Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [466]
Their pets died. When an Other died, its body was casually cast aside, or thrown outside the area of the camp for vultures to eat. The great black phagors did not know death: death was no more to them than time. As they grew older, their movements slowed. Though they remained within the shelter of their vaguely demarcated families, they became apart. Year by year, their abilities grew more circumscribed. Language was early lost. Eventually movement itself was lost.
Then the tribe showed a sense of caring. They cared not for individuals. They ministered to their infants, but otherwise only to those who succumbed to age. These superannuated phagors were stored safely away, revered, brought out on any ceremonial occasion, as for instance when an attack was intended on a nearby component.
Like embodiments of sluggish time, the elderly phagors passed without perceptible change beyond the shadowy division which distinguished life from other conditions. Time congealed in their eddre. They shrank, to become over many years nothing more than small keratinous images of their former selves. Even then, the flickerings of existence were not entirely spent. They were consulted. They still played a part in the life of the component. Only when they disintegrated could it be said that they were visited with finality: and many were so gently handled that they survived for centuries.
This crepuscular life-style continued long. Summer and winter spelt little change in the club-shaped peninsula, extending almost to the equator. Elsewhere, in the winters, the seas might freeze; in the peninsula, up in the mountains, down in the afforested valleys, a lethargic paradise was maintained unaltered over many, many moons, many moons and many eons.
The ancipital kind was not readily responsive to change. The unknown star – the unheralded and unprecedented star – was a brilliant point long before it entered the calculations of the components.
The first white-coated phagors which appeared were treated with indifference. More of them grew to maturity. They produced white offspring. Only then were they driven out. The outcasts lived along the doleful shores of the Kowass Sea, feeding on iguana. Their tame Others rode on their backs, occasionally throwing twigs of dried seaweed into the portable hearths.
In the gloaming, phagors and Others could be seen, strung out along the shore, flame and smoke at their shoulder, moving disconsolately towards the east. As year succeeded year, white phagors became more numerous, the exodus to the east more steady. They marked their way with stone pillars, perhaps in the hope that some day they could return home. That return was never to be.
Instead, the cancerous star in the skies grew brighter, eclipsing all other stars until, like T’Sehn-Hrr, it cast a shadow by night. Then the ancipital kind, after much consultation with the elders in tether, bestowed on the new star a name: Frehyr, meaning fear.
From one generation to another, there appeared no difference in the magnitude of the fear-star. But it grew. And from generation to generation the mutated white phagors spread along the coastlines of Hespagorat. To the west of the Pegovin Peninsula, they were halted by the dreary marshes of a land later to be known as Dimariam. To the east, they slowly covered the alpine lands of Throssa, to come, after two thousand miles, to the Cadmer land-bridge. All this was achieved with the spiritless determination characteristic of the ancipital kind.
Across the land-bridge, spreading over Radado, they entered lands where the climate more nearly resembled that of Pegovin. Some settled there; others, arriving later, foraged further. Always as they went they erected their stone pillars, to mark healthful air-octaves which led back to their ancestral home.
The time of catastrophe arrived. The ageing star, Batalix, with its freight of planets, was captured by the fear-star, young, furious, filling