Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [254]
Beneath that dominating injustice, a general justice prevailed. There was no poverty on the Avernus, no one starving physically. But it was a narrow domain. The spherical station had a diameter of only one thousand metres, most of its inhabitants living on the inside of the outer shell, and within that compass a kind of inanition prevailed, sapping life of its joy. Looking down does not exalt the spirit.
Billy Xiao Pin was a typical representative of Avernian society. Outwardly, he subscribed to all the norms; he worked without industry; he was engaged to an attractive girl; he took regular prescribed exercise; he had an Advisor who preached to him the higher virtues of acceptance. Yet inwardly Billy craved only one thing. He longed to be down on the Helliconian surface, 1500 kilometres below, to see Queen MyrdemInggala, to touch her, speak with her, and make love to her. In his dreams, the queen invited him into her arms.
The distant observers on Earth had other concerns. They followed continuities of which Billy and his kind were unaware. As they watched, suffering, the divorce at Gravabagalinien, they were able to trace the genesis of that division back to a battle which had taken place to the east of Matrassyl, in a region known as the Cosgatt. JandolAnganol’s experiences in the Cosgatt influenced his later actions and led – so it appeared by hindsight – inexorably to divorce.
What became known as the Battle of the Cosgatt took place five tenners – 240 days, or half a small year – before the day that the king and MyrdemInggala severed their marriage bonds by the sea.
In the region of the Cosgatt, the king received a physical wound which was to lead to the spiritual severance.
Both the king’s life and his reputation suffered in the battle. And they were threatened, ironically, by nothing more than a rabble, the raggle-taggle tribes of Driats.
Or, as the more historically minded of terrestrial observers said, by an innovation. An innovation which changed not only the life of the king and queen but of all their people. A gun.
What was most humiliating for the king was that he held the Driats in contempt; as did every follower of Akhanaba in Borlien and Oldorando. For the Driats, it was conceded, were human – but only just.
The threshold between non-human and human is shadowy. On one side of it lies a world full of illusory freedoms, on the other a world of illusory captivity. The Others remained animal, and stayed in the jungles. The Madis – tied to a migratory way of life – had reached the threshold of sapience, but remained protognostic. The Driats had just crossed the threshold, and there abided throughout recorded time, like a bird frozen on the wing.
The adverse conditions of the planet, the aridity of their share of it, contributed to the Driats’ permanent backwardness. For the Driat tribes occupied the dry grasslands of Thribriat, a country to the east of Borlien, across the wide Takissa. The Driats lived among herds of yelk and biyelk which pastured in those high regions during the summer of the great year.
Customs regarded as offensive by the outside world furthered the survival of the Driats. They practised a form of ritual murder, by which the useless members of a family were killed after failing certain tests. In times of near-famine, the slaughter of the ancients was often the salvation of the innocents. This custom had given the Driats a bad name among those whose existence was cast in easier pastures. But they were in reality a peaceful people – or too stupid to be warlike in an effective way.
The eruption of various nations southwards along the ranges of the Nktryhk – particularly those warrior nations temporarily banded together behind Unndreid the Hammer – had changed that. Under pressure, the Driats bestirred their bivouacs and went marauding into the lower valleys of Thribriat, which lie in the rain shadow of the massive Lower Nktryhk.
A cunning warlord, known as Darvlish the Skull, had brought order to their ragged ranks. Finding that