Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [599]
‘Eating the scraps he threw you.’
‘Whatever he wished.’
‘It’s not healthy to feel like that.’
He turned towards her, looking haughty. ‘I am not a lad anymore. I can please myself or I can subdue my will. So it must be with everyone. Compassion and firmness are needed. We must fight unjust laws. As long as anarchy does not take over, Weyr-Winter will be endurable. When spring comes, Sibornal will emerge stronger than ever. We are committed to four tasks. To unify our continent. To rectify work, and consolidate it organisationally with regard to depleted resources … Well, all that’s no concern of yours …’
She stood apart from him. The clouds of their breath formed and dispersed without meeting. ‘What role do I play in your plans?’
He was uneasy with the question, but liked its bluntness. Being in Toress Lahl’s company was like occupying a different world from Insil’s. With a sudden impulse, he turned and grasped her, staring into her eyes before kissing her briefly. He stepped back, drawing deep breath, drinking in her expression. Then he moved forward again and this time kissed her with greater concentration.
Even when she made some response, he could not banish the thought of Insil Esikananzi. For her part, Toress Lahl too struggled against her late husband’s phantom lips.
They broke apart.
‘Be patient,’ he said, as if to himself. She gave no answer.
Luterin climbed back on his mount, and led the way up the track which wound through the dark trees. The bells on the animals’ harness jingled. The little snowbound chapel sank behind them, soon becoming lost in the obscurity.
When he returned, a sealed note from Insil awaited him. He opened it with reluctance, but it contained only an oblique reference to their quarrel of the previous evening. It read:
Luterin:
You will think me hard, but there are those who are harder. They offer you greater danger than ever I could.
Do you recall a conversation we once had about the possible cause of your brother’s death? It took place, unless I dreamed it, after you had recovered from that strange horizontal interlude which followed the death. Your innocence is heroic. Let me say more soon.
I beg you use guile now. Hold ‘our’ new secret for a while, for your own sake.
Insil
‘Too late,’ he said impatiently, screwing the note up into a ball.
XIV
The Greatest Crime
But how could anyone be sure that those tutelary biospheric spirits, the Original Beholder and Gaia, had a real existence?
There was no objective proof, just as empathy cannot be measured. Micro-bacterial life has no knowledge of mankind: their umwelts are too disparate. Only intuition can permit mankind to see and hear the footsteps of those geochemical spirits who have managed the life of a functioning whole world as a single organism.
It is intuition, again, which tells humanity that to live according to the spirit it must not possess, must refrain from dominating. It was precisely those men who met so secretively on Icen Hill, shut away from human contact, secure from contact with the outside world, who most feverishly tried to possess the world.
And if they succeeded?
The biospheric spirits are forgiving and adaptable. Intuition tells us that there are always alternatives. Homeostasis is not fossilisation but the balance of vitality.
The early tribal hunters who burned the forests to secure their prey gave birth to the ecosystems of the great savannahs. Mutability informs Gaia’s cybernetic controls.
The Original Beholder’s grey cloak was sweeping across Helliconia. Human beings defied it or accepted it, according to their individual natures.
Beyond the pale of human possession, the creatures of the wild made their own dispositions. The brassimip trees greedily stored food resources far below ground, in order