Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Winter

Thanks for invaluable preliminary discussions go to Dr. J. M. Roberts (history) and Mr. Desmond Morris (anthropology). I also wish to thank Dr. B. E. Juel-Jensen (pathology) and Dr. Jack Cohen (biology) for factual suggestions. Anything sound philologically is owed to Professor Thomas Shippey; his lively enthusiasm has been of great help all along.

The globe of Helliconia itself was designed and built by Dr. Peter Cattermole, from its geology to its weather. For the cosmology and astronomy, I am indebted to Dr. Iain Nicolson, whose patience over the years is a cause for particular gratitude.

Dr. Mick Kelly and Dr. Norman Myers both gave up-to-date advice on winters other than natural ones. The structure of the Great Wheel owes much to Dr. Joern Bambeck. James Lovelock kindly allowed me to employ his concept of Gaia in this fictional form. Herr Wolfgang Jeschke’s interest in this project from its early days has been vital.

My debt to the writings and friendship of Dr. J. T. Fraser is apparent.

To my wife, Margaret, loving thanks for letting Helliconia take over for so long, and for working on it with me.

Luterm had recovered. He was free of the mysterious illness. He was allowed out again. The couch by the window, the immobility, the grey schoolmaster who came every day—they were done with. He was alive to fill his lungs with the brisk airs of outdoors.

The cold blew down from Mount Shivenink, sharp enough to peel the bark from the north side of trees.

The fresh wind brought out his defiance. It drew the blood to his cheeks, it made his limbs move with the beast which carried him across his father’s land. Letting out a yell, he spurred the hoxney into a gallop. He headed it away from the incarcerating mansion with its tolling bell, away along the avenue traversing the fields they still called the Vineyard. The movement, the air, the uproar of his own blood in his arteries, intoxicated him.

Around him lay his father’s territory, a dominion triumphing over latitude, a small world of moor, mountain, valley, plunging stream, cloud, snow, forest, waterfall—but he kept his thought from the water- fall. Endless game roved here, springing up plenteously even as his father hunted it down. Roving phagors. Birds whose migrations darkened the sky.

Soon he would be hunting again, following the example of his father. Life had been somehow stayed, was somehow renewed. He must rejoice and force away the blackness hovering on the edges of his mind.

He galloped past bare-chested slaves who exercised yelk about the Vineyard, clinging to their snaffles. The hoofs of the animals scattered mounds of earth sent up by moles.

Luterin Shokerandit spared a sympathetic thought for the moles. They could ignore the extravagances of the two suns. Moles could hunt and rut in any season. When they died, their bodies were devoured by other moles. For moles, life was an endless tunnel through which the males quested for food and mates. He had forgotten them, lying abed.

“Moledom!” he shouted, bouncing in the saddle, rising up in the stirrups. The spare flesh on his body made its own movements under his arang jacket.

He goaded the hoxney on. Exercise was what was needed to bring him back into fighting shape. The spare fat was falling away from him even on this, his first ride out for more than a small year. His twelfth birthday had been wasted flat on his back. For over four hundred days he had lain like that—for a considerable period unable to move or speak. He had been entombed in his bed, in his room, in his parents’ mansion, in the great grave House of the Keeper. Now that episode was finished.

Strength flowed back to his muscles, arriving from the animal beneath him, from the air, from the trunks of trees as they flashed by, from his own inner being. Some destructive force whose nature he did not comprehend had wiped him out of the world; now he was back and determined to make a mark upon that flashing stage.

One of the double entrance gates was opened for him by a slave before he reached it. He galloped through without pause or sideways glance.

The wind yelped in his unaccustomed ear like a hound. He lost the familiar note of the bell of the house behind him. The small bells on his harness jingled as the ground responded to his advance.

Both Batalix and Freyr were low in the southern sky. They flitted among the tree trunks like gongs, the big sun and the small. Luterin turned his back on them as he reached the village road. Year by year, Freyr was sinking lower in the skies of Sibornal. Its sinking called forth fury in the human spirit. The world was about to change.

The sweat that formed on his chest cooled instantly. He was whole again, determined to make up for lost time by rutting and hunting like the moles. The hoxney could carry him to the verge of the trackless caspiarn forests, those forests which fell away and away into the deepest recesses of the mountain ranges. One day soon, he planned to fade into the embrace of those forests, to fade and be lost, relishing his own dangerousness like an animal among animals. But first he would be lost in the embrace of Insil Esikananzi.

Luterin gave a laugh. “Yes, you have a wild side, boy,” his father had once said, staring down at Luterin after some misdemeanour or other— staring down with that friendless look of his, while placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder as if estimating the amount of wildness per bone.

And Luterin had gazed downwards, unable to meet that stare. How could his father love him as he loved his father when he was so mute in the great man’s presence?

The distant grey roofs of the monasteries showed through the naked trees. Close lay the gates of the Esikananzi estate. He let the brown hoxney slow to a trot, sensing its lack of stamina. The species was preparing for hibernation. Soon all hoxneys would be useless for riding. This was the season for training up the recalcitrant but more powerful yelk. When a slave opened the Esikananzi gate, the hoxney turned in at walking pace. The distinctive Esikananzi bell sounded ahead, chiming randomly as the wind took its vane.

He prayed to God the Azoiaxic that his father knew nothing of his activities with Ondod females, that wickedness he had fallen into shortly before paralysis had overcome him. The Ondods gave what Insil so far refused him.

He must resist those inhuman females now. He was a man. There were sleazy shacks by the edge of the forest where he and his school friends—including Umat Esikananzi—went to meet those shameless eight-fingered bitches. Bitches, witches, who came out of the woods, out of the very roots of the woods… And it was said that they consorted with male phagors too. Well, that would not happen again. It was in the past, like his brother’s death. And like his brother’s death, best forgotten.

It was not beautiful, the mansion of the Esikananzis. Brutality was the predominant feature of its architecture; it was constructed to withstand the brutal onslaughts of a northern climate. A row of blind arches formed the base of it. Narrow windows, heavily shuttered, began only on the second floor. The whole structure resembled a decapitated pyramid. The bell in its belfry made a slatey sound, as if ringing from the adamantine heart of the building.