‘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.’
‘I’m 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 comes 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 Helliconian 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 contemplaion 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.