Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [618]
‘You always could,’ said her sister half-admiringly.
‘Our old adolescent ancestors feared accident. They feared luck. Hence gods and fences and marriage and nuclear arms and all the rest. Not your possessiveness, but the fear of accident. Which eventually befell them. Perhaps such prophecies are self-fulfilling.’
‘Plausible. Yes. I’ll agree, if you will allow that possessiveness itself might have been a symptom of that fear of accidents.’
‘Oh, well, Trockern, if you’re going to agree, let’s get back to the subject of sex.’ They all laughed. Outside their windows, the mobile city could be seen trundling on its inelegant way, drinking egonicity from the white polyhedrons.
Ermine put an arm about her sister’s shoulder and stroked her hair.
‘You talk about one person possessing another; I suppose you would say that the old institution of marriage was like that. Yet marriage still sounds rather romantic to me.’
‘Most squalid things are romantic if you get far enough away from them,’ Shoyshal said. ‘Anything seen through a haze … But marriage is the supreme example of love as a political act. The love was just a pretence, or at best an illusion.’
‘I don’t see what you mean. Men and women did not have to marry, did they?’
‘It was voluntary in a way, yes, but there was the pressure of society to marry. Sometimes moral pressure, sometimes economic pressure. The man got someone to work for him and have sex with. The woman got someone to earn money for her. They pooled their cupidities.’
‘How awful!’
‘All those romantic postures,’ continued Shoyshal, enjoying herself. ‘Those raptures, those love songs, that sticky music, that literature they so prized, the suicide pacts, the tears, the vows – all just social mating displays, the baiting of the trap they couldn’t see they were setting or falling into.’
‘You make it sound awful.’
‘Oh, it was worse than that, Ermine, I assure you. No wonder so many women chose prostitution. I mean, marriage was another version of the power struggle, with both husband and wife battling for supremacy over the other. The man had the bludgeon of the purse strings, the woman the secret weapon between her legs.’
They all burst out in laughter. The old man on the other bunk, SartoriIrvrash by name, began to snore in self-defence.
‘It’s a long while since yours was secret,’ Trockern said.
When a city became too crowded for someone’s liking, it was not difficult to change to another geonaut and head off in a new direction. There were many other cities, other alternatives. Some people liked to follow the long light days; others travelled to enjoy spectacular scenery; others developed longings to view the sea or the desert. Every environment offered a different kind of experience.
And those kinds of experience were of a different order from the kinds that once had been. No longer did the people cry out. Their agile brains had at last led their emotions to accept a role of modesty, subordinate but never acquiescent to Gaia, spirit of Earth. Gaia did not seek to possess them, as their imagined gods had once done. They were themselves part of that spirit. They had a vision.
In consequence, death ceased to play the leading role of Inquisitor in human affairs, as once it had done. Now it was no more than an item in the homely accounting which included mankind: Gaia was a common grave from which fresh increment continually blossomed.
There was also the dimension of a real involvement with Helliconia. From watchers, men and women had graduated to participators. As the images failed to arrive from the Avernus, as the mere pictures died in the shell-like auditoria, so the empathic link was forged ever more strongly. In a sense, humankind – humanmind – leaped across space to become the eye of the Original Beholder, to lend strength to their distant fellows on the other planet.
What the future might bring to that spiritual extension of being was a matter for expectation.
By accepting a role proper and comfortable to them, the terrestrials had again entered the magic circle of being.