Helliconia Summer

XVI The Man Who Mined a Glacier

Summer of the small year had yielded to autumn in the southern hemisphere. The monsoons were gathering along the coasts of Hespagorat.

While on the pleasant northern coast of the Sea of Eagles Queen MyrdemInggala swam in the blue waters with her dolphins, on the dull southern coast of that same sea, where it merged with the waters of the Scimitar Sea, the Avernian prize-winner, Billy Xiao Pin, lay dying.

The port of Lordryardry was sheltered from open sea by the Lordry islands, two dozen in number, some of which were used as whaling stations. On these islands, and along the low-lying coasts of Hespagorat, marine iguanas lived in dense colonies. Wattled, warted, armoured, these inoffensive beasts grew to twenty feet in length and were sometimes to be seen swimming out to sea. Billy had observed them as the Ice Captain’s Lordryardry Lady brought him to Dimariam.

Ashore, the beasts swarmed over rocks and marshes and each other. Something in their slothful movements and sudden scurries marked them out as conspirators with the soggy weather which closed in on the Dimariamian shores at this time of small year; where cold air flowed northwards from the polar ice cap to meet the warm air above the oceans, banks of fog formed, enveloping everything in humid overcast.

Lordryardry was a small port of eleven thousand people. It owed its existence almost entirely to the enterprise of the Muntras family. One of its noteworthy features was that it lay at a latitude of 36.5° South, a degree and a half outside the wide tropical zone. Only eighteen and a half degrees farther south lay the polar circle. Beyond that circle, in the realms of eternal ice, Freyr was never to be seen during the long centuries of summer. In the Great Winter, Freyr would reappear, to remain for many lifetimes dominating the vacant world of the pole.

This Billy was told as he was driven by a traditional sledge from the ship to the ice captain’s house. Krillio Muntras recounted such facts with pride, though he fell silent as his home drew near.

The room of the house to which Billy was carried was white. Its windows were framed with white curtains. As he lay locked in illness, Billy could look through trees, over town roofs, to a prospect of white mist. In that mist, an occasional mast loomed.

Billy knew he was shortly to embark on another mysterious journey. Before his ship sailed, he was tended by Muntras’s self-effacing wife, Eivi, and by his formidable married daughter, Immya. Immya, he was told, had a high standing in the community as a healer.

After a day’s rest, Eivi’s and Immya’s ministrations took effect, or else Billy enjoyed a remission. The encroaching stiffness partially left him. Immya wrapped him in blankets and helped him into the sledge. Four giant horned dogs, asokins, were harnessed up, and the family drove Billy inland to see the famous Lordryardry Glacier.

The Lordryardry Glacier had carved itself a bed between two hills. The leading face of the glacier fell into a lake which drained into the sea.

Billy observed that Krillio Muntras’s manner changed subtly in the presence of his daughter. They were affectionate together, but the respect he showed Immya was not entirely matched by the respect in which she held him—so Billy judged, going less by the way they spoke than by the way Muntras held his backbone and drew in his broad stomach in Immya’s presence, as if he felt he must contain himself when her sharp eyes were on him.

Muntras began to describe the workings at the glacier face. When Immya modestly prompted him on the number of men working there, he asked her without rancour to give the account herself. Which she did. Div stood behind his father and his sister, scowling; though he, as the son, was to inherit the ice company, he had nothing to contribute to the narrative, and soon slunk off.

Immya was not only the chief medical practitioner of Lordryardry; she was married to the chief lawyer of the town the Muntras clan had founded. Her husband, referred to always as Lawyer in Billy’s presence, as if that had been his baptismal name, stood as the spokesman and justice of the town against the capital, Oiishat. Oiishat lay to the west, on the frontier between Dimariam and Iskahandi. Oiishat cast envious eyes on the prosperous new Lordryardry, and devised ways of securing some of its wealth by taxation—schemes which Lawyer constantly foiled.

Lawyer also foiled Muntras’s local laws, which had been improvised to benefit the Muntras family rather than their workers. So Krillio was of two minds about his son-in-law.

Krillio’s wife evidently felt differently. She would hear no complaint about her daughter or the Lawyer. Though submissive, she was impatient with Div, whose behaviour—adversely affected by his mother’s dislike—became loutish in the home. “You should reconsider,” she told Muntras one day, when they were both standing by Billy’s bedside, after another example of Div’s awfulness. “Hand over the company to Immya and Lawyer, and then everything will prosper. Under Div, it will be in ruin within three years. That girl has a proper grasp of things.”

Certainly, Immya had a grasp of things Hespagoratean. She had never ventured beyond the confines of the continent on which she was born, despite frequent opportunities to do so, as if she preferred to have her front doorstep guarded by the myriad scaley watchdogs which patrolled the shores of Dimariam. But locked in her broad bosom were metaphorical maps, histories, and compass bearings of the southern continent.

Immya Muntras had a good plain square face built like her father’s, a face capable of confronting glaciers. She stood foursquare to the ice face as she delivered her account of the family trade, in which she took great pride.

At this spot, they were far enough inland to be free of the coastal fog. The great wall of ice to which Muntras owed his wealth glittered in the sun. Where the glacier lay more distant, Batalix created in its hollows caverns of sapphire. Even its reflection in the lake at its foot gave off diamond glints.

The air was hard, fresh, and alive. Birds skimmed over the lake surface. Where the pure waters yielded to banks of blue flowers, insects were busy in their thousands.

A butterfly with a head shaped like a man’s thumb settled on the three-faced watch on Billy’s wrist. He stared at it with uncertain gaze, trying to interpret the meaning of the creature.

Things roared overhead, he knew not what. He could hardly look up. The virus was in his hypothalamus, in his brain stem. It would, multiply irresistibly; no poultice could check it. Soon he would be locked immobile, like a phagor ancestor in tether.

He felt no regret. Regret only for the butterfly, leaving his hand and making off. In order to live a real life, of a kind his Advisor would not understand, sacrifices were called for. He had glimpsed the queen of queens. He had lain with beautiful Abathy. Even now, incapacitated, he could see distant bays of glacier where the light, conjuring powder- and thunder-blues, made of the ice more a colour than a substance. The excellence of nature had been tasted. Of course it had a price.

And Immya was explaining about the great blocks of ice which rattled overhead. At the ice face, men worked on scaffolding, cleaving the ice with saws and axes. They were Lordryardry’s glacier miners. As the blocks fell off, they fell into an open funnel, and from there slipped into the shoot. The shoot, timber-built, was constructed with sufficient slope to keep the blocks of ice moving.

Great tombstones of ice travelled slowly down the shoot, which rumbled in every section as they passed over its stressed wooden legs. The tombstones made their way along two miles of shoot to the docks of Lordryardry.

At the docks, the tombstones were sawn into smaller blocks, and loaded into the reed-insulated hulls of the ships of the company’s fleet.

So the snows which had once fallen in the polar regions south of 55°, to be compressed and squeezed sluggishly down into the narrow temperate zone, were made to serve the useful purpose of cooling those who lived in far tropics. Here was where nature stopped and Captain Krillio Muntras took over.

“Please take me home,” Billy said.

Immya’s ready flow of figures ceased. Her tale of tonnages, the length of various voyages, the demand-related costings upon which their little empire was founded; these stopped. She sighed and said something to her father, but a fresh ice-load rumbling overhead erased her words. Then the lines of her face relaxed and she smiled.

“We’d better take Billy home,” she said.

“I saw it,” he said indistinctly. “I saw it.”

And when almost half a Great Year had passed, when Helliconia and its sister planets had journeyed far from Freyr and were once again facing the slow furies of another winter, Billy’s huddled form in the old wooden sledge was seen by millions of people on distant Earth.

Billy’s presence on Helliconia represented an infringement of terrestrial orders. Those orders had stated that no human being was to land on Helliconia and disrupt the web of its cultures.

Those orders had been formulated over three thousand years earlier. In terms of cultural history, three thousand years was a long period of time. Since then, understanding had deepened—thanks largely to an intensive study of Helliconia undertaken by most of the population. There was a much better grasp of the unity—and therefore the strength—of planetary biospheres.

Billy had entered the planetary biosphere and had become part of it. The terrestrials saw no conflict. Billy’s elements comprised the atoms of dead star matter no different from the elements comprising Muntras or MyrdemInggala. His death would represent a final union with the planet, a merging without dissolution. Billy was mortal. The atoms of which he was constituted were indestructible.

There would be a measured sorrow for the winking out of another human consciousness, for the loss of another identity, unique, irreplaceable; but that was hardly a cause for tears on Earth.

The tears were shed long before that on the Avernus. Billy was their drama, their proof that existence existed, that they themselves had the ancient power of biological organisms to be moved in response to the environment. Tears and cheers were the order of the day.

The Pin family, in particular, abandoned their usual passivity and threw a small family storm. Rose Yi Pin, by turns laughing and howling, was the centre of passionate attention. She had a marvellous time. The Advisor was mortified.

The fresh air visited Billy’s body and bathed his lungs. It allowed him to see every detail of the flashing world. But its vividness, its sounds, were too much. He shut his eyes. When he managed to open them again, the asokins were moving briskly, the sledge bumped, and coastal pallors had begun to veil the view.

To compensate for earlier humiliations, Div Muntras insisted on driving the sledge. He threw the reins over his right shoulder, gripping them under his left arm while clutching the sledge handle with his left hand. In his right hand he flourished a whip, which he cracked above the asokins.

“Go steady, Div, lad,” Muntras growled.

As he spoke, the sledge struck a hummock of coarse grass and overturned. They were travelling under the shoot, where the ground was marshy. Muntras landed on his hands and knees. He snatched up the reins, looking blackly at his son but saying nothing. Immya, forming her mouth into the shape of a stretcher, straightened the sledge and lifted Billy back into it. Her silence was more expressive than words.

“It wasn’t my fault,” said Div, pretending to have hurt his wrist. His father took up the reins and silently motioned his son round to the back runners. They then proceeded at a sedate pace home.

The rambling Muntras house was built on one floor only. That floor was on many levels connected by steps or short flights of stairs, owing to the rocky terrain. Beyond the room in which Muntras and Immya placed Billy was the courtyard in which Muntras paid his workers every tenner.

The courtyard was ornamented with smooth boulders, carved from polar mountains which no human had ever seen and delivered to the coast via the glaciers. Compressed into the striations of each stone was a past chthonic history everyone in Lordryardry was too busy to decipher—though electronic eyes aboard the Avernus had done so. Beside each boulder grew tall trees whose trunks forked close to the ground. Billy could see these trees from his couch.

Muntras’s wife, Eivi, greeted them on their return and fussed round her husband, as now she fussed about Billy. He was glad when she left him alone in the bare wooden room, to stare out at the bare outlines of the trees. His eyesight became fixed. The slow madness crept on him, moving his limbs, twisting his arms outward until they stretched above his head as rigidly as the wooden branches outside.

Div entered the room. The lad came in cautiously, pushing the door shut behind him and moving quickly to Billy’s side. He stared down wide-eyed at Billy in his locked posture. The hand of Billy’s left arm was bent back on itself, so that the knuckles almost touched the forearm and his watch cut into his skin.

“I’ll take your watch off for you,” Div said. He unstrapped it clumsily and laid it on a table out of Billy’s line of sight.

“The trees,” Billy said, through gritted teeth.

“I want a word with you,” said Div threateningly, clenching his fists. “You remember on the Lordryardry Lady, that girl AbathVasidol? The Matrassyl girl?” he asked of Billy, sitting near him, speaking low, looking at the door as he did so. “That really beautiful girl with beautiful chestnut hair and big breasts?”

“The trees.”

“Yes, the trees—they’re apricot trees. Father distils his Exaggerator from the fruit of those trees. Billish, that girl Abathy, you remember her, Abathy?”

“They’re dying.”

“Billish, you’re dying. That’s why I want to talk to you. You remember how Father humiliated me with that girl? He gave her to you, Billish, rot you. That was his way of humiliating me, as he always tries to humiliate me. You understand? Where did my father take Abathy, Billish? If you know, tell me. Tell me, Billish. I never did you any harm.”

His elbow joints creaked. “Abathy. Summer ripeness.”

“I won’t hold it against you because you’re foreign rubbish. Now listen. I want to know where Abathy is. I love her. I shouldn’t have come back here, should I? Being humiliated by my father and that sister of mine. She’ll never let me take over the company. Billish, listen, I’m leaving. I can make it on my own—I’m no fool. Find Abathy, start my own trade. I’m asking you, Billish—where did Father take her? Quick, man, before they come.”

“Yes.” The stark gesturing trees at the window were trying to spell out a name. “Deuteroscopist.”

Div leant forward, grasping Billy’s knotted shoulders. “CaraBansity? He took Abathy to CaraBansity?”

From the dying man came a whispered affirmative. Div let him fall back as if he were a plank of wood. He stood flicking his fingers, muttering to himself. Hearing a sound in the passage, he ran to the window. He balanced his bulk momentarily on the sill. Then he jumped out and was gone.

Eivi Muntras returned. She fed Billy with fragments of a delicate white meat from a bowl. She forced and coaxed; he ate ravenously. In the world of the sick, Eivi was perfectly in command. She bathed his face and brow with a sponge. She drew a gauze curtain over the window to cut down the light. Through the gauze, the trees became ghost trees.

“I’m hungry,” he said, when all the food was gone.

“I’ll bring you some more iguana soon, dear. You liked it, didn’t you? I cooked it in milk especially.”

Tm hungry,” he screamed.

She left, looking distressed. He heard her talking to other people. His neck contorted, cords standing out on it as his hearing paid out like a harpoon to fix on what was said. The words made no sense to him. He was lying upside down, so that the sentences entered his ear the wrong way up. When he flipped himself over, everything was perfectly audible.

Immya’s voice said, in impartial tones, “Mother, you are being silly. These homemade nostrums cannot cure Billish. He has a rare disease which we scarcely know of except in history books. It is either bone fever or the fat death. His symptoms are unclear, possibly because he conies from that other world as he claims, and therefore his cellular composition may differ in some way from ours.”

“I don’t know about that, Immya dear. I just think that a little more meat would be good for him. Perhaps he’d like a gwing-gwing…”

“He may go into a state of bulimia, coupled with an overactive disposition. Those would be symptomatic of fat death. In that case, we would have to tie him down to the bed.”

“Surely that won’t be necessary, dear? He’s so gentle.”

“It is not a case of his disposition, Mother, but of the disposition of his disease.” That was a male voice, charged with half-concealed contempt, as if a practical point were being explained to a child. It belonged to Immya’s husband, Lawyer.

“Well, I don’t know about that, I’m sure. I just hope it isn’t catching.”

“We don’t believe that either fat death or bone fever is infectious at this time of the Great Year,” said Immya’s voice. “We think Billish must have been with phagors, with whom these illnesses are generally associated.”

There was more of the kind, and then Immya and Lawyer were in the room, gazing down at Billy.

“You may recover,” she said, bending slightly at the waist to deliver her words and releasing them one by one. “We shall take care of you. We may have to tie you down if you get violent.”

“Dying. Inevitable.” With a great effort, he pretended not to be a tree and said, “Bone fever and fat death—I can explain. Just one virus. Germ. Different effects. According to time. Of Great Year. True.”

Further effort was beyond him. The rigors set in. Yet for a moment he had it all in mind. Although it had not been his subject, the helico virus was a legend on the Avernus, though a dying one, confined to video-texts, since its last outbreak in pandemic form had occurred several lifetimes before those now alive on the station. Those who now looked down helplessly on him from above were witnessing an old story brought back into currency only as the conclusion to every Helliconia Holiday.

The visitations of the virus caused immense suffering but were fortunately confined to two periods in the Great Year: six local centuries after the coldest time of that year, when planetary conditions were improving, and in the late autumn, after the long period of heat into which Helliconia had now entered. In the first period, the virus manifested itself as bone fever; in the second, as fat death. Almost no one escaped these scourges. The mortality rate of each approached fifty percent. Those who survived became, respectively, fifty percent lighter or fifty percent heavier in body weight, and thus were better equipped to face the hotter and colder seasons.

The virus was the mechanism by which human metabolisms adjusted to enormous climatic changes. Billy was being changed.

Immya was silent, standing by Billy’s bedside. She folded her arms over her grand bosom.

“I don’t understand you. How do you know such things? You’re no god, or you would not be ill…”

Even the sound of voices drove him deeper into the entrails of a tree. He managed again. “One disease. Two… opposed systems. You as doctor understand.”

She understood. She sat down again. “If it were so… and yet—why not? There are two botanies. Trees that flower and seed only once in 1825 small years, other trees that flower and seed every small year. Things that are divided yet united…”

She closed her mouth tightly as if afraid of releasing a secret, aware that she stood on the brink of something beyond her understanding. The case of the helico virus was not exactly similar to that of Helliconia’s binary botanies. Yet Immya was correct in her observations on the divergent habits of plant life. At the time of Batalix’s capture by Freyr, some eight million years previously, Batalix’s planets had been bathed in radiation, leading to genetic divergences in multitudinous phyla. While some trees had remained flowering and fruiting as before—so that they attempted to produce seed 1825 times during the Great Year, whatever the climatic conditions—others had adapted a metabolism better geared towards the new regime, and propagated themselves only once in 1825 small years. Such were the rajabarals. The apricot trees outside Billy’s window had not adapted and were, as it happened, dying off in the unusual heat.

Something in the lines which formed about Immya’s mouth suggested she was attempting to chew over these weighty matters; but she switched instead to a contemplation of Billy’s remarks. Her intelligence told her that if the statement proved true, it would be of great importance—if not immediately, then a few centuries ahead, when, the scanty records suggested, fat death pandemics were due.

Thinking so far into the future was not a local habit. She gave him a nod and said, “I will think about it, Billish, and bring your perception before our medical society when next we meet. If we understand the true nature of this malady, perhaps we can find a cure.”

“No. Disease essential for survival…” He could see that she would never accept and he could never explain his point. He compromised by forcing out, “I told your father.”

The remark deflected her interest from medical questions. She stared away from him, swathing herself in silence, seeming to shrink into herself. When she spoke again, her voice was deeper and harsher, as if she too had to communicate from within an imprisonment.

“What else did you do with my father? In Borlien. Was he drunk? I want to know—did he have a young woman on the boat from Matrassyl? Did he have carnal knowledge of her? You must tell me.” She leaned over him, to grasp him as her brother had done. “He’s drinking now. There was a woman, wasn’t there? I ask you for my mother’s sake.”

The intensity with which these words were spoken frightened Billy; he strove to sink deeper into the tree, to feel the rough bark gripping his eddre. Bubbles came from his mouth.

She shook him. “Did he have carnal knowledge? Tell me. Die if you will, but tell me.”

He tried to nod.

Something in his distorted expression confirmed her guess. A look of vindictive satisfaction came on her face.

“Men! That’s how they take advantage of women. My poor mother has suffered from his debauchery for years, poor innocent thing. I found out years ago. It was an awful shock. We Dimariamians are respectable people, not like the inhabitants of the Savage Continent, which I hope never to have to visit…”

As her voice died, Billy attempted an inarticulate protest. It served to rekindle the fire of Immya’s animosity. “And what about the poor innocent girl involved? And her innocent mother? I long ago made that brother of mine, the bane of my life, confess to me everything my father does… Men are pigs, ruled by lust, unable to keep faith…”

“The girl.” But Abathy’s name became entangled with the knots in his larynx.

Gloaming enveloped Lordryardry. Freyr sank to the west. Bird songs became fewer. Batalix took up a position low on the horizon, where it could glare across the water at the scaley things piled on the shore. Mists thickened, obscuring the stars and the Night Worm.

Eivi Muntras brought Billy some soup before she retired to bed. As he drank, terrible hungers rose from his very eddre. His immobility was overcome, he sprang at Eivi, bit her shoulder and tore flesh from it. He ran about the room screaming. This was the bulimia associated with the late stages of fat death. Other members of the family came running, slaves brought lights. Billy was cursed and cuffed and strapped down to his bed.

For an hour he was left, while the sound of ministrations came from the other end of the house. He endured visions of eating Eivi whole, of sucking her brains. He wept. He imagined that he was back on the Avernus. He imagined he was eating Rose Yi Pin. He wept again. His tears fell like leaves.

Boards creaked in the corridor. A dim lamp appeared, behind it a man’s face floating as if on a stream of darkness. The Ice Captain, breathing heavily. Fumes of Exaggerator entered the room with him.

“Are you all right? I’d have to throw you out if you weren’t dying, Billish.” He steadied himself, breathing heavily. “I’m sorry it’s come to this… I know you’re some kind of angel from a better world, Billish, even when you bite like a devil. A man’s got to believe there’s a better world somewhere. Better than this one, where no one cares about you. Avernus… I would take you back there, if I could. I’d like to see it.”

Billy was back in his tree, his limbs part and parcel of its agonized branches.

“Better.”

“That’s right, better. I’m going to sit in the courtyard, Billish, just outside your window. Have a drink. Think about things. It’ll soon enough be time to pay the men. If you want me, just give a call.”

He was sorry that Billish was dying, and the Exaggerator made him sorry for himself. It was puzzling the way he always felt more comfortable with strangers, even with the queen of queens, than he did with his own family. With them he was constantly at a disadvantage.

He settled himself down outside the window, placing a jug and glass on the bench beside him. In the milky light, the stones resembled sleeping animals. The albic climbing the walls of the house opened its blooms, the blooms opened their beaks like parrots; a tranquil scent floated on the air.

After his plan to bring Billish here in secrecy had succeeded, he found himself unable to proceed further. He wanted to tell everyone that there was more to life than they knew, that Billish was a living example of that truth. It was not just that Billish was dying; Muntras suspected, somewhere in a cold corner of his being, that there might be less to life than he knew. He wished he had remained a wanderer. Now he was back home for good…

After a while, sighing, the Ice Captain pulled himself to his feet and peered through the open window. “Billish, are you awake? Have you seen Div?”

A gurgle in response.

“Poor lad, he’s not really fit for the job, that’s the truth…” He sat down again on the bench, groaning. He took up his glass and drank. Too bad Billish didn’t like Exaggerator.

The milky light thickened. Dusk-moths purred among the albic. In the sleeping house at his back boards creaked.

“There must be a better world somewhere…’Muntras said, and fell asleep with an unlit veronikane between his lips.

The sound of voices. Muntras roused. He saw his men gathering in the court to be paid. It was daylight. Dead calm prevailed.

Muntras stood and stretched. He looked in through the window at Billish’s contorted form, motionless on the couch.

“This is assatassi day, Billish—I’d forgotten, with you here. The monsoon high tide. You ought to see this. It’s quite a local event. There’ll be celebrations tonight, and no half measures.”

From the couch came a single word, forced from a locked jaw. “Celebrations.”

The workmen were rough, dressed in rough overalls. They cast their gaze down on the worn paving stones in case their master took offence at being discovered asleep. But that was not Muntras’s way.

“Come on, men. I’ll not be paying you out much longer. It’ll be Master Div’s turn. Let’s get it over with promptly, and then we’ll prepare for the festivities. Where’s my pay clerk?”

A small man with a high collar and hair brushed in the opposite direction to anyone else’s came darting forward. He had a ledger under his arm and was followed by a stallun carrying a safe. The clerk made a great business of pushing through the workers. This he did with his eyes constantly on his employer and his lips working as if he was already calculating what each man should be paid. His arrival caused the men to shuffle into a line to await their modest remuneration. In the unusual light, their features were without animation.

“You lot are going to collect your wages, and then you’re going to hand it over to your wives or get drunk as usual,” Muntras said. He addressed the men near him, among whom he saw only common-hire labourers and none of his master craftsmen. But at once a mixture of indignation and pity seized him and he spoke louder, so that all could hear. “Your lives are going by. Here you’re stuck. You’ve been nowhere. You know of the legends of Pegovin, but have you ever been there? Who’s been there? Who’s been to Pegovin?”

They leaned back against the rounded stones, muttering.

“I’ve been all over the world, I’ve seen it all. I’ve been to Uskutoshk, I’ve visited the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar. I’ve seen old ruined cities and sold junk in the bazaars of Pannoval and Oldorando. I’ve spoken with kings and queens as fair as flowers. It’s all out there, waiting for the man who dares. Friends everywhere. Men and women. It’s wonderful. I’ve loved every minute of it.

“It’s bigger than you can ever imagine, stuck here at Lordryardry. This last voyage, I met a man who came from another world. There’s more than just this world, Helliconia. There’s another circling around us, Avernus. And others beyond that, worlds to be visited. Earth, for instance.”

All the while he was speaking, the little clerk was laying out his effects on a table under one of the barren apricot trees and removing the key to the safe from an inner pocket. And the phagor was setting the safe down just where needed and flicking an ear as it did so. And the men were shuffling forward to the edge of the table and making their line more definite by moving closer to each other. And other men were coming up, directing suspicious looks at their boss, and joining the rear of the line. And the comfortable seriality of the world was being maintained under the purple clouds.

“I tell you there are other worlds. Use your imagination.” Muntras struck the table. “Don’t you feel the wanderlust occasionally? I did when I was a young ’un, I tell you. Inside my house even now I have a young man from one of these other worlds. He’s ill or he’d come out and speak to you. He can tell you miraculous things that happen lifetimes away.”

“Does he drink Exaggerator?”

The voice came from within the ranks of the waiting men. It stopped Muntras in full burst. He paced up and down the line, red of face. Not an eye met his.

“I’ll prove what I’m saying,” Muntras shouted. “You’ll have to believe me then.”

He turned and stamped into the house. Only the clerk showed some impatience, drumming his little fingers on the plank table, staring about, pulling his sharp nose, and looking up at the heavy sky.

Muntras ran in to where Billy was, terribly distorted, without motion. He seized Billy’s petrified wrist, only to find that the watch had gone.

“Billish,” he said. He went over to the invalid, looked down at him, called his name more gently. He felt the cold skin, tested the twisted flesh.

“Billish,” he said again, but now it was merely a statement. He knew that Billish was dead—and he knew who had stolen the watch, that three-faced timepiece which JandolAnganol had once held. There was only one person who would do such a thing.

“You’ll never miss your timepiece now, Billy,” Muntras said aloud.

He covered his face with a slab of hand and uttered something between a prayer and a curse.

For a moment more, the Ice Captain stood in the room, looking up at the ceiling with his mouth open. Then, recalling his duties, he walked over to the window and gave his clerk a sign to start paying out the men’s wages.

His wife entered the. room with Immya, her shoulder bandaged.

“Our Billish is dead,” he said flatly.

“Oh dear, and on assatassi day, too…” Eivi said. “You can hardly expect me to be sorry.”

“I’ll see his body is conveyed to the ice cellar, and we will bury him tomorrow, after the feast,” Immya said, moving over to observe the contorted body. “He told me something before he died which could be a contribution to medical science.”

“You’re a capable girl, you look after him,” Muntras said. “As you say, we can bury him tomorrow. A proper funeral. Meanwhile, I’ll go and look to the nets. As a matter of fact, I feel miserable, as if anyone cares.”

Taking no heed of the jabbering women who were stringing up lines of net on poles, the Ice Captain walked along the water’s edge. He wore high thick boots and kept his hands in his pockets. Occasionally, one of the black iguanas would jump up against him like an importuning dog. Muntras would knee it down again without interest. The iguanas wallowed among thick brown ropes of kelp which swirled in the shallow water, sometimes kicking to get free of the coils. In places, they were banked on top of each other, indifferent to how they lay.

To add to the melancholy abandonment of their postures, the iguanas were commensal with a hairy twelve-legged crab, which scurried in its millions among the forms which kept watch on the breakers. The crabs devoured any fragment of food—seal or seaweed—dropped by the reptiles; nor were they averse to devouring infant iguanas. The characteristic noise of the Dimariamian seashore was a crunch and scrabble of armoured legs against scales; the ritual of their lives was playing out against this clamour, which was as endless as the sound of the waves.

The ice captain took no notice of these saturnine occupants of the shore, but stared out to sea, beyond Lordry, the whaling island. He had checked at the harbour and been told that a light sailing dinghy had been stolen overnight.

So his son was gone, taking the magic watch, either as talisman or for trade. Had sailed away, without so much as a good-bye.

“Why did you do it?” Muntras asked half aloud, staring over the purple sea on which a dead calm prevailed. “For the usual reasons a man leaves home, I suppose. Either you couldn’t bear your family any longer, or you just wanted adventure—strange places, amazements, strange women. Well, good luck to you, lad. You’d never have made the world’s foremost ice trader, that’s certain. Let’s hope you aren’t reduced to selling stolen rings for a living…”

Some of the women, humble worker’s wives, were calling to him to come behind the nets before high tide. He gave them a salute and trudged away from the milling iguana bodies.

Immya and Lawyer would have to take over the company. Not his favourite people, but they’d probably run the whole concern better than he ever did. You had to face facts. It was no use growing bitter. Although he had never been comfortable with his daughter, he recognized that she was a good woman.

At least he’d stand by a friend and see that BillishOwpin got a proper burial. Not that either Billish or he believed in any of the gods. But just for their own two sakes.

He trudged towards the safety of the nets, where the workmen stood.

“You were all right, Billish,” he muttered aloud. “You were nobody’s fool.”

The Avernus had company in its orbit about Helliconia. It moved among squadrons of auxiliary satellites. The main task of these auxiliaries was to observe sectors of the globe the Avernus itself was not observing. But it so happened that the Avernus, on its circumpolar orbit, was itself above Lordryardry and travelling north at the time of Billy’s funeral.

The funeral was a popular event. The fact is, human egos being frail, other people’s deaths are not entirely unpleasurable. Melancholy itself is among the more enjoyable of emotions. Almost everyone aboard the Avernus looked in: even Rose Yi Pin, although she watched the event from the bed of her new boyfriend.

Billy’s Advisor, dry-eyed, gave a homily in one hundred measured words on the virtues of submission to one’s lot. The epitaph served also as an epitaph to the protest movements. With some relief, they forgot difficult thoughts of reform and returned to their administrative duties. One of them wrote a sad song about Billy, buried away from his family.

There were now a good many Avernians buried on Helliconia, all winners of Helliconia Holidays. A question often asked aboard the Earth Observation Station was, How did this affect the mass of the planet?

On Earth, where the funeral of Billy provoked less interest, the event was seen more detachedly. Every living being is created from dead star-matter. Every living being must make its solitary journey upward from the molecular level towards the autonomy of birth, a journey which in the case of humans takes three-quarters of a year. The complex degree of organization involved in being a higher life-form cannot be forever sustained. Eventually, there is a return to the inorganic. Chemical bonds dissolve.

That had happened in Billy’s case. All that was immortal about him was the atoms from which he was assembled. They endured. And there was nothing strange about a man of terrestrial stock being buried on a planet a thousand light-years away. Earth and Helliconia were near neighbours, composed of the same debris from the same long defunct stars.

In one detail that correct man, Billy’s Advisor, was incorrect. He spoke of Billy going to his long rest. But the entire organic drama of which mankind formed a part was pitched within the great continuing explosion of the universe. From a cosmic viewpoint, there was no rest anywhere, no stability, only the ceaseless activity of particles and energies.