Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

“Soon, the warlike nations of the Savage Continent will be making imitations of our weapons. We must/can act before that is allowed to happen to any great extent, while we have supremacy.

“As those of my friends on the War Commission already know, our plan is nothing less than to take over Borlien.”

Her words struck the banqueters to silence. Then a great murmur of acclamation arose. Many eyes turned towards where SartoriIrvrash sat, white-faced.

“We have not/will not enough troops to hold down all of Borlien by force. Our plan is to annex and subdue by means provided unwittingly by the Borlienese king, JandolAnganol. Once we subdue Borlien, we can strike at Pannoval from the south as well as the north.”

The banqueters began clapping before the fair Admiral had finished. They smiled first at each other and then at SartoriIrvrash, who kept his gaze firmly on the finely turned lips of the Admiral.

“We have a fleet ready to sail,” said those lips. “We anticipate that Chancellor SartoriIrvrash will sail with it, to play his vital role. His reward will be great.”

Again applause, rationed to a few hand claps.

“The fleet will sail westward. I shall be in command aboard the Golden Friendship. We intend/shall sail around the coast of Campannlat, finally approaching the Bay of Gravabagalinien, where Queen MyrdemInggala is/will exiled, from the west. The chancellor and I will stop to conduct the queen from that place of exile, while the rest of the fleet intend/will sail on to bombard Ottassol, Borlien’s largest port, until it capitulates/has capitulated.

“The queen is/was will well-loved by her people. SartoriIrvrash will proclaim a new government for Ottassol under the queen, with himself as prime minister. No battle need be fought.

“You will/should appreciate the feasibility of this plan. Our distinguished ally and the barbarian queen, descended from the Thribriat Shannana, are both united in a hatred of King JandolAnganol. The queen will be happy to be reinstated. She will of course be under our supervision.

“Once Ottassol is/can secure, our boats and soldiery will move upriver to take over the capital, Matrassyl. My understanding, based on agents’ reports, is that we shall/ can find allies there, notably the queen’s old father and his faction. The king’s insecure rule will be easily ended. His life the same. The world can do without such phagor lovers.

“With Borlien fallen into our hands, we execute a sabre slash northwards, right across the Savage Continent, from Ottassol in the south to Rungobandryaskosh.

“We are hastening matters forward now that you are here. Rest, friends, for action lies ahead, action of a most glorious sort. We plan that a good part of the fleet will/can/should sail at Freyr-rise, two days from now, God willing.

“A great future dawns/will dawn.”

This time, the applause was unrationed.

“The brute, unchanging ignorance of the people… They labour and do not improve their lot. Or they don’t labour. It makes no difference. They’re interested in nothing beyond their own village—no, beyond their own belly buttons. Look at them, idle lot! If I were that stupid, I’d still be a pedlar in Oldorando City Park…”

The philosopher making these comments was sprawling among cushions, with cushions behind his head and another under his bare feet. By his right hand, he had a glass of his favourite Exaggerator, to which crushed ice and lemon had been added, while his left arm was wrapped about a young woman with whose left breast he was idly toying.

The audience to whom he was making these comments—excluding the young woman, whose eyes were closed—were two in number. His son leaned against the rail of the boat on which they were travelling, his eyes half closed and his mouth half open. This youth had a bunch of yellow-blue gwing-gwings by his side to eat and occasionally spat a gwing-gwing stone at other river traffic.

Propped up against the fo’c’sle where he was shaded from the sun lay a pallid young man who sweated a good deal and muttered still more. He was covered by a striped sheet, beneath which he moved his legs restlessly; he was running a fever and had been ever since the boat left Matrassyl on its journey south. This being one of his less lucid intervals, he scarcely seemed any more capable than the gwing-gwing eater of receiving the older man’s wisdom.

This did not deter the older man.

“At that last stop we made, I asked one old fool who was leaning against a tree if he thought it was getting hotter, year by year. All he said was, ‘It’s always been hot, skipper, since the day the world was made.’ ‘And what day might that be?’ I asked him. ‘In the Ice Age, as I heard tell.’ That was his reply. In the Ice Age! They’ve no sense. Nothing gets through to them. Take religion. I live in a religious country, but I don’t believe in Akhanaba. I don’t believe in Akhanaba because I have reasoned things out. These natives in these villages, they don’t believe in Akhanaba—not because they had reasoned things out as I have, because they don’t reason…”

He interrupted himself to take a firmer grasp on the left breast and a long drink of the Exaggerator.

“… They don’t believe in Akhanaba because they’re too stupid to believe. They worship all kinds of demons, Others, Nondads, dragons. They still believe in dragons… They worship MyrdemInggala. I asked my manager to show me round the village. In almost every hut, there hung a print of MyrdemInggala. No more like her than I am, but intended for her… But, as I say, they’re interested in nothing beyond their own belly buttons.”

“You’re hurting my bips,” the young lady said.

He yawned and covered his mouth with his right hand, wondering absently why he enjoyed the company of strangers so much more than that of his own family: not just his rather stupid son, but his uninteresting wife and overbearing daughter. It would suit him to sail for ever down the river with this girl and this youth who claimed to come from another world.

“It’s soothing, the sound of the river. I like it. I’ll miss it when I’m retired. There’s proof that Akhanaba doesn’t exist. To make a complicated world like ours, with a steady supply of living people coming and going—rather like a supply of precious stones dug from the earth, polished, and sold off to customers—you would need to be really clever, god or no god. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?”

He pinched with his left finger and thumb, so that the girl squealed and said, “Yes, if you say so.”

“I do say so. Well, if you were so clever, what pleasure would it give you to sit up above the world and look down at the stupidity of these natives? You’d go out of your mind with the monotony of it, generation after generation, getting no better. ‘In the Ice Age…’ By the beholder…”

Yawning, he let his eyelids close.

She jabbed him in the ribs. “All right, then. If you’re so clever, tell me who did make the world. If it wasn’t Akhanaba, who was it?”

“You ask too many questions,” he said.

Ice Captain Muntras fell asleep. He woke only when the Lordryardry Lady was preparing to moor for the night at Osoilima, where he was to enjoy the hospitality of the local branch of the Lordryardry Ice Trading Co. He had been enjoying the hospitality of each of his trading posts in turn, so that the journey downriver from Matrassyl had taken longer than was usually the case—almost as long as the upriver journey, when the boats of his ice trading fleet were towed against the stream by teams of hoxneys.

One reason had caused the shrewd Ice Captain, in his younger days, to establish an outpost at Osoilima, and that reason loomed over them as the Lady tied up. It towered three hundred feet above the crests of the brassims which flourished hereabouts. It dominated the surrounding jungle, it lorded it over the wide river, it pondered on its reflection in the water. And it drew pilgrims from the fourteen corners of Campannlat, eager for reverence—and ice. It was the Osoilima Stone.