Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Winter

Her voice shook when she spoke. “Is this why I am brought here? This king is a distant ancestor of mine. His name is proverbial where I come from, though he died almost five centuries ago.”

Luterin’s only response was to say, “I know the building is old. My brother lies nearby. Come and see.”

In a moment, she collected herself and followed him, saying, “fandolAnganol…”

He stood contemplating a cairn. Stone was piled on stone, and capped with a. circular block of granite. His brother’s name—FAVIN— was engraved on the granite, together with the sacred symbol of circle within circle.

To show reverence, Toress Lahl dismounted and stood with Luterin. The cairn was a brutal object in comparison with the delicately worked chapel.

Finally, Luterin turned away and pointed to the rocks above them.

“You see where the waterfall begins?”

High overhead, a spur of rock protruded. Water spouted over its lip, falling clear for seventy feet before striking stone. They could hear the sound of its descent into the valley.

“He rode out here one day on a hoxney, when the weather was better. Jumped—man and mount. The Azoiaxic knows what made him do it. My father was at home. He it was who found my brother, dead on this spot. He erected this cairn to his memory. Since then, we have not been allowed to speak his name. I believe that Father was as heartbroken as I.”

“And your mother?” she asked, after a pause.

“Oh, she was upset too, of course.” He looked up again at the waterfall, biting his lip.

“You think greatly of your father, don’t you?” “Even-one does.” He cleared his throat and added, “His influence on me is immense. Perhaps if he were away less, he would not be so close to me. Everyone knows him hereabouts for a holy man—much like your ancestor, the king.”

Toress Lahl laughed. “JandolAnganol is no holy man. He is known as one of the blackest villains in history, who destroyed the old religion and burnt the leader of it, with all his followers.”

“Well, we know him here as a holy man. His name is revered locally.” “Why did he come here?”

He shook his head impatiently. “Because this is Kharnabhar. Everyone wants to be here. Perhaps he was doing penance for his sins…” To that she would say nothing.

He stood staring down into the valley, into the confused hillsides. “There is no finer love than that between son and father, don’t you agree? Now I have grown up, I know other kinds of love—all with their lure. None has the purity—the clarity—of the love I bear for my father. All others are full of questions, of conflicts. The love for a father is unquestioning. I wish I were one of his hounds, that I could show him unquestioning obedience. He’s away in the caspiarn forests for months at a time. If I were a hound, I could be forever at his heel, following wherever he led.”

“Eating the scraps he threw you.” “Whatever he wished.” “It’s not healthy to feel like that.”

He turned towards her, looking haughty. “I am not a lad anymore. I can please myself or I can subdue my will. So it must be with everyone. Compassion and firmness are needed. We must fight unjust laws. As long as anarchy does not take over, Weyr-Winter will be endurable. When spring comes, Sibornal will emerge stronger than ever. We are committed to four tasks. To unify our continent. To rectify work, and consolidate it organisationally with regard to depleted resources… Well, all that’s no concern of yours…”

She stood apart from him. The clouds of their breath formed and dispersed without meeting. “What role do I play in your plans?”

He was uneasy with the question, but liked its bluntness. Being in Toress Lahl’s company was like occupying a different world from Insil’s. With a sudden impulse, he turned and grasped her, staring into her eyes before kissing her briefly. He stepped back, drawing deep breath, drinking in her expression. Then he moved forward again and this time kissed her with greater concentration.

Even when she made some response, he could not banish the thought of Insil Esikananzi. For her part, Toress Lahl too struggled against her late husband’s phantom lips.

They broke apart.

“Be patient,” he said, as if to himself. She gave no answer.

Luterin climbed back on his mount, and led the way up the track which wound through the dark trees. The bells on the animals’ harness jingled. The little snowbound chapel sank behind them, soon becoming lost in the obscurity.

When he returned, a sealed note from Insil awaited him. He opened it with reluctance, but it contained only an oblique reference to their quarrel of the previous evening. It read:

Luterin:

You will think me hard, but there are those who are harder. They offer you greater danger than ever I could.

Do you recall a conversation we once had about the possible cause of your brother’s death? It took place, unless I dreamed it, after you had recovered from that strange horizontal interlude which followed the death. Your innocence is heroic. Let me say more soon.

I beg you use guile now. Hold “our” new secret for a while, for your own sake.

Insil

“Too late,” he said impatiently, screwing the note up into a ball.

But how could anyone be sure that those tutelary biospheric spirits, the Original Beholder and Gaia, had a real existence?

There was no objective proof, just as empathy cannot be measured. Microbacterial life has no knowledge of mankind: their umwelts are too disparate. Only intuition can permit mankind to see and hear the footsteps of those geochemical spirits who have managed the life of a functioning whole world as a single organism.

It is intuition, again, which tells humanity that to live according to the spirit it must not possess, must refrain from dominating. It was precisely those men who met so secretively on Icen Hill, shut away from human contact, secure from contact with the outside world, who most feverishly tried to possess the world.

And if they succeeded?

The biospheric spirits are forgiving and adaptable. Intuition tells us that there are always alternatives. Homeostasis is not fossilisation but the balance of vitality.

The early tribal hunters who burned the forests to secure their prey gave birth to the ecosystems of the great savannahs. Mutability informs Gaia’s cybernetic controls.

The Original Beholder’s grey cloak was sweeping across Helliconia. Human beings defied it or accepted it, according to their individual natures.

Beyond the pale of human possession, the creatures of the wild made their own dispositions. The brassimip trees greedily stored food resources far below ground, in order that they might continue to grow. The little land crustaceans, the rickybacks, congregated in their thousands on the underside of stones of alabaster, working lodgements for themselves in the stone with secretions of acid; they would derive such light as they needed to sustain them through the stone itself. The horned sheep of the mountains, the wild asokin, the badgered timoroon, the flambreg on their scoured plains, indulged in fierce courtship battles. There was time for one more mating and perhaps one more: the number of living offspring born would be decided by temperature, by the food supply, by courage, by skill.

All those beings which could not be described as part of the human race, but remained suspended by a quirk of evolution just outside the hearths of humanity—wistfully looking towards the camp fires—those beings too made their dispositions.

The Driat tribes, given the gift of language and well able to curse in it, cursed and moved down from the hills to rocky shores of their continent, where they would find food in abundance. The migratory Madis were driven from their dying ucts to seek shelter in the West and to haunt the ruined cities mankind had deserted. The Nondads burrowed down between the roots of great trees, living their elusive lives little differently from in the scorching days of summer.