Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [201]
A few of those pilgrims who watched reflected on the paradox imposed on them by the size of the universe. The eight learned families on the Avernus lived at the same time as the Helliconians. Their lives were contemporaneous in every sense, though the helico virus decreed that they were sundered indefinitely from the Earth-like world they studied.
Yet how much more sundered were the eight families from that distant world they regarded as their native planet! They transmitted signals back to an Earth where not one single auditorium had been constructed, where even the planners of the auditoria were as yet unborn. The signals took a thousand years to cross the compartments of space between the two systems. In that millennium it was not Helliconia alone which changed.
And those who now sat wordless in the auditoria saw the immense figure of Aoz Roon on the holoscreens, saw him sip water which blew from his lips to merge with the flood below, as it was a thousand years ago, a thousand light-years away.
The imprisoned light they watched, even the life they lived, was a technological miracle, a physical construct. And only a metaphysician with omnipresent understanding could say which lived at the moment the drips returned to the river: Aoz Roon or his audiences. Yet it required no great sophistry to deduce that, despite ambiguities imposed by limitations of vision, macrocosm and microcosm were interdependent, laced together by such phenomena as the helico virus, whose effects were ultimately universal, though perceptible only to the phenomenon of consciousness, the eye of the needle through which the macrocosm and microcosm became actual unity. Understanding on a divine scale might resolve the compartments between the infinite orders of being; it was human understanding which brought past and present into their cheek-by-jowl merging.
Imagination functioned; the virus was merely a function.
The two yelk trotted at a brisk rate, necks held horizontally. Their nostrils dilated, for they had been trotting for some while. Sweat shone on their flanks.
Their two riders wore high turn-down boots and long cloaks made of a grey cloth. Their faces were keen and grey, tufted with small beards on their chins. Nobody would have mistaken them for anything but Sibornalans.
The pebbly path they rode was shadowed by a shoulder of mountain. The regular plud-plud-plud of the yelk’s hoofs carried out over an expanse of wilderness threaded with trees and rivers.
The men were scouts belonging to the forces of the warrior-priest, Festibariyatid. They enjoyed their ride, breathing the fresh air, rarely exchanging words, and always keeping a sharp eye for enemies.
Behind them down the trail other Sibornalans followed on foot, leading a group of captured protognostics.
The trail wound down to a river, beyond which the land rose in a rocky promontory. Its sloping cliffs were formed of broken rock strata, displaced almost vertically and studded with stubby trees. Here was the settlement ruled over by Festibariyatid.
The scouts forded the river at a shallow place. Assaying the cliffs, the yelk picked their way cautiously between the strata; they were northern plains animals, and not entirely happy in mountainous ground. They, and others like them, had been brought south with the annual incursion of colonists from the northern continent into Chalce and the regions bordering on Pannoval; hence the presence of yelk so far south.
The rear guard appeared along the trail. Its four members were armed with spears and escorted in their midst some luckless protognostics captured during their patrol. Among the captives, Cathkaarnit-he and Cathkaarnit-she plodded along, still scratching themselves despite weeks as prisoners on the move.
Encouraged by spear point, they waded across