The three riders urged their mounts through a series of eroded buttes and round a shattered boulder the size of a house, where there were signs of past human habitation. In the distance, beyond where the land fell away, was the glint of the sea. Fashnalgid halted and took a drink from his flask. He offered it to Shokerandit, but the latter shook his head.
‘I’ve taken you on trust,’ he said. ‘But now that we have eluded your friends, you had better tell me what is on your mind. My job is to get word to the Oligarch as soon as possible.’
‘My job is to evade the Oligarch. Let me tell you that if you present yourself before him, you will probably be shot.’ He told Shokerandit of the reception being arranged for Asperamanka. Shokerandit shook his head.
‘The Oligarchy ordered us into Campannlat. If you believe that they would massacre us on our return, then you are plainly crazed.’
‘If the Oligarch thinks so little of an individual, he will think no more of an army.’
‘No sane man would wipe out one of his own armies.’
Fashnalgid started to gesticulate.
‘You are younger than I. You have less experience. Sane men do the most damage. Do you believe that you live in a world where men behave with reason? What is rationality? Isn’t it merely an expectation that others will behave as we do? You can’t have been long in the army if you believe the mentalities of all men are alike. Frankly, I think my friends mad. Some were driven mad by the army, some were so mad they were attracted to that area of idiocy, some simply have a natural talent for madness. I once heard Priest-Militant Asperamanka preach. He spoke with such force that I believe him to be a good man. There are good men… But most officers are more like me, I can tell you — reprobates that only madmen would follow.’
There was silence after this outburst, before Shokerandit said coldly, ‘I certainly would not trust Asperamanka. He was prepared to let his own men die.’
‘“Wisdom to madness quickly turns, If suffering is all one learns,”’ quoted Fashnalgid, adding, ‘An army carrying plague. The Oligarchy would be happy to be rid of it, now there’s little danger of an attack from Campannlat. Also, it suits Askitosh to get rid of the Bribahr contingent…’
As if there was nothing more to be said, Fashnalgid turned his back on the other two and took a long swig from his flask. As Batalix descended towards the strip of distant sea, clouds drew across the sky.
‘So what do you propose doing, if we are not to be trapped between armies?’ Toress Lahl asked boldly.
Fashnalgid pointed into the distance. ‘A boat is waiting across the marshes, lady, with a friend of mine in it. That’s where I’m going. You are free to come if you wish. If you believe my story, you’ll come.’
He swung himself up slowly into the saddle, strapped his collar under his chin, smoothed his moustache, and gave a nod of farewell. Then he kicked his beast into action. The yelk lowered its head and started to move down the rocky slope in the direction of the distant glimmering sea.
Luterin Shokerandit called after the disappearing figure, ‘And where’s that boat of yours bound for?’
The wind stirring the low bushes almost drowned the answer that came back.
‘Ultimately, Shivenink…’
The gaunt figure on its yelk moved down into a maze of marshes which fringed the sea; whereupon birds rose up under the shaggy hoofs of the animal as small amphibians disappeared underneath them. Things hopped in rain-pocked puddles. Everything that could move fled from the man’s path.
Captain Harbin Fashnalgid’s mood was too bleak for him even to question why mankind’s position should remain so isolated in the midst of all other life. Yet that very question — or rather a failure to perceive the correct answer to the problem it posed — had brought into existence a world which moved above the planet in a circumpolar orbit.
The world was an artificial one. Its designation was Earth Observation Station Avernus. Circling the planet 1500 kilometres above the surface, it could be seen from the ground as a bright star of swift passage, to which the inhabitants of the planet had given the name Kaidaw.
On the station, two families supervised the automatic recording of data from Helliconia as it passed below them. They also saw to it that that data — in all its richness, confusion, and overwhelming detail — was transmitted to the planet Earth, a thousand light-years distant. To this end, the EOS had been established. To this end, human beings from Earth had been born to populate it. The Avernus was at this time only a few Earth years short of its four thousandth birthday.
The Avernus was an embodiment, cast in the most advanced technology of its culture, of the failure to perceive the answer to that age-old problem of why mankind was divorced from its environment. It was the ultimate token in that long divorce. It represented nothing less than the peak of achievement of an age when man had tried to conquer space and to enslave nature while remaining himself a slave.
For this reason, the Avernus was dying.
Over the long centuries of its existence, the Avernus had gone through many crises. Its technology had not been at fault; far from it — the great hull of the station, which had a diameter of one thousand metres, was designed as a self-servicing entity, and small servomechanisms scuttled like parasites over its skin, replacing tiles and instruments as required. The servomechanisms moved swiftly, signalling to each other with asymmetrical arms, like crabs on an undiscovered germanium shore, communicating with each other in a language only the WORK computer which controlled them understood. In the course of forty centuries, the servomechanisms continued to serve. The crabs had proved untiring.
Squadrons of auxiliary satellites accompanied the Avernus through space, or dived off in all directions, like sparks from a fire. They crossed and recrossed in their orbits, some no bigger than an eyeball, others complex in shape and design, coming and going about their automatic business, the gathering of information. Their metaphorical throats were parched for an ever-flowing stream of data. When one of them malfunctioned, or was silenced by a passing speck of cosmic debris, a replacement floated free from the service hatches of the Avernus and took its place. Like the crabs, the sparklike satellites had proved untiring.
And inside the Avernus. Behind its smooth plastic partitioning lay the equivalent of an endomorphic skeleton or, to use a more suitably dynamic comparison, a nervous system. This nervous system was infinitely more complex than that of any human. It possessed the inorganic equivalent of its own brains, its own kidneys, lungs, bowels. It was to a large extent independent of the body it served. It resolved all problems connected with overheating, overcooling, condensation, microweather, wastes, lighting, intercommunication, illusionism, and hundreds of other factors designed to make life tolerable physiologically for the human beings on the ship. Like the crabs and the satellites, the nervous system had proved untiring.
The human race had tired. Every member of the eight families — later reduced to six, and now reduced to two — was dedicated, through whatever speciality he or she pursued, to one sole aim: to beam as much information about the planet Helliconia as possible back to distant Earth.
The goal was too rarefied, too abstract, too divorced from the bloodstream.
Gradually, the families had fallen victim to a sort of neurasthenia of the senses and had lost touch with reality. Earth, the living globe, had ceased to be. There was Earth the Obligation only, a weight on the consciousness, an anchor on the spirit.