Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Summer

“I’m sure the rogues you name are frightful rogues indeed. Would they have been somewhat nicer, one wonders, if they had been given less uncouth names?”

“I trust your suite is comfortable?”

“To speak true, Jan, I abominate your underground palace. What happens when your River Takissa floods?”

“The peasants dam it with their bodies. If the timetable suits you, we shall sail for Gravabagalinien tomorrow. There’s been delay enough, and the monsoon approaches. The sooner the divorcement is over the better.”

“I look forward to a sea voyage, as long as it is short and the coast remains within earshot.”

Wine was served them, and crushed ice added.

“Something worries you, cousin.”

“Many things worry me, Alam. It’s no matter. These days, even my faith worries me.” He hesitated, looked back over his shoulder. “When I am insecure, Borlien is insecure. Your master, the C’Sarr, our Holy Emperor, surely would understand that. We must live by our faith. For my faith, I renounce MyrdemInggala.”

“Cousin, in private we can admit that faith has a certain lack of substance, eh? Whereas your fair queen…” In his pocket, the king fingered the bracelet he had taken from CaraBansity. That had substance. That was the work of an insidious enemy who, intuition told him, could bring disaster to the state. He clenched his fist round the metal.

Esomberr gestured. His gestures, unlike the king’s, were languid, lacking spontaneity.

“The world’s going to pot, cousin, if not to Freyr. Though I must say religion never caused me to lose a wink of sleep. Indeed, religion’s often been the cause of sleep in me. All nations have their troubles. Randonan and the dreaded Hammer are your preoccupations. Oldorando now has a crisis with Kace. In Pannoval, we are once more being attacked by the Sibornalese. South through Chalce they come, unable to tolerate their ghastly homeland for another instant. A strong Pannoval-Oldorando-Borlien axis will improve the stability of all Campannlat. The other nations are mere barbarians.”

“Alam, you are requested to cheer me, not depress me, on the eve of my divorcement from MyrdemInggala.”

The envoy drained his glass. “One woman’s much like another. I’m sure you’ll be blissfully happy with Simoda Tal.”

He saw the pain in the king’s face. JandolAnganol said, looking away towards the dancers, “My son should be marrying Simoda Tal, but I get no sense from him. MyrdemInggala understands that I take this step in the interests of Borlien.”

“By the boulder, does she indeed?” Esomberr felt inside his silk jacket and produced a letter. “You had better read this, which has just come to my hand.”

Seeing MyrdemInggala’s bold handwriting, JandolAnganol took the sheet trembling, and read.

To the Holy Emperor, C’Sarr Kilandar IX, Head of the Holy Pannovalan Empire, in the City of Pannoval, in the country of that name.

Revered Sire—Whose faith is followed devoutly by the undersigned—

Look favourably upon this supplication from one of thy most unlucky daughters.

I, Queen MyrdemInggala, have been punished where no crime was committed. I was unjustly accused of conspiring against Sibornal by my husband the king, and by his father, and stand in grave danger.

Revered sire, my lord King JandolAnganol has treated me with cruel injustice, banishing me from his side to this forlorn seaside place. Here I must stay until the king disposes of me as he will, a victim of his khmir.

I have been a faithful wife to him for thirteen years, and have borne him a son and a daughter. The daughter is yet little, and remains with me. My son has become wild since this division, and I know not where he is.

Since my lord the king usurped his father’s throne, ill things have befallen our kingdom. He has made enemies on all sides. To break from a circle of retribution, he plans a dynastic marriage with Simoda Tal, daughter of King Sayren Stund of Oldorando. As I understand, this arrangement has obtained your approval. To your judgment I must bow. But it will not be enough for JandolAnganol to reject me by a manipulation of the law, he will also require me finally removed from the earthly scene.

Therefore I beseech my revered Emperor to despatch as soon as possible a letter forbidding the king to harm me or my children in any fashion, on pain of excommunication. At least the king professes religious faith; such a threat would have effect upon him.

This letter will reach you via your envoy in Ottassol, and I pray he will mercifully deliver it to thy cherished hand by the fastest means.

“Well, then we shall have to deal with this,” said the king, with a look of pain, clutching the letter.

“ I will have to deal with this,” corrected Esomberr, retrieving the letter.

The following day, the party set sail westwards along the coast of Borlien. With the king went his new chancellor, Bardol CaraBansity.

The king had developed a nervous habit at this time of looking over his shoulder, as if he felt himself watched by Akhanaba, the great god of the Holy Pannoval Empire.

There were those who watched him—or who would watch him—but they were more remote in space and time than JandolAnganol could imagine. They were to be numbered in their millions. At this time, the planet Helliconia held ninety-six million human beings, and possibly a third of that number of phagors. The distant watchers were still more numerous.

The inhabitants of the planet Earth had once watched the affairs of Helliconia with considerable detachment. The transmissions from Helliconia, beamed to Earth by the Earth Observation Station, had begun as little more than a source of entertainment. Over the centuries, as Great Spring on Helliconia turned to Summer, matters were changing. Observation was developing into commitment. The watchers were being changed by what they watched; despite the fact that Present and Past on the two planets could never coincide, an empathetic link was now being forged. Schemes were in hand to make that link more positive. The increasing maturity, the increasing understanding of what it was to be an organic entity, was a debt which the peoples of Earth owed to Helliconia. They now saw the embarkation of the king from Ottassol, not as Tatro saw the wave on the beach, as a separate event, but rather as a strand in an inescapable web of cosmology, culture and history. That the king possessed free will was never in dispute among the observers; but whichever way JandolAnganol turned to exert his will—a ferocious one—the infinite linkages of the continuum closed behind him again, to leave little more trace than the keel of his ship upon the Sea of Eagles. Although the terrestrials viewed the divorce with compassion, they saw it less as an individual act than as a cruel example of a division in human nature between mistakenly romantic readings of love and duty. This they were able to do because something of Earth’s long crucifixion was over. The upheaval of JandolAnganol’s divorce from MyrdemInggala took place in the year 381, by the local Borlien-Oldorando calendar. As the mysterious timepiece had indicated, on Earth the year was 6877 years after the birth of Christ; but this suggested a false synchronicity, and the events of the divorce would become real to the peoples of Earth only when a further thousand years elapsed.

Dominating such local dates was a cosmic one with more meaning. Astronomical time in the Helliconian system was at full flood. The planet and its sister planets were approaching periastron, the nearest point in the orbit to the brilliant star known as Freyr.