Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [30]
‘Which is more important, survival or the individual?’
‘An individual has importance in his own eyes, but generations have priority.’
He was learning to argue the priest’s way, step by step. ‘But generations are made up of individuals.’
‘Generations are not only the sum of individuals. They contain also aspirations, plans, histories, laws – above all, continuities. They contain the past as well as the future. Akha refuses to work with individuals alone, so individuals must be subdued – quenched, if necessary.’
Slyly, the father taught Yuli to argue. On the one hand, he must have blind faith; on the other, he needed reason. For its long journey through the years, the entombed community needed all defences, needed both prayer and rationality. The sacred verses claimed that at some time in the future, Akha, in his lonely battle, might suffer defeat and the world undergo a period of intense fire descending from the skies. The individual must be quenched, to avoid the burning.
Through the entombing halls went Yuli, with all these ideas declaiming themselves in his head. They stood his understanding of the world upside down – but therein lay much of their attraction, since every revolutionary new insight only emphasised his previous ignorant state.
Among all the deprivations, one sensory delight stole upon his bewilderment to soothe him. The priests found their way through the dark labyrinth by wall-reading, an arcane mystery in which Yuli was soon to be initiated. There was also another directional clue, intended to delight. Music. At first, Yuli in his innocence imagined that he heard the sound of spirits overhead. He could make nothing of the tickling line of melody played on a one-stringed vrach. He had never seen a vrach. If not a spirit, could it be the wail of wind through a crevice somewhere in the rock?
His delight was so secret that he asked no one about the sounds, not even his fellow novices, until walking one day unexpectedly with Sifans into a religious service. Choirs were important, and monody even more so, with a single voice launched into the hollows of the dark; but what Yuli came to love most were the interventions by inhuman voices, those of the instruments of Pannoval.
Nothing similar was ever heard in the Barriers. The only music the besieged tribes there knew was a prolonged drumming, on a drum made of hide; clacking, of animal bones struck together; and clapping, of human hands, accompanied by a monotonous chant. It was the luxurious complication of the new music that convinced Yuli of the reality of his still awakening spiritual life. One great tune in particular took him by storm, ‘Oldorando,’ which had a part for an instrument that soared about all others, then dived into their midst, finally to retreat into a secure melodic refuge of its own.
Music became almost an alternative to light for Yuli. When he talked to his fellow novices, he found that they felt little of his exhilaration. But they – he came to realise – all carried a much greater central commitment to Akha himself than he. Most of the novices had loved or hated Akha from birth; Akha was nature to them as he was not to Yuli.
When he wrestled with such matters during the sparse hours allotted to sleep, Yuli felt guilt that he was not as the other novices. He loved the music of Akha. It was a new language. But was not music the creation of men, rather than of …
Even when he choked off the doubt, another doubt sprang up. How about the language of religion? Wasn’t that also the invention of men – perhaps pleasant, ineffectual men like Father Sifans?
‘Belief is not peace but torment; only the great War is peace.’ That part of the creed at least was true.
Meanwhile, Yuli kept his own counsel, and fraternised only superficially with his fellows.
They met for instruction in a low, damp, foggy hall named Cleft. Sometimes they went in utter darkness, sometimes in the glow of wicks carried by the fathers. Each session ended with the priest pressing his hand