Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [573]
Without further words, they loaded up the sledge. Smrtaa – retribution. A prominent feature of life in these parts. Uuundaamp was harnessing up the dogs, and in a few minutes they were once more on their way through the mist, Shokerandit and Toress Lahl biting on their fox tails.
The unsleeping machines of the Avernus still recorded events below, and transmitted them automatically back to Earth. But the few humans surviving on the Observation Station took little interest in that primary function; their own primary function was to survive. Their numbers were so far down – lowered by disease as well as fighting – that defence became a less pressing need.
Much time was spent establishing tribes and tribal territory, to obviate pitched battles. In neutral territory between tribes, the obscene pudendolls survived, to become something sacrosanct, something between gods and demons.
Though a measure of ‘peace’ descended, the earlier destruction of food-synthesising plants meant that cannibalism was still prevalent. There was almost no meat but human meat. The heavy tabus against this practice fell with great force upon the delicately trained sensibilities of the Avernians. To descend to barbarism and worse within a generation was more than their psyches could easily endure.
The tribes became matriarchies, while many of the younger men, mainly adolescent, developed multiple personalities. As many as ten different personalities could house themselves in one body, differing in inclination, age, and sex, as well as habits. Ascetic vegetarians were common, living an eye’s blink away from stone age savages, tempestuous dancers from lawgivers.
The complex separation from nature undergone by the Avernian colonisers had now reached its limits. Not only did individuals not know each other: they were now strangers to themselves.
This adaptation to stress situations was not for everyone. When severe fighting first broke out, a number of technicians left the Avernus. They stole a craft from one of the Observation Station’s maintenance bays and fled. They landed on Aganip.
Tempting though the green, white, and blue planet of Helliconia looked, its danger was known to all. Aganip occupied a special place in the mythology of Avernus, for it was here, many centuries ago, that Earth’s colonising starship had established a base while the Avernus was being constructed.
Aganip was a lifeless planet, with an atmosphere consisting almost entirely of carbon dioxide, together with a little nitrogen. But the old base still stood, and offered something of a welcome.
The escapers built a small dome. There they lived in restricted circumstances. At first they sent out signals to Earth and then – being naturally unwilling to wait two thousand years for an answer – to the Avernus. But the Avernus had its own problems and did not reply.
The escapers had failed to understand the nature of mankind: that it, like the elephant and the common daisy, is no more and no less than a part and function of a living entity. Separated from that entity, humans, being more complex than elephants and daisies, have little chance of flourishing. The signals continued automatically for a long while.
No one heard.
XII
Kakool on the Trail
And when that massed human spirit we have called empathy reached out across space and communicated with the gossies of Helliconia, what then? Did nothing important happen – or did something unprecedentedly magnificent, something quantally different, happen?
The answer to that question will perhaps remain forever clouded in conjecture; mankind has its umwelt, however bravely it strives to enlarge that confining universe of its perceptions. To become part of a greater umwelt may prove biologically impossible. Or perhaps not. It must be sufficient to admit that if something unprecedentedly magnificent, something quantally different, happened, it