There was G4PBX / 4582–4–3, like something dreamed! Real, but beyond belief, beyond even rejoicing.
As signals from the new station flashed back to Earth, it became more and more clear that the new planet’s resemblance to Earth was close. Not only was it stocked with innumerable varieties of life in the prodigal terrestrial manner — and in heartening contrast to previously discovered planets — more, it supported an intriguing cline of semi-intelligent and intelligent species. Among the intelligent species were a humanlike being and a horned being something resembling a rough-coated minotaur.
The signals eventually reached Charon, on the margins of the solar system, where androids fed the data to Earth, only five light-hours distant.
By the middle of the fifth millennium, Earth’s Modern Ages were in slow decline. The Age of Apperception was a memory. For all but a few meritocrats in positions of power, galactic exploration had become an abstraction, another burden inflicted by bureaucracy. G4PBX / 4582–4–3 changed all that. Ceasing to feature merely as a mysterious body among three sister planets, it took on colour and personality. It became Helliconia, the marvellous planet, the world beyond the veils of darkness where life was.
Helliconia’s suns took on symbolic significance. Mystics remarked on the way in which Freyr-Batalix seemed to represent those divisions of the human psyche celebrated in Asian legend long ago:
Two birds always together in the peach tree:
One eats the fruit, the other watches it.
One bird’s our individual Self, tasting all the world’s gifts:
The other the universal Self, witnessing all and wondering.
How avidly the first prints of human and phagors, struggling out of a snowbound world, were studied! Inexplicable thankfulness filled human hearts. A link with other intelligent life had been forged at last.
By the time the Avernus was built and established in orbit about Helliconia, by the time it was stocked with the humans reared by surrogate mothers on the colonising ship, the sphere of terrestrial-directed space activity was contracting. The inhabited planets of the solar system were moving towards a centralised form of government, later to evolve into COSA, the Co-System Assemblage; their own byzantine affairs occupied them. Distant colonies were left to fend for themselves, marooned here and there on semi-habitable worlds like so many Crusoes on desert islands.
Earth and its neighbouring planets were by this time storehouses of undigested information. While the materials brought back to Earth had been processed, the knowledge had not been absorbed. The enmities which had existed since tribal days, rivalries founded on fear and a lust for possession, remained dormant. The dwindling of space squeezed them into new prominence.
By the year 4901 A.D., all Earth was managed by the one company, COSA. Judicial systems had yielded to profit and loss accounts. Through one chain of command or another, COSA owned every building, every industry, every service, every plant, and the hide of every human on the planet — even those humans who opposed it. Capitalism had reached its glorious apogee. It made a small percentage on every lungful of oxygen breathed. And it paid out its stockholders in carbon dioxide.
On Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter, human beings were more free — free to found their own petty nations and ruin their own lives their own way. But they formed a sort of second-class citizenry of the solar system. Everything they acquired — and acquisition still played a major part in their lives — they paid for to COSA.
It was in 4901 that this burden became too great, and in 4901 that a statesman on Earth made the mistake of using the old derogatory term ‘immigrants’ about the inhabitants of Mars. And so it was in 4901 that nuclear war broke out among the planets — the War over a Word, as it was called.
Although records of those pre-apocalypse times are scarce, we do know that populations then regarded themselves as too civilised to begin such a war. They had a dread that some lunatic might press a button. In fact the buttons were pressed by sane men, responding to a well-rehearsed chain of command. The fear of total destruction had always been there. Nuclear weapons, once invented, cannot be disinvented. And such are the laws of enantiodromia that the fear became the wish, and missiles sped to targets, and people burned like candles, and silos and cities erupted in an unexpungeable fire.
It was a war between the worlds, as had been predicted. Mars was silenced for ever. The other planets struck back with only a fraction of their total firepower (and so were destroyed). Earth was hit by no more than twelve 10,000-megaton bombs. It was enough.
A great cloud rose above the capital of La Cosa. Dust which comprised fragments of soot, grains of buildings, flakes of bodies, vegetable and mineral, rose to the stratosphere. A hurricane of heat rolled across the continents. Forests, mountains, were consumed by its breath. When the initial fires died, when much of the radioactivity sank to the despoiled ground, the cloud remained.
The cloud was death. It covered all of the northern hemisphere. The sunlight was blotted from the ground. Photosynthesis, the basis of all life, could no longer take place. Everything froze. Plants died, trees died. Even the grass died. The survivors of the strike found themselves straggling through a landscape which came more and more to resemble Greenland. Land temperatures fell rapidly to minus thirty degrees. Nuclear winter had come.
The oceans did not freeze. But the cold, the dirt in the upper atmosphere, spread like discharge over a sheet, poisoning the southern hemisphere as well as the northern. Cold gripped even the favoured lands of the equator. Dark and chill reigned on Earth. It seemed that the cloud was to be mankind’s last creative act.
Helliconia was celebrated for its long winters. But those winters were of natural occurrence: not nature’s death, but its sleep, from which the planet would reliably arouse itself. The nuclear winter held no promise of spring.
The filthy aftermath of the war merged indistinguishably with another kind of winter. Snow fell on hills which the so-called summer did not disperse; next winter, more snow fell on what remained. The drifts deepened. They became permanent. One permanent bed linked with another. One frozen lake generated another. The ice reservoirs of the far north began to flow southward. The land took the colour of the sky. The Age of Ice returned.
Space travel was forgotten. For Earthmen, it had again become an adventure to travel a mile.
A spirit of adventure grew in the minds of those who sailed in the New Season. The brig left the harbour without incident, and soon was sailing westwards along the Sibornalese coast with a fresh northeasterly in her canvas. Captain Fashnalgid found that he was whistling a hornpipe.
Eedap Mun Odim coaxed his portly wife and three children on deck. They stood in a mute line, staring back at Koriantura. The weather had cleared. Freyr wreathed itself in fire low on the southern horizon, Batalix shone almost at zenith. The rigging made complex patterns of shadow on the deck and sails.
Odim excused himself politely, and went over to where Besi Besamitikahl stood alone in the stem. At first he thought she was seasick, until the movements of her head told him she was weeping. He put an arm around her.