Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [620]
He thought himself in paradise. Throwing off his furs, he tugged at the ten-link chain with extra vigour, shouting for his unhearing fellows to do the same. Near the end of the twelve-and-a-half-hour work period, the cell’s leading wall slipped forward to reveal the merest slit of light. The cell became filled with a holy substance which flickered and flowed into the least corner of the cell. Luterin fell down on his knees and covered his eyes, crying and laughing.
Before the work period ceased, all of the slit was contained within his outer wall space. It was 240 millimetres wide – and there was now half a small year to go before Luterin had hauled his cell once more to the exit under Bambekk Monastery. Concisely engraved lettering in the granite read: YE HAVE BUT HALF A YEAR LEFT AWAY FROM THE WORLD: SEE YE BENEFIT FROM IT.
The window was cut deep into the rock. It was difficult to see how far it extended before it became a window to the outside. Bars were secured over it at the far end. Through the bars a distant tree could be seen, a caspiarn blowing before a storm wind.
Luterin stared out for a long while before going to sit on his bunk to contemplate the beauty about him. The cleft by which the daylight entered was silted with rubble. Through it filtered a precious quality which brimmed the entire volume of the cell with transforming fluids of beauty. All the light in the world seemed to him to be pouring blessing on his head. Before him lay both the brightest of illuminations, as well as exquisite shadows which painted the corners of the modest room with such gradations of tone as he had never observed in the world of freedom. He drank the ecstasy of being a living biological creature again.
‘Insil!’ he cried into the twilight. ‘I shall be back!’
He did not work the next day, but watched the life-giving window being moved by others across the outer wall. On the following day, when again he refused to work, the window moved again and all but disappeared. Even the crack remaining was sufficient to spin an exquisite pearly luminosity into his confinement. When, on the fourth workday, even that vanished – presumably to charm the inmate of the following cell – he was disconsolate.
Now began a period of self-doubt. His longing to be free changed to a fear of what he would find. What would Insil have done with herself? Would she have left the place she hated?
And his mother. Perhaps she was dead by now. He resisted the impulse to sink into pauk and find out.
And Toress Lahl. Well, he had set her free. Perhaps she had made her way back to Borldoran.
And what of the political situation? Was the new Oligarch carrying out the old Oligarch’s edicts? Were phagors still being slain? What of the quarrel between Church and State?
He wondered how he would himself be treated when he emerged into the world. Perhaps a party of execution would await him. It was the old question, still unanswered over almost ten small years: was he saint or sinner? A hero or a criminal? Certainly he had forfeited any claim to the position of Keeper of the Wheel.
He began talking to an imagined woman, achieving an eloquence that was never his when he was face to face with anyone else.
‘What a maze life is to humans! It must be so much simpler to be a phagor. They aren’t tormented by doubt or hope. When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvellous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents’ limitations, meet a wonderful woman, and be capable of being wonderful to her.
‘At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility, in all the forests of conflicting opinion, there is a vital something that can be known – known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent