Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [345]
The audience to whom he was making these comments – excluding the young woman, whose eyes were closed – were two in number. His son leaned against the rail of the boat on which they were travelling, his eyes half closed and his mouth half open. This youth had a bunch of yellow-blue gwing-gwings by his side to eat and occasionally spat a gwing-gwing stone at other river traffic.
Propped up against the fo’c’sle where he was shaded from the sun lay a pallid young man who sweated a good deal and muttered still more. He was covered by a striped sheet, beneath which he moved his legs restlessly; he was running a fever and had been ever since the boat left Matrassyl on its journey south. This being one of his less lucid intervals, he scarcely seemed any more capable than the gwing-gwing eater of receiving the older man’s wisdom.
This did not deter the older man.
‘At that last stop we made, I asked one old fool who was leaning against a tree if he thought it was getting hotter, year by year. All he said was, “It’s always been hot, skipper, since the day the world was made.” “And what day might that be?” I asked him. “In the Ice Age, as I heard tell.” That was his reply. In the Ice Age! They’ve no sense. Nothing gets through to them. Take religion. I live in a religious country, but I don’t believe in Akhanaba. I don’t believe in Akhanaba because I have reasoned things out. These natives in these villages, they don’t believe in Akhanaba – not because they have reasoned things out as I have, because they don’t reason …’
He interrupted himself to take a firmer grasp on the left breast and a long drink of the Exaggerator.
‘… They don’t believe in Akhanaba because they’re too stupid to believe. They worship all kinds of demons, Others, Nondads, dragons. They still believe in dragons … They worship MyrdemInggala. I asked my manager to show me round the village. In almost every hut, there hung a print of MyrdemInggala. No more like her than I am, but intended for her … But, as I say, they’re interested in nothing beyond their own belly buttons.’
‘You’re hurting my bips,’ the young lady said.
He yawned and covered his mouth with his right hand, wondering absently why he enjoyed the company of strangers so much more than that of his own family: not just his rather stupid son, but his uninteresting wife and overbearing daughter. It would suit him to sail for ever down the river with this girl and this youth who claimed to come from another world.
‘It’s soothing, the sound of the river. I like it. I’ll miss it when I’m retired. There’s proof that Akhanaba doesn’t exist. To make a complicated world like ours, with a steady supply of living people coming and going – rather like a supply of precious stones dug from the earth, polished, and sold off to customers – you would need to be really clever, god or no god. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?’
He pinched with his left finger and thumb, so that the girl squealed and said, ‘Yes, if you say so.’
‘I do say so. Well, if you were so clever, what pleasure would it give you to sit up above the world and look down at the stupidity of these natives? You’d go out of your mind with the monotony of it, generation after generation, getting no better. “In the Ice Age …” By the beholder …’
Yawning, he let his eyelids close.
She jabbed him in the ribs. ‘All right, then. If you’re so clever, tell me who did make the world. If it wasn’t Akhanaba, who was it?’
‘You ask too many questions,’ he said.
Ice Captain Muntras fell asleep. He woke only when the Lordryardry Lady was preparing to moor for the night at Osoilima, where he was to enjoy the hospitality of the local branch of the Lordryardry Ice Trading Co. He had been enjoying the hospitality of each of his trading posts in turn, so that the journey downriver from Matrassyl had taken longer than was usually the