Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [129]
The young women showed Shay Tal the star map they were making, with the relative positions of stars marked on a vellum sheet. She evinced little interest, and said, ‘The stars cannot affect us as the gossies do. How does this hobby of yours advance knowledge? You’d do better to sleep at night.’
Vry sighed. ‘The sky is alive. It’s not a tomb, like the world below. Oyre and I have stood here and seen comets flaring, landing on the earth. And there are four bright stars that move differently from all the others, the wanderers, of which the old songs sing. Those wanderers sometimes double back in their passage across the sky. And one comes over very fast. We’ll see it presently. We think it’s close to us, and we call it Kaidaw, because of its speed.’
Shay Tal rubbed her hands together, looking apprehensively about.
‘Well, it’s cold up here.’
‘It’s colder still down below, where the gossies lie,’ Oyre retorted.
‘You keep a watch on your tongue, young woman. You’re no friend of the academy if you distract Vry from her proper work.’
Her face became cold and hawklike; she turned away quickly, as if to shield Oyre and Vry from its sight, and climbed back downstairs without further words.
‘Oh, I shall pay for this,’ Vry said. ‘I shall have to be extra humble to make up for this.’
‘You’re too humble, Vry, and she’s too haughty. Scumb her academy. She’s scared of the sky, like most people. That’s her trouble, sorceress or no sorceress. She puts up with stupid people like Amin Lim because they pander to her haughtiness.’
She clutched Vry with a sort of angry passion and began to list the stupidities of everyone she knew.
‘What upsets me is that we did not get the chance to make her look through our telescope,’ Vry said.
It was the telescope that had made the greatest difference to Vry’s astronomical interest. When Aoz Roon had become lord, and had gone to live in the big tower, Oyre had been free to grub through all kinds of decaying possessions stored there in trunks. The telescope had come to light tucked among moth-riddled clothes which fell to pieces at the touch. It was simply made – perhaps by the long-defunct glass-makers corps – being no more than a leather tube which held two lenses in place; but when turned upon the wandering stars, the telescope had the power to change Vry’s perceptions. For the wanderers showed distinct discs. In that, they resembled the sentinels, though they did not emit light.
From this discovery, Vry and Oyre had concluded that the wanderers were near to the earth, and the stars far away – some very far. From trappers who worked by starlight they had the names of the wanderers: Ipocrene, Aganip, and Copaise. And there was the fast one they had named themselves, Kaidaw. Now they sought to prove that these were worlds like their own, possibly even with people in them.
Gazing at her friend, Vry saw only the general outlines of that beautiful face and powerful head, and recognised how much Oyre resembled Aoz Roon. Both Oyre and her father seemed so full of spirit – and Oyre had been born outside agreements. Vry wondered if by chance – by any remote chance – Oyre had been with a man, in the dark of a brassimip or elsewhere. Then she shut the naughty thought away and turned her gaze to the sky.
They stayed rather soberly on the top of their tower until Hour-Whistler sounded again. A few minutes later Kaidaw rose and sailed up to the zenith.
Earth Observation Station Avernus – Vry’s Kaidaw – hung high over Helliconia, while the continent of Campannlat turned beneath it. The station’s crew devoted most of their attention to the world below; but the other three planets of the binary system were also under constant surveillance by automatic instrumentation.
On all four planets, temperatures were rising. Improvement overall was steady; only on the ground did anomalies register on tender flesh.
Helliconia’s drama of generations in travail was set upon