Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Summer

And when almost half a Great Year had passed, when Helliconia and its sister planets had journeyed far from Freyr and were once again facing the slow furies of another winter, Billy’s huddled form in the old wooden sledge was seen by millions of people on distant Earth.

Billy’s presence on Helliconia represented an infringement of terrestrial orders. Those orders had stated that no human being was to land on Helliconia and disrupt the web of its cultures.

Those orders had been formulated over three thousand years earlier. In terms of cultural history, three thousand years was a long period of time. Since then, understanding had deepened—thanks largely to an intensive study of Helliconia undertaken by most of the population. There was a much better grasp of the unity—and therefore the strength—of planetary biospheres.

Billy had entered the planetary biosphere and had become part of it. The terrestrials saw no conflict. Billy’s elements comprised the atoms of dead star matter no different from the elements comprising Muntras or MyrdemInggala. His death would represent a final union with the planet, a merging without dissolution. Billy was mortal. The atoms of which he was constituted were indestructible.

There would be a measured sorrow for the winking out of another human consciousness, for the loss of another identity, unique, irreplaceable; but that was hardly a cause for tears on Earth.

The tears were shed long before that on the Avernus. Billy was their drama, their proof that existence existed, that they themselves had the ancient power of biological organisms to be moved in response to the environment. Tears and cheers were the order of the day.

The Pin family, in particular, abandoned their usual passivity and threw a small family storm. Rose Yi Pin, by turns laughing and howling, was the centre of passionate attention. She had a marvellous time. The Advisor was mortified.

The fresh air visited Billy’s body and bathed his lungs. It allowed him to see every detail of the flashing world. But its vividness, its sounds, were too much. He shut his eyes. When he managed to open them again, the asokins were moving briskly, the sledge bumped, and coastal pallors had begun to veil the view.

To compensate for earlier humiliations, Div Muntras insisted on driving the sledge. He threw the reins over his right shoulder, gripping them under his left arm while clutching the sledge handle with his left hand. In his right hand he flourished a whip, which he cracked above the asokins.

“Go steady, Div, lad,” Muntras growled.

As he spoke, the sledge struck a hummock of coarse grass and overturned. They were travelling under the shoot, where the ground was marshy. Muntras landed on his hands and knees. He snatched up the reins, looking blackly at his son but saying nothing. Immya, forming her mouth into the shape of a stretcher, straightened the sledge and lifted Billy back into it. Her silence was more expressive than words.

“It wasn’t my fault,” said Div, pretending to have hurt his wrist. His father took up the reins and silently motioned his son round to the back runners. They then proceeded at a sedate pace home.

The rambling Muntras house was built on one floor only. That floor was on many levels connected by steps or short flights of stairs, owing to the rocky terrain. Beyond the room in which Muntras and Immya placed Billy was the courtyard in which Muntras paid his workers every tenner.

The courtyard was ornamented with smooth boulders, carved from polar mountains which no human had ever seen and delivered to the coast via the glaciers. Compressed into the striations of each stone was a past chthonic history everyone in Lordryardry was too busy to decipher—though electronic eyes aboard the Avernus had done so. Beside each boulder grew tall trees whose trunks forked close to the ground. Billy could see these trees from his couch.

Muntras’s wife, Eivi, greeted them on their return and fussed round her husband, as now she fussed about Billy. He was glad when she left him alone in the bare wooden room, to stare out at the bare outlines of the trees. His eyesight became fixed. The slow madness crept on him, moving his limbs, twisting his arms outward until they stretched above his head as rigidly as the wooden branches outside.

Div entered the room. The lad came in cautiously, pushing the door shut behind him and moving quickly to Billy’s side. He stared down wide-eyed at Billy in his locked posture. The hand of Billy’s left arm was bent back on itself, so that the knuckles almost touched the forearm and his watch cut into his skin.

“I’ll take your watch off for you,” Div said. He unstrapped it clumsily and laid it on a table out of Billy’s line of sight.

“The trees,” Billy said, through gritted teeth.

“I want a word with you,” said Div threateningly, clenching his fists. “You remember on the Lordryardry Lady, that girl AbathVasidol? The Matrassyl girl?” he asked of Billy, sitting near him, speaking low, looking at the door as he did so. “That really beautiful girl with beautiful chestnut hair and big breasts?”

“The trees.”

“Yes, the trees—they’re apricot trees. Father distils his Exaggerator from the fruit of those trees. Billish, that girl Abathy, you remember her, Abathy?”

“They’re dying.”

“Billish, you’re dying. That’s why I want to talk to you. You remember how Father humiliated me with that girl? He gave her to you, Billish, rot you. That was his way of humiliating me, as he always tries to humiliate me. You understand? Where did my father take Abathy, Billish? If you know, tell me. Tell me, Billish. I never did you any harm.”

His elbow joints creaked. “Abathy. Summer ripeness.”

“I won’t hold it against you because you’re foreign rubbish. Now listen. I want to know where Abathy is. I love her. I shouldn’t have come back here, should I? Being humiliated by my father and that sister of mine. She’ll never let me take over the company. Billish, listen, I’m leaving. I can make it on my own—I’m no fool. Find Abathy, start my own trade. I’m asking you, Billish—where did Father take her? Quick, man, before they come.”

“Yes.” The stark gesturing trees at the window were trying to spell out a name. “Deuteroscopist.”

Div leant forward, grasping Billy’s knotted shoulders. “CaraBansity? He took Abathy to CaraBansity?”

From the dying man came a whispered affirmative. Div let him fall back as if he were a plank of wood. He stood flicking his fingers, muttering to himself. Hearing a sound in the passage, he ran to the window. He balanced his bulk momentarily on the sill. Then he jumped out and was gone.

Eivi Muntras returned. She fed Billy with fragments of a delicate white meat from a bowl. She forced and coaxed; he ate ravenously. In the world of the sick, Eivi was perfectly in command. She bathed his face and brow with a sponge. She drew a gauze curtain over the window to cut down the light. Through the gauze, the trees became ghost trees.

“I’m hungry,” he said, when all the food was gone.

“I’ll bring you some more iguana soon, dear. You liked it, didn’t you? I cooked it in milk especially.”

Tm hungry,” he screamed.

She left, looking distressed. He heard her talking to other people. His neck contorted, cords standing out on it as his hearing paid out like a harpoon to fix on what was said. The words made no sense to him. He was lying upside down, so that the sentences entered his ear the wrong way up. When he flipped himself over, everything was perfectly audible.

Immya’s voice said, in impartial tones, “Mother, you are being silly. These homemade nostrums cannot cure Billish. He has a rare disease which we scarcely know of except in history books. It is either bone fever or the fat death. His symptoms are unclear, possibly because he conies from that other world as he claims, and therefore his cellular composition may differ in some way from ours.”