Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [529]
The signals eventually reached Charon, on the margins of the solar system, where androids fed the data to Earth, only five light-hours distant.
By the middle of the fifth millennium, Earth’s Modern Ages were in slow decline. The Age of Apperception was a memory. For all but a few meritocrats in positions of power, galactic exploration had become an abstraction, another burden inflicted by bureaucracy. G4PBX / 4582–4–3 changed all that. Ceasing to feature merely as a mysterious body among three sister planets, it took on colour and personality. It became Helliconia, the marvellous planet, the world beyond the veils of darkness where life was.
Helliconia’s suns took on symbolic significance. Mystics remarked on the way in which Freyr-Batalix seemed to represent those divisions of the human psyche celebrated in Asian legend long ago:
Two birds always together in the peach tree:
One eats the fruit, the other watches it.
One bird’s our individual Self, tasting all the world’s gifts:
The other the universal Self, witnessing all and wondering.
How avidly the first prints of human and phagors, struggling out of a snowbound world, were studied! Inexplicable thankfulness filled human hearts. A link with other intelligent life had been forged at last.
By the time the Avernus was built and established in orbit about Helliconia, by the time it was stocked with the humans reared by surrogate mothers on the colonising ship, the sphere of terrestrial-directed space activity was contracting. The inhabited planets of the solar system were moving towards a centralised form of government, later to evolve into COSA, the Co-System Assemblage; their own byzantine affairs occupied them. Distant colonies were left to fend for themselves, marooned here and there on semi-habitable worlds like so many Crusoes on desert islands.
Earth and its neighbouring planets were by this time storehouses of undigested information. While the materials brought back to Earth had been processed, the knowledge had not been absorbed. The enmities which had existed since tribal days, rivalries founded on fear and a lust for possession, remained dormant. The dwindling of space squeezed them into new prominence.
By the year 4901 A.D., all Earth was managed by the one company, COSA. Judicial systems had yielded to profit and loss accounts. Through one chain of command or another, COSA owned every building, every industry, every service, every plant, and the hide of every human on the planet – even those humans who opposed it. Capitalism had reached its glorious apogee. It made a small percentage on every lungful of oxygen breathed. And it paid out its stockholders in carbon dioxide.
On Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter, human beings were more free – free to found their own petty nations and ruin their own lives their own way. But they formed a sort of second-class citizenry of the solar system. Everything they acquired – and acquisition still played a major part in their lives – they paid for to COSA.
It was in 4901 that this burden became too great, and in 4901 that a statesman on Earth made the mistake of using the old derogatory term ‘immigrants’ about the inhabitants of Mars. And so it was in 4901 that nuclear war broke out among the planets – the War over a Word, as it was called.
Although records of those pre-apocalypse times are scarce, we do know that populations then regarded themselves as too civilised to begin such a war. They had a dread that some lunatic might press a button. In fact the buttons were pressed by sane men, responding to a well-rehearsed chain of command. The