by Brian Aldiss
The seas had absorbed much of the large clouds of carbon dioxide released by the nuclear holocaust. The carbon dioxide remained trapped in the water, retained in deep ocean circulation and not to be released for centuries. The ultimate release initiated a period of greenhouse warming.
As had happened before, life came forth from the seas. Many components of the biosphere – insects, microorganisms, plants, man himself – had survived, thanks to isolation, freak winds, or other providential conditions. They again became active, as white gave place to green. The ozone layer, shielding living cells from lethal ultraviolet, reestablished itself. Once more, as the firn melted, the pipe of separate instruments reached towards orchestral pitch.
By 5900, better conditions were evident. Antelope sprang among low thorn trees. Men and women muffled themselves in skins and trudged north after the glaciers.
At night, those humbled revenants huddled together for comfort and gazed upwards at the stars. The stars had scarcely changed since the time of paleolithic man. It was the human race which had changed.
Whole nations had gone forever. Those enterprising people who had developed mighty technologies and had struck out first for the planets and then for the stars, who had forged clever weapons and legends – those peoples had wiped themselves out. Their sole heirs were the sterile androids working on the outer planets.
Races came forth who, under an earlier dispensation, could be regarded as losers. They lived on islands or in wildernesses, at the tops of mountains or on untamed rivers, in jungles and swamps. They had once been the poor. Now they came forth to inherit the Earth.
They were peoples who took delight in life. In those first generations, as the ice retreated, they had no need to quarrel. The world awoke again. Gaia forgave them. They rediscovered ways of living with the natural world of which they were a part. And they rediscovered Helliconia.
From 6000 and for the next six centuries, Gaia could be said to convalesce. The tall glaciers were withdrawing fast to their polar fortresses.
Some of the old ways of life had survived. As the land returned, old bastions of the technophile culture were uncovered – generally hidden underground in elaborate military complexes. In the deepest bastions, there were descendants still living whose ancestors had been part of the ruling elite of the technophile culture; they had ensured their own survival while those who had been subject to them had perished. But these living fossils, on reaching the sunshine, died within a few hours – like fish brought up from the enormous pressures of the ocean deeps.
In their foul warrens, a hope was found – the link with another living planet. Summonses were sent through space to Charon, and a company of androids fetched back to Earth. These androids, with untiring skill, set about building auditoria in which the new population could observe all that happened on the far-distant planet.
The mentalities of the new populations were shaped to a large extent by the unfolding story they saw. Survivors on the other planets, cut off from Earth, also had their links with Helliconia.
In fresh green lands, auditoria stood like conch shells upended in sand. Each auditorium was capable of housing ten thousand people. In their sandalled feet, roughly clothed in skin, and later cloth, they came to look on with wonder. What they saw was a planet not greatly different from their own, emerging slowly from the grip of a long winter. It was their story.
Sometimes an auditorium might remain deserted for years. The new populations also had their crises, and the natural catastrophes which attended Gaia’s recovery. They had inherited not only the Earth but its uncertainties.
When they could, the new generations returned to watch the story of lives running parallel to their own. They were generations without terrestrial gods; but the figures on the giant screens appeared like gods. Those gods endured mysterious dramas of possession and religion which gripped yet puzzled their terrestrial audiences.
By the year 6344, living forms were again in moderate abundance. The human population took a solemn vow that they would hold all possessions in common, declaring that not only life but its freedom was sacred. They were much influenced by the deeds of a Helliconian living in an obscure hamlet in the central continent, a leader called Aoz Roon. They saw how a good man was ruined by a determination to get his own way. To the new generations, there was no ‘own way’; there was only a common way, the journey of life, the uct of the communal spirit.
As they viewed the immense figure of Aoz Roon, saw water blow from his lips and beard as he drank from his hands, they watched drops which had fallen a thousand years earlier. The human understanding of past generations had made past and present merge. For many years, the picture of Aoz Roon drinking from his hands became a popular ikon.
To the new generations, with their empathic feel for all life, it was natural to wonder whether they could assist Aoz Roon and those who lived with him. They had no idea of setting out in starships, as preglacial peoples might have done. Instead, they decided to focus their empathic sense and broadcast it outwards through conch shells.
So it was that signals went from Earth to Helliconia, responding for the first time to the signals which had long flowed in the opposite direction.
The characteristics of the human race were now drawn from a slightly different genetic pool than formerly. Those who had inherited the Earth were strong on empathy. Empathy had not been dominant in the preglacial world. That gift of entering into the personality of another, of experiencing sympathetically his or her state of mind, had never been rare. But the elite had despised it – or exploited it. Empathy ran against their interest as exploiters. Power and empathy were not happy teammates.
Now empathy was widely dispersed among the race. It became a dominant feature, with survival characteristics. There was nothing inhuman about it.
There was an inhuman aspect to the Helliconians. The terrestrials puzzled greatly about it. The Helliconians knew the spirits of their dead and communed regularly with them.
The new race on Earth took no particular account of death. They understood that when they died they were taken back and absorbed into the great Earth mother, their elementary particles to be re-formed into future living things. They were buried shallowly with flowers in their mouths, symbolising the force that would spring up from their decay. But it was different on Helliconia. They were fascinated by the Helliconians’ descent into pauk to commune with their gossies, those sparks of vital energy.
And it was observed that the ancipital race had a similar relationship with its dead. Dead phagors sank into a ‘tether’ state and appeared to linger, dwindling, for several generations. The phagors had no burial customs.
These macabre extensions to existence were regarded on Earth as a compensation for the extremities of climate which living things endured in the course of a Helliconian Great Year. There was, though, a marked difference between the defunct of the ancipital kind and the defunct of the human kind.
Phagors in tether supported their living descendants, formed a reservoir of wisdom and encouragement, comforted them in adversity. The spirits of humans visited in pauk, on the other hand, were unmitigatedly spiteful. No gossie ever spoke except to utter reproaches and to complain about a spoilt life.
Why this difference? asked the new intellects.
They answered from their own experience. They said: Dreadful though the phagors are, they are not estranged from the Original Beholder, the Helliconian Gaia figure. So they are not tormented by the spirits about them. The humans are estranged; they worship many useless gods who make them ill. So their spirits can never be at peace.
How happy for the Helliconian peoples – said the empathic ones among themselves – if they could have comfort from their gossies in the midst of all their other troubles.
So a determination developed. Those fortunate enough to experience life, to rise up from the molecular and surface into the great light of consciousness, like a salmon leaping from a stream to take a winged life, should radiate their happ
iness towards Helliconia.
The living of Earth, in other words, should beam empathy like a signal to Helliconia. Not to the living of Helliconia. The living, estranged from their Original Beholder, busy with their affairs, their lusts and hatreds, could not be expected to receive such a signal. But the gossies – forever hungry for contact – might respond! The gossies in their event-free existence, suspended in obsidian as they sank towards the Original Beholder, the gossies might be capable of receiving a beam of empathy.
A whole generation discussed the daringly visionary proposal.
Was the attempt worth making? went the question.
It would be a great unifying experience even if it failed, came the answer.
Could we possibly hope to affect alien beings – the very dead – so far away?
Through us, Gaia could address the Original Beholder. They are kin, not alien. Perhaps this amazing idea is not ours but hers. We must try.
But when we are so far distant in space and time … ?
Empathy is a matter of intensity. It defies space and time. Do we not still feel for the exile of Iphigenia in that ancient story? Let’s try.
Shall we?
On all counts, it is worth it. The spirit of Gaia commands.
And so they tried.
The attempt was long-sustained. Wherever they sat and watched, wherever they came or went in their rough sandals, the living generations put away worldly things and radiated empathy towards the dead of Helliconia. And even when they could not resist including the living, such as Shay Tal or Laintal Ay, or whomever they might personally favour, they were still empathising with those long dead.
And over the years the warmth of their empathy took effect. The fessups ceased to grieve, the gossies ceased to chide. Those of the living who communed through pauk were not reproved but comforted. An unpossessive love had triumphed.
IX
A Quiet Day Ashore
A biogas fire burned in the grate. Before it sat two brothers talking. Every now and again, the thin brother would reach out to pat the sturdy one, as the latter told his tale. Odirin Nan Odim, referred to by all his kin as Odo, was a year and six tenners older than Eedap Mun Odim. He much resembled his brother, except in the crucial matter of girth, for the Fat Death had yet to make its dread appearance in Rivenjk.
The two brothers had much to tell each other, and much planning to do. A ship bearing the Oligarch’s soldiery had recently arrived in the port, and the set of regulations against which Odim had fought was beginning to trouble Odo too. However, the Shiveninki were less ready than the Uskuti to take orders. Rivenjk was still a comfortable place in which to live.
The remaining precious porcelain which Odim had brought to his elder brother had been well received.
‘Soon such porcelain will become even more precious,’ said Odo. ‘Such fine quality may never be achieved again.’
‘Because the weather deteriorates towards winter.’
‘What follows from that, brother, is that fuel for firing the kilns will become short, and so increase in price. Also, as people’s lives grow harsher, they will be content with tin plates.’
‘What do you plan to do then, brother?’ asked Odim.
‘My trade links with Bribahr, the neighbouring country, are excellent. I even despatch my goods to Kharnabhar, far north of here. Porcelain and china are not the only goods that need to travel such routes. We must adapt, deal in other goods. I have ideas for—’
But Odirin Nan Odim was never allowed peace for long. He, like his brother, housed a number of relations. Some of them, voluble and voluminous, rushed to the fireside now, heads full of a quarrel that only Odo could settle. Some of Eedap Mun’s relations, surviving plague and voyage, had been billeted with their Rivenjk relations, and the old question had arisen of floor space being encroached upon.
‘Perhaps you would not mind coming with me to see what is happening,’ said Odo.
‘I would be pleased. From now on, I shall be your shadow, brother.’
Homesteads in Rivenjk were arranged round a courtyard and protected from the elements by a high wall. The more prosperous the family, the higher the wall. Round this courtyard lived the various branches of the Odim family – very little more enterprising here than the relatives in Koriantura had been.
With the families lived their domestic animals, housed in stalls adjoining the human habitations. Some of the animals had been crowded together to permit the newly arrived relatives shelter. This arrangement was the cause of the present quarrel: the resident relations prized their animals above the newly arrived relations – and with some justice.
The sanitary arrangements of most Shiveninki courtyard homesteads depended on a commensalism between animals and humans. All excretions from both house and stall were washed down into a bottle-shaped pit carved in the rock under the courtyard. The pit could be maintained from an inspection flap in the courtyard, through which all vegetable refuse was also thrown. As the refuse rotted underground, it gave off biogas, chiefly methane.
The biogas rising from the pit was trapped and piped into the houses, to be used for cooking and lighting.
This civilised system had been developed throughout Shivenink to cope with the extremes of the Weyr-Winter.
As the Odim brothers inspected the complaints of their relatives, they discovered that two cousins had been housed in a stall where there was a small gas leak. The smell offended the cousins, who had insisted on bundling into the adjoining house, which was already packed with people.
The gas leak was plugged. The cousins, protesting for form’s sake, went back to their appointed stall. Slaves were despatched to see that the biogas tank was not malfunctioning.
Odo took his brother’s arm. ‘The church is nearby, as you will observe when we take you on a tour of the city. I have arranged this evening for a small service of thanksgiving to be held there. Praise will be offered to God the Azoiaxic for your preservation.’
‘You are most kind. But I warn you, brother, I am free of religious belief.’
‘This little service is necessary,’ said Odo, raising a dismissive finger. ‘There you will be able to meet all our relatives formally. There is something downcast in your spirit, brother, owing to your multiple bereavements. You must take a good woman, or at least a slave, to make you happy. What is the status of that foreign woman in your party, Toress Lahl?’
‘She’s a slave, belonging to Luterin Shokerandit. A doctor, very spirited. He is a fine young man, and from Kharnabhar. About Captain Fashnalgid, I am less certain. He’s a deserter, not that I blame him for that. I started out the voyage, before the Fat Death overcame us, with a woman who meant much to my comfort. Alas, she died in the epidemic.’
‘Was she from Kuj-Juvec, brother?’
‘No, but she became like a dove to the tree of my self. She was faithful and good. Her name, for I must speak it, was Besi Besamitikahl. She was more to me even than my—’
Odim broke off sharply, for up ran Kenigg, with a newfound friend. As Odim smiled and took his son’s hand, his brother said, ‘Let me help you find another dove for that good tree of your self. You have only one brother, but the air is full of doves waiting for a suitable branch on which to alight.’
Luterin Shokerandit and Harbin Fashnalgid had been given a small room under the roof, thanks to Odo’s generosity. It was lit by one little garret window overlooking the courtyard, from which they could watch the comings and goings of the family and their slaves. In an alcove stood a stove on which their slave could cook their meals.
Both the men had beds of wood, raised above the floor and covered in rugs. Toress Lahl was supposed to lie on the floor beside Shokerandit’s bed.
Shokerandit took her in with him while Fashnalgid still slept. He lay all night with his arms round her. Only as he was rising did Fashnalgid stir.
‘Luterin, why so energetic?’ he asked, yawning cavernously. ‘Didn’t you drink enough of the Odim family’s wine last night? Rest, ma
n, and for the Azoiaxic’s sake, let’s recover from that terrible voyage.’
Shokerandit came and looked down at him, smiling. ‘I had enough wine. Now I want to be off to Kharnabhar as soon as possible. My status is uncertain. I must see how my father is.’
‘Damn fathers. May their gossies eat shoe leather.’
‘I have another anxiety too – one you had better heed. Although the Oligarch is well occupied with the war against Bribahr, he has a ship here in port. More may arrive. They may be watching for us both. The sooner I start for Kharnabhar, the better. Why not come with me? There’d be safety and work with my father.’
‘It’s always cold in Kharnabhar. Isn’t that what they say? How far north is it from here?’
‘The Kharnabhar road covers over twenty-two degrees of latitude.’
Fashnalgid laughed. ‘You go. I’ll stay here. I’ll find a ship sailing for Campannlat or Hespagorat. Anything rather than your frozen refuge, thanks for all that.’
‘Please yourself. We don’t exactly please each other, do we? Men have to get along well, to survive the drive to Kharnabhar.’
Fashnalgid brought an arm up from his furs and held out a hand to Shokerandit. ‘Well, well, you’re a man for the system, and I’m against it, but never mind that.’
‘You like to think I’m a man for the system, but since my metamorphosis I’ve broken from it.’
‘Yes? Yet you long to get back to Father in Kharnabhar.’ Fashnalgid laughed. ‘True conformists don’t know they conform. I like you well enough, Luterin, though I know you think I wrecked your life by capturing you. On the contrary, I saved you from the claws of the Oligarch, so be grateful. Be grateful enough to heave your Toress over to my bed for the morning, will you?’
A flush spread over Shokerandit’s face. ‘She’ll get you water or food while I’m out. Otherwise, she is mine. Ask Odim’s brother for what you want – he has plenty of slaves for whom he cares nothing.’
They looked each other in the eye. Then Shokerandit turned to leave the room.