Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Summer

The murmurings from the crowd were louder. Sayren Stund was plainly uncomfortable. But SartoriIrvrash held up Tatro’s book and called for silence. So engrossed was he that he failed to see the trap opening before him.

“Hear the whole conclusion, my friends. There stands King JandolAnganol among you, and he must hear the truth as well—he who has so long encouraged the noxious ahumans to breed on his territories.”

But no one was interested in JandolAnganol at present. Their angry faces turned to SartoriIrvrash himself.

“The conclusion is clear, inescapable. The ancipital race, to which we can ascribe many of our human difficulties over the ages, is not a race of new invaders, like the Driats. No. It is an ancient race. It once covered Helliconia as flambreg cover the Circumpolar Regions.

“The phagors did not emerge out of the last Weyr-Winter, as the Sibornalese call it. No. That story is based on ignorance. The real story, the fairy story tells the truth. Phagors long preceded mankind.

“They were here on Helliconia before Freyr appeared—possibly long before. Mankind came later. Mankind depended on the phagors. Mankind learned language from the phagors and still uses phagor words. ‘Khmir’ is the Native word for ‘rut’. ‘Helliconia’ itself is an old ancipital term.”

JandolAnganol found his voice at last. The speech was such an onslaught on his religious sensibilities that he had stood as if in a trance, his mouth open, more resembling fish than eagle.

“Lies, heresy, blasphemy!” he shouted. The cry of blasphemy was taken up by other voices. But Sayren Stund had ordered his guard to see that JandolAnganol did not interrupt. Burly men closed in on him—to be met by JandolAnganol’s captains with drawn swords. A struggle broke out.

SartoriIrvrash raised his voice. “No, you see your glory diminished by the truth. Phagors preceded mankind. Phagors were the dominant race on our world, and probably treated our ancestors as animals until we rebelled against them.”

“Let’s hear him. Who dares say the man is wrong?” shrilled Queen Bathkaarnet-she. Her husband struck her in the mouth.

The hubbub from the audience rose. People were standing and shouting or kneeling to pray. Fresh guards ran to the scene, while some court ladies tried to escape. A fight had broken out round JandolAnganol. The first stone was thrown at SartoriIrvrash. Brandishing his fist, he continued to speak.

In that courtly crowd, now moved to fury, there was at least one cool observer, the envoy Alam Esomberr. He was detached from the human drama. Unable to be deeply moved by events, he could derive only amusement from their effects.

Those on Earth, distant in time and space, viewed the scene on King Sayren Stund’s lawn with less detachment. They knew that SartoriIrvrash spoke truth in general, even if his details were sometimes incorrect. They also knew that men did not love truth above all things, as he claimed. Truth had constantly to be fought for, for it was constantly being lost. Truth could sail away like a silver eye, never to be seen again.

When T’Sehn-Hrr sailed away, no human being had witnessed the event. Cosmologists on the Avernus and on Earth had reconstructed the event, and believed they understood it. In the great disruptions which had overtaken the system eight million Earth years previously, the gravitational forces of the star now called Freyr, with a mass 14.8 times that of the Sun, had wrenched T’Sehn-Hrr away from Helliconia’s pull.

Calculations indicated that T’Sehn-Hrr had a radius of 1252 km, against Helliconia’s 7723 km. Whether the satellite had been capable of supporting life was doubtful.

What was certain was that the events of that epoch had been so near catastrophic that they had remained etched in the eotemporal minds of the phagors. The sky had fallen in and no one had forgotten it.

More impressive to human minds was the way in which life on Helliconia had survived even the loss of its moon and the cosmological events which had caused that loss.

“Yes, I know. This sounds like sacrilege and I am sorry,” shouted SartoriIrvrash, as Odi moved close to him and the noise grew. “What is true should be said—and heard. Phagors were once the dominant race and will become so again if allowed to live. The experiments I conducted show, I believe, that we were animals. Genethlic divinities bred mankind from Others—Others who were ancipital pets before the upheaval. Mankind developed from Others as phagors developed from flambreg. As phagors developed from flambreg, they may again cover the earth one day. They are still waiting, wild, with kaidaws, in the High Nktryht, to descend in vengeance. They will wipe you out. Be warned then. Increase the drumbles. Intensify them. Ancipitals must be wiped out in the summer, when mankind is strong. When winter comes, the wild kaidaws return!

“My final word to you: We must not waste energy fighting each other. We should fight the older enemy—and those humans who protect them!”

But the humans were already fighting each other. The most religious members of the audience were often those, like Crispan Mornu, who were most in favour of drumbles. Here was an outsider offending their deepest religious principles, yet encouraging their violent instincts. The first one to throw a stone was attacked by his neighbour. Missiles were flying all over the garden. Soon the first dagger bit into flesh. A man ran among the flower beds, bleeding, and fell on his face. Women screamed. Fighting became more general as tempers and fears mounted. The awning collapsed.

As Alam Esomberr quietly left the scene, a miniature history of warfare was enacted on the palace lawn.

The chief cause of the commotion looked on aghast. It was beyond belief how people responded to scholarship. Holy idiots! A flying stone caught him in the mouth, and he collapsed.

Odi Jeseratabhar threw herself on SartoriIrvrash, crying and trying to ward off more stones.

She was dragged aside by a group of young monks, who punched her and then began to beat and kick the prostrate ex-chancellor. They at least refused to hear the name of Akhanaba defiled.

Crispan Mornu, in fear that matters were getting so out of hand, stepped forward and raised his arms, opening the black wings of his keedrant. It was slashed by a sword blade. Odi turned and ran; her garments were seized by a woman as she passed, and next moment she was struggling for her life amid a dozen angry women.

The clamour grew, a clamour that before the hour was out would spread into the city. Indeed the monks themselves spread the clamour. Before very long, they emerged bloodstained from the precincts of the palace, bearing above their heads the broken corpses of SartoriIrvrash and his Sibornalese companion, screaming as they went, “Blasphemy is dead! Long live Akhanaba!”

After the fighting in the garden, there was a rush to the streets, and more scuffles there, while the dead bodies were paraded down Wozen Avenue before finally being thrown to the dogs. Then a terrible quiet fell. Even the First Phagorian in the park seemed to be waiting.

Sayren Stund’s plan had terribly misfired.

SartoriIrvrash had intended merely to be revenged on his ex-master and to have the First Phagorian slain. That was his conscious aim. His love of knowledge for its own sake, his hatred of his fellow men, had betrayed him. He had failed to understand his audience. As a result, religious belief was set at an intolerable crisis—and that on the day before the Emperor of Holy Pannoval, the great C’Sarr Kilandar IX, was to arrive in Oldorando to bestow the unction of Akhanaba upon the faithful.

The most living words spring from dead martyrs. The monks unwittingly propagated the heresies of SartoriIrvrash, which found ready soil on which to grow. Within a few days, it would be the monks themselves who were under attack.