Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [595]
‘Now we can trade words, and let them be warmer than this room,’ she said. ‘Ugh, how I hate Kharnabhar. Why were you fool enough to come back here? Not for my sake, was it?’ She gave him a look askance.
He walked up and down in front of her. ‘You still have your old ways, Sil. You were my first torturer. Now I’ve found others. I am tormented – tormented by the evil of the Oligarchy. Tormented by the thought that the Weyr-Winter might be survived by a compassionate society, if men thought that way, not by a cruel and oppressive one like ours. Real evil – the Oligarch ordered the destruction of his own army. Yet I can also see that Sibornal must become a fortress, submitting to harsh rules, if it is not to be destroyed as Campannlat will be by the oncoming cold. Believe me, I am not my old childish self.’
Insil appeared to receive the speech without enthusiasm. She perched herself on a chair.
‘Well, you certainly don’t look yourself, Luterin. I was disgusted at the sight of you. Only when you condescend to smile, when you are not sulking over your plate, does your old self reappear. But the size of you … I hope my deformities remain inside me. Any measures, however harsh, against the plague, are justified if they spare us that.’ Her personal bell tinkled in emphasis, its sound calling up a fragment of the past for him.
‘The metamorphosis is not a deformity, Insil; it’s a biological fact. Natural.’
‘You know how I hate nature.’
‘You’re so squeamish.’
‘Why are you so squeamish about the Oligarch’s actions? They’re all part of the same thing. Your morality is as boring as Pa’s politics. Who cares if a few people and phagors are shot? Isn’t life one big hunt anyway?’
He stared at her, at her figure, slender and tense, as she clutched her arms against the chill of the room. Some of the affection he had once felt broke through. ‘Beholder, you still argue and riddle as before. I admire it, but could I bear it over a lifetime?’
She laughed back. ‘Who knows what we shall be called upon to endure? A woman needs fatalism more than a man. A woman’s role in life is to listen, and when I listen I never hear anything but the howl of the wind. I prefer the sound of my own voice.’
He touched her for the first time as he asked, ‘Then what do you want from life, if you can’t even bear the sight of me?’
She stood up, looking away from him. ‘I wish I were beautiful. I know I haven’t got a face – just two profiles tacked together. Then I might escape fate, or at least find an interesting one.’
‘You’re interesting enough.’
Insil shook her head. ‘Sometimes I think I am dead.’ Her tone was unemphatic; she might have been describing a landscape. ‘I want nothing that I know of and many things I know nothing of. I hate my family, my house, this place. I’m cold, I’m hard, and I have no soul.
‘My soul flew out of the window one day, maybe when you were spending your year pretending to be dead … I’m boring and I’m bored. I believe in nothing. No one gives me anything because I can give nothing, receive nothing.’
Luterin was pained by her pain, but only that. As of old, he found himself at a loss with her. ‘You have given me much, Sil, ever since childhood.’
‘I am frigid, too, I suspect. I cannot bear even to be kissed. Your pity I find contemptible.’ She turned away to say, as if the admission cost her dear, ‘As for the thought of making love with you as you are now … well, it repels me … at least, it does not attract me at all.’
Although he had no great depth of human understanding, Luterin saw how her coldness to others was part of her habit of maligning herself. The habit was more ingrained than formerly. Perhaps she spoke truth: Insil was always one for truth.
‘I’m not requiring you to make love with me, dear Insil. There is someone else whom I love, and whom I intend to marry.’
She remained half turned from him, her narrow left cheek against the lace of her collar. She seemed to shrink. The wan gaslight made the skin at the nape of her neck glisten. A low groan came from her. When she could not suppress it by putting hands