Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [392]
‘I don’t know about that, Immya dear. I just think that a little more meat would be good for him. Perhaps he’d like a gwing-gwing …’
‘He may go into a state of bulimia, coupled with an overactive disposition. Those would be symptomatic of fat death. In that case, we would have to tie him down to the bed.’
‘Surely that won’t be necessary, dear? He’s so gentle.’
‘It is not a case of his disposition, Mother, but of the disposition of his disease.’ That was a male voice, charged with half-concealed contempt, as if a practical point were being explained to a child. It belonged to Immya’s husband, Lawyer.
‘Well, I don’t know about that, I’m sure. I just hope it isn’t catching.’
‘We don’t believe that either fat death or bone fever is infectious at this time of the Great Year,’ said Immya’s voice. ‘We think Billish must have been with phagors, with whom these illnesses are generally associated.’
There was more of the kind, and then Immya and Lawyer were in the room, gazing down at Billy.
‘You may recover,’ she said, bending slightly at the waist to deliver her words and releasing them one by one. ‘We shall take care of you. We may have to tie you down if you get violent.’
‘Dying. Inevitable.’ With a great effort, he pretended not to be a tree and said, ‘Bone fever and fat death – I can explain. Just one virus. Germ. Different effects. According to time. Of Great Year. True.’
Further effort was beyond him. The rigors set in. Yet for a moment he had it all in mind. Although it had not been his subject, the helico virus was a legend on the Avernus, though a dying one, confined to video-texts, since its last outbreak in pandemic form had occurred several lifetimes before those now alive on the station. Those who now looked down helplessly on him from above were witnessing an old story brought back into currency only as the conclusion to every Helliconian Holiday.
The visitations of the virus caused immense suffering but were fortunately confined to two periods in the Great Year: six local centuries after the coldest time of that year, when planetary conditions were improving, and in the late autumn, after the long period of heat into which Helliconia had now entered. In the first period, the virus manifested itself as bone fever; in the second, as fat death. Almost no one escaped these scourges. The mortality rate of each approached fifty percent. Those who survived became, respectively, fifty percent lighter or fifty percent heavier in body weight, and thus were better equipped to face the hotter and colder seasons.
The virus was the mechanism by which human metabolisms adjusted to enormous climatic changes. Billy was being changed.
Immya was silent, standing by Billy’s bedside. She folded her arms over her grand bosom.
‘I don’t understand you. How do you know such things? You’re no god, or you would not be ill …’
Even the sound of voices drove him deeper into the entrails of a tree. He managed again. ‘One disease. Two … opposed systems. You as doctor understand.’
She understood. She sat down again. ‘If it were so … and yet – why not? There are two botanies. Trees that flower and seed only once in 1825 small years, other trees that flower and seed every small year. Things that are divided yet united …’
She closed her mouth tightly as if afraid of releasing a secret, aware that she stood on the brink of something beyond her understanding. The case of the helico virus was not exactly similar to that of Helliconia’s binary botanies. Yet Immya was correct in her observations on the divergent habits of plant life. At the time of Batalix’s capture by Freyr, some eight million years previously, Batalix’s planets had been bathed in radiation, leading to genetic divergences in