Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter (173 page)

The asokins were attached to the sledge by twenty feet of leather harness. They were allowed to rest for ten minutes every three hours. Then all eight would lie down except for Uuundaamp the leader. The man Uuundaamp was at least as close to his asokins as he was to Moub. They were his life.

During the break, Uuundaamp did not rest. He and Moub would walk restlessly about, studying natural phenomena – the shape of clouds, the flight of birds, any nuance of change in weather, tracks of animals, sounds and signs of landslides.

Sometimes they met pilgrims coming or going, making the great journey on foot. There were other sledges on the route, bells ringing. Once they were caught behind a slow herring-train and forced to tag along slowly before the vehicle moved into a passing place. The herring-train was a land version of the herring-coach. It bore barrels of pickled fish up to the distant rendezvous.

The asokins barked furiously whenever they met with another vehicle, but the rival drivers never moved a muscle in greeting.

The night’s break also had its set pattern. Uuundaamp pulled the team off the track in selected places he knew about. He then immediately went about settling the dogs, which had to be staked separately and away from the sledge, so that they did not eat its skins. Each asokin was fed two pounds of raw meat every third day; they worked best when starved. But each night they got a herring apiece, which Uuundaamp threw to each asokin in turn, starting with Uuundaamp. They caught the fish in midair, swallowing it at a gulp. The bitch was last to be fed. The lead dog slept some way from the rest of the team. If snow fell during the night, the dogs remained under it, in small caverns carved by their own heat. Bhryeer the phagor slept with them.

At a night’s stop, everything had to be made ready for the evening meal inside fifteen minutes.

‘It’s not possible. What’s the point?’ Fashnalgid complained.

‘The point is that it’s possible and must be done,’ Shokerandit said. ‘Stretch the tent, hold tight.’

They were stiff with cold. Their noses were peeling, their cheeks blackened by frost.

The sledge had to be unloaded. The tent was pitched over it and secured, which often entailed a battle against wind. Skins were stretched across the sledge. On this, the five of them slept, to be off the ground. Belongings required overnight were arranged nearby: food, stove, knives, oil lamp. Although the temperature in the tent generally remained below zero, they found themselves sweating in the confined space, after the cold of the journey.

When Uuundaamp entered on the first night, he found the three humans quarrelling.

‘No more speak. Be good. Anger bring smrtaa.’

‘I can’t stand four weeks of this,’ Fashnalgid said.

‘If you disobey him, he will simply leave,’ Shokerandit said. ‘All he asks is that you put your personality away to sleep for the journey. The cold will not allow quarrels, or death will strike.’

‘Let the sherb leave.’

‘We’d die here without him – can’t you understand that?’

‘Occhara soon, soon,’ said Uuundaamp, nudging Fashnalgid. He handed Moub a pair of silver foxes to cook. They came from traps he had set on his previous journey.

A pleasant fug arose in the tent. The meat smelt good. They ate with filthy hands, afterwards drinking melted snow water from a communal mug.

‘Food ishto?’ asked Moub.

‘Gumtaa,’ they said.

‘She bad cook,’ Uuundaamp said, as he lit up pipes of occhara and handed them round. The lamp was providently extinguished and they smoked in peace. The howl of the wind seemed to die away. Good feelings overcame them. The smoke filtering through their nostrils was the breath of a mysterious better life. They were the children of the mountain and it had them in its care. No harm comes to those who have eaten silver fox. For all the differences between men and women, and between men and men, all have this good thing in common – that the divine smoke pours from their noses, and perhaps from eyes and ears and other orifices.
Sleep itself is but another orifice in the mountain god. Sometimes in sleep men become the dream of the silver fox.

In the morning, when they struggled in the dull, bitter air to fold the tent, Toress Lahl said secretly to Shokerandit, ‘How degraded you are and how I hate you! Last night, you biwacked with that bag of lard, Moub. I heard you. I felt the sledge tremble.’

‘I was being courteous to Uuundaamp. Pure courtesy. Not pleasure.’

He had discovered that the Ondod female was far gone with child.

‘No doubt your courtesy will be rewarded with a disease.’

Uuundaamp came up smiling with the two silver fox tails. ‘Carry these at teeth. Gumtaa. Keep off cold from face.’

‘Loobiss. Have you one for Fashnalgid?’

‘That man, he got tail grow along face,’ said Uuundaamp, indicating the captain’s moustache, and laughing merrily.

‘At least he means to be kind,’ Toress Lahl said, hesitatingly placing the tail between her teeth to protect her chapped nose and cheeks.

‘Uuundaamp is kind. And when we stop tonight you must be kind to him. Return his favour.’

‘Oh, no … Luterin … not that, please. I thought you had some feeling for me.’

He turned savagely on her. ‘I have some feeling for getting us safe to Kharnabhar. I know the conventions of these people and these journeys and you don’t. It’s a code, a matter of survival. Stop thinking you are so special.’

Bitterly hurt, she said, ‘So you don’t care, I suppose, that Fashnalgid rapes me whenever your back is turned.’

He dropped the tent and grasped her jacket.

‘Are you lying to me? When did he do it? Tell me when. Then and when else. How many times?’

He listened bleakly as she told him.

‘Very well, Toress Lahl.’ He spoke in no more than a whisper, his face hard. ‘He has broken the honour that existed between us as officers. We need him on this journey. But when we get to my
father’s home, I shall kill him. You understand? For now, you say nothing.’

Without further words, they loaded up the sledge. Smrtaa – retribution. A prominent feature of life in these parts. Uuundaamp was harnessing up the dogs, and in a few minutes they were once more on their way through the mist, Shokerandit and Toress Lahl biting on their fox tails.

The unsleeping machines of the Avernus still recorded events below, and transmitted them automatically back to Earth. But the few humans surviving on the Observation Station took little interest in that primary function; their own primary function was to survive. Their numbers were so far down – lowered by disease as well as fighting – that defence became a less pressing need
.

Much time was spent establishing tribes and tribal territory, to obviate pitched battles. In neutral territory between tribes, the obscene pudendolls survived, to become something sacrosanct, something between gods and demons
.

Though a measure of ‘peace’ descended, the earlier destruction of food-synthesising plants meant that cannibalism was still prevalent. There was almost no meat but human meat. The heavy tabus against this practice fell with great force upon the delicately trained sensibilities of the Avernians. To descend to barbarism and worse within a generation was more than their psyches could easily endure
.

The tribes became matriarchies, while many of the younger men, mainly adolescent, developed multiple personalities. As many as ten different personalities could house themselves in one body, differing in inclination, age, and sex, as well as habits. Ascetic vegetarians were common, living an eye’s blink away from stone age savages, tempestuous dancers from lawgivers
.

The complex separation from nature undergone by the Avernian colonisers had now reached its limits. Not only did individuals not know each other: they were now strangers to themselves
.

This adaptation to stress situations was not for everyone. When severe fighting first broke out, a number of technicians left the Avernus. They stole a craft from one of the Observation Station’s maintenance bays and fled. They landed on Aganip
.

Tempting though the green, white, and blue planet of Helliconia looked, its danger was known to all. Aganip occupied a special place in the mythology of
Avernus, for it was here, many centuries ago, that Earth’s colonising starship had established a base while the Avernus was being constructed
.

Aganip was a lifeless planet, with an atmosphere consisting almost entirely of carbon dioxide, together with a little nitrogen. But the old base still stood, and offered something of a welcome
.

The escapers built a small dome. There they lived in restricted circumstances. At first they sent out signals to Earth and then – being naturally unwilling to wait two thousand years for an answer – to the Avernus. But the Avernus had its own problems and did not reply
.

The escapers had failed to understand the nature of mankind: that it, like the elephant and the common daisy, is no more and no less than a part and function of a living entity. Separated from that entity, humans, being more complex than elephants and daisies, have little chance of flourishing. The signals continued automatically for a long while
.

No one heard
.

And when that massed human spirit we have called empathy reached out across space and communicated with the gossies of Helliconia, what then? Did nothing important happen – or did something unprecedentedly magnificent, something quantally different, happen?

The answer to that question will perhaps remain forever clouded in conjecture; mankind has its
umwelt,
however bravely it strives to enlarge that confining universe of its perceptions. To become part of a greater
umwelt
may prove biologically impossible. Or perhaps not. It must be sufficient to admit that if something unprecedentedly magnificent, something quantally different, happened, it happened in a greater
umwelt
than mankind’s
.

If it happened, then it was a cooperation, and perhaps a cooperation of various factors not unlike the cooperation forced on differing individuals on the trail to Kharnabhar
.

If it happened, then it left an effect. That effect can be traced by looking at the contrasting fates of Earth, where Gaia resided, and New Earth, which was without a tutelary biospheric spirit …

To start with the case of Earth, after which New Earth was named:

The intermission between the two postnuclear ice ages has been understood as the swing of a pendulum. Gaia was trying to regulate her clock. But it was less simple than that, just as the biosphere was less simple than the mechanism of a clock. The truth may be put more accurately. Gaia had been almost terminally ill. She was now convalescent, and subject to relapses
.

Or, abandoning the dangers of personifying a complex process, it may be said that the carbon dioxide released by the deep oceans initiated a period during which the ice retreated. At the end of the period of greenhouse heating, there was an overshoot of the return to normal, as the whole biosphere and its ruined biosystems strove for adjustment. The ice returned
.

This time, the cold was less severe, the spread of the ice caps less extensive,
and the duration of the cold briefer. The period was marked by a series of oscillations, in the way that a clock’s pendulum gradually slows to a stationary median position. It was a time of discomfort for many generations of the thin-spread human race. In the remission in the 6900s, for instance, there was a small war in what had once been India, followed by famine and pestilence
.

Could that trivial war be likened to a convalescent’s tantrum?

The restlessness of the period awoke a corresponding restlessness in the human spirit. Fences were no longer going to be possible. The old world of fences had died, and was never going to be rebuilt
.

‘We belong to Gaia.’ And with the declaration went the understanding that human beings were not exactly Gaia’s best allies. To see those best allies, a microscope was needed
.

Throughout the ages – and long before the invention and development of nuclear weapons – there had been those who prophesied that the world would end because of man’s wickedness. Such prophecies were always believed, no matter how many times they had been proved wrong in the past. There was a wish for, as well as a fear of, punishment
.

Once nuclear weapons were invented, the prophecies gained plausibility, although now they were couched in lay terms rather than religious ones
.

Evidence, the more convincing because governments tried to suppress it, proved that the world could be ended at the touch of a button
.

Eventually, the button was touched. The bombs came
.

But human wickedness proved too feeble to end the world. Set against that wickedness were industrious microbes of which wickedness took little cognisance
.

Large trees and plants disappeared. The carnivores, including man, disappeared from the scene for a while. They were superfluous to requirements. These large beings were merely the superstars in Earth’s drama. The dramatists themselves still lived. Under the soil, on the seabeds of the continental shelves, thick microbial life continued Gaia’s story, undisturbed by radioactivity or increased ultraviolet. The ecosystems of unicellular life were rebuilding nature. They were Gaia’s pulse
.