Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [543]
The flotation was not to come about for several hours. With the captain and a few crew on their feet again, some attempt was made to bring the ship back into order. Those still sick were settled as comfortably as possible in the surgeon’s cabin. The injured were tended. The convalescent were brought to fresh air. The dead were wrapped in blankets and lined up in a row on the upper deck. The dead numbered twenty-eight. The survivors were twenty-one in number, including the captain and eleven of his crew.
When everyone had been accounted for and order prevailed, the fit assembled for a service of thanksgiving for their survival to God the Azoiaxic, who ordered all things.
In their innocent hymns, they did not see that the complexity of their survival was beyond the capacity of any local deity.
Helliconia was at this period receding towards something like the original conditions which had existed before its parent sun Batalix became locked into the gravitational field of the A-type supergiant. The planet had then carried a remarkable number of phyla, ranging in size from viruses to whales, while being denied the energy levels or the complexity to support beings with that intensity of cellular organisation required as building blocks for higher mental functions – the thinking, deducing, perceiving functions associated with full consciousness. The ancipitals were Helliconia’s supreme effort in this respect.
The ancipitals were a part of the integrated living system of Helliconia’s biosphere. One of the functions of that systemic gestalt – of which, needless to say, its component parts were entirely unaware – was to maintain optimum conditions for the survival of all. As the yellow-striped fly could not live without the flambreg, so ultimately, the flambreg could not live without the yellow-striped fly. All life was interdependent.
The capture of Batalix by the supergiant was only an event of the first magnitude and not a catastrophe for Helliconian life, although it was catastrophic for many phyla and many individuals. The impact of the capture was gradual enough for the biosphere to sustain it. The planet looked after its own. Its moon was lost; its vital processes continued, although through a disruption which brought storms and blizzards raging for hundreds of years.
The fierce output of high-energy radiation from the new sun caused more damage. More phyla were eradicated, while others survived only through genetic mutation. Among the new species were some which were, in evolutionary terms, hastily developed; they survived in the new environment only at some cost to themselves. The assatassi in the sea, which were born as maggots from the decaying bodies of their parents; the yelk and biyelk, necrogenes which resembled mammals but were without wombs; and human stock; these were among the new creatures which rose to abundance under the energy-rich conditions which came about eight million years before the present.
The new creatures were products of the biospheric striving for unity, and cobbled into it at the time of maximum change. Before its capture by Freyr, Helliconia’s atmosphere had contained a large amount of carbon dioxide, protecting its life with a greenhouse effect, and producing a mean temperature of – 7° C. After capture, the atmospheric carbon dioxide was much reduced, combining at periastron with water to form carbonate rocks. Oxygen levels increased to amounts suitable for the new creatures: humans could not live in the oxygen-scarce Nyktryhk, as phagors did. In the seas, greater concentrations of macromolecules led to stepped-up activity all along the food chain. All these new parameters for existence came within the regulatory functions of Helliconia’s biosphere.
The humans, as the