by Brian Aldiss
It is intuition, again, which tells humanity that to live according to the spirit it must not possess, must refrain from dominating. It was precisely those men who met so secretively on Icen Hill, shut away from human contact, secure from contact with the outside world, who most feverishly tried to possess the world.
And if they succeeded?
The biospheric spirits are forgiving and adaptable. Intuition tells us that there are always alternatives. Homeostasis is not fossilisation but the balance of vitality.
The early tribal hunters who burned the forests to secure their prey gave birth to the ecosystems of the great savannahs. Mutability informs Gaia’s cybernetic controls.
The Original Beholder’s grey cloak was sweeping across Helliconia. Human beings defied it or accepted it, according to their individual natures.
Beyond the pale of human possession, the creatures of the wild made their own dispositions. The brassimip trees greedily stored food resources far below ground, in order that they might continue to grow. The little land crustaceans, the rickybacks, congregated in their thousands on the underside of stones of alabaster, working lodgements for themselves in the stone with secretions of acid; they would derive such light as they needed to sustain them through the stone itself. The horned sheep of the mountains, the wild asokin, the badgered timoroon, the flambreg on their scoured plains, indulged in fierce courtship battles. There was time for one more mating and perhaps one more: the number of living offspring born would be decided by temperature, by the food supply, by courage, by skill.
All those beings which could not be described as part of the human race, but remained suspended by a quirk of evolution just outside the hearths of humanity – wistfully looking towards the camp fires – those beings too made their dispositions.
The Driat tribes, given the gift of language and well able to curse in it, cursed and moved down from the hills to rocky shores of their continent, where they would find food in abundance. The migratory Madis were driven from their dying ucts to seek shelter in the West and to haunt the ruined cities mankind had deserted. The Nondads burrowed down between the roots of great trees, living their elusive lives little differently from in the scorching days of summer.
As for the ancipital race, each generation saw global conditions reverting to what they had been before the invasion of Freyr into their skies. To their eotemporal minds, the stereotype of the future was coming more nearly to resemble the stereotype of the past. On the broad plains of Campannlat, phagors became increasingly dominant, relying for meat on the herds of yelk and biyelk, which appeared in growing numbers, and becoming bolder in their attacks on the Sons of Freyr. Only in Sibornal, where their presence had never been strong, were they subject to organised counterattacks from humanity.
All these creatures could be seen as vying with one another. In a sense it was true. But in a wider sense, all were a unity. The steady disappearance of green things destroyed their numbers, but they remained intact. For all of them depended on the anaerobic muds on the Helliconian seabeds, working to bury carbon and maintain the oxygen of the atmosphere, so that the great processes of respiration and photosynthesis were maintained over land and ocean.
All these creatures, again, could be seen as the vital life of the planet. In a sense it was true. But fully half of the mass of Helliconian life lived in the three-dimensional pasturages of the seas. That mass was composed for the most part of single-celled microflora. They were the true monitors of life, and for them little changed, whether Freyr was close or distant.
The Original Beholder held all living forces in balance. How was life possible on the planet? Because there was life on the planet. What would happen without life? There could be no life. The Original Beholder was a spirit who dwelt over the waters: not a separate spirit endowed with mind, but a vast cooperative entity, creating well-being from the centre of a furious chemical storm. And the Original Beholder was forced to be even more ingenious than her sister goddess, Gaia, on nearby Earth.
Somewhat apart from all other living things, from algae and rutting sheep and rickybacks, were the humans of Helliconia. These creatures, although fully as dependent on the homeostatic biosphere as other units of life, had nevertheless elevated themselves to a special category. They had developed language. Within the wordless universe, they had assembled their own umwelt of words.
They had songs and poems, dramas and histories, debate, lament and proclamation, with which to give tongue to the planet. With words came the power to invent. As soon as words came, there was story. Story was to words as Gaia was to Earth and the Original Beholder to Helliconia. Neither planet had a story until mankind came chattering onto the scene and invented it – to fit what each generation saw as the facts.
There were visionaries on Helliconia who, at this time of crisis in human affairs, divined the existence of the Original Beholder. But visionaries had always been there, often inarticulate because they worked close to the thresholds of inarticulacy. They perceived something azoiaxic in the universe, something beyond life round which all life revolves, which was itself at once unliving and the Life.
The vision did not fit easily into words. But because there were words, their listeners could not tell whether the vision was true or false. Words have no atomic weight. The universe of words has no ultimate criteria corresponding to life and death in the tongueless universe. This is why it can invent imaginary worlds which have neither life nor death.
One such imaginary world was the perfectly functioning Sibornalese state as visualised by the Oligarchy. Another was the perfectly functioning universe of God the Azoiaxic as visualised by the elders of the Church of the Formidable Peace. With the defiance of the Oligarch’s edicts and the subsequent burning of Priest-Supreme Chubsalid and his fellow ecclesiastics, the two imaginary perfections ceased to coincide. After long periods of near-identity, Church and State discovered to their mutual horror that they were in opposition.
Many of the leading clergy, like Asperamanka, were too much in the pocket of the State to protest. It was the rank and file of the Church, the lowly friars, the unlovely monks, those closest to the people, who raised the alarm.
One Member of the Oligarchy cried out against ‘those preachers in their cowls running to and fro, spreading false rumours among the common folk’ – thus unconsciously echoing Erasmus on Earth many centuries earlier. But the Oligarchy was no defender of humanism. It could respond to the oppressed only with more oppression.
Enantiodromia once more. Just when the ranks were closing, a gulf opened; when unity was within reach, the divisions became widest.
The Oligarchy turned everything to its advantage. It could use the new unrest in its countries as an excuse for yet firmer measures. The army returning from its success in Bribahr was redeployed in the towns and villages of Uskutoshk. A sullen and cowed population stood by while its village priests were shot.
The dissension reached even Kharnabhar.
Ebstok Esikananzi called upon Luterin to discuss the trouble, and watched his mouth rather than his eyes when Luterin counselled caution. Other worthy officials representing one side or other also called. Luterin found himself closeted with Secretary Evanporil and staff for many hours. With his own fate hanging over him, he was unable to decide the fate of his province.
The Great Wheel was involved in the dispute. While it was itself run by the Church, its territory was under the control of a lay governor appointed by the Keeper. The gulf between lay and ecclesiastic widened. Chubsalid was not forgotten.
After two days of argumentation, Luterin did what he had done before when feeling oppressed. He escaped.
Taking with him a good hound and a huntsman, he rode off into the wilds, the almost limitless wilderness of mountain round Kharnabhar. A blizzard was blowing, but he disregarded it. Lost here and there among the valleys, or punctuating breaks in the caspiarn forests, were hunting lodges and shrines where a man could stable his mount, shelter, and sleep. Like his father, he si
mply disappeared from human ken.
Often he hoped that he might encounter his father. He saw the meeting in his mind’s eye. Saw his father the centre of a group of heavily garbed hunters, the snow swirling about them. Masked hawks sat on leather shoulders. A biyelk dragged a sled carrying dead game. The breath of the hounds rose up. His father descended stiffly from his saddle and came towards him, arms outstretched.
Always his father had learnt of his heroism at Isturiacha, and congratulated him on his escape from death at Koriantura. They embraced …
He and his companion met no one, heard nothing but the clash of glaciers. They slept in remote lodges, where the aurora flickered high above the forests.
However tired he was, however many animals they had slain, the nights brought bad dreams to Luterin. The obsession overwhelmed him that he was climbing, not amid forests, but through rooms stuffed with meaningless furniture and ancient possessions. In those rooms, a sense of horror gathered. He could neither find nor evade the thing that hunted him.
Often he awoke and imagined that he was again laid flat by paralysis. Knowledge of his real surroundings returned only slowly. Then he would try to calm his mind with thoughts of Toress Lahl; but ever and again Insil stood beside her.
At least his mother had taken to her bed after the feast she had given in his honour, so news that he would not marry Insil had not spread.
He saw in how many ways Insil was fitted to be his wife in the years to come; in her was the true unyielding Kharnabhar spirit.
Toress Lahl, by contrast, was an exile, a foreigner. Had he said he would marry her merely to prove his independence?
He hated the fact that he was still undecided. Yet he could not decide finally until his own uncertain situation was made clear. That entailed a confrontation with his father.
Night after night, lying with beating heart inside his sleeping bag, he came to see that confrontation there must be. He could marry Insil only if his father did not force him to it. His father must accept his viewpoint.
He must be hero or outcast. There were no other alternatives. He had to face rejection. Sex, when all was said, was a question of power.
Sometimes, as the aurora cast its glow inside the dark lodges, he saw his brother Favin’s face. Had he also challenged his father in some way – and lost?
Luterin and the huntsman rose early every dawn, when night birds were still in flight. They shared their food together as equals, but never a private thought did they let pass from one to the other.
However badly the nights passed, the days were all happiness. Every hour brought a changing light and changing conditions. The habits of the animals they stalked differed from hour to hour. With the decline of the small year, the days grew shorter, and Freyr remained always close to the horizon. But sometimes they would climb a ridge and see through foliage the old ruler himself, still blazing, throwing his light into another valley brimming in its depths with shadow like a sea, as a king might carelessly fill a glass with wine.
The stoic silence of nature was all about them, increasing their sense of infinity. Infinity came through all their senses. The rocks down which they scrambled to drink at some snow-bearded mountain stream seemed new, untouched by time. Through the silence ran a great music, translated in Luterin’s blood as freedom.
On their sixth day in the wilderness, they spied a party of six horned phagors crossing a glacier on kaidaw-back. The cowbirds sailing above their shoulders gave them away. They stalked the phagors for a day and a half, until they could get ahead of them and ambush them in a ravine.
They killed all six ancipitals. The cowbirds fled, screeching. The kaidaw were good specimens. Luterin and the huntsman managed to round up five of them and decided to drive them back to the family estate. It was possible that the Shokerandit stables could breed a domesticated strain of kaidaw.
The expedition had ended in modest triumph.
The tongues of the sullen bells of the mansion could be heard to toll long before the building loomed out of the blue mists.
So Luterin returned home, to find uproar, and his father’s yelk being combed down in the stables, dead game lying everywhere, and his father’s bodyguard throwing back fresh-brewed yadahl in the gunroom.
Unlike Luterin’s imagined meeting with Lobanster Shokerandit, the real reunion between father and son contained no embraces.
Luterin hurried into the reception hall, throwing off only his outer garments, retaining his boots, his revolver, his bell. His hair was long and unkempt. It fluttered about his ears as he ran towards his father.
Skewbald hounds skulked about the chamber and pissed against the wall hangings. A group of armed men stood by the door, backs to the main party, looking round suspiciously as if plotting.
About Lobanster Shokerandit were gathered his wife, Lourna, and her sister, and friends such as the Esikananzis – Ebstok, his wife, Insil, and her two brothers. They were talking together. Lobanster’s back was turned to Luterin, and his mother saw him first. She called his name.
The talk ceased. They all turned to look at him.
Something in their faces – an unpleasant complicity – told him they had been discussing him. He faltered in mid-stride. They continued to regard him and yet, curiously, their true attention still remained with the black-clad man in their midst.
Lobanster Shokerandit could command the attention of any group. This was less by his stature, which was no more than average, than by a sort of stillness which emanated from him. It was a quality all noticed, yet no one had word for it. Those who hated him, his slaves and servants, said that he froze you with a glance; his friends and allies said that he had an amazing power of command or that he was a man apart. His hounds said nothing, but slunk about his legs with their tails tucked down.
His hands were neat and precise, his nails pointed. Lobanster Shokerandit’s hands were noticeable. They were active while the rest of him remained rigid. They frequently travelled up to visit his throat, which was always swathed in black silk, moving with a startled action not unlike that of crabs or hawks searching for concealed prey. Lobanster had a goitre, which his cravat concealed and his hands betrayed. The goitre lent a pillarlike solidity to the neck, sufficient to support a large head.
The white hair of this remarkable head was brushed straight back as if raked, receding from a broad forehead. There were no eyebrows, but the pallid eyes were surrounded by thick dark lashes – so thick that some people suspected Madi blood somewhere. The eyes were further bolstered by grey pillows or bags below them; these pillows, having a certain goitrous quality, acted as embankments behind which the eyes watched the world. The lips, though ample, were almost as pale as the eyes, and the flesh of the face almost as pale as the lips. A sebaceous sheen covered forehead and cheeks – sometimes the busy hands went up to wipe at the film – so that the face gleamed as if it had recently been recovered from the sea.
‘Come near, Luterin,’ said the face now. The voice was deep and somewhat slow, as if the chin was reluctant to disturb the mound of goitre lying below it.
‘I am glad you are back, Father,’ said Luterin, advancing. ‘Had you good hunting?’
‘Well enough. You are so metamorphosed that I scarcely recognised you.’
‘Those fortunate enough to survive the plague take on compact shape for the Weyr-Winter, Father. I assure you I feel excellently fit.’
He took his father’s neat hand.
Ebstok Esikananzi said, ‘We may assume that phagors feel themselves to be fit, yet they are proven carriers of the plague.’
‘I have recovered from the plague. I cannot carry it.’
‘We certainly hope you can’t, dear,’ said his mother.
As he turned to her, his father said sternly, ‘Luterin, I wish you to retire to the hall and await me. I shall be there presently. We have some legal matters to discuss.’
‘Is there something the matter?’
Luterin took the full force of his father’s stare. He b
owed his head and retired.
Once in the hall, he paced about, heedless of the tongue of his bell. What had made his father so cold he could not guess. True, that august figure had always been distant even when present, but that had been merely one of his qualities, as much taken for granted as the hidden goitre.
He summoned a slave and sent him to fetch Toress Lahl from her quarters.
She came questioningly. As she approached, he thought how appealing her metamorphosed shape was. And the frost prints on her face had healed.
‘Why have you been so long away? Where have you been?’
There was a hint of reproach, although she smiled and took his hand.
As he kissed her, he said, ‘I’m entitled to vanish on the hunt. It’s in the family blood. Now listen, I am anxious for you. My father’s back and evidently displeased. This may be something that concerns you, since my mother and Insil have been talking to him.’
‘What a pity you were not here to welcome him, Luterin.’
‘That can’t be helped,’ he said dismissively. ‘Listen, I want to give you something.’
He led into an alcove off the hall, where a wooden cupboard stood. With a key taken from his pocket, he unlocked the cupboard. Within hung dozens of heavy iron keys, each labelled. He ran a finger along the rows, frowning.
‘Your father has a mania for locking things,’ she said, half laughing.
‘Don’t be silly. He is the Keeper. This place has to be fortress as well as home.’
He found what he wanted and picked out a rusted key almost a hand’s span long.
‘Nobody will miss this,’ he said, locking up the cupboard. ‘Take it. Hide it. It is the key to that chapel built by your countryman, the king-saint. You remember, in the woods? There may be a little trouble – I can’t tell what. Perhaps about pauk. I don’t want you harmed. If anything happens to me, you will be in danger of arrest at the least. Go and hide in the chapel. Take a slave with you – they’re all longing to escape. Choose a woman who knows Kharnabhar, preferably a peasant.’