Brian Aldiss - Helliconia

Usilk shunned him.

Finally, Yuli’s time in Punishment was completed. He entered a period of meditation before going to work with the Security Police. This branch of the militia had come under his notice while working in the cells, and he found within himself the ghost of a dangerous idea.

After only a few days in Security, Wutra’s worm became ever more active in his mind. His task was to see men beaten and interrogated and to administer a final blessing to them when they died. Grimmer and grimmer he became, until his superiors commended him and gave him cases of his own to handle.

The interrogations were simple, for there were few categories of crime. People cheated or stole or spoke heresy. Or they went to places that were forbidden or plotted revolution — the crime that had been Usilk’s. Some even tried to escape to Wutra’s realm, under the skies. It was now that Yuli realised that a land of illness gripped the dark world; everyone in authority suspected revolution. The illness bred in the darkness, and accounted for the numerous petty laws that governed life in Pannoval. Including the priesthood, the settlement numbered almost six and three quarter thousand people, every one of whom was forced into a guild or order. Every living, guild, order, dormitory, was infiltrated by spies, who themselves were not trusted, and also had an infiltrated guild of their own. The dark bred distrust, and some of its victims paraded, hangdog, before Brother Yuli.

Although he loathed himself for it, Yuli found he was good at the work. He felt enough sympathy to lower his victim’s guard, enough destructive rage to tear the truth out. Despite himself, he developed a professional’s taste for the job. Only when he felt secure did he have Usilk brought before him.

At the end of each day’s duty, a service was held in the cavern called Lathorn. Attendance was compulsory for the priesthood, optional for any of the militia who wished to attend. The acoustics of Lathorn were excellent: choir and musicians filled the dark air with swelling veins of music. Yuli had recently taken up a musical instrument. He was becoming expert on the fluggel, a bronze instrument no bigger than his hand, which he at first despised, seeing other musicians play enormous peetes, vrachs, baranboims, and double-clows. But the tiny fluggel could turn his breath into a note that flew as high as a childrim, soaring up to the clouded roof of Lathorn above all conspiring melody. With it, Yuli’s spirit also flew, to the traditional strains of ‘Caparisoned’, ‘In His Penumbra’, and, his favourite, the richly counterpointed ‘Oldorando’.

One evening, after service, Yuli left Lathorn with an acquaintance, a shriven fellow priest by the name of Bervin, and they walked together through the tomblike avenues of the Holies, to run their fingers over new carvings even then being created by the three Brothers Kilandar. It chanced that they encountered Father Sifans, also strolling, reciting a litany to himself in a nervous undertone. They greeted each other cordially. Bervin politely excused himself, so that Yuli and Father Sifans could parade and talk together.

‘I don’t enjoy my feelings about my day’s work, Father. I was glad of the service.’

As was his fashion, Sifans responded to this only obliquely.

‘I hear marvellous reports of your work, Brother Yuli. You will have to seek further advancement. When you do, I will help you.’

‘You are kind, Father. I recall what you told me’ — he lowered his voice — ‘about the Keepers. An organisation for which one can volunteer, you said?’

‘No, I said one could only be elected to the Keepers.’

‘How could I put my name forward?’

‘Akha will aid you when it is necessary.’ He sniffed with laughter. ‘Now you are one of us, I wonder… have you heard a whisper of an order above even the Keepers?’

‘No, Father. You know I don’t listen to whispers.’

‘Hah, you should. Whispers are a blind man’s sight. But if you are so virtuous, then I will say nothing of the Takers.’

‘The Takers? Who are they?’

‘No, no, don’t worry, I will say not a word. Why should you bother your head with secret organisations or tales of hidden lakes, free of ice? Such things may be lies, after all. Legends, like Wutra’s worm.’

Yuli laughed. ‘Very well, Father, you have worked me up to sufficient interest. You can tell me everything.’

Sifans made tsking noises with his thin lips. He slowed his step, and sidled into an alcove.

‘Since you force me. Very regrettable… You may remember how the rabble lives in Vakk, its rooms all a huddle, one on top the next, without order. Suppose this mountain range in which Pannoval lives is like Vakk — better, like a body with various interconnected parts, spleen, lungs, vitals, heart. Suppose there are caverns just as large as ours above us and below us. It’s not possible is it?’

‘No.’

‘I’m saying it is possible. It’s a hypothesis. Let us say that somewhere beyond Twink there exists a waterfall, falling from a cavern above ours. And that waterfall falls to a level below ours, some way below. Water plays where it will. Let us say that it falls into a lake, the waters of which are pure and too warm for ice to form on them… Let us imagine that in that desirable and secure place live the most favoured, the most powerful, the Takers. They take everything of the best, the knowledge and the power, and treasure it for us there, until the day of Akha’s victory.’

‘And keep those things from us …’

‘What’s that? Fillips, I missed what you said, Brother. Well, it’s just an amusing story I tell you.’

‘And does one have to be elected to the Takers?’

The father made little clicking noises with his tongue. ‘Who could penetrate such privilege, supposing it existed? No, my boy, one would have to be born to it — a number of powerful families, with beautiful women to keep them warm, and perhaps secret ways to come and go, even beyond Akha’s domains… No, it would need — why, it would need a revolution to get near such a hypothetical place.’

He stuck his nose in the air and giggled.

‘Father, you tease the poor simple priests below you.’

The old priest’s head went to one side, judicially. ‘Poor you are, my young friend, and will most like remain so. Simple you are not — and that is why you will always make a flawed priest, as long as you continue. That is why I love you.’

They parted. The priest’s declaration troubled Yuli. Yes, he was a flawed priest, as Sifans said. A music lover, nothing more.

He washed his face in icy water as his thoughts burned. All these hierarchies of priesthoods — if they existed — led only to power. They did not lead to Akha. Faith never explained precisely, with a verbal precision to rival the precision of music, how devotion could move a stone effigy; the words of faith led only to a foggy obscurity called holiness. The realisation was as rough as the towel on which he dried his cheeks.

Lying in the dormitory far from sleep, he saw how old Sifans’ life had been stripped from the old man, real love had been starved from him, until he was left only with teasing ghosts of affection. He did not really care — had perhaps ceased to care a while ago — whether those beneath him had faith or not. His hints and riddles expressed a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with his own life.

In sudden fear, Yuli told himself that it would be better to die a man in the wilderness than a dry mouth here in the shadowy safeties of Pannoval. Even if it meant leaving behind his fluggel and the strains of ‘Oldorando’.

The fear made him sit up, casting off his blanket. Dark winds, the restless inhabitants of the dormitory, blew about his head. He shivered.