Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [645]
The burnt-out souls of the dead descend into an obsidian realm of entropy. In this realm, this negative of life, are stored two stages of psychic decay, gossies, the residues of the more recently deceased, and, further down the stack, fessups. Gossies are subject to febrile mood swings, from bitter recrimination to saccharine sweetness, perhaps related to climatic conditions. Fessups, increasingly less articulate, sink towards ultimate disintegration and the Original Boulder – as early understanding has the term.
[Later this term is understood as the Original Beholder. That is to say, Gaia, the presiding unconscious will of the biomass which maintains the difficult equilibrium of the planet.]
The living are able to commune with gossies if they enter a trancelike state resembling death known as pauk.
After physical death, phagors undergo a similar gradual diminution towards ultimate disintegration. This is called tether.
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCE
Male and female humans exhibit little sexual dimorphism. They undergo instead a dramatic weight / shape transformation before and after the Great Winter. This is in response to the diminished or increased energy reaching the planet. It amounts to an evolutionary survival strategy.
THE HELICO VIRUS
The agent of the weight / shape transformation is a pleomorphic helical virus, somewhat similar to a mumps pathogen. Its shell in the shape of an icosahedron consists of lipids and proteins, and contains nucleic acid RNA. It is 97 millimicrons long. The Avernus has not the means to filter out the virus. For this reason, Avernians are unable to visit in person the planet they orbit (except under unusual – and fatal – circumstances).
The helico virus is endemic twice in a Great Year, firstly approximately 600 E years after apastron. It then rages for many small years, coincidental with improving climatic conditions and increased solar energy. Its second appearance is during a decline into wintery conditions, some 1800 E years after apastron.
At its every visitation, the virus brings widespread death. It strikes at the hypothalamus, causing encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and delirium. Its manifestations at this stage resemble meningitis. Populations are usually reduced to about half. Survivors take on altered form, gaining (in autumn) fifty per cent of normal body weight, as fatty tissue is built up. This phase is marked by unquenchable bulimia: their own children, faeces, asokins – sufferers will seize on and eat anything living. The survivors of the spring epidemic shed a corresponding amount of weight, marked by anorexia and self-starvation.
Figure 4. Human form changes throughout Great Year shown in diagram
A Survivor of Fat Death towards Winter
B Median figure
C Survivor of Bone Fever in Spring
In the course of several generations, surviving populations shed the extremes of their thin or heavyweight forms, tending to return to a more average constitution. In so doing, they also lose immunity to the virus.
It will be seen that this terrible scourge has a positive aspect. It forms part of a natural process, ensuring human survival throughout the climatic changes wrought by cosmic upheaval.
In more primitive times, the two phases of the helico pandemic were not recognised as springing from one and the same cause. They were known (in autumn) as the Fat Death, and (in spring) as Bone Fever. By the period covered by Book 3 (‘Winter’), the doctor Toress Lahl has gained a clear understanding of Fat Death – and of its survival rate. A great chain of eclipses occurs at this period, making Bone Fever outbreaks even more terrifying. A total of twenty eclipses takes place between 630 and 658 E years AA.1
VIRUS CARRIER
The carrier of the helico virus is a species of arthropoda or tick. This vector transfers readily from phagors to humans. Phagors are immune to the virus. The human habit of using phagors as slaves or soldiers during the Great Summer and onwards ensures the survival of both tick and virus