Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [302]
Rose Yi Pin turned her neat small face up to Billy’s and wrapped her arms round him for the last time. ‘I believe you will live for ever down there, Billy. I shall watch you as I grow old and ugly. Just beware of their silly religions. Life here is sane. Down there they are mad in the head with religious notions – even that so beautiful queen of yours.’
He kissed her lips. ‘Live your orderly life. Don’t fret.’
Suddenly fury burst from her. ‘Why do you ruin my life? Where’s the order, with you gone?’
He shook his head. ‘That you must discover for yourself.’
The automated craft was waiting to take him from purgatory. Billy climbed through the passage into the little shell, and the door hissed shut behind him. Terror gripped him; he strapped himself into the seat and enjoyed the emotion.
The choice as to whether to make the descent with the windows shuttered or not was his. He pressed a button. Up flew the shutters and he was rewarded with a view of a magical whale from whose flank he was now excommunicated. A belt of irregular stars spread into the distance like the curl of a comet’s tail. Gasping, he realised that these stars were unprocessed rubbish ejected from the Avernus, falling into orbit about the station.
At one moment, the Avernus was an immensity, its eighteen million tons obscuring the field of vision; at the next, it was dwindling, and Billy forgot to look. Helliconia was in view, as familiar as his own face in a mirror, but now seen more nakedly, with cloud drifting across its lit crescent and the peninsula of Pegovin striking like a club into the central sea. The great southern ice cap dazzled.
He looked for the two suns of the binary system as the windows darkened to fend off their light.
Batalix, the nearer sun, was lost behind the planet, only 1.26 astronomical units away.
Freyr, visible as a grey ball behind the opaqued glass, was immensely bright at 240 astronomical units. When at 236 astronomical units distance, Helliconia would reach perihelion, its nearest point to Freyr; that time was only 118 Earth years away. Then once more Batalix and its planets would be carried away on their orbits, not to come so close to the dominant member of the system for another 2592 Earth years.
To Billy Xiao Pin, this set of astronomical figures, which he had learned along with his alphabets at the age of three, made a neat diagram. He was about to land where the diagram became an untidy question of history, of crises and challenges.
His round face elongated at the thought. Although Helliconia had been under constant observation for such a long while, it remained in many ways a mystery.
Billy knew that the planet would survive perihelion, that temperatures at the equator would soar to 150 degrees but nothing worse; that Helliconia had an extraordinary system of homeostasis, at least as powerful as Earth’s, which would maintain as steady a state of equilibrium as possible. He did not share the superstitious fears of the peasantry that Freyr was about to devour them – though he understood how such fears might arise.
What he did not know was whether various nations would survive the testing heat. Tropical countries like Borlien and Oldorando were most threatened.
The Avernus had been in existence and observing since before the spring of the previous Great Year. It had once experienced the slow spread of the Great Winter on the planet below, had witnessed multitudes dying and nations going down. How precisely that pattern would be repeated in the Winter still far distant remained to be seen. The Earth Observation Station would have to function and the six families to exist for another fourteen Earth centuries before that mystery was resolved.
To this awe-inspiring world, Billy had committed