Brian Aldiss: Helliconia

Madis are meek creatures, easily victimised. They are frequently domesticated by humans, the females serving as sex slaves. Although small, they resemble humanity in most major aspects, and interbreeding is not unknown.

The Madi tribes call their language hr’Madi’h , which suggests pervasive phagor influence. hr’Modi’h is a sung language, complex but in fact incomplete. Nothing can be described accurately in it. It is circumscribed, like everything else in Madi existence, by the Ahd . There is no written form.

Additional words are occasionally imported from other languages, but to these the tribes are hostile — or at least fearful.

Other species and semi-species include the waist-high protognostics, the Nondads. Nondads are of subterranean habit. A peaceful people, they leave it to a warrior caste to fight. Thus, they discuss ultimate questions in a language of ‘clicks, whistles, and snorts’, while their warrior kings do battle in the Eighty Darknesses.

Nondads are hunted and eaten by Uskuts; when roast, they are known as treebries .

Nondads live in Campannlat, the Africa of Helliconia.

A related people, the Ondods, live in the harsher climates of the northern continent, Sibornal.

Descending the evolutionary scale, the necrogenes represent a dead end to one line of pre-Freyr development.

These species of fish and animals give birth only through their own death. Examples are the assatassi (fish or, more properly, fish-lizards) yelk, biyelk, and gunnadu.

Necrogenes are hermaphrodite, without such mammalian adjuncts as ovaries and wombs.

For instance, assatassi, a sharp-beaked fish, semi-winged at maturity, flies ashore in its millions during the great summer along the coasts of the Sea of Eagles. Their mating grounds lie deep in the Ardent Sea. After mating they swarm eastwards, against the ocean currents, through the Cadmer Straits, working up considerable speeds for their death flight.

They then launch themselves onto the shores of Hespagorat, some managing to fly a distance inland. Where they fall, there they die. The young have been carried in their bellies. They live as maggots on the decaying bodies of their mothers, before metamorphosing to a legged and tailed form, and crawling back to the sea. [Assatassi first feature in terrestrial literature in ‘Star Millenia’, in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (Signet Books, New York, 1960).]

Larger land necrogenes follow similar patterns. After yelk mate, the sperm seed develops into maggot-like creatures which live off the double stomachs of their mothers. When they enter an artery, the maggots explode through the parental body, causing rapid death. They devour the carcass — and each other — until after metamorphosis, when they emerge to survive in the outside world as young adult yelk.

In the great hubbub of Helliconian life, one other life form deserves special mention.

In the centuries of Great Winter, Wutra’s Worm is a kind of devouring dragon. Flighted, it destroys all it comes upon. To the embattled tribes of humanity — in Pannoval and elsewhere — Wutra is God of the Skies. In time, the idea becomes a god.

During the Great Summer, a transformation takes place in the life cycle. The worm retreats to the warming oceans in a marine stage. Having passed its flighted period in higher latitudes, where it mated, it now lives out the rest of its life in the sea. The oceans teem with food. Into this rich environment, the offspring are born.

These fish-like offspring are as vulnerable as they are plentiful, and are known to coastal peoples as scupper-fish. Scupper-fish make a nourishing and tasty dish.

After some centuries, when the Great Autumn sets in, the scupper-fish crawl to land (much like Earth’s mudskippers) and develop wings. A few more years, and Wutra’s Worm is again aloft in darkening air.

Even during the period when it is being eaten in its thousands and hundreds of thousands, Wutra’s Worm has gained a niche in the night sky.

Most nations of Campannlat and Sibornal recognise ten houses of the Zodiac, the plane of the ecliptic traversed by the two suns and the other planets. One of these houses is Wutra’s Worm, sometimes known as the Night Worm. Somewhere within this constellation lies a dim star, Sol.

The Bat

Devil Bull (also known as Wutra’s Ox)

The Boulder

Wutra’s Worm (The Night Worm)

The Queen’s Scar (Akha’s Wound)

The Old Pursuer

The Fountain

The Golden Ship

The Two Dogs

The Sword

Terrestrial interest in Helliconia stems from the fact that after many centuries of interstellar exploration, a planet was discovered on which human life thrives, part of a diverse biomass. However, researches conducted on Avernus soon showed that Helliconian humanity differs in interesting psychological and physical ways from its earthly counterparts.

One divergence from normal terrestrial existence seems so great, even so uncanny, that it must be regarded as pervasively psychological and phylogenic. Indeed, centuries of dispute on Earth failed to resolve the question of whether Helliconians should be categorised as human, or as a separate species.

The aberration (as some call it) lies in a much gentler gradation between life and death than terrestrial humanity experiences. Terrestrial human existence is binary; one is either alive or dead. On Helliconia, two further states follow bodily demise.

The burnt-out souls of the dead descend into an obsidian realm of entropy. In this realm, this negative of life, are stored two stages of psychic decay, gossies , the residues of the more recently deceased, and, further down the stack, fessups . Gossies are subject to febrile mood swings, from bitter recrimination to saccharine sweetness, perhaps related to climatic conditions. Fessups, increasingly less articulate, sink towards ultimate disintegration and the Original Boulder — as early understanding has the term.

[Later this term is understood as the Original Beholder. That is to say, Gaia, the presiding unconscious will of the biomass which maintains the difficult equilibrium of the planet.]

The living are able to commune with gossies if they enter a trancelike state resembling death known as pauk .

After physical death, phagors undergo a similar gradual diminution towards ultimate disintegration. This is called tether .

Male and female humans exhibit little sexual dimorphism. They undergo instead a dramatic weight / shape transformation before and after the Great Winter. This is in response to the diminished or increased energy reaching the planet. It amounts to an evolutionary survival strategy.

The agent of the weight / shape transformation is a pleomorphic helical virus, somewhat similar to a mumps pathogen. Its shell in the shape of an icosahedron consists of lipids and proteins, and contains nucleic acid RNA. It is 97 millimicrons long. The Avernus has not the means to filter out the virus. For this reason, Avernians are unable to visit in person the planet they orbit (except under unusual — and fatal — circumstances).