Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [610]
Father father what headwaters are these
The rock so red hot like a forehead
And me so fevered in the rude red darkness
Are you there above below me
Waiting not to die O death
Its energies You scream in the walls
Of my existence by my side The lights go by
Go by and are gone and I in the snoring
Rock I revile myself that thing
I never did in mind but of a sudden
With your knife cutting our mutual
It was I swear our mutual artery
This place of terror screaming
Where I’ll forever bleed like lava
Clogging the rude red rock darkness
His thoughts ran in curious patterns, seemed to him to flow through him forever. Time was marked in the entombed soul by protracted squeals of rock against rock and by hideous groans. Gradually, the groans caught his attention. His mind became quieter listening to them.
He was uncertain of his whereabouts. He imagined himself lying in the subterranean stall of some great wounded beast. Though close to death, the beast was still searching for him, looking here, looking there. When it found him, it would fall upon him and crush him to death in its own final agonies.
At last he roused himself. It was the wind he heard. The wind blew down the orifices of the Wheel, creating a harmony of groans. The squealing was the movement of the Wheel.
Luterin sat up. The priests of the Wheel had not only let him in, thus saving him from his father’s avengers, they had absolved him from all his sins before guiding him into his cell. Such was their standard practice. Men who were imprisoned with their sins upon them were more likely to go mad.
He stood up. The terrible thing he had done filled all his mind. He looked with horror at his right hand, and at the bloodstain on his right sleeve.
Food arrived. It could be heard rumbling down a chute in the rock overhead. It consisted of a round loaf of bread, a cheese, and a chunk of something which was probably roast stungebag, tied up in a cloth. So it was Batalix-dawn overhead. Soon the small winter would prevail, and then Batalix would not be seen again for several tenners. But little difference that made in the entrails of Mount Kharnabhar. As he munched on a piece of bread, he walked about his cell, examining it with the attention a man gives his surroundings when he knows that a narrow box is to become his life.
The Architects of Kharnabhar had arranged every measurement to correspond in some way with the astronomical facts which governed life on Helliconia. The height of the cell was 240 centimetres, corresponding to the six weeks of a tenner times the forty minutes of the hour, or to five times the six weeks times the eight days in a week.
The width of the cell at its outer end was 2.5 metres – 250 centimetres, corresponding to the ten tenners of a small year times the number of hours in a day.
The depth of the cell was 480 centimetres, corresponding to the number of days in a small year.
Against one wall was a bunk, the cell’s sole furniture. Above the bunk was the chute down which provisions came. On the far side of the cell was the opening which served as a latrine. The wastes fell down a pipe to biogas chambers below the Wheel, which, supplemented by vegetable and animal wastes from the monastery overhead, supplied the Wheel with its methane lighting.
Luterin’s cell was separated from those on either side by walls .64159 metres in thickness – a figure which, added to the cell width, gave the value of pi. As he sat on his bunk with his back against this partition, he regarded the wall on his left. It was solid unmoving rock, and formed the fourth wall of the cell with scarcely a crack between it and its neighbours in the Wheel. Carved in this rock were two sets of alcoves: a high series containing the biogas burners, which provided the cells with what light and warmth they enjoyed, and, set twice as frequent, a lower series containing lengths of chain, firmly stapled into place.
Still munching his bread, Luterin crossed to the outer wall and lifted the heavy links of chain.