Helliconia Spring, page 52
For example, in “Summer” four different calendars are mentioned. Taking these into account, Book 2 opens in
(Terrestrial dateline
AD 6877)
Earth years AA
1177
Helliconia year AA “Denniss” calendar
828*
Oldorando-Borlien After Union
381 (some claim 408)
Ancipital year
749**
HUMAN AGES COMPARED
Because the Small Year on Helliconia is longer than a terrestrial year, age differentials exist.
The following table (years) gives comparable ages of humans on the two planets.
Earth
Helliconia
5
3.5
10
7
12
8.45
15
10.56
18
12.67
20
14
22
15.49
25
17.6
30
21
35
24.67
40
28
50
35.21
60
42
70
49
75
52.8
80
56
Life spans are longer in summers of the Great Year
*The legendary King Denniss was ruling in Year 249 before apastron, and foresaw disaster.
His calendar has been discarded.
**The full and correct name of this year in the Ancipital calendar, forged in the ancipital cotcmporal brain, is:
“Year After Small Apotheosis of Great year 5,634,000 Since catastrophe”. That is, since Freyr’s capture of Batalix, some 8,000,280 years previously.
APPENDIX 2
Phagors
The struggle for supremacy on Helliconia is between humans and phagors. Phagors, a two-homed, shaggy-coated species, were the original dominant inhabitants of the planet before Batalix (Star B) was captured by Freyr, the supergiant sun (Star A). They are also known as ancipitals (two-edged), a reference to their sharp horns.
This cowlike species probably evolved from flambreg, vast herds of which graze the northern wilds of Sibornal. They are kin to older pre- Freyr species, such as the kaidaws.
Kaidaws are the large horned animals, somewhat resembling horses, which phagors ride. These older species have physical traits in common, such as ball-joints at knees and elbows. This greater dexterity is counterbalanced by a sporadically firing nervous system; hence frequent bursts of immobility.
Phagors stand upright and possess three fingers on each hand.
BRAIN
A major distinction between phagor and human lies in brain structure. A phagor brain is uni-hemispheric, unlike a human brain with its two hemispheres. There is no equivalent to the neocortex. Inasmuch as the phagor brain resembles a human’s, it consists largely of hypothalamus, overlaid with a kind of cerebellum controlling motion.
It may be said in consequence that phagors live in their own perceptual Umwelts. Theirs is an eotemporal consciousness (Eos was the goddess of dawn, sister to Selene), where endings and beginnings cannot be distinguished from one another. For them, time is no indicator of progression as registered in a human mind. Events are monitored as a series of milestones from which direction has been obliterated; thus a trail is indicated, without an arrow of perception to point direction. A rudimentary nervous system permits only action and reaction. But tether (See Appendix 4) greatly extends ancipital awareness.
Ancipitals were masters of the cool dawn world before Freyr capture.
With their cowbirds, commensal avians which feed in part on their hosts’ parasites, they dominated a world, from the lowlands of Pegovin to Mt Estakhadok in the High Nktryhk. In those remote ages, they kept Others as pets.
BLOOD
Ancipital blood is golden, containing as it does an anti-freeze system which (together with their stiff pelage) renders the phagors impervious to cold. Cowbirds, kaidaws, and other dawn animals, share this characteristic. Red blood, free of anti-freeze, represents a more recent evolutionary development.
Moss forms a large part of phagor diet during cold periods. Mosses contain high percentages of arachidonic acid, which is highly polyunsaturated. A concentration of this fatty acid in the phospholipids of cell membranes makes the membranes more fluid. This serves to lower the temperature at which the lipid in the membranes undergoes a phase shift from liquid-crystalline to a more solid or gel-like state. Hence the acid from the moss protects cell membranes from the effects of cold; the cell is then able to function at low temperatures. Humanity, of course, has no such reinforcement.
SEXES
Linked with their sporadic endocrine system, female phagors come on heat ten times a year (tenners is the Eotemporal term, equivalent to the terrestrial term “monthlies”). Phagors copulate infrequently. As with terrestrial gorillas, the penis is small. Phagors never commit rape; that is a piece of human mythology. Females are viviparous and lactate; parturition takes place one small (or Batalix) year after conception. Both sexes carry the Helico virus within the mitochondria of their cells.
stallun – adult male
creaght – young male
gillot – adult mare
fillock – young mare
runt – child, either sex
LANGUAGE
Phagors used two intertwined languages. Native ancipital is an everyday language, employing only one tense, the continuous present. Eotemporal is a sacred speechform, also used for counting on the base three. It is supposedly the language spoken by those ancipitals sunk in tether.
Language, phagor-to-phagor, is generally accompanied by gesture. Thus the exhortation on parting is “Hold horns high”, accompanied by the ceremony of both sides leaning forward, arms to side, foreheads touching, harneys meeting. Then smartly away.
APPENDIX 3
Other species
Following the capture by Freyr of Batalix and its planetary system, the proximity of the A-type supergiant bathed the planets in high energy radiation.
The effect on the atmospheric composition of Helliconia was to raise the oxygen level, due to the photolysis of CO2, H2O, etc. The oceans were also affected. Greater concentrations of macromolecules led to increased activity all the way up the food chain.
For something like a million years, the upheaval of capture bathed Helliconia in high UV radiation and X-ray levels. The result was a fairly rapid evolution of species. The human species evolved from a small Hespagorat ape. Some species perished—the childrim for one.
In evolving, the Others escaped from captivity, but remained in proximity with phagors in loose commensal communities, while going through a protognostic stage of development. Hence the survival of ancipital terms into the Olonets language (the main language of Campannlat). Phagors long retained a shadowy dominance (hence the god Akha). Eventually various tribes fled from Hespagorat and the Pegovin region, crossing to Campannlat. The crossing was effected via an ancient landbridge between the two continents.
East-West phagor migratory routes were established at the time of the crossing, or just thereafter.
The tribes crossing the landbridge were known as the Olle Onets. This name was derived from the glut of oil-fish found in the shallows on either side of the isthmus. It became in turn the name of the chief language of Campannlat, Olonets.
Many of the “winter” tribes were driven eastwards before the advancing newcomers. Clans later occupying the lower Nktyrhk, such as the Mordriats, are descendants of such defeated tribes.
Figure 3. The ancient landbridge
Landbridge in heavy outline. Present land configuration in light outline. The isthmus between the Climent Ocean and the Narmoset Sea. The land on either side, following the destruction of the isthmus when the polar caps melted, eventually became the countries of Throssa and Radado, now separated by the Cadmer Straits.
THE MADIS
These transhumance peoples have never achieved a fully human consciousness. Madis are categorised as protognostics. Travel is their whole existence, pursued whether there is one sun in the sky or two. This fixed pattern of behaviour suggests that they existed before solar capture, living much as they do at present.
While not numerous, the Madis have made their mark on the landscape of Campannlat. They and their flocks leave behind them a trail of spores and seeds which grows into a continuous line of copse, or uct, to be traversed countless times by the tribes. The uct gives shelter to birds, rodents, and snakes, while serving in some places as a barrier between nations. The Madi have little understanding of time; time’s passage is expressed only by measures of distance.
Madis are meek creatures, easily victimised. They are frequently domesticated by humans, the females serving as sex slaves. Although small, they resemble humanity in most major aspects, and interbreeding is not unknown.
The Madi tribes call their language hr’Madi’h, which suggests pervasive phagor influence. hr’Madi’h is a sung language, complex but in fact incomplete. Nothing can be described accurately in it. It is circumscribed, like everything else in Madi existence, by the Ahd. There is no written form.
Additional words are occasionally imported from other languages, but to these the tribes are hostile—or at least fearful.
hr’Madi’h – the language
Ahd – life, the journey
uct – the avenues seeded by migratory passage
la’hrap – flat unleavened bread
fhlebiht – arang, a grazing animal of the flock
Other species and semi-species include the waist-high protognostics, the Nondads. Nondads are of subterranean habit. A peaceful people, they leave it to a warrior caste to fight. Thus, they discuss ultimate questions in a language of “clicks, whistles, and snorts”, while their warrior kings do battle in the Eighty Darknesses.
Nondads are hunted and eaten by Uskuts; when roast, they are known as treebries.
Nondads live in Campannlat, the Africa of Helliconia. A related people, the Ondods, live in the harsher climates of the northern continent, Sibornal.
NECROGENES
Descending the evolutionary scale, the necrogenes represent a dead end to one line of pre-Freyr development. These species of fish and animals give birth only through their own death. Examples are the assatassi (fish or, more properly, fish-lizards) yelk, biyelk, and gunnadu.
Necrogenes are hermaphrodite, without such mammalian adjuncts as ovaries and wombs.
For instance, assatassi, a sharp-beaked fish, semi-winged at maturity, flies ashore in its millions during the great summer along the coasts of the Sea of Eagles. Their mating grounds lie deep in the Ardent Sea. After mating they swarm eastwards, against the ocean currents, through the Cadmer Straits, working up considerable speeds for their death flight.
They then launch themselves onto the shores of Hespagorat, some managing to fly a distance inland. Where they fall, there they die. The young have been carried in their bellies. They live as maggots on the decaying bodies of their mothers, before metamorphosing to a legged and tailed form, and crawling back to the sea. [Assatassi first feature in terrestrial literature in “Star Millenia”, in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (Signet Books, New York, 1960).]
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 carcase—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 Sibomal 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 Fountains
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 their 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 terrestrial mumps pathogene. 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.
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
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.
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.
