Brian W. Aldiss - Helliconia Spring

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HELLICONIA

BRIAN ALDISS

First published in Great Britain in three volumes:

Helliconia Spring

Helliconia Suminer

Helliconia Winter

BRIAN ALDISS was born in Norfolk. After active service in Burma and the Far

East, he turned to writing; his Horatio Stubbs trilogy reflects those wartime days.

His most famous sf novels include Hothouse and the Helliconia trilogy.

He has won all the major sf awards. He has also published contemporary

novels, and his Hugo Award-winning history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree

(with David Wingrove), and a memoir of his writing life, Bury My Heart at W. H.

Smith's. He is a past chairman of the Society of Authors, and a Fellow of the Royal

Society of Literature. His most recent work is a collection of short stories, The

Secret of This Book.

INTRODUCTION

A publisher friend was trying to persuade me to produce a book I did not greatly

wish to write. Trying to get out of it, I wrote him a letter suggesting something

slightly different. What I had in mind was a planet much like Earth, but with a

longer year. I wanted no truck with our puny 365 days.

"Let's say this planet is called Helliconia," I wrote, on the spur of the moment.

The word was out. Helliconia! And from that word grew this book.

Science of recent years has become full of amazing concepts. Rivalling SF! We are

now conversant with furious processes very distant from our solar system in both

time and space. Cosmologists, talking of some new development, will often say, "It

sounds like science fiction". A perfectly just remark, reflecting as it does the

relationship that exists between science fiction and science.

This relationship is not capable of precise definition, since science permeates

our lives, and both scientists and writers are wayward people. It is a shifting

relationship. What is clear is that science fiction functions in predictive or

descriptive mode. It can attempt either to stay ahead of science, to foresee future

developments or discontinuities, or it can dramatise newly achieved developments,

making the bare (and, to some, arid) facts of science accessible to a wide

readership.

An example of the former method (the "Wait and See" method) is Gregory

Benford's novel, Timescape, in which he talks of the intricacies of time in a way

which has only recently entered discussion by the scientific community.

An example of the latter method (the "Digestive Tract" method) is H. G. Wells'

The Time Machine, in which he demonstrates, as it were, the possibility of solar

death - a startlingly new idea when Wells wrote.

In Helliconia, the Digestive Tract method is employed. In 1979, while this book

was a mere building site, its foundations open to the alien sky, James Lovelock

published a small book entitled, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The name

Gaia was suggesfed by Lovelock's friend (I might even claim him as a friend of

mine) William Golding, the novelist. The classical Gaia was the goddess of the

Earth in Greek mythology; Lovelock was outlining an impersonal updated version

of that gubernatory personage. Lovelock pointed out that the continued survival of

a living Earth is miraculous. Life survives despite an amazingly narrow range of

chemical and physical parameters - parameters subject to fluctuation.

How is it that the Earth's temperature has not long ago increased, as has

happened on "our sister planet" Venus; that the salinity of the oceans has not

become more toxic than the Dead Sea, that atmospheric oxygen has not become

tied down in oxides, or that hydrogen has not escaped from the upper atmosphere?

Lovelock's answer known as the Gaia Hypothesis, is that everything on the earth,

the biomass, constitutes a single self-regulatory entity - living, of course, but of

course without conscious intention. Gaia has no particular centre, no prime minister

or parliament no Fuhrer, not even a Greek goddess; it functions through its

unfocused complexity, built up over millions of years. The implication is that the

work of bacterial and other forces have built, and maintain, the living world we

know, best to suit themselves - a process in which humanity has played small part.

I gave myself up to James Lovelock's arguments in his first book and

succeeding ones in the way that, in an earlier phase of existence, I had surrendered

myself to Thomas Hardy's novels.

Interestingly, Lovelock is an independent biologist of a rather old-fashioned

kind, unsupported by universities or other institutions. And his hypothesis relies on

the mode of close observation and enquiry which is such a marked feature of

Charles Darwin's work. Darwin perceived where we merely see. Lovelock points

out that what he calls "city wisdom" has become almost entirely centred on

problems of human relationships; whereas, in a natural tribal group, wisdom means

giving due weight to relationships with the rest of the animate and inanimate world.

He says, "I speak from personal experience when I say that those of us who go

forth in ships to travel to remote places … are few in number compared with those

who chose to work in city-based institutions and universities."

From travel, investigation, and perception, Lovelock built up his integrative

hypothesis. I was wildly excited by it. Whether it was true or not, I felt that it was

just and should be proved by research, and that here was a thesis which delivered

new understanding. Lovelock wrote during the period of the Cold War, when we

lived in the shadow of nuclear war, and the threat of nuclear destruction, followed

by nuclear winter. Had nuclear winter come about, it would have been the ultimate

profaning of nature, the rape and slaughter of Gaia.

These intellectual and emotional ideas were in my mind when I sat down to the

seven year task of writing Helliconia. I hoped in it to dramatise on a wide scale the

workings out of Lovelock's hypothesis.

The story between these covers is just a scientific romance. It talks about pretty

ordinary fallible people living within fallible systems, just like us - together with

the alien who also has a share in us. Although it may not look like it, I did not

intend to place a great scientific emphasis on this introduction. SF, that spectral

entity, is not science but fiction, bound to obey many of fiction's ordinary rules,

possibly with an extra imaginative dimension - there is no proof whatsoever that

life exists elsewhere in the galaxy.

Deeply interested in the workings of the world of affairs, of economics and

ideology and religion, I had written a novel (Life in the West) concerning such

matters, of which I was merely a bystander. The novel met with enough success for

me to hope to do something similar on a larger scale.

So at first I thought of an allegory, with the three major power blocs represented

by three Helliconian continents. Happily, this scheme soon faded away - although

three continents were left behind by the tide, Campannlat, Hespagorat, and

Sibornal.

For by then creative instincts flooded in, washing away more didactic ones. All

the conflicting impulses with which our minds are filled seemed to rise up and

organise themselves in a remarkable way. Whole populations seemed to assemble,

with a great rustle of garments, from the dark. This astonishing creative process,

with its seeming autonomy, is one of the major pleasures of writing.

Naturally, I had to find a story. Three stories, in fact.

There I already had general ideas, once I realised that I desired to assemble a

large cast of characters.

What I could not grasp to begin with was what the Helliconian vegetation would

took like.

I was stuck. My three most able advisers, Tom Shippey, Iain Nicolson, and

Peter Cattermole, had done their best to drum philological and cosmological facts

into my head. Still I could not think what a tree on Helliconia would look like. If I

could not imagine a tree, I told myself, I was incapable of painting the whole new

binary system I - we - had devised.

One evening in 1980, I was travelling from Oxford to London by train, to attend

some function or other at the British Council. The time was towards sunset as the

train passed Didcot power station. My wife and I had often talked about the

station's cooling towers, were they not, from a distance at least beautiful? Wasn't

the industrial landscape beautiful? Would John Keats have found such sights "a joy

forever"?

The towers on this occasion stood with the sun low behind them. They breathed

forth immense clouds of steam into the still-bright sky. Towers and steam were a

unity, black against the light background.

Yes! They were Helliconian trees!

The cooling towers, those cylinders with their corsetted Victorian waists, were

the trunks. The billowing ragged forms of steam were the foliage. The foliage

would emerge from the trunk only at certain times of year.

That moment of revelation was what I needed. I started to write my scientific

romance. Among the many characters with whom I became involved, I felt most

affection for Shay Tal, who stands her ground at Fish Lake; the lovely summer

queen, MyrdemInggala; young Luterin; and especially Ice Captain Muntras, who

plies a trade once fashionable on Earth in the days before refrigerators, selling what

is sometimes prized, sometimes cursed.

As the whole matter had seemed to unfold from that one word, Helliconia, so

we believe the whole universe has unfolded from the primal atom. The principle is

similar. It is also contained, emblematically in the second book of this novel. A

defeated general walks through a Randonan forest, a great rain forest swarming

with life, a seemingly permanent thing. Yet, only a few generations earlier, it all

burst out of a handful of nuts.

When the third and final volume was published, my enthusiastic publisher, Tom

Maschler, asked me over a drink, "What would you say Helliconia's really all

about?"

I shrugged. "A change in the weather … ," I said.

Most so-called contemporary novels are freighted with nostalgia. Perhaps one

reason for either loving or shunning science fiction is that it is relatively free of the

poisons of forever looking back. It looks to the future, even when it looks with

foreboding.

Science fiction has a remarkable and expanding history this century. It has

diversified from cheap paperbacks and magazines to all forms of culture, whether

acknowledged or otherwise, from pop to grand opera. It is a curious fact that a large

proportion of SF takes place off-Earth, sometimes very far off. One day, a cunning

critic will explicate these mysteries.

Meanwhile, here is another story, taking place a thousand light years from

Earth. But less far from its concerns.

For this first one-volume edition, I have added appendices. They contain some

of the stage directions, as it were, of the drama. The drama can be read and, we

hope, enjoyed without them; the appendices form something of a separate

entertainment.

BRIAN W. ALDISS

1996

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks for invaluable preliminary discussions go to Professor Tom Shippey

(philology), 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 Tom

Shippey; his lively enthustasm 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 Caia 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 and to David

Wingrove (for being protean) is apparent.

To my wife, Margaret, loving thanks for letting Helliconia take over for so long,

and for working on it with me.

My dear Clive,

In my previous novel LIFE IN THE WEST, I sought to depict something of the

malaise sweeping the world, painting as wide a canvas as I felt I could confidently

tackle.

My partial success left me ambitious and dissatisfied. I resolved to start again.

All art is a metaphor, but some art forms are more metaphorical then others;

perhaps, I thought, I would do better with a more oblique approach. So I developed

Helliconia: a place much like our world, with only one factor changed—the length

of the year. It was to be a stage for the kind of drama in which we are embroiled in

our century.

In order to achieve some verisimilitude, I consulted experts, who convinced me

that my little Helliconia was mere fantasy, I needed something much more solid.

Invention took over from allegory. A good thing, too. With the prompting of

scientific fact, whole related series of new images crowded into my conscious mind.

I have deployed them as best I could. When I was farthest away from my original

conception—at the apastron of my earliest intentions—I discovered that I was

expressing dualities that were as relevant to our century as to Helliconia's.

It could hardly be otherwise. For the people of Helliconia, and the non-people,

the beasts, and other personages, interest us only if they our concerns. No one

wants a passport to a nation of talking slugs.

So I offer you this volume for your enjoyment, hoping you will find more to

agree with than you did in LIFE IN THE WEST—and maybe even more to amuse

you.

Your affectionate

Father

Begbroke

Oxford

HELLICONIA SPRING

CONTENTS

PRELUDE Yuli

Embruddock

IDeath of a Grandfather

II The Past That Was Like a Dream

III A Leap from the Tower

IV Favourable Temperature Gradients

VDouble Sunset

VI "When I Were All Befuddock …"

VII A Cold Welcome for Phagors

VIII In Obsidian

IX In and Out of a Hoxney Skin

XLaintal Ay's Achievement

XI When Shay Tal Went

XII Lord of the Island

XIII View from a Half Roon

XIV Through the Eye of a Needle

XV The Stench Of Burning

Why have so many heroic deeds recurrently dropped out of mind and found no

shrine in lasting monuments of fame? The answer, I believe, is that this world is

newly made; its origin is a recent event, not one of remote antiquity.

That is why even now some arts are still being perfected: the process of

development is still going on. Yes, and it is not long since the truth about nature

was first discovered, and I myself am even now the first who has been found to

render this revelation into my native speech… .

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura

55 BC

PRELUDE Yuli

This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his

descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.

Yuli was seven years old, virtually a grown man, when he crouched under a skin

bivouac with his father and gazed down the wilderness of a land known even at that

time as Campannlat. He had roused from a light doze with his father's elbow in his

rib and his harsh voice saying, "Storm's dying."

The storm had been blowing from the west for three days, bringing with it snow

and particles of ice off the Baffiers. It filled the world with howling energy,

transforming it to a grey-white darkness, like a great voice that no nun could

withstand. The ledge on which the bivouac was pitched afforded little protection

from the worst of the blast; father and son could do nothing but he where they were

under the skin, dozing, once in a while chewing on a piece of smoked fish, while

the weather battered away above their heads.

As the wind expired, the snow arrived in spurts, twitching in feather-like flurries

across the drab landscape. Although Freyr was high in the sky—for the hunters

were within the tropics—it seemed to hang there frozen. The lights rippled

overhead in shawl after golden shawl, the fringes of which seemed to touch the

ground, while the folds rose up and up until they vanished in the leaden zenith of

heaven. The lights gave little illumination, no warmth.

Both father and son rose by instinct, stretching, stamping their feet, throwing

their arms violently about the massive barrels of their bodies. Neither spoke. There

was nothing to say. The storm was over. Still they had to wait. Soon, they knew,

the yelk would be here. Not for much longer would they have to maintain their

vigil.

Although the ground was broken, it was without feature, being covered with ice

and snow. Behind the two men was higher ground, also covered with the mat of

whiteness. Only to the north was there a dark grim greyness, where the sky came

down like a bruised arm to meet the sea. The eyes of the men, however, were fixed

continually on the east. After a period of stamping and slapping, when the air about

them filled with the foggy vapour of their breath, they settled down again under the

skins to wait.

Alehaw arranged himself with one befurred elbow on the rock, so that he could

tuck his thumb deep into the hollow of his left cheek, propping the weight of his

skull on his zygomatic bone and shielding his eyes with four curled gloved fingers.

His son waited with less patience. He squirmed inside his stitched skins. Neither

he nor his father was born to this kind of hunting. Hunting bear in the Barriers was

their way of life, and their fathers' before them. But intense cold, exhaled from the

high hard hurricane mouths of the Barriers had driven them, together with the sick

Onesa, down to the gentler weather of the plains. So Yuli was uneasy and excited.

His ailing mother and his sister, together with his mother's family, were some

miles distant, the uncles venturing hopefully towards the frozen sea, with the sledge

and their ivory spears. Yuli wondered how they had fared in the days-long storm, if

they were feasting even now, cooking fish or hunks of seal meat in his mother's

bronze pot. He dreamed of the scent of meat in his mouth, the rough feel of it

meshed in saliva as it was gulped down, the flavour… . Something in his hollow

belly went whang at the thought.

"There, see!" His father's elbow jabbed his biceps.

A high iron-coloured front of cloud rose rapidly in the sky, dimming Freyr,

spilling shade across the landscape. Everything was a blur of white, without

definition. Below the bluff on which they lay stretched a great frozen river—the

Vark, Yuli had heard it called. So thickly covered in snow was it that nobody could

tell it was a river, except by walking across it. Up to their knees in powdery drift,

they had heard a faint ringing beneath their heels; Alehaw had pawed, putting the

sharp end of his spear to the ice and the blunt end to his ear, and listened to the dark

flow of water somewhere beneath their feet. The far bank of the Vark was vaguely

marked by mounds, broken here and there by patches of black, where fallen trees

lay half-concealed by snow. Beyond that, only the weary plain, on and on, until a

line of brown could be made out under the sullen shawls of the far eastern sky.

Blinking his eyes, Yuli stared at the line and stared again. Of course his father

was right. His father knew everything. His heart swelled with pride to think that he

was Yuli, son of Alehaw. The yelk were coming.

In a few minutes, the leading animals could be discerned, travelling solidly on a

wide front, advancing with a bow wave preceding them, where their elegant hoofs

kicked up snow. They progressed with their heads down, and behind them came

more of their kind, and more, without end. It appeared to Yuli that they had seen

him and his father and were advancing directly upon them. He glanced anxiously at

Alehaw, who gestured caution with one finger.

"Wait."

Yuli shivered inside his bearskins. Food was approaching, enough food to feed

every single person of every tribe upon whom Freyr and Batalix ever shone, or

Wutra smiled.

As the animals drew nearer, approaching steadily at something like a man's fast

walking pace, he tried to comprehend what an enormous herd it was. By now, half

of the landscape was filled with moving animals, with the white-and-tan texture of

their hides, while more beasts were appearing over from the eastern horizon. Who

knew what lay that way, what mysteries, what terrors? Yet nothing could be worse

than the Barriers, with its searing cold, and that great red mouth Yuli had once

glimpsed through the scudding wrack of cloud, belching out lava down the

smoking hillside… .

Now it was possible to see that the living mass of animals did not consist solely

of yelk, although they made up the greater part. In the midst of the herd were knots

of a larger animal, standing out like clumps of boulders on a moving plain. This

larger animal resembled a yelk, with the same long skull about which elegant horns

curled protectively on either side, the same shaggy mane overlying a thick matted

coat, the same hump on its back, situated towards its rump. But these animals stood

half as tall again as the yelk which hemmed them in. They were the giant biyelk,

formidable animals capable of carrying two men on their backs at the same time—

so one of Yuli's uncles had told him.

And a third animal associated itself with the herd. It was a gunnadu, and Yuli

saw its neck raised everywhere along the sides of the herd. As the mass of yelk

moved indifferently forward, the gunnadu ran excitedly to either flank, their small

heads bobbing on the end of their long necks. Their most remarkable feature, a pair

of gigantic ears, turned hither and thither, listening for unexpected alarms. This was

the first two-legged animal Yuli had seen; below its long-haired body, two

immense pistonlike legs propelled it. The gunnadu moved at twice the speed of the

yelk and biyelk, covering twice as much ground, yet each animal remained where it

was in relation to the herd.

A heavy dull continuous thunder marked the approach of the herd. From where

Yuli lay against his father, the three species of animal could be distinguished only

because he knew what to look for. They all merged with one another in the heavy

mottled light. The black cloud-front had advanced more rapidly than the herd, and

now covered Batalix entirely: that brave sentinel would not be seen again for days.

A rumpled carpet of animals rolled across the land, its individual movements no

more distinguishable than currents in a turbulent river.

Mist hung over the animals, further shrouding them. It comprised sweat, heat,

and small winged biting insects able to procreate only in the heat from the burly-

hoofed flock.

Breathing faster, Yuli looked again and—behold!—the creatures in the forefront

were already confronting the banks of the snowbound Vark. They were near, they

were coming nearer—the world was one inescapable teeming animal. He flicked

his head to look in appeal at his father. Although he saw his son's gesture, Alehaw

remained rigidly staring ahead, teeth gritted, eyes clenched against the cold under

his heavy eye ridges.

"Still," he commanded.

The tide of life surged along the riverbanks, flowed over, cascaded over the

hidden ice. Some creatures, lumbering adults, skipping fauns, fell against concealed

tree trunks, dainty legs kicking furiously before they were trampled under the

pressure of the march.

Individual animals could now be picked out. They carried their heads low. Their

eyes were staring, white-rimmed. Thick green trails of saliva hung from many a

mouth. The cold froze the steam from their upthrust nostrils, streaking ice across

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HELLICONIABRIANALDISSFirstpublishedinGreatBritaininthreevolumes:HelliconiaSpringCopyright©BrianAldiss1982HelliconiaSuminerCopyright©BrianAldiss1983HelliconiaWinterCopyright©BrianAldiss1985BRIANALDISSwasborninNorfolk.AfteractiveserviceinBurmaandtheFarEast,heturnedtowriting;hisHoratioStubbstrilogyrefl...

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