Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Winter

The Restrictions of Persons in Abodes Act met with the mixed reception customary for proclamations from the Oligarchy. In the more privileged sectors of the city people nodded their heads and said, “How wise—what a good idea.” Nearer the docks, they exclaimed, “So that’s what the biwackers are up to now!”

Eedap Mun Odim gave no overt expression to his dismay when he returned to his crowded five-storey home. He knew that the police would call soon enough to inform him that he was contravening the new law.

That night, he patted his children, settled his modest anatomy beside the slumbrous bulk of his wife, and prepared his mind for pauk. He had said nothing to his spouse, knowing that her display of anguish, her tears, her undoubted rushing from one end of the room to the other, kissing her three children with huge hydropic kisses en route, would do nothing to resolve the problem. As her breath became as regular as a balmy breeze over the autumn valleys of Kuj-fuvec, Odim gathered together his inner resources and underwent that small death which forms the entrance gate to pauk.

For the poor, the troubled, the persecuted, there was always that refuge: the trance state of pauk. In pauk lay communication with those of the family whose life on earth was ended. Neither State nor Church had jurisdiction over the region of the dead. That vast dimension of death placed no restriction on persons; nor did God the Azoiaxic prevail there. Only gossies and the more remote fessups existed in orderly oblivion, sinking towards the unrisen sun of the Original Beholder, she who took to her bosom all who lived.

Like a feather, the tremulous soul of Eedap Mun Odim sank down, to hold what intercourse it might with the gossie of its father, recently departed the world above.

The father now resembled a kind of ill-made gilt cage. It was difficult to see it through the obsidian of nonexistence, but Odim’s soul made its obeisances, and the gossie twinkled a little in response. Odim poured out his troubles.

The gossie listened, expressing consolation in little dreadful gasps of bright dust. It in its turn communed with the guttering ranks of ancestors below it. Finally it uttered advice to Odim.

“Gentle and beloved son, your forebears honour you for your tender duty towards our family. Family must rely upon family, since governments do not comprehend families. Your good brother Odirin Nan lives distantly from you, but he, like you, shares an abiding fondness for our poor people. Go to him. Go to Odirin Nan.”

The voiceless voice sank away in an eddy. To which Odim faintly responded that he loved his brother Odirin Nan, but that brother lived in far Shivenink; might it not be better instead to cross the mountains and return to a remote branch of the family which still lived in the vales of Kuj-Juvec?

“These here with me who still can make voice advise no return to Kuj-Juvec. The way over the mountains becomes more hazardous every month, as new arrivals here report.” The tenuous framework guttered even as it spoke. “Also, the valleys are becoming stonier, and the cattle herds grow thin of flank. Sail westwards to your brother, beloved one, most dutiful of young men. Be advised.”

“Father, to hear the melody of your voice is to obey its music.”

With tender expressions on either side, the soul of Odim drifted upwards through obsidian, like an ember through a starry void. The ranks of past generations were lost to view. Then came the pain of finding a feeble human body lying inert on a mattress, and seeking entry to it.

Odim returned to his mortal body, weakened by the excursion but strengthened by the wisdom of his father. Beside him, his ample wife breathed on, undistressed in her sleep. He put an arm about her and snuggled into her warmth, like a child against its mother.

There were those—lovers of secrecy—who rose almost at the time that Odim was settling to sleep. There were those—lovers of night—who liked to be about before dawn, in order to get ahead of their fellow men. There were those—lovers of chill—whose constitutions were such that they found satisfaction in the small hours when human resistance is at its lowest.

At the chime of three in the morning, Major Gardeterark stood in his leather trousers, keeping a watchful eye on his reflection in the mirror while he shaved.

Major Gardeterark would have no nonsense with pauk. He regarded himself as a rationalist. Rationalism was his creed, and his family’s. He had no belief in the Azoiaxic—Church Parade was a different matter— and less than a belief in pauk. It would never occur to the major that his thinking had confined him to an umwelt of living obsidian, through which no light shone.

At present, with each stroke of his cut-throat razor, he contemplated how to make miserable the lives of the inhabitants of Koriantura, as well as the existence of his under officer, Captain Harbin Fashnalgid. Gardeterark believed he had rational family reasons for hating Fashnalgid, over and above the motive of the latter’s inefficiency. And he was a rational man.

A great king had once ruled in Sibornal, before the last Weyr-Winter. His name had come down as King Denniss. King Denniss’s court had been held in Old Askitosh, and his retreat had been in the mighty edifices now known as the Autumn Palaces. So legend had it.

To his court, King Dennis had summoned learned men from all quarters of the globe. The great king had fought for Sibornal’s survival through the grim centuries of Weyr-Winter, and had launched an invasion force across the seas to attack Pannoval.

The king’s scholars had compiled catalogues and encyclopaedias. Everything that lived had been named, listed, categorised. Only the slow-pulsed world of the dead had been excluded, in deference to the Church of the Formidable Peace.

A long period of confusion followed the death of King Denniss. The winter came. Then the great families of the seven Sibornalese nations had joined together to form an Oligarchy, in an attempt to rule the continent on rational and scientific lines, as proposed by King Denniss. They had sent learned men abroad to enlighten the natives of Cam-pannlat, even as far afield as the old cultural centre of Keevasien, in the southwest of Borlien.

The autumn of the present Great Year had witnessed one of the most enlightened of the Oligarchy’s decrees. The Oligarchy had altered the Sibornalese calendar. Previously, Sibornalese nations, with the exception of backwaters like Upper Hazziz, had adhered to a “so many years after the coronation of Denniss” formula. The Oligarchy abolished such prescriptions.

Henceforth, the small years were numbered as the astronomers

directed, in precedence following the small year in which Helliconia and its feebler luminary, Batalix, were most distant from Freyr: in other words, the year of apastron.

There were 1825 small years, each of 480 days, in a Great Year. The present year, the year of Asperamanka’s incursion into Chalce, was 1308 After Apastron. Under this astronomical system, nobody could forget where they stood with regard to the seasons. It was a rational arrangement.

And Major Gardeterark rationally finished shaving, dried his face, and commenced in a rational way to brush his formidable teeth, allowing so many strokes for each tooth in front, so many for each behind.

The innovation of the calendar alarmed the peasantry. But the Oligarchy knew what it was doing. It became secretive; it amassed secrets. It deployed its agents everywhere. Throughout the autumn it developed a secret police force to watch over its interests. Its leader, the Oligarch, gradually became a secret person, a figment, a dark legend hovering over Askitosh, whereas—or so the stories said—King Denniss had been loved by his people and seen everywhere.