Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Summer

Ottassol was earth and its converse, hollowed earth, the negative and positive of soil, as if it had been bitten out by geometrical worms.

The city housed 695,000 people. Its extent could not be seen and was rarely appreciated even by its inhabitants. Favourable soil, climate, and geographical situation had caused the port to grow larger than Borlien’s capital, Matrassyl. So the warrens expanded, often on different levels, until they were halted by the River Takissa.

Paved lanes ran underground, some wide enough for two carts to pass. ScufBar walked along one of these lanes, leading the hoxney with the casket. He had parted with FloerCrow at a market on the outskirts of town. As he went, pedestrians turned to stare, screwing up their noses at the smell which floated behind him. The ice block at the bottom of the casket had all but melted away.

“The anatomist and deuteroscopist?” he asked of a passerby. “Bardol CaraBansity?”

“Ward Court.”

Beggars of all descriptions called for alms outside the frequent churches, wounded soldiers back from the wars, cripples, men and women with horrific skin cancers. ScufBar ignored them. Pecubeas sang from their cages at every corner and court. The songs of different strains of pecubea were sufficiently distinct for the blind to distinguish and be guided by them.

ScufBar made his way through the maze, negotiated a few broad steps down into Ward Court, and came to the door which bore a sign with the name Bardol CaraBansity on it. He rang the bell.

A bolt was shot back, the door opened. A phagor appeared, dressed in a rough hempen gown. It supplemented its blank cerise stare with a question.

“What you want?”

“I want the anatomist.”

Tying the hoxney to a hitching post, ScufBar entered and found himself in a small domed room. It contained a counter, behind which a second phagor stood.

The first phagor walked down a corridor, both walls of which it brushed with its broad shoulders. It pushed through a curtain into a living room in which a couch stood in one corner. The anatomist was enjoying congress with his wife on the couch. He rested as he listened to what the ahuman servant had to say, and then sighed.

“Scerm you, I’ll be there.” He climbed to his feet and leaned against the wall to pull his pants up under his charfrul, which he adjusted with slow deliberation.

His wife hurled a cushion at him. “You dolt, why do you never concentrate? Finish what you’re doing. Tell these fools to go away.”

He shook his head and his heavy cheeks trembled. “It’s the unremitting clockwork of the world, my beauty. Keep it warm till I return. I don’t order the comings and goings of men…”

He moved down the corridor and paused at the threshhold of his shop so as to inspect the new arrival. Bardol CaraBansity was a solid man, less tall than weighty, with a ponderous way of speech and a heavy skull shaped not unlike a phagor’s. He wore a thick leather belt over his charfrul, and a knife in the belt. Although he looked like a common butcher, CaraBansity had a well-earned reputation as a crafty man.

With his hollow chest and protruding stomach, ScufBar was not an impressive sight, and CaraBansity made it plain he was not impressed.

“I’ve got a body for sale, sir. A human body.”

Without speaking, CaraBansity motioned to the phagors. They went and brought the body in between them, dropping it down on the counter. Sawdust and ice fragments adhered to it.

The anatomist and deuteroscopist took a step nearer.

“It’s a bit high. Where did you acquire it, man?”

“From a river, sir. When I was fishing.”

The body was so distended by internal gasses that it bulged out of its clothes. CaraBansity pulled it onto its back and tugged a dead fish from inside its shirt. He threw it at ScufBar’s feet.

“That’s a so-called scupperfish. To those of us who have a care for truth, it’s not a fish at all but the marine young of a Wutra’s worm. Marine. Sea, not freshwater. Why are you lying? Did you murder this poor fellow? You look like a criminal. The phrenology suggests it.”

“Very well, sir, if you prefer, I did find him in the sea. Since I am a servant of the unfortunate queen, I did not want the fact widely known.”

CaraBansity looked at him closely. “You serve MyrdemInggala, queen of queens, do you, you rogue? She deserves good lackeys and good fortune, does that lady.”

He indicated a cheap print of the queen’s face, which hung in a corner of the shop.

“I serve her well enough. Tell me what you will pay me for this body.”

“You have come all this way for ten roon, not more. In these wicked times, I can get bodies to cut up every day of the week. Fresher than this one, too.”

“I was informed that you would pay me fifty, sir. Fifty roon, sir.” ScufBar looked shifty, and rubbed his hands together.

“How does it happen that you turn up here with your malodorous friend when the king himself and an envoy from the Holy C’Sarr are due to arrive in Ottassol? Are you an instrument of the king’s?”

ScufBar spread his hands and shrank a little. “I have connections only with the hoxney outside. Pay me just twenty-five, sir, and I’ll go back to the queen immediately.”

“You scerm are all greedy. No wonder the world’s going to pot.”

“If that is the case, sir, then I’ll accept twenty. Twenty roon.”

Turning to one of the phagors standing by, flicking its pale milt up its slotlike nostrils, CaraBansity said, “Pay the man and get him out of here.”

“How muzzh I pay?”

“Ten roon.”

ScufBar let out a howl of anguish.

“All right. Fifteen. And you, my man, present Bardol CaraBansity’s compliments to your queen.”

The phagor fumbled in its hempen gown and produced a thin purse. It proffered three gold coins, lying in the gnarled palm of its three-fingered hand. ScufBar grabbed them and made for the door, looking sullen.

Briskly CaraBansity ordered one of his ahuman assistants to shoulder the corpse—an order obeyed without observable reluctance—and followed him along the dim corridor, where strange odours drifted. CaraBansity knew as much about the stars as about the intestines, and his house—itself shaped rather like an intestine—extended far into the loess, with entrances to chambers devoted to all his interests on several lanes.

They entered a workshop. Light slanted down through two small square windows set in fortress-thick earth walls. Where the phagor trod, points of light glinted under his splayed feet. They looked like diamonds. They were beads of glass, scattered when the deuteroscopist was making lenses. The room was crammed with learned litter. The ten houses of the zodiac were painted on the wall. Against another wall hung three carcasses in Various stages of dissection—a giant fish, a hoxney, and a phagor. The hoxney had been opened up like a book, its soft parts removed to display ribs and backbone. On a desk nearby lay sheets of paper on which CaraBansity had drawn detailed representations of the dead animal, with various parts depicted in coloured ink.

The phagor swung the Gravabagalinien corpse from his shoulder and hung it upside down from a rail. Two hooks pierced the flesh between the Achilles tendon and the calcaneum. The broken arms dangled, the puffy hands rested like shelled crabs on the floor. At a blow from CaraBansity, his assistant departed. CaraBansity hated having the ancipitals about, but they were cheaper than servants or even human slaves.

After a judicial contemplation of the corpse, CaraBansity pulled out his knife, and cut the dead man’s clothes away. He ignored the stench of decay.

The body was that of a young man, twelve years old, twelve and a half, possibly twelve and nine tenners, not more. His clothes were of coarse and foreign quality, his hair was cut in a manner generally used by sailors.