Brian W. Aldiss - Helliconia Winter

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HUGO AND NEBULA

AWARD WINNER BRIAN W. ALDISS:

"Helliconia came to mind suddenly. But something much grander emerged, a pattern buried deep in

the human psyche.

"Suppose that Earth took not a year of 365 days to complete its orbit of the sun, but the equivalent of

2592 years—would not almost everything we know be transformed?

"There is not just mankind on Helliconia; there are also phagors. The two species are enemies, yet

codependent.

"What happens when that a-human race competes for supremacy? How does that competition fare

when nature requries both species to survive if either are to do so?"

HELLICONIA WINTER

"An important statement by a master of the genre...only an author such as Aldiss...could have

completed such a vision."

—Fantasy Review

"Dark, rich, engrossing!"—Publishers Weekly

Berkley books

by Brian W Aldiss

HELLICONIA SPRING

HELLICONIA SUMMER

HELLICONIA WINTER

THE MALACIA TAPESTRY

BRIAN W. ALDISS

HELLICONIA WINTER

BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

Map by Margaret Aldiss

This Berkley book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

HELLICONIA WINTER

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Atheneum Publishers

PRINTING HISTORY

Atheneum edition published 1985 Berkley trade paperback edition / May 1986

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: Atheneum Publishers,

122 East 42nd Street, New York, 10017.

ISBN: 0-425-08994-0

A BERKLEY BOOK ® TM 757,375 Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design

are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks for invaluable preliminary discussions go to Dr. J. M. Roberts (history) and Mr. Desmond

Morris (anthropology). I also wish to thank Dr. B. E. Juel-Jensen (pathology) and Dr. Jack Cohen (biology)

for factual suggestions. Anything sound philologically is owed to Professor Thomas Shippey; his lively

enthusiasm has been of great help all along.

The globe of Helliconia itself was designed and built by Dr. Peter Cattermole, from its geology to its

weather. For the cosmology and astronomy, I am indebted to Dr. Iain Nicolson, whose patience over the

years is a cause for particular gratitude.

Dr. Mick Kelly and Dr. Norman Myers both gave up-to-date advice on winters other than natural ones.

The structure of the Great Wheel owes much to Dr. Joern Bambeck. James Lovelock kindly allowed me to

employ his concept of Gaia in this fictional form. Herr Wolfgang Jeschke's interest in this project from its

early days has been vital.

My debt to the writings and friendship of Dr. J. T. Fraser is apparent.

To my wife, Margaret, loving thanks for letting Helliconia take over for so long, and for working on it

with me.

In the first place, since the elements of which we see the world composed—solid earth and moisture,

the light breaths of air and torrid fire—all consist of bodies that are neither birthless nor deathless, we

must believe the same of the Earth as a whole, and of its populations.. . . And whatever earth contributes

to feed the growth of others is restored to it. It is an observed fact that the Universal Mother is also the

common grave. Earth, therefore, is whittled away and renewed with fresh increment.

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura

55 bc

CONTENTS

Prelude 3

I • The Last Battle 12

11 • A Silent Presence 29

III • The Restrictions of Persons in Abodes Act 45

I V • An Army Career 59

V • A Few More Regulations 78

VI • G4?BX/45S2-4-3 96

VII • The Yellow-Striped Fly no

VIII • The Rape of the Mother 127

I X • A Quiet Day Ashore 141

X • "The Dead Never Talk Politics" 152

XI • Stern Discipline for Travellers 164

XII • Kakool on the Trail 175

XIII • "An Old Antagonism" 196

XIV • The Greatest Crime 218

X V • Inside the Wheel 232

XVI • A Fatal Innocence 246

XVII • Sunset 266

HELLICONIA WINTER

PRELUDE

Luterm had recovered. He was free of the mysterious illness. He was allowed out again. The couch by

the window, the immobility, the grey schoolmaster who came every day—they were done with. He was

alive to fill his lungs with the brisk airs of outdoors.

The cold blew down from Mount Shivenink, sharp enough to peel the bark from the north side of trees.

The fresh wind brought out his defiance. It drew the blood to his cheeks, it made his limbs move with

the beast which carried him across his father's land. Letting out a yell, he spurred the hoxney into a gallop.

He headed it away from the incarcerating mansion with its tolling bell, away along the avenue traversing

the fields they still called the Vineyard. The movement, the air, the uproar of his own blood in his arteries,

intoxicated him.

Around him lay his father's territory, a dominion triumphing over latitude, a small world of moor,

mountain, valley, plunging stream, cloud, snow, forest, waterfall—but he kept his thought from the water-

fall. Endless game roved here, springing up plenteously even as his father hunted it down. Roving

phagors. Birds whose migrations darkened the sky.

Soon he would be hunting again, following the example of his father. Life had been somehow stayed,

was somehow renewed. He must rejoice and force away the blackness hovering on the edges of his mind.

He galloped past bare-chested slaves who exercised yelk about the Vineyard, clinging to their snaffles.

The hoofs of the animals scattered mounds of earth sent up by moles.

Luterin Shokerandit spared a sympathetic thought for the moles. They could ignore the extravagances

of the two suns. Moles could hunt and rut in any season. When they died, their bodies were devoured by

other moles. For moles, life was an endless tunnel through which the males quested for food and mates.

He had forgotten them, lying abed.

"Moledom!" he shouted, bouncing in the saddle, rising up in the stirrups. The spare flesh on his body

made its own movements under his arang jacket.

He goaded the hoxney on. Exercise was what was needed to bring him back into fighting shape. The

spare fat was falling away from him even on this, his first ride out for more than a small year. His twelfth

birthday had been wasted flat on his back. For over four hundred days he had lain like that—for a

considerable period unable to move or speak. He had been entombed in his bed, in his room, in his

parents' mansion, in the great grave House of the Keeper. Now that episode was finished.

Strength flowed back to his muscles, arriving from the animal beneath him, from the air, from the trunks

of trees as they flashed by, from his own inner being. Some destructive force whose nature he did not

comprehend had wiped him out of the world; now he was back and determined to make a mark upon that

flashing stage.

One of the double entrance gates was opened for him by a slave before he reached it. He galloped

through without pause or sideways glance.

The wind yelped in his unaccustomed ear like a hound. He lost the familiar note of the bell of the house

behind him. The small bells on his harness jingled as the ground responded to his advance.

Both Batalix and Freyr were low in the southern sky. They flitted among the tree trunks like gongs, the

big sun and the small. Luterin turned his back on them as he reached the village road. Year by year, Freyr

was sinking lower in the skies of Sibornal. Its sinking called forth fury in the human spirit. The world was

about to change.

The sweat that formed on his chest cooled instantly. He was whole again, determined to make up for

lost time by rutting and hunting like the moles. The hoxney could carry him to the verge of the trackless

caspiarn forests, those forests which fell away and away into the deepest recesses of the mountain

ranges. One day soon, he planned to fade into the embrace of those forests, to fade and be lost, relishing

his own dangerousness like an animal among animals. But first he would be lost in the embrace of Insil

Esikananzi.

Luterin gave a laugh. "Yes, you have a wild side, boy," his father had once said, staring down at

Luterin after some misdemeanour or other— staring down with that friendless look of his, while placing a

hand on the boy's shoulder as if estimating the amount of wildness per bone.

And Luterin had gazed downwards, unable to meet that stare. How could his father love him as he

loved his father when he was so mute in the great man's presence?

The distant grey roofs of the monasteries showed through the naked trees. Close lay the gates of the

Esikananzi estate. He let the brown hoxney slow to a trot, sensing its lack of stamina. The species was

preparing for hibernation. Soon all hoxneys would be useless for riding. This was the season for training

up the recalcitrant but more powerful yelk. When a slave opened the Esikananzi gate, the hoxney turned

in at walking pace. The distinctive Esikananzi bell sounded ahead, chiming randomly as the wind took its

vane.

He prayed to God the Azoiaxic that his father knew nothing of his activities with Ondod females, that

wickedness he had fallen into shortly before paralysis had overcome him. The Ondods gave what Insil so

far refused him.

He must resist those inhuman females now. He was a man. There were sleazy shacks by the edge of

the forest where he and his school friends—including Umat Esikananzi—went to meet those shameless

eight-fingered bitches. Bitches, witches, who came out of the woods, out of the very roots of the woods . . .

And it was said that they consorted with male phagors too. Well, that would not happen again. It was in

the past, like his brother's death. And like his brother's death, best forgotten.

It was not beautiful, the mansion of the Esikananzis. Brutality was the predominant feature of its

architecture; it was constructed to withstand the brutal onslaughts of a northern climate. A row of blind

arches formed the base of it. Narrow windows, heavily shuttered, began only on the second floor. The

whole structure resembled a decapitated pyramid. The bell in its belfry made a slatey sound, as if ringing

from the adamantine heart of the building.

Luterin dismounted, climbed the steps, and pulled the doorbell.

He was a broad-shouldered youth, already lofty in the Sibomalese manner, with a round face

seemingly built naturally for merriment: although, at this moment, awaiting sight of Insil, his brows were

knit, his lips compressed. The tension of his expression caused him to resemble his father, but his eyes

were of a clear grey, very different from his father's dark, in-dwelling pupils.

His hair, curling riotously about his head and the nape of his neck, was light brown, and formed a

contrast to the neat dark head of the girl into whose presence he was ushered.

Insil Esikananzi had the airs of one born into a powerful family. She could be sharp and dismissive.

She teased. She lied. She cultivated a helpless manner; or, if it suited her better, a look of command. Her

smiles were wintery, more a concession to politeness than an expression of her spirit. Her violet eyes

looked out of a face she kept as blank as possible.

She was carrying a jug of water through the hall, clasped in both hands. As she came towards Luterin

she lifted her chin slightly into the air, in a kind of mute exasperated enquiry. To Luterin, Insil was intensely

desirable, and no less desirable for her capriciousness.

This was the girl he was to marry, according to the arrangement drawn up between his father and hers

at Insil's birth, to cement the accord between the two most powerful men of the district.

Directly he was in her presence, Luterin was caught up once more into their old conspiracy, into that

intricate teasing web of complaint which she wove about herself.

"I see, Luterin, you are on your two feet again. How excellent. And like a dutiful husband-to-be, you

have perfumed yourself with sweat and hoxney before presuming to call and present your compliments.

You have certainly grown while in bed—at least in the region of your waistline."

She fended off an embrace with the jug of water. He put an arm about her slender waist as she led him

up the immense staircase, made more gloomy by dark portraits from which dead Esikananzis stared as if

in tether, shrunken by art and time.

"Don't be provoking, Sil. I'll soon be slim again. It's wonderful to have my health back."

Her personal bell uttered its light clap on every stair.

"My mother's so sickly. Always sickly. My slimness is illness, not health. You are lucky to call when my

tedious parents and my equally tedious brothers, including your friend Umat, are all attending a boring

ceremony elsewhere. So you can expect to take advantage of me, can't you? Of course, you suspect that

I have been had by stable boys while you were in your year's hibernation. Giving myself in the hay to sons

of slaves."

She guided him along a corridor where the boards creaked under their worn Madi carpets. She was

close, phantasmal in the little light that filtered here through shuttered windows.

"Why do you punish my heart, Insil, when it is yours?"

"It's not your heart I want, but your soul." She laughed. "Have more spirit. Hit me, as my father does.

Why not? Isn't punishment the essence of things?"

He said heatedly, "Punishment? Listen, we'll be married and I'll make you happy. You can hunt with

me. We'll never be apart. We'll explore the forests—"

"You know I'm more interested in rooms than forests." She paused with a hand on a door latch, smiling

provocatively, projecting her shallow breasts toward him under their linens and laces.

"People are better outside, Sil. Don't grin. Why pretend I'm a fool? I know as much about suffering as

you. That whole small year spent prostrate—wasn't that about the worst punishment anyone could

imagine?"

Insil put a finger on his chin and slid it up to his lip. "That clever paralysis allowed you to escape from a

greater punishment—having to live here under our repressive parents, in this repressive community—

where you for instance were driven to cohabit with non-humans for relief . . ."

She smiled as he blushed, but continued in her sweetest voice. "Have you no insight into your own

suffering? You often accused me of not loving you, and that may be so, but don't I pay you better attention

than you pay yourself?"

"What do you mean, Insil?" How her conversation tormented him.

"Is your father at home or away on the hunt?"

"He's at home."

"As I recall, he had returned from the hunt not more than two days before your brother committed

suicide. Why did Favin commit suicide? I suspect that he knew something you refuse to know."

Without taking her dark gaze from his eyes, she opened the door behind her, pushing it so that it

opened to allow sunshine to bathe them as they stood, conspiratorial yet opposed, on the threshold. He

clutched her, tremulous to discover that she was as necessary to him as ever, and as ever full of riddles.

"What did Favin know? What am I supposed to know?" The mark of her power over him was that he

was always questioning her.

"Whatever your brother knew, it was that which sent you escaping into your paralysis—not his actual

death, as everyone pretends." She was twelve years and a tenner, not much more than a child: yet a

tension in her gestures made her seem much older. She raised an eyebrow at his puzzlement.

He followed her into the room, wishing to ask her more, yet tongue-tied. "How do you know these

things, Insil? You invent them to make yourself mysterious. Always locked in these rooms . . ."

She set the jug of water down on a table beside a bunch of white flowers which she had picked earlier.

The flowers lay scattered on the polished surface, their faces reflected as in a misted mirror.

As though to herself, she said, "I try to train you not to grow up like the rest of the men here . . ."

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摘要：

HUGOANDNEBULAAWARDWINNERBRIANW.ALDISS:"Helliconiacametomindsuddenly.Butsomethingmuchgranderemerged,apatternburieddeepinthehumanpsyche."SupposethatEarthtooknotayearof365daystocompleteitsorbitofthesun,buttheequivalentof2592years—wouldnotalmosteverythingweknowbetransformed?"ThereisnotjustmankindonHelli...

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