Helliconia Winter

by neetha Napew

  "Father, I must leave."

  "Come nearer to me that I may embrace you."

  Accustomed to obey, Luterin drifted nearer to the battered cage. He was about to hold out a hand in a gesture of affection when a strong rain of particles shot up from the gossie, enveloping it as if with fire. He scudded away. The glow died. Just in time, he recalled the stories which claimed that the gossies, for all their resignation to death, would seize a living soul and change places with it if they could.

  Once more, he uttered his protestations of affection and rose up slowly through the obsidian, until the whole congregation of gossies and fessups was not more than a dwindling star field. He returned to his own prostrate form in its cell. Sluggishly, he became aware of the warmth of the living body.

  There were still eight years to go before his cell was hauled round to the exit, still three before his cell had reached even halfway, in the heart of the dolorous mountain.

  The environment never changed. But Luterin's revulsion for himself began to stale, and change came to colour his thought. He began to brood on the division which had been growing between the Church and the State. Supposing that division became still wider and, for whatever reason, recruitment to the Wheel ceased. Supposing that ten-yearers continued to be released and were not replaced. Gradually the Wheel would slow. There would be too few men to budge its mass. Then, despite all the world's bugles, the Wheel would stop. He would be entombed deep within the mountain. There would be no escape.

  The thought pursued him like a yellow-striped fly, even in his slumbers. He did not doubt that it pursued many another prisoner. Certainly the Wheel had never failed since the Architects finished their work long ago; but the past was no guarantee for the future. He lived in a suspense that was scarcely life, thinking with resignation of the old saying, "A Sibornalese works for life, marries for life, and longs for life." Apart from the clause regarding marriage, he would have sworn that the proverb originated in the Wheel.

  He was tormented by the thought of women, and by the lack of male companionship. He tried to signal through the rock to his nearest fellow sufferers, but no response came. Nor did he receive any more messages from outside. Hope of them died. He had been forgotten.

  Through the spells of work and silence, a riddle rose to haunt him. Of the 1825 cells of the Wheel, only two had access to the outer world at one time, the cell by which one entered and the adjacent cell by which one left. How, then, had the Wheel been loaded with its pilgrims in the first instance? How had the giants who had erected this machine started it into motion?

  He burdened his mind with visions of ropes and hawsers and pulleys, and of gushing underground rivers which turned the Wheel into a waterwheel. But he could never resolve the riddle to his satisfaction.

  Even the processes of his mind remained incarcerated within the holy mountain.

  Occasionally a rickyback would make a journey across his cell floor. With joy, he seized it up, holding it gently, watching its fragile legs wave as it struggled to be free. The rickyback understood freedom and was undividedly interested in the subject. Infinitely more complex humans were more divided.

  What transcendental pain caused men to imprison themselves for a large portion of their lives within the Great Wheel? Was this indeed the path towards self-understanding?

  He wondered if the rickyback understood itself. His efforts to identify with the tiny creatures, so as to enjoy a fraction of their freedom, left him feeling ill. He lay for hours at a time on the floor of the cell, staring at minute moving things, small white ants, microscopic worms. Sometimes he caught pink-eyed rats and mice observing him. If I died, he thought, these would be my only witnesses. The unconsidered.

  Many men must have died during their confinement in the intestines of the Wheel. Some had confined themselves from choice, as some were celibate from choice. Perhaps they had been goaded by a wish to escape into changelessness, away from the bustle of the world - that bustle framed, if he understood the astronomers, within the greater commotion of the universe.

  But for him, the changelessness of the cell was a kind of death. There had been no yesterday. There would be no tomorrow. His spirit fought against a withering process.

  Then the day's trumpets echoed, and he scrambled up, ran to the outer wall of his cell, and grasped the nearest chain. Heaving the Wheel through the rock had become the only meaningful activity left. By 119 centimetres a day, the machine progressed each of its occupants through the darkness.

  He never sank into pauk again. But the visit to his father's ember had removed the burden of his guilt. He found after a while that he had ceased to think of his father; or, if he thought at all, he thought only of the spark spluttering in the world beyond mortality.

  The father who had been real to him, the brave hunter, forever stalking with his gallant friends through the wilds of the caspiarn forest, was lost, had never existed. Instead there was a man who - in place of that free life - had chosen to incarcerate himself in Icen Hill, in the slatey castle in Askitosh.

  There were curious parallels between the dead man's life and Luterin's own. Luterin was also self-imprisoned.

  For the third time, his life had come to a standstill. After the year's paralysis, on the threshold of adulthood, the hiatus of the Fat Death, with its subsequent metamorphosis; now this. Was he at last to cease to be what Harbin Fashnalgid had called a creature of the system? Was there a last metamorphosis awaiting him?

  It remained to be seen if he could throw off his father's influence. His father, though head of the system, had also been its victim, as had his family through him. Luterin thought of his mother, for ever incarcerated in the family mansion: she might as well be where he was.

  As the years passed, he saw Toress Lahl more dimly. The glow of her presence went out. By becoming a slave, she had become no more than a slave; as his mother had pointed out, her devotion was merely the devotion of a slave, self-seeking, self-preserving, not from the heart. Without social status - dead to society, as people said of slaves - the heart did not move. There could be only tactical moves. He thought he understood that a slave must always hate its captor.

  Insil Esikananzi glowed more brightly as the tenners and centimetres passed. Incarcerated in her own home, entombed within her own family, she carried the spark of rebellion; her heart beat strongly under her velvets. He spoke to her in the dark. She answered always mockingly, teasing him for his conformity; yet he was comforted by her concern, and by her perception of the world.

  And he hauled on his chain whenever the trumpets blew.

  High above the Great Wheel rode a structure to some extent resembling it. The Earth Observation Station Avernus also relied on faith for its working.

  That faith had failed. Matriarchal societies ruled over small groups of people now entirely devoted to the spiritual playacting of multiple personalities. The giant aberrant sexual organs, the pudendolls, had all been ceremonially put to death - often by aberrant means. But a revulsion from all things mechanical or technological had left the tribes prey to a spiritless eudaemonism in which the sexual motif predominated.

  The genders became hopelessly confused. From childhood, individuals adopted female and male personalities, sometimes as many as five of each. These multiple personalities might remain forever strangers to each other, speaking different dialects, pursuing different ways of life. Or they might fall into violent quarrels with each other, or become hopelessly enamoured of another.

  Some of these personalities died, while their originator lived on.

  Gradually, a general disintegration took place, as if the genetic coding on which inheritance depended had itself become confused.

  A diminishing population continued to play its intricate games. But the sense of an ending was in the air. The automatic systems were also breaking down. The drones programmed to service faulty circuits were becoming themselves fit only for regeneration. Regeneration required human supervision, which was not forthcoming.

>   The signals passing back to Earth became more partial, less coordinated. Soon they would cease entirely. It needed only a few more generations.

  XVI

  A FATAL INNOCENCE

  It was summer in the northern hemisphere of Earth in a year that would once have been called 7583. A group of lovers was travelling in a slowly moving room. Other rooms were moving nearby, also at a leisurely pace. They perambulated before a mountainous geonaut. The geonaut perambulated in the tropics.

  Sometimes, one of the lovers would climb down from the room and cross to another room. Seventy rooms clustered round the geonaut. Soon it would replicate.

  A man called Trockern was talking, as he liked to do in the afternoons, when the morning's rethinking session was over. Like the others present, male and female, Trockern wore nothing but a light gauze veil over his head.

  He was a lightly built olive-skinned man, with good features and an irrepressible smile which broke forth even when he was speaking seriously.

  "If I've got the fruits of this morning's rethink right, then the bizarre peoples who lived in the ages before the nuclear war failed to realise one fact which now seems obvious to us. They had not developed sufficiently to escape from the same sort of territorial possessiveness which still governs birds and animals."

  He was addressing two sisters, Shoyshal and Ermine, who were currently sharing his room with him. The sisters looked much alike; but there was a greater clarity about Shoyshal, and she was the leader of the pair.

  "At least part of the old race denounced the evils of landownership," Ermine said.

  "They were regarded as cranks," Trockern said. "Listen, my theory, which I hope we can explore, is that possession was everything for the old race. Love - for them, even love was a political act."

  "That's far too sweeping," Shoyshal said. "Admittedly, over most of the globe in those times one sex dominated the other-"

  "Possessed them as slaves."

  "Well, dominated them, you argumentative hunk. But there were also societies where sex became just good clean fun, without any spiritual or possessive connotations, where 'liberation' was the watchword, and-"

  Trockern shook his head. "Darling, you prove my point. That minority was rebelling against the predominant ethos, so they too treated - were forced to treat - love as a political act. 'Liberation' or 'free love' was a statement, therefore political."

  "I don't suppose they thought like that."

  "They didn't see clearly enough to think like that. Hence their perpetual unease. My belief is that even their wars were welcome as an escape from their personal predicaments...." Seeing that Shoyshal was about to argue, he went on hastily, "Yes, I know war was also linked to territory. That sense of territorially extended from the land to the individual. You were supposed to be proud of your native land and to fight for it, and equally you were supposed to be proud of and fight for your lover. Or wife, as they then called it. Do you imagine I am proud of you or would fight for you?"

  "Is that a rhetorical question?" Ermine asked, smiling.

  "Look, take an example. This obsession the old race had with ownership. Slavery was a common condition on Earth up to and including the Industrial Revolution. Long after that, in many places. It was just as bad as we witness it on Helliconia. It gave you power to possess another person - an idea now almost past belief to us. It would bring us only misery. But we can see how the slave owner also becomes enslaved."

  As Trockern raised both his left hand and his voice for emphasis, the old man sleeping away the afternoon on a nearby bunk muttered irritably, snorted, and rolled over onto his other side.

  "Again, darling, there were plenty of societies without slaves," Shoyshal said. "And plenty of societies which abhorred the idea."

  "They said they abhorred it, but they kept servants when they could - possessed them as far as possible. Later they employed androids. Officially nonslave societies went in for multiple possessions instead. Possessions, possessions ... It was a form of madness."

  "They were not mad," Shoyshal said. "Just different from us. They'd probably find us pretty strange. Besides, it was the adolescence of mankind. I've listened to your preaching often enough, Trockern, and can't deny I've enjoyed it - more or less. Now listen to what I am going to say.

  "We're here because of astonishing luck. Forget about the Hand of God, about which the Helliconians are always agonising. There's just luck. I don't mean only luck that a few humans survived the nuclear winter - though that's a part of it. I mean by luck the series of Earth's cosmic accidents. Think of the way plantlike bacteria released oxygen into an otherwise unbreathable atmosphere. Think of the accident of fish developing backbones. Think of the accident of mammals developing placenta - so much cleverer than eggs - though eggs, too, were winners in their day. Think of the accident of the bombardment which altered conditions so sharply that the dinosaurs failed, to give mammals their chance. I could go on."

  "You always could," said her sister half-admiringly.

  "Our old adolescent ancestors feared accident. They feared luck. Hence gods and fences and marriage and nuclear arms and all the rest. Not your possessiveness, but the fear of accident. Which eventually befell them. Perhaps such prophecies are self-fulfilling."

  "Plausible. Yes. I'll agree, if you will allow that possessiveness itself might have been a symptom of that fear of accidents."

  "Oh, well, Trockern, if you're going to agree, let's get back to the subject of sex." They all laughed. Outside their windows, the mobile city could be seen trundling on its inelegant way, drinking egonicity from the white polyhedrons.

  Ermine put an arm about her sister's shoulder and stroked her hair.

  "You talk about one person possessing another; I suppose you would say that the old institution of marriage was like that. Yet marriage still sounds rather romantic to me."

  "Most squalid things are romantic if you get far enough away from them," Shoyshal said. "Anything seen through a haze... But marriage is the supreme example of love as a political act. The love was just a pretence, or at best an illusion."

  "I don't see what you mean. Men and women did not have to marry, did they?"

  "It was voluntary in a way, yes, but there was the pressure of society to marry. Sometimes moral pressure, sometimes economic pressure. The man got someone to work for him and have sex with. The woman got someone to earn money for her. They pooled their cupidities."

  "How awful!"

  "All those romantic postures," continued Shoyshal, enjoying herself. "Those raptures, those love songs, that sticky music, that literature they so prized, the suicide pacts, the tears, the vows - all just social mating displays, the baiting of the trap they couldn't see they were setting or falling into."

  "You make it sound awful."

  "Oh, it was worse than that, Ermine, I assure you. No wonder so many women chose prostitution. I mean, marriage was another version of the power struggle, with both husband and wife battling for supremacy over the other. The man had the bludgeon of the purse strings, the woman the secret weapon between her legs."

  They all burst out in laughter. The old man on the other bunk, Sartorilrvrash by name, began to snore in self-defence.

  "It's a long while since yours was secret," Trockern said.

  When a city became too crowded for someone's liking, it was not difficult to change to another geonaut and head off in a new direction. There were many other cities, other alternatives. Some people liked to follow the long light days; others travelled to enjoy spectacular scenery; others developed longings to view the sea or the desert. Every environment offered a different kind of experience.

  And those kinds of experience were of a different order from the kinds that once had been. No longer did the people cry out. Their agile brains had at last led their emotions to accept a role of modesty, subordinate but never acquiescent to Gaia, spirit of Earth. Gaia did not seek to possess them, as their imagined gods had once done. They were themselves part of that spirit. Th
ey had a vision.

  In consequence, death ceased to play the leading role of Inquisitor in human affairs, as once it had done. Now it was no more than an item in the homely accounting which included mankind: Gaia was a common grave from which fresh increment continually blossomed.

  There was also the dimension of a real involvement with Helliconia. From watchers, men and women had graduated to participators. As the images failed to arrive from the Avernus, as the mere pictures died in the shell-like auditoria, so the empathic link was forged ever more strongly. In a sense, humankind - humanmind - leaped across space to become the eye of the Original Beholder, to lend strength to their distant fellows on the other planet.

  What the future might bring to that spiritual extension of being was a matter for expectation.

  By accepting a role proper and comfortable to them, the terrestrials had again entered the magic circle of being. They had forsworn their old greeds. Theirs was the world, as they were the world's.

  When it was growing dark, Ermine said, "Talking about love as a political act. It takes a little getting used to. But what was that legalistic arrangement the old race suffered when a marriage broke up? JandolAnganol had one? Oh, a divorce. That was a quarrel over possessions, wasn't it?"

  "And over who possessed the children," Shoyshal said.

  "That's an example of love all entangled in economics and politics. They didn't understand that the random cannot be escaped. It's one of the caprices by which Gaia keeps herself up to date."

  Trockern glanced out the window and gestured at the geonaut. "I wouldn't be surprised if Gaia hasn't sent that object to supersede us," he said, with an air of mock gloom. "After all, geonauts are more beautiful and more functional than we are - present company excepted."

  As the stars came out, the three climbed down onto the earth and walked by the side of their slow-trundling room. Ermine linked arms with the other two.