Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

“What’s that?”

“You can just have her disappear in the darkness one night. Never seen again. Now that the brother’s gone, there’s no one interested enough to make a real fuss. Is her old father still alive?”

“No. I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t even dream of doing it.”

“Of course you would…” He panted a little by way of laughter. “But my conspiracy idea is a good way, eh?”

The king went to stand under the window. Waves of light floated on the domed brick ceiling of the prison. Outside was the queen’s reservoir. His sorrow accumulated like water. How treacherous this old man still was…

“Good? Full of guile and taking advantage of circumstances, yes. I see clearly where I had my character from.”

He hammered on the door for release.

After the cellars, the evening world appeared bathed in light. He took a side door and emerged by the reservoir, where a flight of steps led down to the water. Once a boat had been moored there; he remembered playing in it as a boy; now it had disintegrated and sunk.

The sky was the hue of stale cheese, flecked with wisps of grey cloud. On the far side of the pool, like a cliff, rose the queen’s quarters, its elegant outlines black against the sky. A light burned dimly in one window. Perhaps his beautiful wife was there, preparing for her bed. He could go and beg her forgiveness. He could lose himself in her beauty.

Instead, unpremeditatedly, he jumped forward into the reservoir.

He held his hands together above his head as if he were falling from a building. Air belched out from his clothes. The water grew dark rapidly as he sank.

“Let me never rise,” he said.

The water was deep and cold and black. He welcomed terror, trying to embrace the mud at the bottom. Bubbles streamed from his nose.

The processes of life commanded by the All-Powerful would not allow him to escape into the avenues of death. Despite his struggles, he found himself drifting upward again. As he surfaced, gasping, the queen’s light went out.

The next day dawned hot and heavy. The queen of queens allowed herself to be bathed by her women. She played with Tatro for a while, and then summoned SartoriIrvrash to meet her in the family vault.

There she paid her last respects to her brother. Soon he would be buried in his correct land-octave. His body lay swathed in yellow cloth on a block of Lordryardry ice. She noted with grief how even death had not transformed his plain features. She wept for all things prosaic and exotic, for all that had happened and failed to happen to her brother in his lifetime. So the chancellor found her.

He wore an ink-smeared smock. There was ink on his fingers. He bowed low, and there was ink on his pate.

“Rushven, I have a farewell to say here, but I wish also to greet my brother now that his soul has passed to the world below. I wish you by me while I go into pauk, to see that nobody disturbs me.”

He looked troubled. “Madam. May I recall two items to your troubled mind. First, that pater-placation—pauk, if you prefer the old-fashioned term—is discouraged by your church. Second, it is not possible to commune with gossies before their mortal bodies are buried in their land-octaves.”

“And third, you believe that pauk is a fairy tale anyway.” She gave him a wan smile as she resurrected an old argument between them.

He shook his head. “I know well what once I said. However, times change. Now I confess that I myself have learned to go into pater-placation, to console myself by communing with the spirit of my departed wife.”

He bit his lips. Reading her expression, he said, “Yes, she has forgiven me.”

She touched him. “I’m glad.”

Then the academic rose up in him again, and he said, “But you see, Your Majesty, there is a philosophical difficulty in believing that the pater-placation ritual is other than subjective. There cannot be gossies and fessups under the ground with whom living people talk.”

“We know there are. You and I and millions of peasants talk to our ancestors whenever we wish. Where’s the difficulty?”

“Historical records, of which I have plenty, all report that the gossies were once creatures of hatred, bewailing their failed lives, pouring scorn on the living. Over the generations, that has changed; nowadays, all anyone gets is sweetness and consolation. That suggests that the whole experience is wish-fulfilment, a kind of self-hypnosis. Moreover, stellar geometry has outmoded the antique idea that our world rests on an original boulder, towards which fessups descend.”

She stamped her foot. “Must I call the vicar? Am I not under grief and strain enough, without having to listen to your preposterous historical lectures at this hour?”

She was immediately sorry for her outburst, and put an arm through his as they ascended to her room.

“It’s a comfort, whatever it is,” she said. “Praise be, there’s a realm of the spirit beyond knowledge.”

“My dear queen, though I hate religion, I recognize sanctity when I am in its presence.” When she squeezed his arm, he was emboldened to add, “But, the Holy Church has never quite accepted pater-placation as part of its ritual, has it? It does not know what to make of gossies and fessups. In consequence, it would like to ban it, but if it did so, then a million peasants would quit the Church. So it ignores the entire question.”

She looked down at her smooth hands. Already she was preparing herself for the act. “How very sensible of the Church,” she murmured.

SartoriIrvrash in his turn, was sensible enough to make no reply.

MyrdemInggala led the way through into her inner chamber. She sank down on her bed, composing herself, controlling her breathing, relaxing her muscles. SartoriIrvrash sat quietly by her bed, circling his forehead with the holy sign, to begin his vigil. He saw that already she was moving into the pauk state.

He kept his eyes tight closed, not daring to gaze upon her defenceless beauty, and listened to her infrequent exhalations.

The soul has no eyes, yet it sees in the world below.

The soul of the queen cast its regard downwards as it began its long descent. Beneath lay space more vast than night skies, more rich, more imposing. It was not space at all: it was the opposite of space, of consciousness even—a peculiar rupellary density without feature.

Just as the land regards an ocean-going ship as a token of freedom, while the sailors confined on that ship regard the land in similar terms, so the realm of oblivion was at once space and non-space.

To consciousness, the realm appeared infinite. In its downward direction, it ceased only where the races of manlike-kind began, in a green and unknown, unknowable womb, the womb of the original beholder. The original beholder—that passive motherly principle—received the souls of the dead who sank back into her. Although she might be no more than a fossil scent entombed in rock, she was not to be resisted.

Above the original beholder were the gossies and fessups, floating, thousands upon thousands upon thousands, as if all the stars of night had been stacked in order, and arranged in accordance with the ancient idea of land-octaves.

The queen’s exploratory soul sank down, floating like a feather towards the fessups. At close quarters, they resembled not stars so much as mummified chickens, with hollow eyes and stomachs, their legs dangling clumsily. Age had eroded them. They were transparent. Their insides circulated like luminescent fish in a bowl. Their mouths were open like fish, as if trying to blow a bubble towards a surface they would never see again. In their upper strata, where the gossies were less ancient, little dusts still escaped from phantom larynxes, the very last apostrophes remaining to the possessive case of life.