Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [513]
For this reason, the Avernus was dying.
Over the long centuries of its existence, the Avernus had gone through many crises. Its technology had not been at fault; far from it – the great hull of the station, which had a diameter of one thousand metres, was designed as a self-servicing entity, and small servomechanisms scuttled like parasites over its skin, replacing tiles and instruments as required. The servomechanisms moved swiftly, signalling to each other with asymmetrical arms, like crabs on an undiscovered germanium shore, communicating with each other in a language only the WORK computer which controlled them understood. In the course of forty centuries, the servomechanisms continued to serve. The crabs had proved untiring.
Squadrons of auxiliary satellites accompanied the Avernus through space, or dived off in all directions, like sparks from a fire. They crossed and recrossed in their orbits, some no bigger than an eyeball, others complex in shape and design, coming and going about their automatic business, the gathering of information. Their metaphorical throats were parched for an ever-flowing stream of data. When one of them malfunctioned, or was silenced by a passing speck of cosmic debris, a replacement floated free from the service hatches of the Avernus and took its place. Like the crabs, the sparklike satellites had proved untiring.
And inside the Avernus. Behind its smooth plastic partitioning lay the equivalent of an endomorphic skeleton or, to use a more suitably dynamic comparison, a nervous system. This nervous system was infinitely more complex than that of any human. It possessed the inorganic equivalent of its own brains, its own kidneys, lungs, bowels. It was to a large extent independent of the body it served. It resolved all problems connected with overheating, overcooling, condensation, microweather, wastes, lighting, intercommunication, illusionism, and hundreds of other factors designed to make life tolerable physiologically for the human beings on the ship. Like the crabs and the satellites, the nervous system had proved untiring.
The human race had tired. Every member of the eight families – later reduced to six, and now reduced to two – was dedicated, through whatever speciality he or she pursued, to one sole aim: to beam as much information about the planet Helliconia as possible back to distant Earth.
The goal was too rarefied, too abstract, too divorced from the bloodstream.
Gradually, the families had fallen victim to a sort of neurasthenia of the senses and had lost touch with reality. Earth, the living globe, had ceased to be. There was Earth the Obligation only, a weight on the consciousness, an anchor on the spirit.
Even the planet before their view, the glorious and changing balloon of Helliconia, burning in the light of its two suns and trailing its cone of darkness like a wind sock behind it, even Helliconia became an abstract. Helliconia could not be visited. To visit it meant death. Although the human beings on its surface, scrutinised so devotedly from above, appeared identical to Earthlings, they were protected from external contact by a complex virus mechanism as untiring as the mechanisms of the Avernus. That virus, the helico virus, was lethal to the inhabitants of the Avernus at all seasons. Some men and women had gone down to the planet’s surface. They had walked there for a few days, marvelling at the experience. And then they had died.
On the Avernus, a defeated minimalism had long prevailed. The attenuation of the spirit had been embraced.
With the slow crawl of autumn across the planet below, as Freyr receded day by day and decade by decade from Helliconia and its sister planets – as the 236 astronomical units of periastron between Batalix and Freyr lengthened to the formidable 710 of apastron – the young on the Observation Station rose up in despair and overthrew their masters. What though their masters were themselves slaves? The era of asceticism was gone. The old were slain. Minimalism was slain.