Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

The food was a porridge into which highly coloured fruit had been chopped. He took up a silver spoon and began to eat. The taste was insipid. After a few spoonfuls, drowsiness overcame him. He pushed the bowl away, groaning, and lay his head on the table again. Flies settled on the food, and on his undefended cheek.

Lex went to the wall opposite to the one by which he and the chancellor habitually entered, and tapped on one of the wooden panels. A countertap answered, to which he responded with two wide-spaced answering taps. A section of panelling opened into the room, scattering dust.

A female ancipital entered the cell, moving with the gliding movement of her kind. Without hesitation, she and Lex lifted the paralysed Billy and carried him into the narrow passage now revealed. She closed and bolted the panel door behind him.

The palace contained neglected passages in plenty; this one, in its unfinished state, gave every appearance of having been neglected for centuries. The two great ahumans filled it.

Phagor slaves were as common about Matrassyl Palace as phagor soldiers. When employed as stone masons, for which work they had a rough aptitude, they had walled in a retroversion in the great walls, roofed it over, and utilized it as one of their own convenient ways about the building.

Billy, in a state of paralysis, but still conscious, found himself being carried down stairs that went back and forth as if forever denied an exit. His head dangled over the gillot’s shoulder, knocking against her shoulderblade at every step.

At ground level, they paused. Damp hung in the air. Somewhere out of his sight, a torch smouldered. Hinges squeaked. He was being lowered down into the earth through a trapdoor. His terror could escape only in the faintest sigh.

The torch appeared as his head fell back, to be eclipsed by a shaggy head. He was somewhere underground and three-fingered hands were clutching him. Mauve and red pupils glowed in the gloom. Sickly smells and shuffling sounds surrounded him. A trapdoor slammed, its echoes shuttling away into distance.

His viewpoint showed little more than a monstrous back. Another door, more waiting, more stairs, more insane whispers. He passed out—yet remained aware of jolts of descent which continued for uncounted time.

They were making him walk like a drunken man. His feet were dead. Of course—they had drugged his food. Head rolling to one side, he gathered that they were in a large underground chamber, moving along a wooden walk set near the ceiling. Banners hung from the walk. Below, humans in long garments congregated, barefoot. He recalled their name in a moment: monks. They sat at long tables, where phagors in similar garments served them. Memories returned to Billy Xiao Pin; he recollected the monasteries under the hill where he had bought a waffle. He was being taken through the maze of holy ways carved in the rock beneath JandolAnganol’s palace.

The walking revived him. Two phagors escorted him, both gillots. Probably Lex had returned to do duty for the chancellor, who would now be asleep. He gave a feeble call to the monks below, but nobody heard him in the babble of voices. They left the lighted space.

More corridors. He tried to protest, but the females hustled him on. By his side, a band of carving braided the stone wall. He tried to grip it; his hand was snatched away.

Down again.

Total darkness, smelling of rivers and things unborn.

“Please let me go.” His first words. A gate opened.

He was marched into a different world, an underground ancipital kingdom. The very air was different, its sounds and stinks alien. Water lapped. Proportions were different: archways were wide and low, cavernous. The way was rough and uphill. It was like climbing into a dead mouth.

Nothing in the Avernus had prepared Billy for this adventure. Crowds of phagors were gathering to inspect him, thrusting their cow faces into his. They jostled him before a council of ancipitals, male and female. In niches round the walls were stacked their totems, aged phagors sinking further and further in tether; the oldest totem was like a little black doll, almost entirely composed of keratin. Leading the council was a young kzahhn, Ghht-Yronz Tharl.

Ghht-Yronz Tharl was no more than a creaght. The dense white coat over his shoulders was still red-tipped. His long curving horns were painted with a spiral design, and he kept his head thrust low, with a pugnacious gesture, so as not to scrape the tips of those horns on the roof of the chamber.

As for that chamber itself, though its roof was indeed rough and unfinished, its form was approximately circular. Indeed, the auditorium—if such a term was applicable among such an inhuman audience—was built in the shape of a wheel. Ghht-Yronz Tharl stood stiffly upright, puffing out his chest, at the hub of the wheel.

Stalls for the audience radiated like spokes from the hub. Most of the floor was divided into low stalls. Here members of the council stood motionless, or merely twitching a shoulder or ear. In each stall was a trough and a length of chain stapled into the stonework. Runnels for water or urine were cut in the floor and ran to ditches by the perimeter of the wheel.

The fog seemed to have penetrated here, or else the sickly breath of the ancipital race lent a blue aura to the torches. Taking in what he could of this scene as he was examined by rough hands, Billy saw ramps leading upwards, and others, their entrances unwelcoming, leading even further underground.

A perception came to him: in these caves, at this time, phagors gathered to escape the heat; the time would come when men huddled here, to escape the cold. The phagors would then take over the outside world.

Some kind of order was called, and interrogation began. It was evident that Lex had informed Ghht-Yronz Tharl of the content of Billy’s conversation with SartoriIrvrash.

Sitting by the kzahhn was a middle-aged female human, a shapeless woman in a dress of stammel, who translated a series of questions from the kzahhn into Olonets. The questions concentrated on Billy’s arrival from Freyr—the phagors would hear nothing of Avernus. If this son of Freyr had arrived from otherwhere, then it followed that he came from Freyr, whence, in ancipital eyes, all evil came.

He could hardly understand their questions. Nor could they understand his answers. He had had difficulties with the Borlienese chancellor; here the cultural difference was much wider—he would have said insuperable, except that occasionally he made himself understood. For instance, these nightmarish creatures grasped the point that Helliconia’s time of intensifying heat would pass in three or four human lifetimes, to be replaced by a long continued slide towards winter.

At this juncture, the questioning broke off, and the kzahhn sank into a trance in order to communicate with the ancestors of his component present. A human slave brought Billy flavoured water to drink. He begged to be allowed back to the palace, but in a short while his questioning was resumed.

It was curious that the phagors grasped what SartoriIrvrash could not, that Billy had travelled through space, though the Native Ancipital phrase for ‘space’ was an almost untranslatable conglomerate, meaning ‘immeasurable pathway of air-turns and great year procedures’. More briefly, they sometimes spoke of it as ‘Aganip pathway’.

They examined his watch without touching it. He was pushed from one to another of the audience, along the spokes of the council wheel, so that all could see it. His explanation that the three dials showed time on Earth, Helliconia and Avernus meant nothing to them. Like the phagors he had met outside Matrassyl, they made no attempt to take the instrument and soon reverted to other topics.

His eyes streamed, his nose ran—he had an allergy to their dense coats against which he had been forced to brush.