Helliconia, page 117
Afterwards, Odim had no idea how long he lay on the catwalk. It was Besi, with her split mouth, who ventured along the walk and helped him return to the gallery. Gagrim had fled.
She was hugging him and wiping his burnt face with a cloth. He realised that he was saying to her over and over, ‘I killed a man.’
‘You saved us all,’ she said. ‘You were very brave, my darling. Now we must get into the ship and sail as soon as possible, before anyone discovers what has happened.’
‘I killed a man, Besi.’
‘Say rather that he fell, Eedap.’ She kissed him with her burst lips and began to cry. He clutched her as he never had before in daylight, and she felt his thin, hard body tremble.
So ended the well-organised part of Eedap Mun Odim’s life. From now on, existence would be a series of improvisations. Like his father before him, he had attempted to control his small world by keeping accurate accounts, by balancing ledgers, by cheating no one, by being friendly, by conforming in every way he could. At one stroke, all that was gone. The system had collapsed.
Besi Besamitikahl had to assist him across the quayside to the waiting ship. With them went two others, whose lives had been equally disrupted.
Captain Harbin Fashnalgid had seen his own face crudely portrayed on a red poster as he stepped ashore with Besi, after they had sailed the twenty miles from the jetty in the marshlands. The poster was newly arrived from the local printing works commandeered by the army, and still glistened with the bill sticker’s glue. For Fashnalgid, Odim’s ship served the purpose, not only of escaping from Uskutoshk, but of staying close to Besi. Fashnalgid had decided that if he were to reform his life, then he needed a courageous, constant woman to look after him. He stepped up the gangplank briskly, longing to be free of the army and its shadow.
Behind him followed Toress Lahl, widow of the great Bandal Eith Lahl, recently killed in battle. Since her husband’s death and her capture by Luterin Shokerandit, her life had become quite as disoriented as Odim’s or Fashnalgid’s. She now found herself in a foreign port, about to sail for another foreign port. And her captor lay already in the ship, tied down while he underwent the agony of the Fat Death. She might elude him; but Toress Lahl knew of no way in which a woman of Oldorando could return home safely from Sibornal. So she remained to tend Shokerandit, hoping to earn his gratitude thereby if he survived the plague.
Of the plague, she had less fear than the others. Back home in Oldorando, she had worked as a doctor. The word that inspired fear and curiosity in her was the name of Shokerandit’s homeland, Kharnabhar, a word which embodied legend and romance when spoken from the distance of Borldoran.
To acquire his ship, Odim had worked through intermediaries, local friends who knew useful people in the Priest-Sailors Guild. The money from the sale of his house and company had all gone to purchase the New Season. It now lay moored alongside Climent Quay, a two-masted brig of 639 tons, square-rigged on fore and mainmasts. The vessel had been built twenty years earlier, in Askitosh shipyards.
Loading was complete. The New Season contained, besides such provisions as Odim could lay his hands on at short notice, a herd of arang, fine Odim porcelain services, and a sick man bearing the plague, with a slave woman to tend him.
Odim had managed to get clearance from the quaymaster, an old acquaintance of his who had been paid liberally across Odim cargoes for many years. The captain of the vessel was persuaded to compress into the shortest possible time all the ceremonies recommended by deuteroscopists and hieromancers for an auspicious voyage. A cannon was fired to mark the departure of a ship from Sibornal.
A brief hymn was sung on deck to God the Azoiaxic. With tide and wind set fair, a gap widened between ship and Climent Quay. The New Season began its voyage for distant Shivenink.
VI
G4PBX / 4582–4–3
On the Avernus, fleet Kaidaw of Helliconian skies, the monotony of barbarism descended. Eedap Mun Odim was rightly proud of the craftsmanship embodied in the Kuj-Juvecian clock he presented to Jheserabhay; the very narrowness of societies such as Kuj-Juvec gives their art a concentrated vitality. But the barbarism prevailing on the Avernus produced nothing but smashed skulls, ambushes, tribal drumming, simian mirth.
The many generations which had served under Avernian civilisation had often expressed a longing to escape from the sense of futility, from a doctrine of minimalism, imposed by the concept of Obligation Earth. Some had preferred death on Helliconia to a continuation of Avernian order. They would have said, if asked, that they preferred barbarism to civilisation.
The boredom of barbarism was infinitely greater than the restraints of civilisation. The Pins and the Tans had no respite from fear and deprivation. Surrounded by a technology which was in many respects self-governing, they were little better off than many of the tribes of Campannlat, caught between marsh and forest and sea. Barbarism let loose their fears and curtailed their imaginations.
The sections of the station which had suffered greatest damage were those most intimately connected with human activity, such as the canteens and restaurants, and the protein-processing plants which supplied them. The crop fields dominating the inside of the spherical hull were now battlefields. Man hunted man for food. The great perambulant pudendolls, those genital monstrosities created from a perverted genetic inheritance, were also tracked down and eaten.
The automated station continued to flash images on internal screens from the living world below – continued, indeed, to vary the interior weather, so that humanity was not bereft of that eternal stimulus.
The surviving tribes were no longer capable of making the old connections. The images they received of hunters, kings, scholars, traders, slaves, had become divorced from their contexts. They were received as visitants from another world, gods or devils. They brought only wonder into the hearts of those whose forebears had studied them with disdain.
The rebels of the Avernus – a mere dissident handful at the onset – had launched out for greater freedoms than they imagined they enjoyed. They had beached themselves on the shores of a melancholy existence. The rule of the head was taken over by the belly.
But the Avernus had a duty which took precedence over tending its inhabitants. Its first duty was to transmit a continuous signal back to the planet Earth, a thousand light-years away. Over the eventful centuries of the Observation Station’s existence, that signal, with its freight of information, had never faltered.
The signal had formed an artery of data, fed back to Earth according to the original plan of a technocratic elite responsible for the grandiose schemes of interstellar exploration. The artery never ran dry, not even when the inhabitants of the Avernus reduced themselves to a state close to savagery.
The artery never ran dry, but somewhere a vein had been cut. Earth did not always respond.
Charon, a distant outpost of the solar system, housed a receiving complex built across the frigid methane surface of the satellite. At this station, on which the nearest approaches to intelligent life were the androids which maintained it, the Helliconia signals were analysed, classified, stored, transmitted to the inner solar system. The outward process was far less complex, consisting merely of a string of acknowledgements, or an order to the Avernus to increase coverage of such and such an area. The news bulletins which had once been sent outwards had long ago ceased, ever since someone pointed out the absurdity of feeding the Avernus with items of news one thousand years old. Avernus knew – and now cared – nothing regarding events on Earth.
As to those events: The crowded nations of Earth spent most of the twenty-first century locked in a series of uncomfortable confrontations: East threatened West, North threatened South, First World helped and cheated Third World. Growing populations, dwindling resources, continuous localised conflicts, slowly transferred the face of the globe into something approaching a pile of rubble. The concept of ‘terrorist nation’ dominated the mid-century; it was at this time that the ancient city of Rome was taken out. Yet, contrary to gloomy expectations, that ultimate Valhalla, nuclear war, was never resorted to. This was in part because the superpowers masked their operations behind manipulated smaller nations, and in part because the exploration of neighbouring space acted as something of a safety valve for aggressive emotions.
Those who lived in the twenty-first century regarded their age as a melancholy one despite exponential developments in technological and electronics systems. They saw that every field and factory producing food was electronically protected or physically patrolled. They felt the increasing regimentation of their life. Yet the structure, the underlying system of civilisation, was maintained. Restrictive though it was, it could be transcended.
Many gifted individuals made the century a brilliant one, at least in retrospect. Men and women arose from nowhere, from the masses, and won enormous fame by their gifts. In their brilliance, their defiance of their underprivileged environment, they lightened the hearts of their audience. When Derek Eric Absalom died, it was said that half the globe wept. But his wonderful improvised songs remained as consolation.
At first, only two of Earth’s nations were in competition beyond the confines of the solar system. The number crept up to four and stopped at five. The cost of interstellar travel was too great. No more could play, even in an age when technology had become a religion. Unlike religion, the hope of the poor, technology was a rich man’s strategy.
The excitements of interstellar exploration were relayed back to the multitudes of Earth. Many admired intellectually. Many cheered for their own teams. The projects were always presented with great solemnity. Great expenditures, great distances, great prestige: these united to impress the taxpayers back home in their ugly cities.
Occasional automated starships were launched during the heyday of interstellar travel, from approximately 2090 to 3200. These ships carried computer-stored colonists, able to range vacuum continually until habitable worlds were discovered.
The extrasolar planet on which mankind first set foot was solemnly named New Earth. It was one of two moonless bodies orbiting Alpha Centauri C. ‘Arabia Deserta writ large,’ said one commentator, but most settled for comfortable awe as the monotonous landscapes of New Earth unrolled.
The planet consisted mainly of sand and tumbled mountain ranges. Its one ocean covered no more than a fiftieth of the total land area. No life was found on it, apart from some abnormally large worms and a kind of seaweed which grew in the fringes of the salt sea. The air, though breathable, had an extremely low water-vapour content; human throats became parched within a few minutes when breathing it. No rain ever fell on New Earth’s dazzling surface. It was a desert world, and had always been so. No viable biosphere could establish itself.
Centuries passed.
A base and rest centre were established on New Earth. The exploration ships moved farther out. Eventually, they covered a sphere of space with a diameter of almost two thousand light-years. This area, though immense in the experience of a species which had only fairly recently tamed the horse, was negligible as a proportion of the galaxy.
Many planets were discovered and explored. None yielded life. Additional mineral resources for Earth, but not life. Down in the gloomy miasmas of a gas giant, writhing things were discovered which came and went in a manner suggesting volition. They even surrounded the submersible which was lowered to investigate them. For sixty years, human explorers tried to communicate with the writhing things – with no success. At this period, the last whale in Earth’s polluted oceans became extinct.
On some newly discovered worlds, bases were established and mining carried out. There were accidents – unreported back home. The gigantic planet Wilkins was dismantled; fusion motors, roaring through its atmosphere, converted its hydrogen to iron and heavier metals, and the planet was then broken up. Energy was released as planned – but rather more rapidly than planned. Lethal shortwave radiation killed off all involved in the project. On Orogolak, war broke out between two rival bases, and a short nuclear war was fought which turned the planet into an ice desert.
There were successes, too. Even New Earth was a success. Successful enough, at least, for a resort to be set up on the edge of its chemical-laden sea. Small colonies were established on twenty-nine planets, some of which flourished for several generations.
Although some of these colonies developed interesting legends – which contributed to Earth’s rich store – none was large or complex enough to nourish cultural values which diverged from their parent system.
Space-going mankind fell victim to many strange new maladies and mental discomforts. It was a fact rarely acknowledged that every terrestrial population was a reservoir for disease; a considerable proportion of the people of all ethnic groups were unwell for a percentage of their days – for unidentifiable reasons. SUDS (Silent Untreated Disease Syndrome) now clamoured for identification. In gravity-free conditions, SUDS proliferated.
What had been untreated was long to prove incurable. Nervous systems failed, memories developed imaginary life histories, vision became hallucinatory, musculature seized up, stomachs overheated. Space dementia became an everyday event. Shadowy frights passed across the vacuum-going psyche.
Despite its discomforts and disillusions, infiltration of the galaxy continued. Where there is no vision, the people perish – and there was a vision. There was a vision that knowledge, for all its dangers, was to be desired; and the ultimate knowledge lay in an understanding of life and its relationship to the inorganic universe. Without understanding, knowledge was worthless.
A Chinese / American fleet was investigating the dust clouds of the Ophiuchus constellation, seven hundred light-years from Earth. This region contained giant molecular clusters, nonisotropic gravities, accreted planets, and other anomalies. New stars were being created among the palls of inchoate matter.
An astrophysics satellite attached to one of the computerborgoids of the fleet obtained spectrographic readings on an atypical binary system some three hundred light-years distant from the Ophiuchus clouds which revealed at least one attendant planet supporting Earth-like conditions.
The oddity of an ageing G4 yellow star moving about a common axis with a white supergiant no more than eleven million years old had already engaged the interest of the cosmologists attached to the Chinese / American feet. The spectroanalysis spurred them into active investigation.
The supposedly Earth-like planet of the distant binary system was filed under the appellation G4PBX / 4582–4–3. Signals were despatched on their lengthy journey through the dust clouds to Earth.
Berthed inside the flagship of the fleet, then cruising the outer fringes of the Ophiuchus dust clouds, was an automated colonising ship. The ship was programmed and despatched to G4PBX / 4582–4–3. The year was 3145.
The colonising ship entered the Freyr-Batalix system in 3600 A.D., to begin immediately the task for which it was programmed, the establishment of an Observation Station.
There was G4PBX / 4582–4–3, like something dreamed! Real, but beyond belief, beyond even rejoicing.
As signals from the new station flashed back to Earth, it became more and more clear that the new planet’s resemblance to Earth was close. Not only was it stocked with innumerable varieties of life in the prodigal terrestrial manner – and in heartening contrast to previously discovered planets – more, it supported an intriguing cline of semi-intelligent and intelligent species. Among the intelligent species were a humanlike being and a horned being something resembling a rough-coated minotaur.
The signals eventually reached Charon, on the margins of the solar system, where androids fed the data to Earth, only five light-hours distant.
By the middle of the fifth millennium, Earth’s Modern Ages were in slow decline. The Age of Apperception was a memory. For all but a few meritocrats in positions of power, galactic exploration had become an abstraction, another burden inflicted by bureaucracy. G4PBX / 4582–4–3 changed all that. Ceasing to feature merely as a mysterious body among three sister planets, it took on colour and personality. It became Helliconia, the marvellous planet, the world beyond the veils of darkness where life was.
Helliconia’s suns took on symbolic significance. Mystics remarked on the way in which Freyr-Batalix seemed to represent those divisions of the human psyche celebrated in Asian legend long ago:
Two birds always together in the peach tree:
One eats the fruit, the other watches it.
One bird’s our individual Self, tasting all the world’s gifts:
The other the universal Self, witnessing all and wondering.
How avidly the first prints of human and phagors, struggling out of a snowbound world, were studied! Inexplicable thankfulness filled human hearts. A link with other intelligent life had been forged at last.
By the time the Avernus was built and established in orbit about Helliconia, by the time it was stocked with the humans reared by surrogate mothers on the colonising ship, the sphere of terrestrial-directed space activity was contracting. The inhabited planets of the solar system were moving towards a centralised form of government, later to evolve into COSA, the Co-System Assemblage; their own byzantine affairs occupied them. Distant colonies were left to fend for themselves, marooned here and there on semi-habitable worlds like so many Crusoes on desert islands.
Earth and its neighbouring planets were by this time storehouses of undigested information. While the materials brought back to Earth had been processed, the knowledge had not been absorbed. The enmities which had existed since tribal days, rivalries founded on fear and a lust for possession, remained dormant. The dwindling of space squeezed them into new prominence.
By the year 4901 A.D., all Earth was managed by the one company, COSA. Judicial systems had yielded to profit and loss accounts. Through one chain of command or another, COSA owned every building, every industry, every service, every plant, and the hide of every human on the planet – even those humans who opposed it. Capitalism had reached its glorious apogee. It made a small percentage on every lungful of oxygen breathed. And it paid out its stockholders in carbon dioxide.
