Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter

by Brian Aldiss

  Larger land necrogenes follow similar patterns. After yelk mate, the sperm seed develops into maggot-like creatures which live off the double stomachs of their mothers. When they enter an artery, the maggots explode through the parental body, causing rapid death. They devour the carcass – and each other – until after metamorphosis, when they emerge to survive in the outside world as young adult yelk.

  WUTRA

  In the great hubbub of Helliconian life, one other life form deserves special mention.

  In the centuries of Great Winter, Wutra’s Worm is a kind of devouring dragon. Flighted, it destroys all it comes upon. To the embattled tribes of humanity – in Pannoval and elsewhere – Wutra is God of the Skies. In time, the idea becomes a god.

  During the Great Summer, a transformation takes place in the life cycle. The worm retreats to the warming oceans in a marine stage. Having passed its flighted period in higher latitudes, where it mated, it now lives out the rest of its life in the sea. The oceans teem with food. Into this rich environment, the offspring are born.

  These fish-like offspring are as vulnerable as they are plentiful, and are known to coastal peoples as scupper-fish. Scupper-fish make a nourishing and tasty dish.

  After some centuries, when the Great Autumn sets in, the scupper-fish crawl to land (much like Earth’s mudskippers) and develop wings. A few more years, and Wutra’s Worm is again aloft in darkening air.

  Even during the period when it is being eaten in its thousands and hundreds of thousands, Wutra’s Worm has gained a niche in the night sky.

  Most nations of Campannlat and Sibornal recognise ten houses of the Zodiac, the plane of the ecliptic traversed by the two suns and the other planets. One of these houses is Wutra’s Worm, sometimes known as the Night Worm. Somewhere within this constellation lies a dim star, Sol.

  Houses of the Zodiac

  The Bat

  Devil Bull (also known as Wutra’s Ox)

  The Boulder

  Wutra’s Worm (The Night Worm)

  The Queen’s Scar (Akha’s Wound)

  The Old Pursuer

  The Fountain

  The Golden Ship

  The Two Dogs

  The Sword

  APPENDIX 4

  Helliconian Humanity

  Terrestrial interest in Helliconia stems from the fact that after many centuries of interstellar exploration, a planet was discovered on which human life thrives, part of a diverse biomass. However, researches conducted on Avernus soon showed that Helliconian humanity differs in interesting psychological and physical ways from its earthly counterparts.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE

  One divergence from normal terrestrial existence seems so great, even so uncanny, that it must be regarded as pervasively psychological and phylogenic. Indeed, centuries of dispute on Earth failed to resolve the question of whether Helliconians should be categorised as human, or as a separate species.

  The aberration (as some call it) lies in a much gentler gradation between life and death than terrestrial humanity experiences. Terrestrial human existence is binary; one is either alive or dead. On Helliconia, two further states follow bodily demise.

  The burnt-out souls of the dead descend into an obsidian realm of entropy. In this realm, this negative of life, are stored two stages of psychic decay, gossies, the residues of the more recently deceased, and, further down the stack, fessups. Gossies are subject to febrile mood swings, from bitter recrimination to saccharine sweetness, perhaps related to climatic conditions. Fessups, increasingly less articulate, sink towards ultimate disintegration and the Original Boulder – as early understanding has the term.

  [Later this term is understood as the Original Beholder. That is to say, Gaia, the presiding unconscious will of the biomass which maintains the difficult equilibrium of the planet.]

  The living are able to commune with gossies if they enter a trancelike state resembling death known as pauk.

  After physical death, phagors undergo a similar gradual diminution towards ultimate disintegration. This is called tether.

  PHYSICAL DIFFERENCE

  Male and female humans exhibit little sexual dimorphism. They undergo instead a dramatic weight / shape transformation before and after the Great Winter. This is in response to the diminished or increased energy reaching the planet. It amounts to an evolutionary survival strategy.

  THE HELICO VIRUS

  The agent of the weight / shape transformation is a pleomorphic helical virus, somewhat similar to a mumps pathogen. Its shell in the shape of an icosahedron consists of lipids and proteins, and contains nucleic acid RNA. It is 97 millimicrons long. The Avernus has not the means to filter out the virus. For this reason, Avernians are unable to visit in person the planet they orbit (except under unusual – and fatal – circumstances).

  The helico virus is endemic twice in a Great Year, firstly approximately 600 E years after apastron. It then rages for many small years, coincidental with improving climatic conditions and increased solar energy. Its second appearance is during a decline into wintery conditions, some 1800 E years after apastron.

  At its every visitation, the virus brings widespread death. It strikes at the hypothalamus, causing encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and delirium. Its manifestations at this stage resemble meningitis. Populations are usually reduced to about half. Survivors take on altered form, gaining (in autumn) fifty per cent of normal body weight, as fatty tissue is built up. This phase is marked by unquenchable bulimia: their own children, faeces, asokins – sufferers will seize on and eat anything living. The survivors of the spring epidemic shed a corresponding amount of weight, marked by anorexia and self-starvation.

  Figure 4. Human form changes throughout Great Year shown in diagram

  A Survivor of Fat Death towards Winter

  B Median figure

  C Survivor of Bone Fever in Spring

  In the course of several generations, surviving populations shed the extremes of their thin or heavyweight forms, tending to return to a more average constitution. In so doing, they also lose immunity to the virus.

  It will be seen that this terrible scourge has a positive aspect. It forms part of a natural process, ensuring human survival throughout the climatic changes wrought by cosmic upheaval.

  In more primitive times, the two phases of the helico pandemic were not recognised as springing from one and the same cause. They were known (in autumn) as the Fat Death, and (in spring) as Bone Fever. By the period covered by Book 3 (‘Winter’), the doctor Toress Lahl has gained a clear understanding of Fat Death – and of its survival rate. A great chain of eclipses occurs at this period, making Bone Fever outbreaks even more terrifying. A total of twenty eclipses takes place between 630 and 658 E years AA.1

  VIRUS CARRIER

  The carrier of the helico virus is a species of arthropoda or tick. This vector transfers readily from phagors to humans. Phagors are immune to the virus. The human habit of using phagors as slaves or soldiers during the Great Summer and onwards ensures the survival of both tick and virus (even when the latter is latent) among human populations.

  The helico virus is a reminder (for those who can understand) of the connection between the present deadly hostility of phagor and humanity and a distant past when the two species were commensal.

  Figure 5. Diagram of human biomass governed by Helico virus.

  Terrible though the disease is, human survival is largely dependent upon the violent weight / shape transformation which it effects. Thus, if the humans succeed in eliminating their enemies, they cause their own undoing.

  Or so it seems. If the nations of Summer ceased to war among themselves, if they could then defeat the phagor legions, if they could maintain a selected number in the equivalent of zoological gardens, then humanity could break free from its present limitations. But these are large Ifs …

  1 Eclipses occur in the following manner. The orbits of Helliconia and her sister planets lie at a 10° inclination to the orbit of Batalix a
nd Freyr about each other. Helliconia’s orbit crosses the greater orbital plane at two points. Joining these two points is the line of the nodes. When the line of the nodes passes through Freyr, so that Helliconia, Batalix, and Freyr are aligned, then eclipses of the greater light will occur.

  A lesser eclipse cycle occurs on the other side of periastron, lasting for 9.45 years. In accordance with Kepler’s laws, Batalix speeds up when closer to Freyr. It therefore takes less time to move from the Fat Death eclipses to the post-periastron position than from the post-periastron position to the Fat Death position in 630 E yrs AA. So the second eclipse series commences in the year 1424 E yrs AA.

  APPENDIX 5

  Kharnabhar

  Kharnabhar is a small town in a remote region of Sibornal. The town has grown up about a remarkable monument, the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar. Previously a sacred site, it now houses criminal elements.

  The fame of the Great Wheel is universal. When SartoriIrvrash arrives in Ashkitosh (Bk. 2, xi), he sees a tapestry bearing an allegorical depiction of the Wheel. ‘Upon a scarlet background, a great wheel [was] being rowed through the heavens by oarsmen in cerulean garments, each smiling blissfully, towards an astonishing maternal figure from whose mouth, nostrils, and breasts sprang the stars in the scarlet sky.’

  The main and almost only route to Kharnabhar is from the port of Rivenjk, on the Climent Sea coast, northwards through the mountains of the Shivenink Chain. The distance is about 2400 miles, equivalent to a journey from Gibraltar to the north of Norway.

  The Great Wheel

  The Wheel is a granite ring, carved inside a granite mountain of the Chain. It revolves within Mount Kharnabhar, only one small segment being accessible from outside the mountain. The Architects long ago created the Wheel, encoding with its dimensions the external world, in a bid for astrological symmetry. ‘As Above, so below.’ The holy men who first occupied the Wheel intended it as an instrument by which to propel their world across the heavens, out of Winter and into the welcoming light and warmth of Freyr.

  Originally, the Great Wheel was dedicated to God the Azoiaxic (meaning ‘something which revolves beyond life’ – later interpreted to mean ‘one who existed before life and round whom all life revolves’).

  Penned within the confines of the mountain, the Wheel is inclined at 5° to the horizontal. It rotates above a floor inclined at 4°. This slight difference permits the river flowing round the base of the Wheel to carry mud beneath it, acting as lubricant.

  Three-walled cells like alcoves line the outer surface of the ring. The ring is kept in slow movement, day by day. The immovable fourth wall is not part of the Wheel, although it closes off all the cells; it consists of solid unmoving rock, Mt Kharnabhar itself. Into the rock is inset lengths of chain, stapled firmly into the wall. These chains hang at 125 cm intervals.

  With these chains, prisoners in the one thousand and eighty-five cells can haul themselves into and through the dark night of granite. When priests’ trumpets sound throughout, all prisoners must pull in unison on their chains. So the Wheel is shifted in its journey through rock or – as some still claim – through the heavens.

  Some technical data

  Wheel diameter 1825 metres (Number of Small Years in one Great Year)

  thickness 13.19 m (1319 being the year of Freyr-set or Myrkwyr at latitude of Kharnabhar, counting from apastron)

  height 6.60 m (12 times 55, the latitude of the Wheel)

  Cell height 240 cm (= the 6 wks of 1 tenner × the 40 mins of 1 hr)

  width 250 cm (+ the 10 tenners of 1 yr × the hrs in a day)

  depth 480 cm (= no. of days in Small Year)

  Wall thickness

  between cells 0.64159 m (+ cell width gives value of pi)

  Figure 6. Diagram of the Great Wheel within the granite of Mt. Kharnabhar. (Bambeck protection).

  After ten years, the Wheel has been tugged by a captive back to the point at which he started his imprisonment. A revolution has been completed. On that final day, one prisoner finds daylight instead of stone for the fourth wall of his cell, and may make his exit to freedom; in the cell leading his, another man will be entering for his first day of the ten-year journey into and through the rock.

  This ceaseless revolution has been seen by some to be echoed by the ceaseless orbiting of the Avernus, high above Kharnabhar.

  APPENDIX 6

  Populations

  Helliconia is a sparsely populated world, at least as far as human and phagor densities are concerned. The following table shows how those densities fluctuate between the periods of extreme cold and heat. Phagor populations are more stable than human ones.

  The weight of planetary biomass is in direct proportion to the solar energy absorbed by the planetary surface. At the time of apastron, the total mass is almost one third that at periastron.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks for invaluable preliminary discussions go to Professor Tom Shippey (philology), Dr J. M. Roberts (history) and Mr Desmond Morris (anthropology). I also wish to thank Dr B. E. Juel-Jensen (pathology) and Dr Jack Cohen (biology) for factual suggestions. Anything sound philologically is owed to Professor Tom Shippey; his lively enthusiasm has been of great help all along.

  The globe of Helliconia itself was designed and built by Dr Peter Cattermole, from its geology to its weather. For the cosmology and astronomy, I am indebted to Dr Iain Nicolson, whose patience over the years is a cause for particular gratitude.

  Dr Mick Kelly and Dr Norman Myers both gave up-to-date advice on winters other than natural ones. The structure of the Great Wheel owes much to Dr Joern Bambeck. James Lovelock kindly allowed me to employ his concept of Gaia in this fictional form. Herr Wolfgang Jeschke’s interest in this project from its early days has been vital.

  My debt to the writings and friendship of Dr J. T. Fraser and to David Wingrove (for being protean) is apparent.

  To my wife, Margaret, loving thanks for letting Helliconia take over for so long, and for working on it with me.

  Brian Aldiss was born in 1925. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Signals in Burma and Sumatra. In 1948 he was demobilised and became an assistant in an Oxford bookshop. His first published SF novel was Non-Stop, published in 1958. By 1962 he had already won an award for his series of novellas collectively known as Hothouse, and during the 1960s he wrote some of his most famous novels: Greybeard (1964), Report on Probability A (1968) and Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia (1969). In addition, The Saliva Tree (1965) won the Nebula award for best novella. He continued his prolific output throughout the 1970s but achieved his greatest acclaim in the 1980s for the three massively researched novels Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983) and Helliconia Winter (1985), the first of which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He subsequently turned his attention to straight fiction focusing on aspects of his own life (such as Forgotten Life (1988)) or autobiography (Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman (1998)) before returning to SF.

  Throughout his writing career, Aldiss has been both an anthologist and a critic, involved in both the Penguin Science Fiction and The Year’s Best SF series. Both Billion Year Spree (1973) and its expanded follow-up Trillion Year Spree (1986) are considered classic surveys of SF. The latter won a Hugo Award in 1987. He has also worked as a reviewer and essayist, writing for the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, and the Washington Post. In 2001, his short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long was the basis for the Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Aldiss was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2005. He currently lives in Oxford.

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  Helliconia Brian Aldiss