Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (159 page)

‘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.

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
.