how Earth’s technocrats had programmed them for obedience. The great families continued to analyse all incoming data, and the automatic systems continued to broadcast signals to distant Earth.
Gigantic auditoria shaped like conch shells stood all round that faraway planet.
To the people of Earth, Helliconian events were news. The signals were received first of all on Charon, on the extreme fringes of the solar system. There again they were analysed, classified, stored, transmitted. The most popular transmission went to Earth via the Eductainment Channel, which carried various continuous dramas from the binary system. The events at King JandolAnganol’s court were at present the highest-rating news. And that news was a thousand years old.
Those who listened to that news formed part of a global society undergoing a change as profound as any on Helliconia. The Decline of the Modern Ages had been hastened by greatly increased glaciation at the terrestrial poles, leading to the Great Ice Age. In the ninth century of the sixth millennium after the birth of Christ, the glaciers were again retreating, and the peoples of Earth moving northwards in their wake. Old racial and national antipathies were in abeyance. A mood appropriate to the congenial climate of Earth prevailed, in which sophisticated sensibilities were directed to exploring the relationship between the biosphere, its living things, and the gubernatory globe itself.
For once, leaders and statesmen arose who were worthy of their people. They shared a true vision and inspired the populace. They saw to it that the drama of the distant planet Helliconia was studied as an object lesson in folly as well as an endless tapestry of circumstance.