Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [629]
He stared impatiently into her hypnotic eyes.
‘And this secret meeting – what is it about?’
‘I am playing the role of messenger, Luterin. You still remember the name of Toress Lahl, I suppose?’
XVII
Sunset
Trockern and Ermine were asleep. Shoyshal had gone somewhere. The geonaut they preceded had come to a halt, and stood gently breathing out its little white hexagonal offspring.
SartoriIrvrash woke and stretched, yawning as he did so. He sat up on his bunk and scratched his white head. It was his habit to sleep for the second half of the day, waking at midnight, thinking through the dark hours, when his spirit could commune with the travelling Earth, and teaching from dawn onwards. He was Trockern’s teacher. He had named himself after a dangerous old sage who once lived on Helliconia, whose gossie he had met empathically.
After a while, he heaved himself up and went outside. He stood for a long while looking at the stars, enjoying the feel of the night. Then he padded back into the room and roused Trockern.
‘I’m asleep,’ Trockern said.
‘I could hardly waken you if you weren’t.’
‘Zzzz.’
‘You stole something of mine, Trockern. You stole my explanation of why things went awry on Earth, in order to impress your ladies.’
‘As you see, I impressed fifty percent of them.’ Trockern indicated the peacefully sleeping Ermine, whose lips were pursed as if she was awaiting the chance to kiss someone in her midsummer dream.
‘Unfortunately you got my argument wrong. That possessiveness which was once such a feature of mankind was not a product of fear, as you claimed – although I believe you called it “perpetual unease”. It was a product of innate aggressiveness. The old races did not fear enough: otherwise they would never have built the weapons they knew would destroy them. Aggression was at the root of it all.’
‘Isn’t aggression born of fear?’
‘Don’t get sophisticated before you can walk. If you take Helliconia as an example, you can see how every generation ritualises its aggression and its killing. The earlier terrestrial generations you were talking about did not seek to possess only territory and one another, as you were claiming.’
‘In truth, SartoriIrvrash, you cannot have slept well this afternoon.’
‘In truth I sleep, as I wake in truth.’ He put an arm about the younger man’s shoulders. ‘The argument can be taken to greater heights. Those ancient people sought to possess the Earth also, to enslave it under concrete. Nor did their ambitions die there. Their politicians strove to make space their dominion; while the ordinary people created fantasies wherein they invaded the galaxy and ruled the universe. That was aggression, not fear.’
‘You could be right.’
‘Don’t abandon your point of view so easily. If I could be right I could be wrong. We ought to know the truth about our forebears who, wicked though they were, have given us our chance on the scene.’
Trockern climbed from his bunk. Ermine sighed and turned over, still sleeping.
‘It’s warm – let’s take a stroll outside,’ said SartoriIrvrash.
As they went out into the night, with the star field above them, Trockern said, ‘Do you think we improve ourselves, master, by rethinking?’
‘We shall always be as we are, biologically speaking, but we can improve our social infrastructures, with any luck. I mean by that the sort of work our extitutions are working on now – a revolutionary new integration of the major theorems of physical science with the sciences of mankind, society, and existence. Of course, our main function as biological beings is as part of the biosphere, and we are most useful in that role if we remain unaltered; only if the biosphere in some way altered again could our role change.’
‘But the biosphere is altering all the time. Summer is different from winter, even here so close to the tropics.’
SartoriIrvrash was