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    Helliconia Winter
    Helliconia Winter
    Helliconia Winter
    Ebook503 pages9 hours

    Helliconia Winter

    By Brian W. Aldiss

    3.5/5

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    A civilization crumbles as its planet hurtles away from its star in the final chapter of this “monumental” epic from the Grand Master of Science Fiction (The Times, London).

    After many centuries, the flowering of human civilization has begun to dwindle again and the Great Year slowly progresses while the long, deadly cold winter looms—but a break in the long, repeating cycles of growth and decay may result from the long-ago visit of the Earthman. New legends of the spring and summer have evolved and a new future may be aborning.

    More than thirty years after the original publication of Helliconia Spring, the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy, the series is newly available, now with a map, an afterword, and an introduction by the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781497608351
    Helliconia Winter
    Author

    Brian W. Aldiss

    Brian W. Aldiss was born in Norfolk, England, in 1925. Over a long and distinguished writing career, he published award‑winning science fiction (two Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award); bestselling popular fiction, including the three‑volume Horatio Stubbs saga and the four‑volume the Squire Quartet; experimental fiction such as Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head; and many other iconic and pioneering works, including the Helliconia Trilogy. He edited many successful anthologies and published groundbreaking nonfiction, including a magisterial history of science fiction (Billion Year Spree, later revised and expanded as Trillion Year Spree). Among his many short stories, perhaps the most famous was “Super‑Toys Last All Summer Long,” which was adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick and produced and directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg as A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Brian W. Aldiss passed away in 2017 at the age of 92. 

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    3.5/5

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    • 2/5
      Got a bit gloomy with the cyclic pointlessness there at the end, as I recall.
    • 5/5
      An amazing feat of imagination and engaging throughout.

    Book preview

    Helliconia Winter - Brian W. Aldiss

    Helliconia Winter

    The Helliconia Trilogy: Book Three

    Brian W. Aldiss

    Open Road logoMap

    INTRODUCTION TO THE E-READS EDITION

    Two years passed before I began to write the first of this three-volume account of a distant planetary system.  I spent that time in search of facts and in ordering various imaginings. On the one hand, the scientific hand, I needed an unfilterable virus; while on the other hand, I felt we needed an observation post—a post needful to observe the activities of this strange planet, but one that would keep the reader in comfortable touch with our own world.

    For Earth, too, is changing as time passes. Yet time on Helliconia is an altogether more considerable force. Instead of our little tinpot year of 365 days, on this other planet one year lasts for five thousand years.

    Walking the streets of a Northern town, a writer friend and I discussed ‘Time’ as an almost disregarded regulator of our days. This friend was Bob Shaw. He went on to create ‘slow glass’ in which to trap time. 

    I struggled with my gigantic Helliconian year, while asking questions of the learned of Oxford and elsewhere.

    How this long year might come about was an astronomical matter.

    My final construction was to have the Helliconian planet in orbit about an ordinary sun, not unlike our sun. But this combination has been captured by a much grander luminary, a giant among suns (Freyr, so called); it is about this sun that the planet and its minor sun revolve.

    Some astronomers at the time believed this to be an impossible construct. However, in 2011, NASA telescopes discerned just such a constellation as I had conjured up. The news hit the front page of the New York Times—though sadly without mentioning that I had been there first. The fact is that I had got it right, well ahead of time—and was well pleased!

    Back in Oxford, I took lunch with Professor John Roberts, Warden of Merton College, who had then recently published a fascinating book, THE TRIUMPH OF THE WEST. In his earlier book, entitled THE HUTCHINSON HISTORY OF THE WORLD, he had included as an illustration a cover from an October Fantastic Stories.  He was just the man to answer my question: what would happen to civilization over those long Helliconian winters? Could it be maintained?

    I left Merton with almost more knowledge than I could accommodate, only to find myself faced with another question. With Helliconia’s lengthy division between summer and winter, those extended seasons, might it not be plausible, in fact highly likely, that two separate types of life form might develop?

    So, mankind and phagor emerged upon the scene. Oh, the phagors, the ancipitals!—I was always on their side!

    The ‘Spring’ novel opens with a struggle between man and phagor on the very lips of spring. A signifier of what is to follow.

    There is always a question of what a place will look like. All the Helliconian flora and fauna will have adapted to the extremes of temperature. Professor James Lovelock, who later became a friend, had developed his theory of geo-physiological systems in his inspiring Gaia hypothesis; that was another encouragement to think anew. I could not come up with anything feasible: sequoias two miles high, radishes as big as footballs, giant pumpkins the size of grapes?

    Surely, no.

    I was travelling by train from Oxford to London. We were passing Didcot power station, the four towers of which were emitting quantities of steam. The sun, setting behind the towers, had turned the steam in shadow black, so that in consequence, it looked much like foliage, hanging over giant trees. 

    Helliconia trees! And I thought that when winter was encroaching, leaves would not blow away in air to the ground; instead they would shrink back with their boughs into the hollow of the tree, where they would melt down to form a kind of waxen cap for protection against cold, until their reemergence when at length spring returned.

    Splendid! So then I was free, away, and telling the stories at last.

    What are the implications of such imaginings? Are they not an enhancement of our consciousness? To quote Jung again, Man … is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence—without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to an unknown end.

    And does not imaginative fiction serve to enlarge and enrich consciousness? I can’t think otherwise.

    Brian W. Aldiss

    2012

    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 suggested 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 look like.

    I was stuck. My three most able advisers, Tom Shippey, Iain Nicholson, 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, Myrdemlnggala; 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 these reprint editions, 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 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 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 than 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 mere 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 mirror 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

    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

    PRELUDE

    Luterin 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 waterfall. 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 ne 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 Sibornalese 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 …

    She walked over to the window, framed in heavy brown curtains which hung from ceiling to floor. Although she stood with her back to him, he sensed that she was not looking out. The dual sunlight, shining in from two different directions, dissolved her as if it were liquid, so that her shadow on the tiled floor appeared more substantial than she. Insil was demonstrating once more her elusive nature.

    It was a room he had not entered before, a typical Esikananzi room, loaded with heavy furniture. It held a tantalising scent, in part repugnant. Perhaps its only purpose was to hoard furniture, most of it wooden, against the day when the Weyr-Winter came and no more furniture would be made. There was a green couch with carved scrollwork, and a massive wardrobe which dominated the chamber. All the furniture had been imported; he saw that by its style.

    He shut the door, remaining there contemplating her. As if he did not exist, she began arranging her flowers in a vase, pouring water from the jug into the vase, shuffling the stems peremptorily with her long fingers.

    He sighed. My mother is always sickly, too, poor thing. Every day of her life she goes into pauk and communes with her dead parents.

    Insil looked up sharply at him. And you—while you were lying flat on your back—I suppose you’ve fallen into the habit of pauk too?

    No. You’re mistaken. My father forbad me … besides, it’s not just that …

    Insil put fingers to her temples. "Pauk is what the common people do. It’s so superstitious. To go into a trance and descend into that awful underworld, where bodies rot and those ghastly corpses are still spitting the dregs of life … oh, it’s disgusting. You’re sure you don’t do it?"

    Never. I imagine my mother’s sickness comes from pauk.

    Well, sherb you, I do it every day. I kiss my grandmother’s corpse-lips and taste the maggots … Then she burst into laughter. Don’t look so silly. I’m joking. I hate the thought of those things underground and I’m glad you don’t go near them.

    She lowered her gaze to the flowers.

    These snowflowers are tokens of the world’s death, don’t you think? There are only white flowers now, to go with the snow. Once, so the histories say, brightly coloured flowers bloomed in Kharnabhar.

    She pushed the vase resignedly from her. Down in the throats of the pale blossoms, a touch of gold remained, turning to a speck of intense red at the ovary, like an emblem of the vanishing sun.

    He sauntered across to her, over the patterned tiles. Come and sit on the couch with me and talk of happier things.

    You must be referring to the climate—declining so rapidly that our grandchildren, if we live to have any, will spend their lives in near darkness, wrapped in animal skins. Probably making animal noises … That sounds a promising topic.

    What nonsense you talk! Laughing, he jumped forward and grasped her. She let him drag her down on the couch as he uttered fevered endearments.

    Of course you can’t make love to me, Luterin. You may feel me as you have before, but no lovemaking. I don’t think I shall ever take kindly to lovemaking—but in any case, were I to permit it, you would lose your interest in me, your lust being satisfied.

    It’s a lie, a lie.

    It had best stand as the truth, if we are to have any marital happiness at all. I am not marrying a sated man.

    I could never have enough of you. As he spoke, his hand was foraging up her clothes.

    The invading armies … Insil sighed, but she kissed him and put the point of her tongue in his mouth.

    At which moment, the door of the wardrobe burst open. Out jumped a young man of Insil’s dark colouration, but as frenzied as his sister was passive. It was Umat, brandishing a sword, shouting.

    Sister, sister! Help is at hand! Here’s your brave rescuer, to save you and the family from dishonour! Who’s this beast? Isn’t a year in bed enough for him, that he must rise immediately to seek the nearest couch? Varlet! Rapist!

    You rat in the skirting! Luterin shouted. He rushed at Umat in a rage, the wooden sword fell to the floor, and they wrestled furiously. After his long confinement, Luterin had lost some of his strength. His friend threw him to the floor. As he picked himself up, he saw that Insil had flitted away.

    He ran to the door. She had vanished into the dark recesses of the house. In the scuffle, her flowers had been spilt and the jug broken on the tiled floor.

    Only as he made his way disconsolately back to the village road, letting the hoxney carry him at walking pace, did it occur to Luterin that possibly Insil had staged Umat’s interruption. Instead of going home, he turned right at the Esikananzi gate, and rode into the village to drink at the Icen Inn.

    Batalix was close to setting when he followed the mournful Shokerandit bell home. Snow was falling. No one was about in the grey world. At the inn, the talk consisted mainly of jokes and complaints concerning the new regulations being introduced by the Oligarch, such as curfew. The regulations were intended to strengthen communities throughout Sibornal for ordeals to come.

    Most of the talk was cheap, and Luterin despised it. His father would never speak of such things—or not in his one remaining son’s hearing.

    The gaslights were burning in the long hall of his home. As Luterin was unbuckling his personal bell, a slave came up, bowed, and announced that his father’s secretary wished to see him. Where is my father? Luterin demanded. Keeper Shokerandit has left, sir.

    Angrily Luterin ran up the stairs and threw open the door into the secretary’s room. The secretary was a permanent member of the Shokerandit household. With his beaklike nose, his straight line of eyebrow, his shallow forehead, and the quiff of hair which protruded over that forehead, the secretary resembled a crow. This narrow wooden room, its pigeonholes stuffed with secret documents, was the crow’s nest. From here, it surveyed many secret prospects beyond Luterin’s ken.

    Your father is off on a hunt, Master Luterin, announced this wily bird now, in a tone mingling deference with reproach. Since you were nowhere to be found, he had to leave without bidding you farewell.

    Why didn’t he let me accompany him? He knows I love the hunt. Perhaps I can catch him up. Which way did his entourage go?

    He entrusted me with this epistle for you. You would perhaps be advised to read it before dashing off.

    The secretary handed over a large envelope. Luterin snatched it from his talons. He ripped open the cover and read what was set down on the enclosed sheet in his father’s large and careful hand:

    Son Luterin,

    There is a prospect in the days to come that you will be appointed Keeper of the Wheel in my place. That role, as you are aware, combines both secular and religious duties.

    When you were born, you were taken to Rivenjk to be blessed by the Priest-Supreme of the Church of the Formidable Peace. I believe this to have fortified the godly side of your nature. You have proved a submissive son in whom I am satisfied.

    Now it is time to fortify the secular side of your nature. Your late brother was commissioned to the army, as is the tradition with elder sons. It is fitting that you should take up a similar office, especially as in the wider world (of which you so far know nothing), Sibornal’s affairs are moving towards a point of decision.

    Accordingly, I have left a sum of money with my secretary. He will hand it over to you. You will proceed to Askitosh, chief

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