Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

What it must not do is rule our individual lives and thinking. If we sacrifice too much to religion, then we are prisoners of it, as Madis are prisoners of the uct. You must, sire, forgive my pointing this out to you, and I fear that you will not find it palatable, but you yourself have shown such a slavishness to Akhanaba—

He paused. No, as usual he was going too far. The king in his anger would destroy him if he read that sentence. Laboriously, he took a fresh sheet of parchment and wrote a modified version of his first letter. He charged Lex with delivering it.

Then he sat and wept.

He dozed. Later, he awoke to find Lex standing over him, his milt flicking up the slots of his nostrils. He had long grown used to the silence of phagors; though he hated the creatures, they were less bothersome than human slaves about the place.

His table clock told him it was near the twenty-fifth hour of the day. He yawned, stretched, and put on a warmer garment. Outside, the aurora flickered over an empty courtyard. The palace was asleep—except perhaps for the king…

“Lex, we’ll go and speak with our prisoner. Have you fed him?”

The phagor, immobile, said, “The prisoner has his food, sir.” He spoke in a low voice, buzzingly, so that the honorific came out as ‘zzorr’. His Olonets was limited, but SartoriIrvrash, in his abhorrence, refused to learn Hurdhu.

Among the shelves covering most of a long wall stood a cupboard. Lex swung it away from the wall to reveal an iron door. Clumsily, the ancipital inserted a key in the lock and turned it. He pulled the door open; man and phagor entered a secret cell.

This had once been an independent room. In the days of VarpalAnganol, the chancellor had had its external door plastered over. Now the only means of entry lay through his study. Stout bars had been fixed over the window. From outside, the window was lost in the muddle of the castle facade.

Flies buzzed in the room, or hung as if sleeping in the thick air. They crawled over the table, and over the hands of Billy Xiao Pin.

Billy sat on a chair. He was chained to a strong eye anchored in the floor. His clothes were stained with sweat. The stench in the room was overwhelming.

Producing a sachet of scantiom, pellamountain, and other herbs, SartoriIrvrash pressed it to his nose and gestured towards a cessbucket standing in a corner of the room.

“Empty that.” Lex moved to obey.

The chancellor took a chair and placed it beyond the reach of any lunge his prisoner might make. He sat down carefully, nursing his back and grunting. He lit a long veronikane before he spoke.

“Now, BillishOwpin, you have been here for two days. We shall have another discussion. I am the Chancellor of Borlien, and, if you lie to me, it is well within my powers to torture you. You introduced yourself to me as the mayor of a town on the Gulf of Chalce. Then, when I locked you up, you claimed that you were a much grander person, who came from a world above this one. Who are you today? The truth now!”

Billy wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “Sir, believe me, I knew of this secret room before I arrived here. Yet I am ignorant of many aspects of your manners. My initial mistake was to pose as someone I am not—which I did because I doubted if you would believe the truth.”

“I may say without vanity that I happen to be one of the foremost seekers after truth of my generation.”

“Sir, I know it. Therefore set me free. Let me follow the queen. Why lock me up when I mean no harm?”

“I lock you up because I may get some good out of you. Stand up.”

The chancellor surveyed his captive. Certainly, there was something odd about the fellow. His physiology was not the attenuated one of a Campannlatian, nor had he the barrel shape of those freak humans, sometimes displayed at fairs, whose ancestors (according to medical thought) had escaped the near-universal bone fever.

His friend CaraBansity in Ottassol would have said that underlying bone structure accounted for the peculiar rounded quality of the captive’s features. The man’s skin texture was smooth, with a notable pallor, though his button nose was sunburnt. His hair was fine.

And there were more subtle differences, such as the quality of the captive’s gaze and its duration. He seemed to look away to listen, and regarded SartoriIrvrash only when he spoke—although fear could account for that. His eyes were often cast upward, instead of down. In particular, he spoke Olonets in a foreign style.

All this the chancellor observed before saying, “Give me an account of this world above from which you claim to come. I am a rational man, and I shall listen without prejudice to what you have to say.” He drew upon his kane and coughed.

Lex returned with an empty bucket and stood motionless against one wall, fixing his cerise glare on an undefined point in the middle distance.

When Billy sat down, his chains rattled. He placed his weighted wrists on the table before him and said, “Merciful sir, I come, as I told you, from a much smaller world than yours. A world perhaps of the size of the great hill upon which Matrassyl Castle stands. That world is called Avernus, though your astronomers have long known it as Kaidaw. It lies some fifteen hundred kilometres above Helliconia, with an orbital period of 7770 seconds, and its—”

“Wait. On what does this hill of yours lie? On air?”

“There is no air about Avernus. In effect, the Avernus is a metal moon. No, you don’t have that word in Olonets, sir, since Helliconia possesses no natural moon. Avernus orbits Helliconia continually, as Helliconia orbits Batalix. It travels through space, as Helliconia does, and moves continually, as Helliconia does. Otherwise, it would fall under the pull of gravitation. I think you understand this principle, sir? You know of the true relationships between Helliconia on the one hand and Batalix and Freyr on the other.”

“I understand what you say very well.” He slapped at a fly crawling over his bald pate. “You are addressing the author of ‘The Alphabet of History and Nature’, in which I seek to synthesize all knowledge. It is understood by few men—but I happen to be one of them—that Batalix and Freyr revolve about a common focus, while Copaise, Aganip, and Ipocrene revolve with Helliconia about Batalix. The haste of our sister worlds in their orbits is commensurate with their stature and their distance from the parent body Batalix. Furthermore, cosmology informs us that these sister worlds sprang from Batalix, as men spring from their mothers and Batalix sprang from Freyr, which is its mother. In the realm of the heavens, you will find me suitably informed, I flatter myself.”

He looked up at the ceiling and blew smoke among the flies.

Billy cleared his throat. “Well, it’s not quite like that. Batalix and its planets form a relatively aged solar system which was captured by a much larger sun, which you call Freyr, some eight million years ago, as we reckon time.”

The chancellor moved restlessly, crossing and uncrossing his legs, with a peevish expression on his face. “Among the impediments to knowledge are the persecutions of those who seek power, the difficulties of investigation, and—this in particular—a failure to recognize what should be investigated. I set all this out in my first chapter.

“You clearly have some knowledge, yet you betray it by mingling it with falsehood for your own reasons. Remember that torture is a friend of truth, BillishOwpin. I’m a patient man, but this wild talk of millions angers me. You won’t impress me by mere numbers. Anyone can invent figures out of thin air.”

“Sir, I do not invent. How many people inhabit all Campannlat?”

The chancellor looked flustered. “Why, some fifty million, according to best estimates.”