Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Winter

“The soldiers!” he gasped.

They understood. The soldiers were no longer their allies. They hurried him into the gloom, while the great metal doors clanged fast together behind him.

The Great Wheel had claimed him.

The geonauts were the first life systems on Earth not to consist of living cells, and therefore not to depend on bacteria. They formed a complete break from all life that had gone before, including those amazing gene cities, humanity.

Perhaps Gain had turned her metaphorical thumbs down on humanity. They had proved themselves more of a curse than an adjunct to the biosphere. Possibly they were now being phased out, or merged with a greater thing.

At all events, the white polyhedrons were now everywhere, covering every continent. They appeared to do no harm. Their ways were as inscrutable as the ways of kings to cats, or of cats to kings. But they emitted energy.

The energy was not the old energy which mankind had used JOT centuries and termed electricity. The humans called the new energy ego-nicity, perhaps in memory of the old.

Egonicity could not be generated. It was a force which flowed only from large white polyhedrons when they were about to replicate, or were meditating on the subject. It could, however, be felt. It was felt as a mild singing noise in the lower stomach or hora region. It did not register on any instrument the post-ice age humans could devise.

The post-ice age humans were itinerant. They no longer wished to possess land but rather to be possessed by it. The old world of fences was dead for ever.

Wherever they went, they walked. And it so turned out that it was the easiest thing to follow a suitable geonaut. Humanity had not lost its old ingenuity, or its skill with its hands. As generations passed, a group of men on one of the new continents discovered a way of harnessing enough egonicity to move a small carriage. Soon, small carriages were to be seen everywhere, moving at a slow rate over the land, trundling in front of a geonaut.

When the geonaut replicated, letting slip a stream of tiny polyhedrons like sheets of paper in the wind, the egonicity ceased, and those who sat in the carriage had to push it to another source.

However, that was just a beginning. Later developments would bring different arrangements.

The human race, greatly reduced from its former numbers, roamed the new Earth, and developed a dependence on the geonauts which increased generation by generation.

Nobody worked as once people had worked, bent double planting rice or sowing potatoes in the dirt. They did plant vegetables occasionally, but that was for pleasure; and others inherited the fruits of their labours, since they had by that time moved on — though rarely by more than a mile a day. Egonicity was not a violent power source. Nobody worked at desks. Desks were extinct.

It might have been supposed that these people were always on holiday, or perhaps that they inhabited some rather spartan version of the Garden of Eden. Such was not the case. They were intensely involved with work of their own specific kind. They were doing what they termed rethinking.

The storms of radioactivity which had followed the nuclear war had left their brand upon the genetic pool. The survival of mankind increasingly favoured those with new connections among the neural path- ways of their brains. The neocortex had been, in geological terms, a hasty development. It had functioned well on ordinary occasions but, in times of stress, it had been bypassed by emotion. In prenuclear tim.es, this deficiency had been regarded as a norm, sometimes as a desirable norm. Violence was regarded as an acceptable solution to many problems which would never have originated had violence not been in the air in the first place.

In these more pacific times, violence was unwelcome. It was seen as a failing, never as a solution. Generation by generation, the neocortex developed better connections with other parts of the brain. Mankind began to know itself for the first time.

These itinerant people did see themselves as on holiday. Such are the ways that Gaia works through evolution. They found pleasure in doing exactly those things which improved their stock, and those couples excelled whose children in the next generation would do best at the new sport of rethinking.

Mainly they searched for deep structures in the human consciousness. While seeking out those guiding determinants which had shaped the history of the human race so far, they were guided by what happened on Helliconia. The records of terrestrial history before the nuclear destruction were almost entirely destroyed; only one or two caches of knowledge had been disinterred from the ruins. But Helliconia was reckoned to present in its people a fair parallel of the deep structures which had once prevailed on Earth.

Those terrestrials who had so feared their own violent nature, who had walled themselves about with fences, armaments, and harsh laws — so it was reckoned—were not greatly different from the troubled young man who killed his father. Aggression and killing had been an escape from pain: in the end, the planet itself had been murdered by its own sons.

Although there was scarcely a person on the whole planet who had not heard of the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar, few had visited it. None had seen it in its entirety.

The Great Wheel lay underground, buried in the heart of Mount Kharnabhar. The Architects had built it, and none had come after them who could even emulate their work.

Nothing was known of the Architects of Kharnabhar, but one thing was certain. They were devout men. They had believed that faith could move worlds. They had set about building a machine of stone which could haul Helliconia across the darkness and cold until it docked again to bask in the warmth of God the Azoiaxic’s favour. So far, the machine had always worked.

The machine was powered by faith, and the faith was in the hearts of men.

The way by which men entered the Wheel had been unchanged throughout the ages. After a preliminary ceremony at the gates of the tunnel, the newcomer was led down a wide flight of stairs which curved into the mountain. Biogas jets lit the way. At the bottom of the steps was a funnel-shaped chamber, the far wall of which was a section of the Wheel itself. The newcomer was then helped or propelled, depending on his state of mind, into the cell of the Wheel there visible. After a while, after a jerk, the Wheel began to rotate. Slowly, the view of the outer world was cut off from the cell’s new occupant by the rock face. The outer world disappeared from view. Now the newcomer was alone—except for all the occupants of all the other cells nearby, who would remain unseen throughout his tenure of the Wheel.

Luterin Shokerandit was not untypical of those who entered the Wheel. Others had sought refuge there. Some had been saints, some sinners.

Originally, the plan of the Architects had been followed by the Church. There had been no shortage of volunteers to take their places in the Great Wheel and row it across the firmament to its rightful port beside Freyr. But when the long centuries of light returned at last, when Sibornal was again bathed in daylight, then the faith declined. It became more difficult to attract the faithful, to persuade them into the darkness.

The Wheel would have come to a standstill had not the State stepped in to aid the Church. It had sent its criminals to Kharnabhar, in order that they might serve their sentences in the Wheel and, crouched deep in rock, haul their world and themselves to remission. Thus had come about the close collaboration of Church and State which had sustained the strength of Sibornal for more Great Years than could be re- membered.