Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [293]
He shook his head. ‘I know well what once I said. However, times change. Now I confess that I myself have learned to go into pater-placation, to console myself by communing with the spirit of my departed wife.’
He bit his lips. Reading her expression, he said, ‘Yes, she has forgiven me.’
She touched him. ‘I’m glad.’
Then the academic rose up in him again, and he said, ‘But you see, Your Majesty, there is a philosophical difficulty in believing that the pater-placation ritual is other than subjective. There cannot be gossies and fessups under the ground with whom living people talk.’
‘We know there are. You and I and millions of peasants talk to our ancestors whenever we wish. Where’s the difficulty?’
‘Historical records, of which I have plenty, all report that the gossies were once creatures of hatred, bewailing their failed lives, pouring scorn on the living. Over the generations, that has changed; nowadays, all anyone gets is sweetness and consolation. That suggests that the whole experience is wish-fulfilment, a kind of self-hypnosis. Moreover, stellar geometry has outmoded the antique idea that our world rests on an original boulder, towards which fessups descend.’
She stamped her foot. ‘Must I call the vicar? Am I not under grief and strain enough, without having to listen to your preposterous historical lectures at this hour?’
She was immediately sorry for her outburst, and put an arm through his as they ascended to her room.
‘It’s a comfort, whatever it is,’ she said. ‘Praise be, there’s a realm of the spirit beyond knowledge.’
‘My dear queen, though I hate religion, I recognise sanctity when I am in its presence.’ When she squeezed his arm, he was emboldened to add, ‘But the Holy Church has never quite accepted pater-placation as part of its ritual, has it? It does not know what to make of gossies and fessups. In consequence, it would like to ban it, but if it did so, then a million peasants would quit the Church. So it ignores the entire question.’
She looked down at her smooth hands. Already she was preparing herself for the act. ‘How very sensible of the Church,’ she murmured.
SartoriIrvrash, in his turn, was sensible enough to make no reply.
MyrdemInggala led the way through into her inner chamber. She sank down on her bed, composing herself, controlling her breathing, relaxing her muscles. SartoriIrvrash sat quietly by her bed, circling his forehead with the holy sign, to begin his vigil. He saw that already she was moving into the pauk state.
He kept his eyes tight closed, not daring to gaze upon her defenceless beauty, and listened to her infrequent exhalations.
The soul has no eyes, yet it sees in the world below.
The soul of the queen cast its regard downwards as it began its long descent. Beneath lay space more vast than night skies, more rich, more imposing. It was not space at all: it was the opposite of space, of consciousness even – a peculiar rupellary density without feature.
Just as the land regards an ocean-going ship as a token of freedom, while the sailors confined on that ship regard the land in similar terms, so the realm of oblivion was at once space and non-space.
To consciousness, the realm appeared infinite. In its downward direction, it ceased only where the races of manlike-kind began, in a green and unknown, unknowable womb, the womb of the original beholder. The original beholder – that passive motherly principle – received the souls of the dead who sank back into her. Although she might be no more than a fossil scent entombed in rock, she was not to be resisted.
Above the original beholder were the gossies and fessups, floating, thousands upon thousands upon thousands, as if all the stars of night had been stacked in order, and arranged in accordance with the ancient idea of land-octaves.
The queen’s exploratory soul sank down, floating like a feather towards the fessups. At close quarters, they resembled not stars so much as mummified chickens, with hollow eyes and stomachs, their legs dangling clumsily. Age had eroded them. They were transparent.