Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [5]
My partial success left me ambitious and dissatisfied. I resolved to start again. All art is a metaphor, but some art forms are more metaphorical than others; perhaps, I thought, I would do better with a more oblique approach. So I developed Helliconia: a place much like our world, with only one factor changed – the length of the year. It was to be a stage for the kind of drama in which we are embroiled in our century.
In order to achieve some verisimilitude, I consulted experts, who convinced me that my little Helliconia was mere fantasy; I needed something much more solid.
Invention took over from allegory. A good thing, too. With the prompting of scientific fact, whole related series of new images crowded into my conscious mind. I have deployed them as best I could. When I was farthest away from my original conception – at the apastron of my earliest intentions – I discovered that I was expressing dualities that were as relevant to our century as to Helliconia’s.
It could hardly be otherwise. For the people of Helliconia, and the non-people, the beasts, and other personages, interest us only if they mirror our concerns. No one wants a passport to a nation of talking slugs.
So I offer you this volume for your enjoyment, hoping you will find more to agree with than you did in LIFE IN THE WEST – and maybe even more to amuse you.
Your affectionate
Father
Begbroke
Oxford
Helliconia Spring
Why have so many heroic deeds recurrently dropped out of mind and found no shrine in lasting monuments of fame? The answer, I believe, is that this world is newly made; its origin is a recent event, not one of remote antiquity.
That is why even now some arts are still being perfected: the process of development is still going on. Yes, and it is not long since the truth about nature was first discovered, and I myself am even now the first who has been found to render this revelation into my native speech …
Lucretius: De Rerum Natura
55 BC
PRELUDE
YULI
This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.
Yuli was seven years old, virtually a grown man, when he crouched under a skin bivouac with his father and gazed down the wilderness of a land known even at that time as Campannlat. He had roused from a light doze with his father’s elbow in his rib and his harsh voice saying, ‘Storm’s dying.’
The storm had been blowing from the west for three days, bringing with it snow and particles of ice off the Barriers. It filled the world with howling energy, transforming it to a grey-white darkness, like a great voice that no man could withstand. The ledge on which the bivouac was pitched afforded little protection from the worst of the blast; father and son could do nothing but lie where they were under the skin, dozing, once in a while chewing on a piece of smoked fish, while the weather battered away above their heads.
As the wind expired, the snow arrived in spurts, twitching in featherlike flurries across the drab landscape. Although Freyr was high in the sky – for the hunters were within the tropics – it seemed to hang there frozen. The lights rippled overhead in shawl after golden shawl, the fringes of which seemed to touch the ground, while the folds rose up and up until they vanished in the leaden zenith of heaven. The lights gave little illumination, no warmth.
Both father and son rose by instinct, stretching, stamping their feet, throwing their arms violently about the massive barrels of their bodies. Neither spoke. There was nothing to say. The storm was over. Still they had to wait. Soon, they knew, the yelk would be here. Not for much longer would they have to maintain their vigil.
Although the ground was broken, it was without feature, being covered with ice and snow. Behind the two men was higher ground, also covered with the mat of whiteness. Only to the north was there a dark grim greyness, where the sky came down like a bruised arm to meet