Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Spring

He thought to himself, Dreams are not for you, dodger. You’re too tough. You think of your mother now, yet you never showed her affection. You were too afraid of your father’s fist. You know, I really believe I hated my father. I believe I was glad when the phagors carried him off—weren’t you?

No, no… It’s just that my experiences have made me hard. You’re hard, dodger, hard and cruel. You killed those two gentlemen. What are you going to be? Better to confess to the murders and see what happens. Try and love me, try and love me…

I know so little. That’s it. The whole world—you want to find out. Akha must know. Those eyes see everything. But me—you’re so small, dodger—life’s no more than one of those funny feelings when the childrim flies overhead.

He marvelled at his own thoughts. Finally he cried for the guards to open his door, and found that he had been incarcerated for three days.

For a year and a day, Yuli served in the Holies as a novice. He was not allowed to leave the halls, but dwelt in a monastic nocturne, not knowing whether Freyr and Batalix swam separately or together in the sky. A wish to run through the white wilderness gradually left him, erased by the penumbral majesty of the Holies.

He had confessed to the murder of the two gentlemen. No punishment followed.

The thin grey priest with the blinking eyes, Father Sifans, was the charge-father over Yuli and other novices. He clasped his hands and said to Yuli, “That unhappy incident of the murders is now sealed behind the wall of the past. Yet you must never allow yourself to forget it, lest, in forgetting, you come to believe that it never happened. Like the many suburbs of Pannoval, all things in life are interwoven. Your sin and your longing to serve Akha are of a piece. Did you imagine that it was holiness that led a man to serve Akha? Not so. Sin is a more powerful mover. Embrace the dark—through sin you come to terms with your own inadequacy.”

“Sin” was a word often on Father Sifans’ lips at one period. Yuli watched it there with interest, with the absorption pupils devote to their masters. The way the lips moved was something he imitated to himself later, alone, using the movements to repeat all that he had to learn by heart.

While the father had his own private apartment to which he withdrew after instruction, Yuli slept in a dormitory with others of his kind, in a nest of dark within the dark. Unlike the fathers, they were allowed no pleasures; song, drink, wenches, recreation were forbidden, and their food was of the most spartan kind, selected from the offerings made by supplicants of Akha daily.

“I can’t concentrate. I’m hungry,” he complained once to his charge-father.

“Hunger is universal. We cannot expect Akha to fatten us. He defends us against hostile outside forces, generation by generation.”

“Which is more important, survival or the individual?”

“An individual has importance in his own eyes, but generations have priority.”

He was learning to argue the priest’s way, step by step. “But generations are made up of individuals.”

“Generations are not only the sum of individuals. They contain also aspirations, plans, histories, laws—above all, continuities. They contain the past as well as the future. Akha refuses to work with individuals alone, so individuals must be subdued—quenched, if necessary.”

Slyly, the father taught Yuli to argue. On the one hand, he must have blind faith; on the other, he needed reason. For its long journey through the years, the entombed community needed all defences, needed both prayer and rationality. The sacred verses claimed that at some time in the future, Akha, in his lonely battle, might suffer defeat and the world undergo a period of intense fire descending from the skies. The individual must be quenched, to avoid the burning.

Through the entombing halls went Yuli, with all these ideas declaiming themselves in his head. They stood his understanding of the world upside down—but therein lay much of their attraction, since every revolutionary new insight only emphasised his previous ignorant state.

Among all the deprivations, one sensory delight stole upon his bewilderment to soothe him. The priests found their way through the dark labyrinth by wall-reading, an arcane mystery in which Yuli was soon to be initiated. There was also another directional clue, intended to delight. Music. At first, Yuli in his innocence imagined that he heard the sound of spirits overhead. He could make nothing of the tickling line of melody played on a one-stringed vrach. He had never seen a vrach. If not a spirit, could it be the wail of wind through a crevice somewhere in the rock?

His delight was so secret that he asked no one about the sounds, not even his fellow novices, until walking one day unexpectedly with Sifans into a religious service. Choirs were important, and monody even more so, with a single voice launched into the hollows of the dark; but what Yuli came to love most were the interventions by inhuman voices, those of the instruments of Pannoval.

Nothing similar was ever beard in the Barriers. The only music the besieged tribes there knew was a prolonged drumming, on a drum made of hide; clacking, of animal bones struck together; and clapping, of human hands, accompanied by a monotonous chant. It was the luxurious complication of the new music that convinced Yuli of the reality of his still awakening spiritual life. One great tune in particular took him by storm, “Oldorando,” which had a part for an instrument that soared about all others, then dived into their midst, finally to retreat into a secure melodic refuge of its own.

Music became almost an alternative to light for Yuli. When he talked to his fellow novices, he found that they felt little of his exhilaration. But they—he came to realise—all carried a much greater central commitment to Akha himself than he. Most of the novices had loved or hated Akha from birth; Akha was nature to them as he was not to Yuli.

When he wrestled with such matters during the sparse hours allotted to sleep, Yuli felt guilt that he was not as the other novices. He loved the music of Akha. It was a new language. But was not music the creation of men, rather than of …

Even when he choked off the doubt, another doubt sprang up. How about the language of religion? Wasn’t that also the invention of men—perhaps pleasant, ineffectual men like Father Sifans?

“Belief is not peace but torment, only the great War is peace.” That part of the creed at least was true.

Meanwhile, Yuli kept his own council, and fraternised only superficially with his fellows.

They met for instruction in a low, damp, foggy hall named Cleft. Sometimes they went in utter darkness, sometimes in the glow of wicks carried by the fathers. Each session ended with the priest pressing his hand to the novice’s forehead, gesturing at his brain, an action at which the novices laughed later in their dormitory. Priests’ fingers were rough, from the wall-reading by which they navigated briskly about the labyrinths of the Holies even in the most pitchy blackness.

Each novice sat in a curiously shaped dock, built of clay bricks, facing his instructor. Each dock was decorated in individual low-reliefs, to make their identification in the dark easier. Their instructor sat opposite and above them, astride a clay saddle.

When only a few weeks of the novitiate had lapsed, Father Sifans announced the subject of heresy. He spoke in a low voice, coughing as he did so. Worse than nonbelief was to believe wrongly. Yuli leaned forward. He and Sifans had no light, but the charge-father in the next box did, a fluttering flame which served to throw a foggy orange nimbus about Sifans’ head and shade his face. The old man’s white- and-black gown further disintegrated his outlines, so that he merged with the dark of the chamber. Mist rolled about them, trailing anyone who walked slowly by, practising wall-reading. Coughs and muttering filled the low cavern; water dripped ceaselessly, like small bells.