Helliconia, page 61
With emptiness the universe was prodigal beyond belief. With organic life, it was niggardly. As much as anything, it was the scale of desolation of the universe which caused mankind to turn with abhorrence from interstellar flight. By then, however, the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system had been discovered.
‘God built Earth in seven days. He spent the rest of his life doing nothing. Only in his old age did he stir himself and create Helliconia.’ So said one terrestrial wag.
So the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system were of prime importance to the spiritual existence of Earth. And of those planets, Helliconia was paramount.
Helliconia was not unlike Earth. Other human beings lived there, breathed air, suffered, enjoyed, and died. The ontological systems of both planets were parallel.
Helliconia was a thousand light-years from Earth. To travel from one world to the other in the most technologically advanced starship took over fifteen hundred years. Human mortality was too frail to sustain such a journey.
Yet a deep need in the human spirit, a wish to identify with something beyond itself, sought to sustain a bond between Earth and Helliconia. Despite all the difficulties imposed by the enormous gulfs of space and time, a permanent watch post was built in orbit about Helliconia, the Earth Observation Station. Its duty was to study Helliconia and send back its findings to Earth.
So began a long one-sided involvement. That involvement exercised one of mankind’s most attractive gifts, the power of empathy. Ordinary terrestrials turned every day – or would turn long hence – to learn how their friends and heroes fared on the surface of the remote planet They feared phagors. They watched developments at the court of JandolAnganol. They wrote in the Olonets script; many people spoke one or other of the languages. To some extent, Helliconia had unwittingly colonised Earth.
This bond continued long after the end of Earth’s great interstellar age.
Indeed, Helliconia, prize of that age, was another cause of its decline. There it was, this world of splendour and terror, as beautiful as any dream – and to step on it was death for any human. Not immediate, but certain death.
Pervading the atmosphere of Helliconia were viruses which, through long processes of adaptation, were harmless to the natives. At least they were harmless throughout most of the Great Year. But to anyone from Earth, those unfilterable viruses formed a barrier like the sword of the angel who – in an ancient Earth myth – guarded the entrance to the Garden of Eden.
And to many people aboard the Avernus, a garden of Eden was what the planet below them resembled, at least when the slow cruel centuries of the winter of the Great Year had passed.
The Avernus had its parks, with streams and lakes, and a thousand ingenious electronic simulations with which to challenge its young men and women. But it remained an artificial world. Many aboard it felt that their lives remained artificial lives, without the zest of reality.
This sense of artificiality was particularly oppressive in the case of the Pin clan. For the Pin clan was in charge of cross-continuities. Their responsibility was mainly sociological.
The chief task of the Pin clan was to record the unfolding of the lives of one or two families through the generations throughout the 2592 Earth years of the Great Year and beyond. Such data, impossible to collect on Earth, was of great scientific value. It meant also that the Pin family built up an especially close identification with their subjects below.
That proximity was reinforced by the knowledge which shadowed all their days – the knowledge that Earth was irrecoverably far away. To be born on station was to be born into unremitting exile. The first law governing life on the Avernus was that there was no going home.
Computerborgoid ships occasionally arrived from Earth. These link-ships, as they were called, always provided emergency accommodation in which humans could travel. Possibly some faint hope existed on Earth that one of the Avernians would be able, as a result of new methods, to return to Earth; more likely, the ships, old-fashioned in design, had never been modernised. The gulf of space and time made the thought of such passage a mockery; even bodies sunk deep in cryogenic sleep fell into decay over one and a half thousand years.
Helliconia lay incomparably nearer than Earth. Yet the viruses kept Helliconia sacrosanct.
Existence on the Avernus was utopian – that is to say, pleasant, equable, and dull. There were no terrors to face, no injustices, no shortages, and few sudden shocks. There was no revelatory religion; religious faith hardly commended itself to a society whose duty it was to watch the upheavals on the world below. The metaphysical agonies and ecstasies of individual egos were ruled incorrect.
Yet to some Avernians of every generation, their world remained a prison, its orbit an uct going nowhere. Certain members of the Pin clan, looking down on poor crazed Roba wandering in the wilderness, were consumed by envy of his freedom.
The intermittent arrival of link-ships merely emphasised their oppression. In earlier days, a link-ship had caused a riot. It had come full of cassettes of news – ancient news of cartels, sports, nations, artefacts, names, all unknown. The leader of the riot had been caught and, in an unprecedented move, sent down to his death on the surface of Helliconia.
Everyone on the Observation Station had watched avidly his extraordinary adventures before he succumbed to the virus. They had lived vicariously on the planet on their doorstep.
From that time on, there had to be a safety valve, a tradition of ritualised sacrifice and escape. So the ironically named Helliconia Holiday Lottery came into being. The lottery was held once every ten years during the centuries of the Helliconian summer. The winner of the lottery was allowed to descend to his certain death, and to choose any place at which to land. Some preferred solitude, some cities, some mountains, some the plains. No winner ever refused to go or turned aside from fame and freedom.
Lottery time came round again 1177 Earth years after apastron – the nadir of the Great Year.
The three previous winners had been women. On this occasion, the prizewinner was Billy Xiao Pin. He made his choice without difficulty. He would go down to Matrassyl, capital city of Borlien. There he would gaze upon the face of the queen of queens before the helico virus overcame him.
Death was to be Billy’s prize: a death in which he would mingle richly with the centuries-long orchestration of Helliconia’s Great Summer.
VI
Diplomats Bearing Gifts
King JandolAnganol eventually returned from Oldorando to his queen. Four weeks passed. He ceased to limp. Yet the incident of the Cosgatt was not lost. It was midwinter’s day, and diplomats from Pannoval were expected in Matrassyl.
A dead heat lay over the Borlienese capital, enshrouding the palace on the hill which overlooked the city. The outer walls of the palace shimmered, as if they were a mirage that could be walked through. Centuries ago, in the winter of the Great Year, midwinter’s day had been celebrated in earnest; now it was otherwise. People were too hot to care.
The native courtiers idled in their chambers. The Sibornalese ambassador added ice to his wine and dreamed of the cool women of his home country. Arriving diplomats, loaded with baggage and bribes, sweated under their ceremonial robes and collapsed on couches once the official welcome was over.
The Chancellor of Borlien, SartoriIrvrash, went to his musty room and smoked a veronikane, concealing his anger from the king.
This occasion would lead to ill things. He had not arranged it. The king had not consulted him.
Being a solitary man, SartoriIrvrash conducted a solitary kind of diplomacy. His inward belief was that Borlien should not be drawn further into the orbit of powerful Pannoval by an alliance with it or with Oldorando. The three countries were already united by a common religion which SartoriIrvrash, as a scholar, did not share.
There had been centuries when Borlien was dominated by Oldorando. The chancellor did not want to see them return. He understood better than most how backward Borlien was; but falling under Pannoval’s power would not cure that backwardness. The king thought otherwise, and his religious advisors encouraged him so to think.
The chancellor had introduced strict laws into Matrassyl to govern the comings and goings of foreigners. Perhaps his solitariness included a touch of xenophobia; for he banned Madis from the city, while no foreign diplomat was allowed to enjoy sexual intercourse with a Matrassylan woman, on pain of death. He would have introduced laws against phagors had not the king flatly intervened.
SartoriIrvrash sighed. He desired only to pursue his studies. He detested the way power had been thrust upon him; in consequence, he became a tyrant in petty ways, hoping to steel himself to be bold when the stakes were high. Uncomfortable wielding the power he had, he wished for total power.
Then they would not be in this present dangerous situation, where fifty or more foreigners could lord it in the palace as they liked. He knew with cold certainty that the king intended to bring in change and that a drama was in store which would affect the reasonable tenor of his life. His wife had called him unfeeling; SartoriIrvrash knew it was truer to say that his emotions centred round his work.
He hunched his shoulders in a characteristic way; possibly the habit made him look more formidable than he was. His thirty-seven years – thirty-seven years and five tenners, in the precise way the Campannlatians measured age – had told on him, wrinkling his face round his nose and whiskers to make him resemble an intelligent vole.
‘You love your king and your fellow men,’ he instructed himself, and left the refuge of his chambers.
Like many similar strongholds, the palace was an accumulation of old and new. There had been forts in the caves under the Matrassyl rock during the last great winter. It grew or shrank, became stronghold or pleasure dome, according to the fortunes of Borlien.
The distinguished personages from Pannoval were disturbed by Matrassyl, where phagors were allowed to walk in the street without molestation – and without causing molestation. In consequence, they found fault with JandolAnganol’s palace. They called it provincial.
JandolAnganol, in the years when fortune was less against him and his marriage to MyrdemInggala still new, had brought in the best provincial architects, builders, and artists to patch the ravages of time. Particular care had been lavished on the queen’s quarters.
Although the general atmosphere of the palace tended towards the military, there was none of the stifling etiquette which marked the Oldorandan and Pannovalan courts. And in places, some kind of higher culture flourished. The apartments of Chancellor SartoriIrvrash, in particular, provided a rat’s nest of arts and learning.
The chancellor moved grudgingly on his way to consult with the king. To his mind came thoughts which were pleasanter than affairs of state. Only the previous day he had solved a problem which had long puzzled him, an antiquarian problem. Truth and lies were more easily distinguished in the past than the present.
The queen approached him, wearing one of her flame-red gowns, accompanied by her brother and the Princess Tatro, who ran and clutched his leg. The chancellor bowed. Despite his absorption he saw by the queen’s expression that she too was anxious about the diplomatic visit.
‘You will have business with Pannoval today,’ she said.
‘I have to consort with a set of pompous asses, and all the while my history is not getting written.’ Then he caught himself and laughed sharply. ‘My pardon, ma’am, I meant to say merely that I do not reckon Prince Taynth Indredd of Pannoval a great friend of Borlien …’
She sometimes had a slow way of smiling as if she was reluctant to be amused, which started at her eyes, included her nose, and then worked about the curves of her lips.
‘We’d agree on that. Borlien lacks great friends at the present.’
‘Admit it, Rushven, your history will never be finished,’ said YeferalOboral, the queen’s brother, using an old nickname. ‘It simply gives you an excuse to sleep all afternoon.’
The chancellor sighed; the queen’s brother had not his sister’s brains. He said severely, ‘If you stopped kicking your heels about the court, you could set up an expedition and sail round the world. How that would add to our knowledge!’
‘I wish that Robayday had done some such thing,’ said MyrdemInggala. ‘Who knows where the lad is now?’
SartoriIrvrash was not going to waste sympathy on the queen’s son. ‘I made one new discovery yesterday,’ he said. ‘Do you wish to hear of it or not? Will I bore you? Will the mere sound of such botherations of knowledge cause you to jump from the ramparts?’
The queen laughed her silvery laugh and held his hand. ‘Come, Yef and I are no dolts. What’s the discovery? Is the world getting colder?’
Ignoring this facetiousness, SartoriIrvrash asked, frowning, ‘What colour is a hoxney?’
‘I know that,’ cried the young princess. ‘They’re brown. Everyone knows hoxneys are brown.’
Grunting, SartoriIrvrash lifted her up into his arms. ‘And what colour were hoxneys yesterday?’
‘Brown, of course.’
‘And the day before that?’
‘Brown, you silly Rushven.’
‘Correct, you wise little princess. But if that is the case, then why are hoxneys depicted as being striped in two brilliant colours in the illuminations in ancient chronicles?’
He had to answer his own question. ‘That is what I asked my friend Bardol CaraBansity down in Ottassol. He flayed a hoxney and examined its skin. And what has he discovered? Why, that a hoxney is not a brown animal as we all believe. It is a brown-striped animal, with brown stripes on a brown background.’
Tatro laughed. ‘You’re teasing us. If it’s brown and brown, then it’s brown, isn’t it?’
‘Yes and no. The lie of the coat shows that a hoxney is not a plain brown animal. It consists of brown stripes. What possible point could there be to that?
‘Well, I have hit upon the answer, and you will see how clever I am. Hoxneys were once striped in brilliant stripes, just as the chronicles show. When was that? Why, in the spring of the Great Year, when suitable grazing was available again. Then the hoxneys needed to multiply as rapidly as possible. So they put on their most brilliant sexual display. Nowadays, centuries later, hoxneys are well established everywhere. They don’t need to breed exponentially, so mating display is out. The stripes are dulled down to neutral brown – until the spring of the next Great Year calls them out again.’
The queen made a moue. ‘If there is another Great Year spring, and we don’t all tumble into Freyr.’
SartoriIrvrash clapped his hands pettishly together. ‘But don’t you see, this – this adaptive geometry of the hoxneian species is a guarantee that we don’t tumble into Freyr – that it comes near every great summer, and then again recedes?’
‘We’re not hoxneys,’ said YeferalOboral, gesturing dismissively.
‘Your Majesty,’ said the chancellor, addressing himself earnestly to the queen, ‘my discovery also shows that old manuscripts can often be trusted more than we think. You know the king your husband and I are at odds. Intercede for me, I pray. Let a ship be commissioned. Let me be allowed two years away from my duties to sail about the world, collecting manuscripts. Let us make Borlien a centre of learning, as it once was in the days of YarapRombry of Keevasien. Now my wife is dead, there’s little to keep me here, except your fair presence.’
A shadow passed over her face.
‘There is a crisis in the king, I feel it. His wound has healed in his flesh but not in his mind. Leave your thought with me, Rushven, and let it wait until this anxious meeting with the Pannovalans is over. I fear what is in store.’
The queen smiled at the old man with considerable warmth. She easily endured his irritability, for she understood its source. He was not entirely good – indeed, she considered some of his experiments pure wickedness, especially the experiment in which his wife was killed. But who was entirely good? SartoriIrvrash’s relationship with the king was a difficult one, and she often tried, as now, to protect him from JandolAnganol’s anger.
Endeavouring to deliver him from his own blindness, she added gently, ‘Since the incident in the Cosgatt, I have to be careful with his majesty.’
Tatro tugged SartoriIrvrash’s whiskers. ‘You mustn’t go sailing at your age, Rushven.’
He set her down on the ground and saluted her. ‘We may all have to make unexpected journeys before we are finished, my dear little Tatro.’
As on most mornings, MyrdemInggala and her brother walked along the western ramparts of the palace and gazed out over the city. This morning, the mists that little winter usually brought were absent. The city lay clear below them.
The ancient stronghold stood on a cliff looming over the town, in a deep curve of the Takissa. Slightly towards the north, the Valvoral gleamed where it joined the greater river. Tatro never tired of looking down at the people in the streets or on the river craft.
The infant princess extended a finger towards the wharfs and cried, ‘Look, ice coming, Moth!’
A fore- and aft-rigged sloop was moored by the quayside. Its hatches had recently been opened, for steam poured forth into the air. Carts were drawn up alongside the ship, and blocks of finest Lordryardry ice gleamed for a moment in the sun as they were swung from the hold into the waiting vehicles. As ever, the delivery was on time, and the palace with its guests would be awaiting it.
The ice carts would come rumbling up the castle road, winding as the road wound, with four oxen straining at the shafts, to gain the fortress which stood out like a ship of stone from its cliffs.
Tatro wanted to stand and watch the ice carts come all the way up the hill, but the queen was short of patience this morning. She stood slightly apart from her child, looking about her with an abstracted air.
