Pallahaxi

by Michael Coney

  As the cold ate into me I saw the vision of a pretty girl with her foot caught, soon falling asleep, waking safe with no memory of having slept, no memory of the passage of time.

  And recently, empty shacks, empty tents…

  And a long time ago, a small boy waking on a doorstep fresh and happy; and while he had been sleeping he would not have breathed, neither would his heart have beaten…

  Neither would he have aged.

  My thoughts were failing now, but there was no fear. Dimly I saw Browneyes, still young, smiling at me under the new sun, kissing me with our love still new, very soon now because this sleep has no memory…

  Presently, the lorin came.

  I REMEMBER PALLAHAXI

  Michael Coney

  INTRODUCTION

  I never had the pleasure of meeting Michael G. Coney, and yet I feel that I know the man. There are two reasons for this.

  The first is that, way back in ‘85, I happened across his short story “The True Worth of Ruth Villiers” in John Carnell’s New Writings in SF 17, and a few weeks after that “Bartholomew & Son (and the Fish-Girl)” in issue 27 of the same series. The stories made a big impact on me. The former was set in the near future, in a well-realised southern England coastal locale, and featured a first person narrator and a single science fictional idea from which Coney had extrapolated a society changed by that idea. The latter story was set a little further into the future, and featured artists and their creations - emotion mobiles - in a fictional land not a million miles removed from British Columbia, written from the viewpoint of Joe Sagar, the central character of the Peninsula series of stories and novellas. What I liked about both stories, quite apart from Coney’s expert handling of narrative and plot, was that they were principally about people, and about how a few small changes in society had an effect on character. Coney wasn’t so much interested in the science behind the stories, or the mechanics of the technology, but in how the results of science and technology affected individual human beings, and how he could use both new ideas and character to write compelling, event-charged stories full of incident and narrative twists.

  A couple of months later I came across the novels Syzygy and The Girl with a Symphony in Her Fingers in a second-hand bookshop, and devoured them within days. From then on I was a devoted Coney addict.

  Over the next few years I read and re-read Michael’s novels and all but a handful of his short stories. There were highs and lows in his modest output: the lows were the novels in which I felt that he was struggling with a setting imposed by the narrative, a setting not his beloved Devon translocated to another planet: The Hero of Downways and Winter’s Children come to mind, competent and entertaining novels, but missing some vital component. The highs, fortunately, outnumbered the lows: among his early novels, Syzygy and Brontomek! stand out - the latter won the BSFA award for the best novel of 1976. Both novels are first person narratives set on the colony world of Arcadia, featuring a cast of believable, likeable characters. In the latter, especially, Coney achieved a total synthesis of character and narrative, producing a fast-paced, entertaining novel about people with whom the reader could identify in a story that gripped and constantly surprised. The Girl with a Symphony in Her Fingers brought the Peninsula stories together in a skilful fix-up novel and told the story of slithe farmer Joe Sagar and his interactions with a series of fascinating locals: the spiteful and neurotic ex-3V star Carioca Jones, the bonded slave girl Joanne, the snobbish and bigoted Miss Marjoribanks. In an earlier novel, Mirror Image, the central idea is a race of aliens, the Amorphs, who can take on the appearance of humans; in Charisma, a parallel world love story set in Devon, Coney introduces us to the feisty Susanna, who would make her reappearance in the later Brontomek!.

  I felt, through the reading of Coney’s novels and short stories, that I was coming to know the man. Perhaps at the risk of mistakenly identifying the author with his creations, I saw Coney as a compassionate chronicler of human foibles, able to write with equal facility of young love and aged cynicism (he did a fine line in bombastic and bumptious characters in positions of authority); Coney seemed humane, reasonable and humorous.

  In the early nineties we began exchanging letters, and a few years later, when we both had e-mail, I suggested collaborating on a short story. I had a couple of ideas, and a magazine editor who was a fan of Michael’s work had expressed an interest in anything we might produce.

  Michael got back to me saying he liked the idea in principle, but was unsure how it might work. I suggested I send him a couple of ideas which he could mull over, and then get back to me.

  I recall that the first idea I sent him was half-baked. Michael made some radical suggestions, improving the premise of the story and adding ideas of his own. Slowly, over a period of weeks, we developed the outline of the story, then characters and a setting - a coastal outpost on a colony world. Throughout the process I was learning something about the art of story-telling, and about Michael the writer: he was a perfectionist and a consummate craftsman. In one e-mail he told me that what was important to him in the initial stages of a story was not the actual writing of it, the words, but being able to envisage the story’s shape in his head. This resonated with me. One of the delights of reading a Coney story or novel - perhaps on the second reading, having been dragged along helter-skelter through the first reading - is the appreciation of the story’s shape and balance, the way all the parts fit together like a precision-tooled machine. From the collaboration I came to understand how, in a Coney story, clues dropped in the first few pages are picked up and expanded upon later in the tale; how nothing at all is wasted, and how whatever is unnecessary is ruthlessly cut. Michael was a great believer in Chekhov’s dictum that a pistol introduced in the first act should be used by the third. What mattered to Michael was the telling of an entertaining story about people and events in which the reader could believe, using as the premise an idea that could come about only in a science fiction story.

  The collaboration also showed me what a thoroughly pleasant man Michael was. More than once he suggested that, as I came up with the original idea, my name should come before his on the by-line. He was full of praise for my ideas, and was characteristically modest about his own talents, having not written much in recent years.

  I emerged from the experience of collaborating with Michael with plans and ideas for further joint projects. We batted a few ideas back and forth, but other projects got in the way. I look back and regret the fact.

  Our sole collaboration, “The Trees of Terpsichore Three”, was published in Spectrum 8, May 2002. It proved to be the last piece of fiction Michael ever published.

  He died, after a short illness, in November 2005.

  I’ve left mentioning Michael’s finest novel until now.

  I came across Hello Summer, Goodbye in the early nineties, after reading most of his others. I had inadvertently saved the best till last.

  Hello Summer, Goodbye, first published in 1975, tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi Browneyes on a far-flung alien world. They are not human, but stilk, a humanoid race. In a short prefatory note to the novel, Coney explained: “I have assumed my aliens to be humanoid and, being humanoid, to be subject to human emotions and frailties. I have assumed their civilisation to be at the stage of development approximate to our year 1875…” The planet undergoes long periods of summer, and a gruelling winter lasting some forty years, and is made real by some brilliant world-building: the tidal effect of the grume, at which time the sea water thickens; ice-devils which inhabit tidal pools and have the ability to freeze the water when prey enters the pool; and the lorin, the pacific, furry humanoid co-habitees of the planet, with whom the destiny of the Stilk is mysteriously bound. To quote Coney’s introduction again: “This is a love story, and a war story, and a science-fiction story, and more besides.” It is also Coney’s finest intermeshing of character, incident and event; a sensitive account of growing up and the experience of
first love, with one of the finest endings in modern SF.

  I Remember Pallahaxi is the sequel to Hello Summer, Goodbye - and for reasons that defy logic has waited until now to find a publisher. It was written years after Hello Summer, Goodbye, and marketed at a time when Michael’s work was not finding the audience it deserved. Why Michael’s writing was never more popular is a question I often ask myself: he wrote satisfying, entertaining stories about real human beings, with excellent plots, great ideas and neat resolutions. What he didn’t write, perhaps, is the reason he failed to make it onto the best-seller list. Michael eschewed sensationalism; his novels were not action-adventure or militaristic, and nor were they filled with gratuitous sex or violence. He didn’t write hard-SF, but quiet novels in which the emotions of his characters were paramount.

  I Remember Pallahaxi is set hundreds of years after the events recounted in Hello, and much has changed on the planet. Coney introduces one of his finest ideas: the stilk now have the facility of accessing their ancestors’ memories during periods of ‘stardreaming’. This has radically changed their society, dividing men and women into separate communities, for the males have access only to the memories of male forebears, and women to those of the distaff side. This ability has led to a static, changeless society that has no desire, or need, of written records of how things were - custom and tradition are all accessible through stardreaming. It’s a first rate science-fictional idea, and it is also a marvellous device for generating a fascinating story-line. I Remember Pallahaxi is, foremost, a mystery story - a murder mystery on one level, and on a deeper level a mystery about the origins of the stilk and their enigmatic relationship with the docile lorin. It is also - like Hello Summer, Goodbye - many things besides: a love story, a novel of character, a critique of colonialism - for Coney has brought the human race to the stilk’s homeworld, which they exploit…

  One of the many delights of the novel is how Coney skilfully combines all the elements of the story - the history and culture of the stilk, their relation with the lorin and the land, the role of stardreaming in everyday affairs, the place of the humans in their world - in a plot that moves from incident to incident, revelation to revelation, towards a dénouement that is both moving and deeply satisfying.

  I Remember Pallahaxi never found a publisher during Michael’s lifetime. But, at last, it is now available to the loyal band of Coney devotees, and to new readers alike. If you are among the former, then this novel is that rare fruit, a work almost lost but plucked from oblivion for our enjoyment. If you have never before read Michael Coney, you have many hours of pleasure in store, and I envy you.

  —Eric Brown

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  One morning long ago, at a time when I had about seven novels under my belt, I awakened from a vivid dream. I’d been standing on the quayside at Brixham in South Devon and the lines mooring a nearby fish boat to the quay were hanging just clear of the water. But the water that dripped from these ropes was no ordinary water. It was thick and slow-dripping like a heavy motor oil. And I knew, in my dream, that this was a seasonal phenomenon. Instead of tides ebbing and flowing, in my dream the sea alternated between thick and thin.

  The book took me three weeks to write, which was quick by my standards. I have a poor memory and am apt to forget what happened three chapters back, so I like to hurry things along. Hello Summer, Goodbye was born, known in the US as Rax and in Canada as Pallahaxi Tide. The book did well by my modest standards and appeared in a number of languages. Over the years it also generated a surprising amount of fan mail, and if I am to believe what read on http//www.bsfa.co.uk/bestbrit.htm, it was the best British book of the 70’s. Needless to say, I’m tempted to assume that the Internet never lies.

  I had no thought of writing a sequel because I thought I’d said all there was to say about the heroes, Drove and Browneyes. But a common thread running through the fan mail was just such a request, so many years later I wrote it. It has never been published, partly because it was written long after I’d retired from novel writing and publishers didn’t want to re-launch me and partly, I suspect, because my writing was never in the mainstream of popularity in any case. Even Hello Summer Goodbye was never reprinted.

  So here is I Remember Pallahaxi, free to download. I hope you enjoy it, I really do.

  —Michael Coney

  PROLOGUE

  I came close to drowning on my seventeenth birthday.

  This may not seem very important to a human like you; after all, you might say, what’s one stilk more or less? But to me it was a big thing, almost as big as another thing that happened that summer day.

  The other thing was that I met Noss Charm.

  The near-drowning? It happened like this.

  The water in the estuary lay flat and lazy and the little white cottages of Noss gleamed like a big human smile along the shoreline, and I was singing in the misty sunlight. A gentle breeze puffed out the sail of my skimmer as I glided upstream. There are all kinds of fascinating inlets on the Yam estuary and I was in the mood to explore.

  The grume was on its way.

  The ocean current that circles our world had been bringing denser water from the Great Shallows day by day, and by now all deep-hulled boats had been drawn up in ranks along the shore. The fishermen had fixed their nets and lines with heavier weights, and taken to the water in flat-bottomed boats like bigger versions of my own skimmer. Today they hauled in fish of a different kind, bottom-dwellers forced up by the thickening water. It’s a special time, the grume.

  Later would come the fierce grume-riders, skittering over the surface on powerful flippers, following the grume in its path around the world’s ocean, attacking anything stranded on the surface, consummate predators. They’ll even attack zumes, which must be twenty times their size.

  Something about the grume-riders terrifies me. Probably something that happened to an ancestor of mine; that’s where a lot of our fears come from. One day I’d dig back in my memories, stardreaming, and identify it and lay it to rest. We call it a backflash; that involuntary surfacing of a generations-old memory.

  “Look out!”

  I was deep in thought and only half-heard the shout.

  “Look where you’re going!”

  A girl was waving and shouting from a deep-hulled rowboat near the rocky shore below the cottages. These flounders seem to think they own the sea around Noss, I thought. Probably got some kind of local rights over this little bay. Well, to Rax with her, I thought. I’m sailing where I like.

  But the fact that she was able to sit easily in a deep-hulled boat should have told me something. Deep hulls rise and become unstable during the grume.

  My skimmer picked up speed unexpectedly.

  It was a nasty moment. The wind hadn’t changed, but the boat leaped forward like a startled lox. Water splashed noisily under the blunt bow. Now, grume water doesn’t splash; it flops and oozes. Uncanny, this was.

  Then the boat slowed suddenly, as though it had run into a fisherman’s net. Off balance, I slid forward. The boat stopped, sitting lower in the water. Much lower.

  Sinking, in fact.

  The stuff of nightmares. I jumped to my feet and the little craft rocked violently. The sail jibed and enveloped me, blinding me. I felt cold water creeping up my legs. Cold, cold water. Infinitely cold water squeezed from the grip of the dead planet Rax.

  You humans — born into a warm world — don’t understand our fear of cold. But I tell you this fear is very real and based on ancient memories, not to mention superstitions.

  Muffled in the sail, I heard myself screaming with dread. I couldn’t think of anything but the icy hand of Rax, now exploring my groin with vile fingers. I couldn’t move because I was wrapped so tightly in the sail. And anyway, I’m an inlander, so I can’t swim.

  Logic may tell you that my personal history ends right here and now.

  “For Phu’s sake stop that awful howling and come out from under that sa
il.”

  It was the voice of an angel, although I didn’t discover this until later. At the time, any voice was welcome.

  “I can’t move!” I shouted back. I was trapped. I was doomed. And I was only seventeen. It was a tragic loss to the world.

  The water crept stealthily up to my chest. The skimmer, well underwater, slid from under me. I fell sideways. Something caught me a fearsome blow in the ribs. A hand peeled the sail away from my face and a pair of grave eyes stared into mine.

  “Look, this is embarrassing. People might be watching,” she said. “I’ve saved you. Mumble broken words of gratitude, if you must. But stop that yelling right now.”

  I was lying half in, half out of her small deep-hulled rowboat. I was still entangled in the skimmer’s sail, and the mast lay across my ribs. I began to see reason. After all, the icy powers of the dead planet Rax are only superstition, put about by religious cranks like my uncle Stance. The good sun Phu shone on my face and all was warm again. Particularly the brown eyes of my savior. Brown eyes are a much-admired rarity in our culture. They are supposed to be a blessing to remind us of the legendary Browneyes who, with her lover Drove, delivered us from evil long ago in a somewhat unlikely fashion. Anyway, I’d stopped yelling at some point and was able to appreciate my surroundings more intensely than ever before, especially my savior’s beautiful eyes.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, maybe brokenly.

  “Don’t mention it. Listen, if you crawl forward you’ll be free of all that stuff. I’ll hold onto the mast so we don’t lose your boat.”

  Later we sat on the rocks, drying off. We’d drawn the skimmer up on the beach; it lay tidily beside the rowboat. A gap in the canopy of tall seasuckers allowed the sun through. A few rock pools glittered nearby and we kept our feet well clear of them — more about that later. A long-legged loat stood beside one, eyeing it cautiously, as well it might. You humans don’t really know our world; there’s always a lot of explaining to do.