Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [319]
He wondered at his own long struggle to make sense of the world. How was it that such an omnipresent problem oppressed so few?
Billy might be a figment of his tired imagination, the darker side of rationality, sent to plague him.
He turned to the phagor. ‘Lex, guard him. I’ll think how to dispose of him and his umwelts on the morrow.’
In his bedchamber, loneliness overwhelmed the chancellor. The king had seized him and flung him to the floor! He felt the bumps of his bruised spine, felt how ugly his body was growing as the years squeezed it dry. The days contained so much shame.
His slave woman came at his call, looking reluctant as he had looked reluctant when summoned before the king.
‘Massage my back,’ he ordered.
She lay against him, running a rough but gentle hand from his skull to his pelvis. He smelt of veronikane, phagors, and piss. She was Randonanese, with tribal marks cut in her cheeks. She smelt of fruit. After a while, he rolled over to face her, his prodo stirring. There was one comfort given to believers and atheists alike, one refuge from abstraction. The chancellor thrust one hand between the dark exiled thighs and reached with the other into her shift, to clasp the slave woman’s breasts.
She drew him close.
Petitions were being signed on the Avernus for a party to descend to the Helliconian surface and rescue Billy Xiao Pin. No serious notice was taken of the petitions. Billy’s contract clearly stated that, whatever difficulties he found himself in, no help would be forthcoming. Which did not prevent many young ladies of the Pin family from threatening to commit suicide if the government did not act at once.
But the work of the station continued as usual, as it had done for the previous thirty-two centuries. Little the Avernians knew how Earth’s technocrats had programmed them for obedience. The great families continued to analyse all incoming data, and the automatic systems continued to broadcast signals to distant Earth.
Gigantic auditoria shaped like conch shells stood all round that faraway planet.
To the people of Earth, Helliconian events were news. The signals were received first of all on Charon, on the extreme fringes of the solar system. There again they were analysed, classified, stored, transmitted. The most popular transmission went to Earth via the Eductainment Channel, which carried various continuous dramas from the binary system. The events at King JandolAnganol’s court were at present the highest-rating news. And that news was a thousand years old.
Those who listened to that news formed part of a global society undergoing a change as profound as any on Helliconia. The Decline of the Modern Ages had been hastened by greatly increased glaciation at the terrestrial poles, leading to the Great Ice Age. In the ninth century of the sixth millennium after the birth of Christ, the glaciers were again retreating, and the peoples of Earth moving northwards in their wake. Old racial and national antipathies were in abeyance. A mood appropriate to the congenial climate of Earth prevailed, in which sophisticated sensibilities were directed to exploring the relationship between the biosphere, its living things, and the gubernatory globe itself.
For once, leaders and statesmen arose who were worthy of their people. They shared a true vision and inspired the populace. They saw to it that the drama of the distant planet Helliconia was studied as an object lesson in folly as well as an endless tapestry of circumstance.
To the great conch shells, millions of terrestrials had come to watch the departure of the queen, the burning of the Myrdolators, the quarrel between the king and his chancellor. These were contemporary events, in that they influenced the emotional climate of those who looked up at the gigantic images. But the events were also fossil events, compressed within the strata of light on which they had arrived. They seemed to burst up with renewed heat and life on reaching the consciousness of terrestrial human