Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Winter

He used the oath again. As one of the damned, he was permitted it.

The dimmer the vision, the louder the noises. Luterin presumed that the other occupants of the Wheel slept when it was not moving. He lay awake, gazing vacantly about the dull box he inhabited.

His water supply ran down into a trough near the foot of his bunk. Its drips and splashes were close, and as regular as the tick of clocks.

Deeper in tone were the flows of water beneath the mobile floor. These were lazy noises, like a continuous drunken monologue. Luterin found them soothing.

Other watery noises, drips and plops, coming more distantly, reminded him of the outside world of nature, of freedom, of the hunt. He could imagine himself wandering free in the caspiarn forests. But that illusion could not be sustained. Ever and again he saw his father’s face in its final agony. The brooks, waterfalls, torrents, disappeared from his mind’s eye, to be replaced by blood.

His lethargy was pierced only when he opened his daily woven bundle of food, and found a message in it.

He carried the scrap of paper over to the blue flame in the outer wall and peered at it. Someone had written in small script, “All is well here. Love.”

There was no signature, not even an initial. His mother? Toress Lahl? Insil? One of his friends?

The very anonymity of the message was an encouragement. There was someone outside who thought well of him and who could—at least on one occasion—communicate with him.

That day, when the priests’ trumpets sounded, he leaped up and seized hold of the chain hanging in its alcove in the outer wall. Bracing his feet against the partition wall, he heaved on the chain. His cell moved—the Wheel moved.

Another heave, and the movement was less reluctant this time. A few centimetres were gained.

“Pull, you biwackers!” he shouted.

The encouraging bugles sounded at intervals for twelve and a half hours, then fell silent as long. By the end of a day’s work, Luterin had advanced himself by some 119 centimetres, almost half the width of his cell. The flame which lit his cell was close to the dividing wall. By the end of another day’s work, it would be eclipsed—would be in the following cell—and a new one would be revealed.

A mass of 1284551.137 tons had to be shifted: that was the burden which holiness had placed on the incumbents of the Wheel. It appeared to be merely a physical labour. But, as the days were to pass, Luterin would find himself regarding it more and more as a spiritual task; while more and more it became apparent to him that there were indeed connections out from his heart, and from the Wheel, to Freyr and Batalix and to the far constellations. The perception would come that the Wheel contained not merely hardship but—as legend claimed—the beginnings of wisdom.

“Pull!” he shouted again. “Pull, you saints and sinners.”

From then on, he became fanatical, leaping up eagerly from his bunk as soon as the awaited bugle blew. He cursed those who, in his imagination, did not rise as swiftly to the task as he did. He cursed those who would not labour at their chains at all, as he had once done. It was beyond his understanding why the work periods were not longer.

At night—but here only night existed—Luterin lay down to sleep with a head full of the image of that great slow-grinding Wheel, crushing men’s lives away like a grindstone. The Wheel moved every day, as it had done since the great Architects had established it.

It revolved about a harsh irony. The captives, nested like maggots each in separate cells on the perimeter of the Wheel, were forced to propel themselves into the heart of the granite mountain. Only by submitting to that cruel journey, by actively collaborating in it, was it possible to emerge. Only by that collaboration was it possible to effect the revolution of the Wheel which meant freedom. Only by plunging deep into the entrails of the mountain was it possible to issue forth a free man.

“Pull, pull!” shouted Luterin, straining every muscle. He thought of the 1824 others, captive each in his separate cell, each bound to pull if ever they were to escape.

He knew not what crises prevailed in the outside world. He knew not what sequence of events he had precipitated. He knew not who lived or died. Increasingly, as the tenners went by, his mind was filled with loathing for those other prisoners—some perhaps sick or even dead— who did not pull with a whole heart. He felt that he alone was bearing the weight of rock on his sinews, he alone heaving the Wheel through its firmament of granite towards the light.

The tenners passed, and the small years. Only the scratchings on the outer rock wall changed. Otherwise, all remained always the same.

The sameness overpowered his youthful mind. He became dull, resigned. He did not always move now when the priests’ trumpets blew overhead, their noise made reedy by the thickness of roof.

His thoughts of his father receded. He had come to terms with his guilt by believing that his father had himself been overwhelmed by guilt, and had handed his son the knife before taunting him in order that he might meet death. That face, always shining with sebum, had been a face of misery.

It took him a long while to contemplate the possibility of visiting his father in pauk. But the idea preyed on his mind. In the second year of his incarceration, Luterin climbed onto his bunk and lay flat. He scarcely knew what to do. Gradually, the pauk state overcame him, and he drifted down into a darkness greater than any in the heart of the mountain.

Never before had he entered into that melancholy world of the gossies, where all who had once lived and lived no more sank slowly through the terrible silences into nonbeing. Disorientation overwhelmed him. At first he could not sink; then he could not stop himself sinking. He drifted down towards the sparks dim below him like guttering stars, all arranged in a static uniformity possible only within the regions of death.

The barque of Luterin’s soul moved steadily, peering without sight into the fessup ranks which filtered down all the way to the heart of the Original Beholder. Viewed closely, even- gossie resembled something like singed poultry, hanging to dry. Through their rib cages, their transparent stomachs, particles could be seen, circulating slowly like flies in a bottle. In their sketchy heads, little lights flickered through hollow eye sockets. Obeying a direction no compass could detect, the soul of Luterin fluttered before the gossie of Lobanster Shokerandit.

“My father, you need say one word only and I shall be gone, I who loved you best and harmed you most.”

“Luterin, Luterin, I wait here, sinking towards extinction, only in the hope of seeing you. What sight could be more welcome to my eyes than you? How fare you, child, in the ranks of those who must still undergo the hour of their mortality?” On the last word, puffs of sparks were transpired.

“Father, ask not of me. Speak of yourself. My thoughts are never free of that crime I committed. Those terrible moments in that fatal courtyard always haunt me.”

“You must forgive yourself, as I forgave you when I reached this place. We were of different generations, your mind had not yet composed itself, you were unable to take the long view of human affairs that I could. You obeyed a principle, just as I did. There’s honour in that.”

“I did not intend to kill you, my beloved father—only the Oligarch.”

“The Oligarch never dies. There is always another.” As the gossie spoke, a cloud of dull particles issued from the cavity where once a mouth had been. They hung and dispersed but slowly, like snow sinking into coal dust.

The cinder of Lobanster described how he had taken on the duties of the Oligarch because he believed that there were values in Sibornal worth preserving. He spoke long about these virtues, and many times his discourse wandered.