Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [390]
‘Please take me home,’ Billy said.
Immya’s ready flow of figures ceased. Her tale of tonnages, the length of various voyages, the demand-related costings upon which their little empire was founded: these stopped. She sighed and said something to her father, but a fresh ice-load rumbling overhead erased her words. Then the lines of her face relaxed and she smiled.
‘We’d better take Billy home,’ she said.
‘I saw it,’ he said indistinctly. ‘I saw it.’
And when almost half a Great Year had passed, when Helliconia and its sister planets had journeyed far from Freyr and were once again facing the slow furies of another winter, Billy’s huddled form in the old wooden sledge was seen by millions of people on distant Earth.
Billy’s presence on Helliconia represented an infringement of terrestrial orders. Those orders had stated that no human being was to land on Helliconia and disrupt the web of its cultures.
Those orders had been formulated over three thousand years earlier. In terms of cultural history, three thousand years was a long period of time. Since then, understanding had deepened – thanks largely to an intensive study of Helliconia undertaken by most of the population. There was a much better grasp of the unity – and therefore the strength – of planetary biospheres.
Billy had entered the planetary biosphere and had become part of it. The terrestrials saw no conflict. Billy’s elements comprised the atoms of dead star matter no different from the elements comprising Muntras or MyrdemInggala. His death would represent a final union with the planet, a merging without dissolution. Billy was mortal. The atoms of which he was constituted were indestructible.
There would be a measured sorrow for the winking out of another human consciousness, for the loss of another identity, unique, irreplaceable; but that was hardly a cause for tears on Earth.
The tears were shed long before that on the Avernus. Billy was their drama, their proof that existence existed, that they themselves had the ancient power of biological organisms to be moved in response to the environment. Tears and cheers were the order of the day.
The Pin family, in particular, abandoned their usual passivity and threw a small family storm. Rose Yi Pin, by turns laughing and howling, was the centre of passionate attention. She had a marvellous time.
The Advisor was mortified.
*
The fresh air visited Billy’s body and bathed his lungs. It allowed him to see every detail of the flashing world. But its vividness, its sounds, were too much. He shut his eyes. When he managed to open them again, the asokins were moving briskly, the sledge bumped, and coastal pallors had begun to veil the view.
To compensate for earlier humiliations, Div Muntras insisted on driving the sledge. He threw the reins over his right shoulder, gripping them under his left arm while clutching the sledge handle with his left hand. In his right hand he flourished a whip, which he cracked above the asokins.
‘Go steady, Div, lad,’ Muntras growled.
As he spoke, the sledge struck a hummock of coarse grass and overturned. They were travelling under the shoot, where the ground was marshy. Muntras landed on his hands and knees. He snatched up the reins, looking blackly at his son but saying nothing. Immya, forming her mouth into the shape of a stretcher, straightened the sledge and lifted Billy back into it. Her silence was more expressive than words.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Div, pretending to have hurt his wrist. His father took up the reins and silently motioned his son round to the back runners. They then proceeded at a sedate pace home.
The rambling Muntras house was built on one floor only. That floor was on many levels connected by steps or short flights of stairs, owing to the rocky terrain. Beyond the room in which Muntras and Immya placed Billy was the courtyard in which Muntras paid his workers every tenner.
The courtyard