Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

The great lottery prize was designed to counteract this withering of the senses. The youthful hope of the ship—which in magical ways centred about that great object of study disrobing its seasons below them—died, generation by generation, until the enforced imprisonment became voluntary imprisonment. Billy had to go and die that others might live.

He had to go to where that sloe-eyed queen thrust her body against the breath of the thordotter as she climbed to the castle.

The speech ceased at last. Billy took his chance.

“Thousand thanks for all your care, Master.” Bowing. Leaving. Breathing deeper.

His departure from the Avernus was stage-managed as a great event. Everyone felt strongly about his going. This was the actual proof that Helliconia existed. The six thousand were becoming less able to live imaginatively beyond the station, in spite of all the instruments which were devised to enable them to do so. The prize was a gesture of supreme worth, even to the losers.

Rose Yi Pin turned her neat small face up to Billy’s and wrapped her arms round him for the last time. “I believe you will live for ever down there, Billy. I shall watch you as I grow old and ugly. Just beware of their silly religions. Life here is sane. Down there they are mad in the head with religious notions—even that so beautiful queen of yours.”

He kissed her lips. “Live your orderly life. Don’t fret.”

Suddenly fury burst from her. “Why do you ruin my life? Where’s the order, with you gone?”

He shook his head. That you must discover for yourself.”

The automated craft was waiting to take him from purgatory. Billy climbed through the passage into the little shell, and the door hissed shut behind him. Terror gripped him; he strapped himself into the seat and enjoyed the emotion.

The choice as to whether to make the descent with the windows shuttered or not was his. He pressed a button. Up flew the shutters and he was rewarded with a view of a magical whale from whose flank he was now excommunicated. A belt of irregular stars spread into the distance like the curl of a comet’s tail. Gasping, he realized that these stars were unprocessed rubbish ejected from the Avernus, falling into orbit about the station.

At one moment, the Avernus was an immensity, its eighteen million tons obscuring the field of vision; at the next, it was dwindling, and Billy forgot to look. Helliconia was in view, as familiar as his own face in a mirror, but now seen more nakedly, with cloud drifting across its lit crescent and the peninsula of Pegovin striking like a club into the central sea. The great southern ice cap dazzled.

He looked for the two suns of the binary system as the windows darkened to fend off their light.

Batalix, the nearer sun, was lost behind the planet, only 1.26 astronomical units away.

Freyr, visible as a grey ball behind the opaqued glass, was immensely bright at 240 astronomical units. When at 236 astronomical units distance, Helliconia would reach perihelion, its nearest point to Freyr; that time was only 118 Earth years away. Then once more Batalix and its planets would be carried away on their orbits, not to come so close to the dominant member of the system for another 2592 Earth years.

To Billy Xiao Pin, this set of astronomical figures, which he had learned along with his alphabets at the age of three, made a neat diagram. He was about to land where the diagram became an untidy question of history, of crises and challenges.

His round face elongated at the thought. Although Helliconia had been under constant observation for such a long while, it remained in many ways a mystery.

Billy knew that the planet would survive perihelion, that temperatures at the equator would soar to 150 degrees but nothing worse; that Helliconia had an extraordinary system of homeostasis, at least as powerful as Earth’s, which would maintain as steady a state of equilibrium as possible. He did not share the superstitious fears of the peasantry that Freyr was about to devour them—though he understood how such fears might arise.

What he did not know was whether various nations would survive the testing heat. Tropical countries like Borlien and Oldorando were most threatened.

The Avernus had been in existence and observing since before the spring of the previous Great Year. It had once experienced the slow spread of the Great Winter on the planet below, had witnessed multitudes dying and nations going down. How precisely that pattern would be repeated in the Winter still far distant remained to be seen. The Earth Observation Station would have to function and the six families to exist for another fourteen Earth centuries before that mystery was resolved.

To this awe-inspiring world, Billy had committed his soul.

Trembling took Billy in every limb. He was to embrace this world, he was to be born.

The craft made two orbits of the planet, braking as it did so, and landed on a plateau to the east of Matrassyl.

Billy rose from his seat and stood listening. At last he remembered to breathe. An android had been sent down with him, an alter ego to defend him. The Avernians felt their vulnerability. The product of generations of soft-bred men, Billy was reckoned to need protection. The android was programmed to be aggressive. It carried defensive weapons. It looked human, and indeed its face was moulded to resemble Billy’s, which it did in all but mobility; its expressions changed sluggishly, giving it a permanent air of gloom. Billy disliked it. He looked at it as it stood expectantly in a recess shaped to its body.

“Stay where you are,” Billy said. “Go back to the Avernus with the craft.”

“You need my protection,” said the android.

“I will manage as best I can. It’s my life now.” He pressed a delay switch which would ensure automatic liftoff in an hour’s time. Then he activated the door and climbed from the craft.

He stood on the wished-for planet, breathing its scents, letting a thousand strange sounds come to his ears. The unfiltered air bruised his lungs. Dizziness assailed him.

He looked up. All above him stretched a sky of most beautiful resonant blue, without feature. Billy was accustomed to looking at space; paradoxically, the arch of sky appeared vaster. The eye was drawn forever into it. It covered the living world and was its most beautiful expression.

To the west, Batalix in aurioles of gold and tan was preparing to set. Freyr, its disc only thirty percent the size of Batalix’s, burned with splendid intensity almost at zenith. All around it swam the great blue envelope which was the first of Helliconia to be seen from space, and the unmistakable imprimatur of it as a life-bearing planet. The visiting life-form lowered his head and passed a hand over his eyes.

At a short distance stood a group of five trees, overhung with fleshy creepers. Towards them Billy made his way, walking as if gravity had only just been invented. He fell against the nearest trunk, embracing it, to have his hands torn by thorns. Nevertheless, he clung tight, closing his eyes, flinching from every inexplicable sound. He could not move. When the craft lifted for its return to the mother station, he wept.

Here was the real, with a vengeance. It penetrated all his senses.

By clinging to the tree, lying on the ground, hiding beside a fallen trunk, he accustomed himself to the experience of being on an immense planet. Distant objects, clouds, and a line of hills, in particular, terrified him with their implications of size and—yes—reality. Just as alarming were all the small live things with random inclinations of their own, whole phyla absent from existence aboard the Avernus. He looked down in anguish as a small winged creature alighted on his left hand and used it as a highway to his sleeve. What was most alarming was the knowledge that all these things were beyond his control; no touch of a switch could tame them.