He stood up, trembling, forgetting the insignificant creatures at his feet.
He looked up at the thick clouds in the sky. Had someone spoken?
If there was an Akhanaba, then he must surrender his will to the god. Whatever the All-Powerful decreed must be done. Even murder was justified, if the end was Akhanaba’s.
At least he believed in the original beholder, that mother figure who saw to the earth and all its works. That misty figure, identified with the world itself, took precedence over Akhanaba.
The days went by, and the suns travelled across them, scorching him. He was lost to the wilderness, hardly knowing he was lost, speaking to no one, seeing no one. There were nondads about, evasive as thought, but he had no business with them. He was listening to the voice of Akhanaba, or the beholder.
As he wandered, a forest fire overtook him. He plunged in a brook full-length, watching the roaring machine of conflagration rush up one slope of a hill and down the other, exhaling energy. In the furnace of its flames he saw the face of a god; the smoke trailing out behind was the god’s beard and hair, grey with cosmic wisdom. Like his father, the vision in its passage left destruction behind it. He lay with half his face in the water and both eyes staring, one under water, one above, seeing two universes lit by the visitant. When the visitant had gone by, he rose, going up the hill as if drawn in the wake of the monster, to stagger among smouldering bushes.
The fire god had left a trail of black. He would see it ahead, still pursuing its course like a whirlwind of vengeance.
Prince RobaydayAnganol began to run, laughing as he went. He was convinced that his father was too powerful to kill. But there were those near him who could be killed, whose deaths would lessen him.
The thought roared into his mind like fire, and he recognized it for the voice of the All-Powerful. No longer did he feel pain; he had become anonymous, like a true Madi.
Caught up in the uct of his own life, RobaydayAnganol saw the stars wheel over his head every night. He saw as he fell asleep YarapRombry’s Comet blazing in the north. He saw the fleet star Kaidaw pass overhead.
Robayday’s keen eyes picked out the phases of Kaidaw when it was at zenith. But it moved rapidly, traversing the sky from south to north. As he watched it hurl itself towards the horizon, it was no longer possible to distinguish the Kaidaw’s disc; it sank to a pinpoint of bright light and then disappeared.
To its inhabitants the Kaidaw was known as the Avernus, Earth Observation Station Avernus. During this period, it was home for some six thousand inhabitants, men, women, children, androids. The human beings were divided into six scholarly families or clans. Each clan studied some aspect of the planet below, or of its sister planets. The information they gathered was signalled back to Earth.
The four planets which circled about the G-class star known as Batalix comprised the great discovery of Earth’s interstellar age. Interstellar exploration—“conquest’, as the peoples of that arrogant age called it—was conducted at enormous expense. The expense became so ruinous that interstellar flight was eventually abandoned.
Yet it yielded a transformation in the human spirit. A more integrated approach to life meant that people no longer sought to exact more than their fair share from a global production system now much better understood and controlled. Indeed, interpersonal relationships took on a kind of sanctity, once it was realized that, of a million planets within reasonable distance from Earth, not one could sustain human life or match the miraculous diversity of Earth itself.
With emptiness the universe was prodigal beyond belief. With organic life, it was niggardly. As much as anything, it was the scale of desolation of the universe which caused mankind to turn with abhorrence from interstellar flight. By then, however, the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system had been discovered.
“God built Earth in seven days. He spent the rest of his life doing nothing. Only in his old age did he stir himself and create Helliconia.” So said one terrestrial wag.
So the planets of the Freyr-Batalix system were of prime importance to the spiritual existence of Earth. And of those planets, Helliconia was paramount.
Helliconia was not unlike Earth. Other human beings lived there, breathed air, suffered, enjoyed and died. The ontological systems of both planets were parallel.
Helliconia was a thousand light-years from Earth. To travel from one world to the other in the most technologically advanced starship took over fifteen hundred years. Human mortality was too frail to sustain such a journey.
Yet a deep need in the human spirit, a wish to identify with something beyond itself, sought to sustain a bond between Earth and Helliconia. Despite all the difficulties imposed by the enormous gulfs of space and time, a permanent watch post was built in orbit about Helliconia, the Earth Observation Station. Its duty was to study Helliconia and send back its findings to Earth.
So began a long one-sided involvement. That involvement exercised one of mankind’s most attractive gifts, the power of empathy. Ordinary terrestrials turned every day—or would turn long hence—to learn how their friends and heroes fared on the surface of the remote planet. They feared phagors. They watched developments at the court of JandolAnganol. They wrote in the Olonets script; many people spoke one or other of the languages. To some extent, Helliconia had unwittingly colonised Earth.
This bond continued long after the end of Earth’s great interstellar age.
Indeed, Helliconia, prize of that age, was another cause of its decline. There it was, this world of splendour and terror, as beautiful as any dream—and to step on it was death for any human. Not immediate, but certain death.
Pervading the atmosphere of Helliconia were viruses which, through long processes of adaptation, were harmless to the natives. At least they were harmless throughout most of the Great Year. But to anyone from Earth, those unfilterable viruses formed a barrier like the sword of the angel who—in an ancient Earth myth—guarded the entrance to the Garden of Eden.
And to many people aboard the Avernus, a garden of Eden was what the planet below them resembled, at least when the slow cruel centuries of the winter of the Great Year had passed.
The Avernus had its parks, with streams and lakes, and a thousand ingenious electronic simulations with which to challenge its young men and women. But it remained an artificial world. Many aboard it felt that their lives remained artificial lives, without the zest of reality.
This sense of artificiality was particularly oppressive in the case of the Pin clan. For the Pin clan was in charge of cross-continuities. Their responsibility was mainly sociological.
The chief task of the Pin clan was to record the unfolding of the lives of one or two families through the generations throughout the 2592 Earth years of the Great Year and beyond. Such data, impossible to collect on Earth, was of great scientific value. It meant also that the Pin family built up an especially close identification with their subjects below.
That proximity was reenforced by the knowledge which shadowed all their days—the knowledge that Earth was irrecoverably far away. To be born on station was to be born into unremitting exile. The first law governing life on the Avernus was that there was no going home.