Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Winter

All the acts and edicts promulgated by the Oligarchy were backed by rational argument. Rationality was a cruel philosophy when practised by the likes of Gardeterark. Rationality gave him good reason for bullying people. He drank to rationality every evening in the mess, sinking his huge teeth deep over the rim of his glass as the liquor ran down his throat.

Now, having finished his toilet, he allowed his servant to help him into his boots and greatcoat. Rationally clad, he went out into the frosty predawn streets.

His under officer, Captain Harbin Fashnalgid, was not rational, but he drank.

Fashnalgid’s drinking had begun as an amiable social habit, indulged in with other young subalterns. As Fashnalgid’s hatred of the Oligarch grew, so did his need for drink. Sometimes, the habit got out of hand.

One night, back in the officers’ mess in Askitosh, Fashnalgid had been peaceably drinking and reading, ignoring his fellow men. A hearty captain by the name of Naipundeg halted by Fashnalgid’s chair and laid his hoxney-crop across the open page of the book.

“Always reading, Harbin, you unsociable dog! Filth, I suppose?”

Closing the volume, Fashnalgid said in his flat voice, “This is not a work you would have come across, Naipundeg. It’s a history of sacred architecture through the ages. I picked it up from a stall the other day. It was printed three hundred years ago, and it explains how there are secrets that we in these later days have forgotten. Secrets of contentment, for example. If you’re interested.”

“No, I’m not interested, to be frank. It sounds wretchedly dull.”

Fashnalgid stood up, tucking the little book into a pocket of his uniform. He raised his glass and drained it dry. “There are such blockheads in our regiment. I never meet anyone interesting here. You don’t mind me saying that? You’re proud of being a blockhead, aren’t you? You’d find any book not about filth dull, wouldn’t you?”

He staggered slightly. Naipundeg, himself far gone in drink, began to bellow with rage.

It was then that Fashnalgid blurted out his hatred of the Oligarchy, and of the Oligarch’s increasing power.

Naipundeg, throwing another tumbler of fiery liquor down his throat, challenged him to a duel. Seconds were summoned. Supporting their primaries, they jostled them into the grounds of the mess.

There a fresh quarrel broke out. The two officers drove off their seconds and blazed away at each other.

Most of the bullets flew wild.

All except one.

That bullet hit Naipundeg’s face, shattering the zygomatic bone, entering the head by way of the left eye, and leaving through the rear of the skull.

In that casual military society, Fashnalgid was able to pass off the duel as an affair of honour regarding a lady. The court-martial convened under Priest-Militant Asperamanka was easily satisfied; Naipundeg, an officer from Bribahr, had not been popular. Fashnalgid was exonerated of blame. Only Fashnalgid’s conscience remained unappeased; he had killed a fellow officer. The less his drinking companions blamed him, the more he judged himself guilty.

He applied for leave of absence and went to visit his father’s estates in the undulating countryside to the north of Askitosh. There he intended to reform, to become less prodigal with women and drink. Harbin’s parents were growing senile, although both still rode daily— as they had done for the past forty years or more—about their fields and stands of timber.

Harbin’s two younger brothers ran the estate between them, aided by their wives. The brothers were shrewd, sowing coarser crops when finer ones failed, selecting strains with more rapid growth periods, planting cold-resistant caspiarn saplings where gales blew down established trees, building stout fences to keep out the herds of flambreg which came marauding from the northern plains. Sullen phagors worked under the brothers’ direction.

The estate had seemed a paradise to Harbin in his childhood. Now it became a place of misery. He saw how much labour was required to maintain a status quo threatened by the ever worsening season, and wanted no part of it. Every morning, he endured his father’s repetitive conversation rather than join his brothers outdoors. Later, he retired to the library, to leaf moodily through old books which had once en- chanted him and to allow himself the occasional little drink.

Harbin Fashnalgid had often grieved that he was ineffectual. He could not exert his will. He was too modest to realise how many people, women especially, liked him for this trait. In a more lenient age, he would have been a great success.

But he was observant. Within two days, he had noticed that his youngest brother had a quarrel with his wife. Perhaps the difference between them was merely temporary. But Fashnalgid began offering the woman sympathy. The more he talked to her, the weaker became his resolve to reform. He worked on her. He spun her exaggerated tales about the glamour of military life, at the same time touching her, smiling at her, and feigning a great sorrow which was only part feigned. So he won her confidence and became her lover. It was absurdly easy.

It was an irrational way to behave.

Even in that rambling two-storey parental house, it was impossible that the affair should remain secret. Intoxicated by love, or something like it, Fashnalgid became incapable of behaving with discretion. He lavished absurd gifts on his new partner—a wicker hammock; a two-headed goat; a doll dressed as a soldier; an ivory chest crammed with manuscript versions of Ponipotan legends; a pair of pecubeas in a gilt cage; a silver figurine of a hoxney with a woman’s face; a pack of playing cards in ivory inlaid with mother-of-pearl; polished stones; a clavichord; ribbons; poems; and a fossilized Madi skull with alabaster eyes.

He hired musicians from the village to serenade her.

The woman in her turn, driven to ecstasies by the first man in her life who knew nothing about the planting of potatoes and pellamoun-tain, danced for him on his verandah in the nude, wearing only the bracelets he gave her, and sang the wild zyganke.

It could not last. A lugubrious quality in the countryside could not tolerate such exuberance. One night, Fashnalgid’s two brothers rolled up their sleeves, rushed into the love nest, kicked over the clavichord, and bounced Fashnalgid out of the house.

“Abro Hakmo Astab!” roared Fashnalgid. Not even the labourers on the estate were allowed to employ that vile expression aloud.

He picked himself up and dusted himself down in the darkness. The two-headed goat chewed at his trousers.

Fashnalgid stationed himself under his old father’s window, to shout insults and supplications. “You and Mother have had a happy life, damn you. You’re of the generation which regarded love as a matter of will. ‘Will marks us from the animal, and love from lovelessness,’ as sayeth the poet. You married equally for life, do you hear, you old fool? Well, things are different now. Will’s given way to weather…

“You have to grab love when you can now… Didn’t you have a parental duty to make me happy? Eh? Reply, you biwacking old loon. If you’ve been so sherbing happy, why couldn’t you have given me a happy disposition? You’ve given me nothing else. Why should I always be so miserable?”

No answer came from the dark house. A doll dressed as a soldier sailed from one of the windows and struck him on the side of the head.

There was nothing for it but to return to his regiment in Askitosh. But news travelled fast among the landed families. Scandal followed Fashnalgid. As ill fortune would have it, Major Gardeterark was an uncle of the woman he had disgraced, of that very woman who had so recently danced naked on his verandah and sung the wild zyganke. From then on, Harbin Fashnalgid’s position in the regiment became one of increasing difficulty.