Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [342]
As they passed under the shadow of an immense church, SartoriIrvrash tried to sort out the impressions that thronged in on him. He was struck by the fact that much of the wagonette in which they rode was not of wood but metal: its axles, its sides, even the seats on which they sat, all were metal.
Metal objects were to be seen on every side. The people crowding in the streets – not jostling and shouting like a Matrassyl crowd – carried metal pails or ladders or assorted instruments to the ships; some men were encased in gleaming armoured jackets. Some of the grander buildings on the way flaunted iron doors, often curiously decorated, with names in raised relief upon them, as if the occupants intended to live on there perpetually, whatever happened in the Circumpolar Regions.
A haze in the sky warded off the heat of Freyr, which, to the visitor’s eye, stood unnaturally high in the sky at noon. The atmosphere of the city was smokey. Although Sibornal’s forests were thin in comparison with the riotous jungles of the tropics, the continent had extensive lignite and peat beds, as well as metal ores. The ores were smelted in small factories in various parts of the city. Each metal was located in a definite area. Its refiners, its workers, and its ancillary trades were grouped about it, and its slaves about them. Over the last generation, metals had become less expensive than wood.
‘It’s a beautiful city.’ One of the men leaned over to favour the visitor with this observation.
He felt small, sniffed a small sniff, and said nothing.
From the wagonette, he could see how Askitosh’s half-wheel plan worked. The great church by the harbour was the axle. After a semicircle of buildings came a semicircle of farms, with fields, then another semicircle of buildings, and so on, though various living pressures had in some places broken down what to Borlienese eyes was an unnatural symmetry.
They were delivered to a large plain building like a box, in which slitlike windows had been cut. Its double entrance doors were of metal; on them, in raised relief, were the words 1st. Convential, Sector Six. The convential proved to be a cross between a hotel, a monastery, a nunnery, a school, and a prison, or so it appeared to SartoriIrvrash, as he explored the cell-like room he was given, and read the rules.
The rules declared that two meals were served per day, at twenty minutes past four and at nineteen, that prayers were held every hour (voluntary) in the church on the top floor, that the garden was open during dimday for relaxed walking and meditation, that instructions (whatever they were) might be had at all times, and that permission was needed before visitors left the establishment.
Sighing, he washed himself and settled down on the bed, letting gloom overcome him. But Uskutoshkan hospitality, like most things Uskutoshkan, was brisk, and in no time came a brisk rap at his door and he was conducted along a corridor to a banquet.
The banqueting hall was long and low, lit by slit windows, from which the activities of the street could be glimpsed in small vertical sections. The floor was uncarpeted, yet a touch of luxury, even grandeur, was added to the chamber by an enormous tapestry on the rear wall which depicted, upon a scarlet background, a great wheel being rowed through the heavens by oarsmen in cerulean garments, each smiling blissfully, towards an astonishing maternal figure from whose mouth, nostrils, and breasts sprang the stars in the scarlet sky.
So struck was SartoriIrvrash by the details of this tapestry that he itched to make a note or even a sketch; but he was thrust forward and introduced to twelve personages who stood waiting to receive him. Each was named for him in turn by Madame Dienu Pasharatid. None shook his proffered hand: it was not the habit in