Helliconia Summer, page 56
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.
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.*
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.
Figure 5. Diagram of human biomass governed by Helico virus.
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.
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…
*Eclipses occur in the following manner. The orbits of Helliconia and her sister planets lie at a 10° inclination to the orbit of Batalix and 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-pcriastron 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 Rivernjk, 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 immoveable fourth wall is not part of die Wheel, although it closes off all the cells; it consists of solid unmoving rock, Mt Khamabhar itself. Into the rock is inset lengths of chain, stapled firmly into die 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.
