Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (195 page)

1
The legendary King Denniss was ruling in Year 249 before apastron, and foresaw disaster.

His calendar has been discarded.

2
The full and correct name of this year in the Ancipital calendar, forged in the ancipital cotemporal 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.

The struggle for supremacy on Helliconia is between humans and phagors. Phagors, a two-horned, 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.

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.

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 CO
₂
, H
₂
O, 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 Nktryhk, 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 Narmosset 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’Modi’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.

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 carcass – 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.