Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (155 page)

The three riders urged their mounts through a series of eroded buttes and round a shattered boulder the size of a house, where there were signs of past human habitation. In the distance, beyond where the land fell away, was the glint of the sea. Fashnalgid halted and took a drink from his flask. He offered it to Shokerandit, but the latter shook his head.

‘I’ve taken you on trust,’ he said. ‘But now that we have eluded
your friends, you had better tell me what is on your mind. My job is to get word to the Oligarch as soon as possible.’

‘My job is to evade the Oligarch. Let me tell you that if you present yourself before him, you will probably be shot.’ He told Shokerandit of the reception being arranged for Asperamanka. Shokerandit shook his head.

‘The Oligarchy ordered us into Campannlat. If you believe that they would massacre us on our return, then you are plainly crazed.’

‘If the Oligarch thinks so little of an individual, he will think no more of an army.’

‘No sane man would wipe out one of his own armies.’

Fashnalgid started to gesticulate.

‘You are younger than I. You have less experience. Sane men do the most damage. Do you believe that you live in a world where men behave with reason? What is rationality? Isn’t it merely an expectation that others will behave as we do? You can’t have been long in the army if you believe the mentalities of all men are alike. Frankly, I think my friends mad. Some were driven mad by the army, some were so mad they were attracted to that area of idiocy, some simply have a natural talent for madness. I once heard Priest-Militant Asperamanka preach. He spoke with such force that I believe him to be a good man. There are good men … But most officers are more like me, I can tell you – reprobates that only madmen would follow.’

There was silence after this outburst, before Shokerandit said coldly, ‘I certainly would not trust Asperamanka. He was prepared to let his own men die.’

‘“Wisdom to madness quickly turns, If suffering is all one learns,”’ quoted Fashnalgid, adding, ‘An army carrying plague. The Oligarchy would be happy to be rid of it, now there’s little danger of an attack from Campannlat. Also, it suits Askitosh to get rid of the Bribahr contingent …’

As if there was nothing more to be said, Fashnalgid turned his back on the other two and took a long swig from his flask. As Batalix descended towards the strip of distant sea, clouds drew across the sky.

‘So what do you propose doing, if we are not to be trapped between armies?’ Toress Lahl asked boldly.

Fashnalgid pointed into the distance. ‘A boat is waiting across the marshes, lady, with a friend of mine in it. That’s where I’m going. You are free to come if you wish. If you believe my story, you’ll come.’

He swung himself up slowly into the saddle, strapped his collar under his chin, smoothed his moustache, and gave a nod of farewell. Then he kicked his beast into action. The yelk lowered its head and started to move down the rocky slope in the direction of the distant glimmering sea.

Luterin Shokerandit called after the disappearing figure, ‘And where’s that boat of yours bound for?’

The wind stirring the low bushes almost drowned the answer that came back.

‘Ultimately, Shivenink …’

The gaunt figure on its yelk moved down into a maze of marshes which fringed the sea; whereupon birds rose up under the shaggy hoofs of the animal as small amphibians disappeared underneath them. Things hopped in rain-pocked puddles. Everything that could move fled from the man’s path
.

Captain Harbin Fashnalgid’s mood was too bleak for him even to question why mankind’s position should remain so isolated in the midst of all other life. Yet that very question – or rather a failure to perceive the correct answer to the problem it posed – had brought into existence a world which moved above the planet in a circumpolar orbit
.

The world was an artificial one. Its designation was Earth Observation Station Avernus. Circling the planet 1500 kilometres above the surface, it could be seen from the ground as a bright star of swift passage, to which the inhabitants of the planet had given the name Kaidaw
.

On the station, two families supervised the automatic recording of data from Helliconia as it passed below them. They also saw to it that that data – in all its richness, confusion, and overwhelming detail – was transmitted to the planet Earth, a thousand light-years distant. To this end, the EOS had been established. To this end, human beings from Earth had been born to populate it. The Avernus was at this time only a few Earth years short of its four thousandth birthday
.

The Avernus was an embodiment, cast in the most advanced technology of
its culture, of the failure to perceive the answer to that age-old problem of why mankind was divorced from its environment. It was the ultimate token in that long divorce. It represented nothing less than the peak of achievement of an age when man had tried to conquer space and to enslave nature while remaining himself a slave
.

For this reason, the Avernus was dying
.

Over the long centuries of its existence, the Avernus had gone through many crises. Its technology had not been at fault; far from it – the great hull of the station, which had a diameter of one thousand metres, was designed as a self-servicing entity, and small servomechanisms scuttled like parasites over its skin, replacing tiles and instruments as required. The servomechanisms moved swiftly, signalling to each other with asymmetrical arms, like crabs on an undiscovered germanium shore, communicating with each other in a language only the WORK computer which controlled them understood. In the course of forty centuries, the servomechanisms continued to serve. The crabs had proved untiring
.

Squadrons of auxiliary satellites accompanied the Avernus through space, or dived off in all directions, like sparks from a fire. They crossed and recrossed in their orbits, some no bigger than an eyeball, others complex in shape and design, coming and going about their automatic business, the gathering of information. Their metaphorical throats were parched for an ever-flowing stream of data. When one of them malfunctioned, or was silenced by a passing speck of cosmic debris, a replacement floated free from the service hatches of the Avernus and took its place. Like the crabs, the sparklike satellites had proved untiring
.

And inside the Avernus. Behind its smooth plastic partitioning lay the equivalent of an endomorphic skeleton or, to use a more suitably dynamic comparison, a nervous system. This nervous system was infinitely more complex than that of any human. It possessed the inorganic equivalent of its own brains, its own kidneys, lungs, bowels. It was to a large extent independent of the body it served. It resolved all problems connected with overheating, overcooling, condensation, microweather, wastes, lighting, intercommunication, illusionism, and hundreds of other factors designed to make life tolerable physiologically for the human beings on the ship. Like the crabs and the satellites, the nervous system had proved untiring
.

The human race had tired. Every member of the eight families – later reduced to six, and now reduced to two – was dedicated, through whatever
speciality he or she pursued, to one sole aim: to beam as much information about the planet Helliconia as possible back to distant Earth
.

The goal was too rarefied, too abstract, too divorced from the bloodstream
.

Gradually, the families had fallen victim to a sort of neurasthenia of the senses and had lost touch with reality. Earth, the living globe, had ceased to be. There was Earth the Obligation only, a weight on the consciousness, an anchor on the spirit
.

Even the planet before their view, the glorious and changing balloon of Helliconia, burning in the light of its two suns and trailing its cone of darkness like a wind sock behind it, even Helliconia became an abstract. Helliconia could not be visited. To visit it meant death. Although the human beings on its surface, scrutinised so devotedly from above, appeared identical to Earthlings, they were protected from external contact by a complex virus mechanism as untiring as the mechanisms of the Avernus. That virus, the helico virus, was lethal to the inhabitants of the Avernus at all seasons. Some men and women had gone down to the planet’s surface. They had walked there for a few days, marvelling at the experience. And then they had died
.

On the Avernus, a defeated minimalism had long prevailed. The attenuation of the spirit had been embraced
.

With the slow crawl of autumn across the planet below, as Freyr receded day by day and decade by decade from Helliconia and its sister planets – as the 236 astronomical units of periastron between Batalix and Freyr lengthened to the formidable 710 of apastron – the young on the Observation Station rose up in despair and overthrew their masters. What though their masters were themselves slaves? The era of asceticism was gone. The old were slain. Minimalism was slain. Eudaemonism ruled in its stead. Earth had turned its back on the Avernus. Very well, then Avernus would turn its back on Helliconia
.

At first, blind indulgence in sensuality had been sufficient. Just to have broken the sterile bonds of duty was glory enough. But – and in that ‘but’ lies possibly the fate of the human race – hedonism proved insufficient. Promiscuity proved as much of a dead end as abstention
.

Cruel perversions grew from the sullied beds of the Avernus. Woundings, slashings, cannibalism, pederasty, paedophilia, intestinal rape, sadistic penetrations of infants and the ageing became commonplace. Flayings, public mass fornications, buggery, irrumation, mutilation – such was the daily diet. Libido waxed, intellect waned
.

Everything depraved flourished. The laboratories were encouraged to bring
forth more and more grotesque mutations. Dwarfs with enlarged sex organs were succeeded by hybrid sex organs imbued with life. These ‘pudendolls’ moved with legs of their own; later models progressed by labile or preputial musculature. These reproductive leviathans publicly aroused and engulfed each other, or overwhelmed the humans thrown into their path. The organs became more elaborate, more aposematic. They proliferated, reared and tumbled, sucked, slimed, and reproduced. Both those forms resembling priapic fungi and those resembling labyrinthiform ooecia were ceaselessly active, their colours flaring and fading according to their flaccidity or engorgement. In their later stages of evolution, these autonomous genitalia grew enormous; a few became violent, battering like multicoloured slugs at the walls of the glass tanks wherein they spent their somewhat holobenthic existence
.

Several generations of Avernians venerated these strange polymorphs almost as if they were the gods which had been banished from the station long ago. The next generation would not tolerate them
.

A civil war, a war between generations, broke out. The station became a battleground. The mutated organs broke free; many were destroyed
.

The fighting continued over several years and lifetimes. Many people died. The old structure of families, stable for so long, based on patterns of long endurance on Earth, broke down. The two sides became known as the Tans and the Pins, but the labels had little reference to what had once existed
.

The Avernus, haven of technology, temple of all that was positive and enquiring in mankind’s intellect, was reduced to a tumbled arena, in which savages ran from ambush at intervals to break each other’s skulls
.

A system of raised dykes covered the marshlands between Koriantura and Chalce like a network of veins. Here and there, the dykes intersected. The intersections were sometimes marked by crude gates, which prevented domestic cattle from wandering. The tops of the dykes were flattened where animals and men had worn paths; the sides of the dykes were covered in rough lush grass that merged into reeds bearding the lips of ditches which ran with black water. The land divided by these features squelched when walked upon. Heavy domestic cattle crossed it with slow deliberation. They paused occasionally to drink from dark open pools.

Luterin Shokerandit and his captive woman were the only human figures to be seen for miles. Their progress occasionally disturbed flocks of birds, which rose up with a clatter, flew low, and suddenly folded up the fan of their winged cloud to sink in unison back to earth.

As the man drew nearer to the sea and the distance between him and the following woman increased, so the little streams which flowed became more subject to the sea and their waters more brackish. The slight babble they made was a pleasant accompaniment to the plod-plod of the yelk’s hoofs.

Shokerandit halted and waited for Toress Lahl to catch up. He intended to shout to her, but something stopped him.

He was certain that the strange Captain Fashnalgid was lying about the reception which awaited Asperamanka on the Koriantura ridge. To believe Fashnalgid was to cast doubt on the integrity of the system by which Shokerandit lived. All the same, a certain sincerity about the man made Shokerandit cautious.
Shokerandit’s duty was to bear Asperamanka’s message to Koriantura, to the army headquarters there. It was therefore his duty also to avoid possible ambush. The wisest course seemed to be to pretend to believe Fashnalgid’s story, and to escape from Chalce by boat.

The light over the marshes was deceptive. Fashnalgid’s figure had disappeared. Shokerandit was not making the progress he wished. Though his mount followed the trail along the top of the dykes, every step seemed sluggish and mired in marsh.