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  Helliconia Spring

  ( Helliconia - 1 )

  Brian Aldiss

  This is the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy—a monumental sage which goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today’s imaginative writers. An entire solar system is revealed, and with it a world disturbingly reflecting our own, Helliconia: an Earth-like planet where dynasties change with the seasons. Events and characters and animals stream across the pages of this gigantic novel. Cosmic in scope, it keeps an eye lovingly on the humans involved. So the 5,000 inhabitants of the Earth’s observation station above Helliconia keep their eyes trained on the events of Oldorando and may long to intervene though the dangers are too great. So we on Earth have them all in our vision in one of the most consuming and magnificent novels of scientific romance.

  Won BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1982.

  Won John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1983.

  Nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1983.

  Note: British spelling.

  Helliconia Spring

  by Brian Aldiss

  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 fac
ts 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

  Death of a Grandfather

  The Past That Was Like a Dream

  A Leap from the Tower

  Favourable Temperature Gradients

  Double Sunset

  “When I Were All Befuddock …”

  A Cold Welcome for Phagors

  In Obsidian

  In and Out of a Hoxney Skin

  Laintal Ay’s Achievement

  When Shay Tal Went

  Lord of the Island

  View from a Half Roon

  Through the Eye of a Needle

  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, twit
ching 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.