Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [318]
‘That’s enough,’ he said, breaking into Billy’s discourse. ‘Your kind is known in history, talking in strange terms, mocking the understandings of wise men. Perhaps it is a delusion we suffer from … Small wonder if we do. Only two days ago – only fifty hours – the queen of queens left Matrassyl, charged with conspiracy, and sixty-one Myrdolators were cruelly murdered … And you talk to me of suns swooping here and there as fancy takes them …’
Billy drummed the fingers of one hand on the table and fanned away flies with the other. Lex stood nearby, motionless as furniture, eyes closed.
‘I’m a Myrdolator myself. I’m much to blame for these crimes. Too used to serving the king … as he’s too used to serving religion. Life was so placid … Now who knows what fresh botherations will happen tomorrow?’
‘You are too sunk in your own little affairs,’ Billy said. ‘You’re as bad as my Advisor on the Avernus. He doesn’t entirely believe in the reality of Helliconia. You don’t entirely believe in the reality of the universe. Your umwelt is no larger than this palace.’
‘What’s an umwelt?’
‘The region encompassed by your perceptions.’
‘You pretend to know so much. Is it correct, as I perceive, that the hoxney is a brown-striped animal which wore coloured stripes in the spring of the Great Year?’
‘That is correct. Animals and plants adopt different strategies to survive the vast changes of a Year. There are binary biologies and botanies, some following one star, as previously, some the other.’
‘Now you return to your perambulating suns. In my belief, established over thirty-seven years, our two suns are set in our skies as a constant reminder of our dual nature, spirit and body, life and death, and of the more general dualities which govern human life – hot and cold, light and dark, good and evil.’
‘You say my kind is known in history, Chancellor. Maybe those were other visitors from the Avernus, also trying to reveal the truth, and being ignored.’
‘Revelations through some crazed geometries? Then they perished!’ SartoriIrvrash rose, resting his fingers on the table, frowning.
Billy also laboriously rose, rattling his chains. ‘The truth would free you, Chancellor. Whatever you think, those “crazed geometries” rule the universe. You half-know this. Respect your intellect. Why not go further, break from your umwelt? The life that teems on Helliconia is a product of those crazed geometries you scoff at.
‘That A-type sun you know as Freyr is a gigantic hydrogen fusion-reactor, pouring out high-energy emissions. When Batalix and its planets took up orbits round it, eight million years ago, they were subjected to bombardments of X rays and ultraviolet radiation. The effect on the then-sluggish Helliconian biosphere was profound. There was rapid genetic change. Dramatic mutations occurred. Some new forms survived. One animal species in particular rose to challenge the supremacy previously enjoyed by a much older species—’
‘No more of this,’ cried SartoriIrvrash, waving a hand in dismissal. ‘What is this about species changing into other species? Can a dog become an arang, or a hoxney a kaidaw? Everyone knows at least that every animal has its place, and humans their place. So the All-Powerful has ordained.’
‘You’re an atheist! You don’t believe in the All-Powerful!’
Confused, the chancellor shook his head. ‘I’d prefer to be ruled by the All-Powerful than by your crazed geometries.… I had hoped to make a present of you to King JandolAnganol, but you would drive him madder than he is already.’
Wearily, SartoriIrvrash realised that the king could not be placated at present by rational means. SartoriIrvrash himself felt far from rational. Listening to Billy, he was reminded of another young madman – the king’s son, Robayday. Once a charming child, then overtaken by a kind of mad fancy, espousing the desert like a parched mother, expert at killing