Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [356]
Drama was not a feature of life aboard Avernus. It was avoided. Emotion: superfluous, as ‘On the Prolongation of One Helliconian Season Beyond the Human Life-span’ had it. Yet dramatic tension was evident, especially among the youth of the six great families. Everyone was forced into the situation of disagreeing or agreeing with Billy’s actions.
Many said that Billy was ineffectual. It was more difficult to admit that he showed courage and considerable ability to adapt to different conditions. Under the arguments that raged was a wistful hope that Billy might somehow convince people on Helliconia that they, the Avernians, existed.
True, Billy appeared to have persuaded Muntras. But Muntras was not considered to be important. And there were indications that Billy, having convinced Muntras, would take no further steps in that direction, but merely, selfishly, enjoy his remaining days before the helico virus attacked him.
The great disappointment was that Billy had failed where JandolAnganol and SartoriIrvrash were concerned. It had to be admitted that they had on their minds matters of more immediate concern.
The question that few people on the Avernus asked was, What, effectively, could the king and his councillor have done had they taken the trouble to understand Billy and come to believe in the existence of his ‘other world’? For that question led to the reflection that Avernus was far less important to Helliconia than Helliconia was to Avernus.
Billy’s successes and failures were compared with those of previous Helliconia Holiday winners. Few winners had done much better than Billy, if truth were told. Some had been killed as soon as they arrived on the planet. Women had fared worse than men: the noncompetitive atmosphere on the Avernus favoured equality of the sexes; on the ground, matters were conducted differently, and most women winners ended their lives in slavery. One or two strong personalities had had their stories believed, and in one case a religious cult had grown round this Saviour from the Skies (to quote one of his titles). The cult had died when a force of Takers eradicated the villages where the believers lived.
The strongest personalities to descend had concealed their origins entirely and lived by their wits.
One characteristic all winners shared. Despite often severe warnings from their Advisors, all had enjoyed or at least attempted sexual intercourse with the Helliconians. The moths always headed for the brightest flame.
Billy’s treatment merely strengthened a general aversion among the families to the religions of Helliconia. The consensus was that those religions got in the way of sensible, rational living. The inhabitants – believers and unbelievers alike – were seen as struggling in the toils of falsehood. Nowhere was there an attempt to be placid and view one’s life as an art form.
On distant Earth, conclusions would be different. The chapter in the long cavalcade of history which concerned JandolAnganol, SartoriIrvrash, and Billy Xiao Pin would be watched with a grief superior to any on the Avernus, a grief in which detachment and empathy were nicely balanced. The peoples of Earth, for the most part, had developed beyond that stage where religious belief is suppressed, or supplanted by ideology, or translated into fashionable cults, or atrophied into a source of references for art and literature. The peoples of Earth could understand how religion allowed even the labouring peasants their glimpse of eternity. They understood that those with least power have most need of gods. They understood that even Akhanaba paved the way for a religious sense of life which needed no God.
But what they most thoroughly understood was that the reason why the ancipital race was untroubled by the perturbations of religion was that their eotemporal minds would not rise to such disquiet. The phagors could never aspire to a moral altitude where they would abase themselves before false gods.
The materialists of the Avernus, a thousand light-years from such thinking, admired