Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [389]
Lawyer also foiled Muntras’s local laws, which had been improvised to benefit the Muntras family rather than their workers. So Krillio was of two minds about his son-in-law.
Krillio’s wife evidently felt differently. She would hear no complaint about her daughter or the Lawyer. Though submissive, she was impatient with Div, whose behaviour – adversely affected by his mother’s dislike – became loutish in the home. ‘You should reconsider,’ she told Muntras one day, when they were both standing by Billy’s bedside, after another example of Div’s awfulness. ‘Hand over the company to Immya and Lawyer, and then everything will prosper. Under Div, it will be in ruin within three years. That girl has a proper grasp of things.’
Certainly, Immya had a grasp of things Hespagoratean. She had never ventured beyond the confines of the continent on which she was born, despite frequent opportunities to do so, as if she preferred to have her front doorstep guarded by the myriad scaley watchdogs which patrolled the shores of Dimariam. But locked in her broad bosom were metaphorical maps, histories, and compass bearings of the southern continent.
Immya Muntras had a good plain square face built like her father’s, a face capable of confronting glaciers. She stood foursquare to the ice face as she delivered her account of the family trade, in which she took great pride.
At this spot, they were far enough inland to be free of the coastal fog. The great wall of ice to which Muntras owed his wealth glittered in the sun. Where the glacier lay more distant, Batalix created in its hollows caverns of sapphire. Even its reflection in the lake at its foot gave off diamond glints.
The air was hard, fresh, and alive. Birds skimmed over the lake surface. Where the pure waters yielded to banks of blue flowers, insects were busy in their thousands.
A butterfly with a head shaped like a man’s thumb settled on the three-faced watch on Billy’s wrist. He stared at it with uncertain gaze, trying to interpret the meaning of the creature.
Things roared overhead, he knew not what. He could hardly look up. The virus was in his hypothalamus, in his brain stem. It would multiply irresistibly; no poultice could check it. Soon he would be locked immobile, like a phagor ancestor in tether.
He felt no regret. Regret only for the butterfly, leaving his hand and making off. In order to live a real life, of a kind his Advisor would not understand, sacrifices were called for. He had glimpsed the queen of queens. He had lain with beautiful Abathy. Even now, incapacitated, he could see distant bays of glacier where the light, conjuring powder-and thunder-blues, made of the ice more a colour than a substance. The excellence of nature had been tasted. Of course it had a price.
And Immya was explaining about the great blocks of ice which rattled overhead. At the ice face, men worked on scaffolding, cleaving the ice with saws and axes. They were Lordryardry’s glacier miners. As the blocks fell off, they fell into an open funnel, and from there slipped into the shoot. The shoot, timber-built, was constructed with sufficient slope to keep the blocks of ice moving.
Great tombstones of ice travelled slowly down the shoot, which rumbled in every section as they passed over its stressed wooden legs. The tombstones made their way along two miles of shoot to the docks of Lordryardry.
At the docks, the tombstones were sawn into smaller blocks and loaded into the reed-insulated hulls of the ships of the company’s fleet.
So the snows which had once fallen in the polar regions south of 55°, to be compressed and squeezed sluggishly down into the narrow temperate