Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [451]
XXI
The Slaying of Akhanaba
The drama of the court and the humiliation of JandolAnganol had been watched by a greater audience than the king could have imagined.
The personnel of the Avernus, however, were not entirely occupied by the story in which the king played a conspicuous part. Some scholars studied developments taking place elsewhere on the planet, or continuities in which the king played merely an incidental role. A group of learned ladies of the Tan family, for instance, had as their subject the origins of long-standing quarrels. They followed several quarrels through generations, studying how the differences began, were maintained, and were eventually resolved. One of their cases concerned a village in Northern Borlien through which the king had passed on his way to Oldorando. There the quarrel originally concerned whether pigs belonging to two neighbours should drink at the same brook. The brook had gone and so had the pigs, yet two villages existed at the spot locked in hatred and still referring to the killing of neighbours as ‘hog-sticking’. King JandolAnganol, by passing with his phagors through one village and not the other, had exacerbated the feud, and a youth had had a finger broken in a brawl that night.
Of that, the learned Tan ladies were as yet unaware. All their records were automatically stored for study, while they at present worked over a chapter in their quarrel which had taken place two centuries ago; they studied videos of an incident of indecent exposure, when an old man from one of the villages had been mobbed by men from the other village. After this squalid incident, someone had composed a beautiful dirge on the subject, which was still sung on festive occasions. To the learned Tan ladies, such incidents were as vital as the king’s trial – and of more significance than all the austerities of the inorganic.
Other groups studied matters even more esoteric. Phagor lines of descent were particularly closely watched. The question of phagor mobility, baffling to the Helliconians, was by now fairly well understood on the Avernus. The ancipitals had ancient patterns of behaviour from which they were not easily deflected, but those patterns were more elaborate than had been supposed. There was a kind of ‘domestic’ phagor which accepted the rule of man as readily as the rule of a kzahhn; but hidden from the eyes of men was a much more independent ancipital which survived the seasons much as its ancestors had done, taking what it would and moving on: a free creature, unaffected by mankind.
The history of Oldorando as a unit also had its scholars, those who were most interested in process. They followed interweaving lives of individuals in only a general way.
When the eyes of Avernus first turned towards Oldorando, or Embruddock as it was then, it was little more than a place of hot springs where two rivers met. Round the springs, a few low towers stood in the middle of an immense ice desert. Even then, in the early years of Avernian research, it was apparent that this was a place, strategically situated, with a potential for growth when the climate improved.
Oldorando was now larger and more populous than anyone in the six families had seen it before. Like any living organism, it expanded in favourable weather, contracted in adverse.
But the story was no more than begun as far as those on the Avernus were concerned. They kept their records, they transmitted a constant stream of information back to Earth; present transmissions could be reckoned to arrive there in the year 7877. The intricacies of the Helliconian biosphere and its response to change throughout the Great Year could be understood only when at least two complete cycles had been studied.
The scholars could extrapolate. They could make intelligent guesses. But they could no more see the future than King JandolAnganol could see what was to befall that very afternoon.
Sayren Stund had not been in better humour since before his elder daughter died. Before the afternoon’s event, which was to humiliate