In the morning, when they struggled in the dull, bitter air to fold the tent, Toress Lahl said secretly to Shokerandit, ‘How degraded you are and how I hate you! Last night, you biwacked with that bag of lard, Moub. I heard you. I felt the sledge tremble.’
‘I was being courteous to Uuundaamp. Pure courtesy. Not pleasure.’
He had discovered that the Ondod female was far gone with child.
‘No doubt your courtesy will be rewarded with a disease.’
Uuundaamp came up smiling with the two silver fox tails. ‘Carry these at teeth. Gumtaa. Keep off cold from face.’
‘Loobiss. Have you one for Fashnalgid?’
‘That man, he got tail grow along face,’ said Uuundaamp, indicating the captain’s moustache, and laughing merrily.
‘At least he means to be kind,’ Toress Lahl said, hesitatingly placing the tail between her teeth to protect her chapped nose and cheeks.
‘Uuundaamp is kind. And when we stop tonight you must be kind to him. Return his favour.’
‘Oh, no… Luterin… not that, please. I thought you had some feeling for me.’
He turned savagely on her. ‘I have some feeling for getting us safe to Kharnabhar. I know the conventions of these people and these journeys and you don’t. It’s a code, a matter of survival. Stop thinking you are so special.’
Bitterly hurt, she said, ‘So you don’t care, I suppose, that Fashnalgid rapes me whenever your back is turned.’
He dropped the tent and grasped her jacket.
‘Are you lying to me? When did he do it? Tell me when. Then and when else. How many times?’
He listened bleakly as she told him.
‘Very well, Toress Lahl.’ He spoke in no more than a whisper, his face hard. ‘He has broken the honour that existed between us as officers. We need him on this journey. But when we get to my father’s home, I shall kill him. You understand? For now, you say nothing.’
Without further words, they loaded up the sledge. Smrtaa — retribution. A prominent feature of life in these parts. Uuundaamp was harnessing up the dogs, and in a few minutes they were once more on their way through the mist, Shokerandit and Toress Lahl biting on their fox tails.
The unsleeping machines of the Avernus still recorded events below, and transmitted them automatically back to Earth. But the few humans surviving on the Observation Station took little interest in that primary function; their own primary function was to survive. Their numbers were so far down — lowered by disease as well as fighting — that defence became a less pressing need.
Much time was spent establishing tribes and tribal territory, to obviate pitched battles. In neutral territory between tribes, the obscene pudendolls survived, to become something sacrosanct, something between gods and demons.
Though a measure of ‘peace’ descended, the earlier destruction of food-synthesising plants meant that cannibalism was still prevalent. There was almost no meat but human meat. The heavy tabus against this practice fell with great force upon the delicately trained sensibilities of the Avernians. To descend to barbarism and worse within a generation was more than their psyches could easily endure.
The tribes became matriarchies, while many of the younger men, mainly adolescent, developed multiple personalities. As many as ten different personalities could house themselves in one body, differing in inclination, age, and sex, as well as habits. Ascetic vegetarians were common, living an eye’s blink away from stone age savages, tempestuous dancers from lawgivers.
The complex separation from nature undergone by the Avernian colonisers had now reached its limits. Not only did individuals not know each other: they were now strangers to themselves.
This adaptation to stress situations was not for everyone. When severe fighting first broke out, a number of technicians left the Avernus. They stole a craft from one of the Observation Station’s maintenance bays and fled. They landed on Aganip.
Tempting though the green, white, and blue planet of Helliconia looked, its danger was known to all. Aganip occupied a special place in the mythology of Avernus, for it was here, many centuries ago, that Earth’s colonising starship had established a base while the Avernus was being constructed.
Aganip was a lifeless planet, with an atmosphere consisting almost entirely of carbon dioxide, together with a little nitrogen. But the old base still stood, and offered something of a welcome.
The escapers built a small dome. There they lived in restricted circumstances. At first they sent out signals to Earth and then — being naturally unwilling to wait two thousand years for an answer — to the Avernus. But the Avernus had its own problems and did not reply.
The escapers had failed to understand the nature of mankind: that it, like the elephant and the common daisy, is no more and no less than a part and function of a living entity. Separated from that entity, humans, being more complex than elephants and daisies, have little chance of flourishing. The signals continued automatically for a long while.
No one heard.
XII. Kakool on the Trail
And when that massed human spirit we have called empathy reached out across space and communicated with the gossies of Helliconia, what then? Did nothing important happen — or did something unprecedentedly magnificent, something quantally different, happen?
The answer to that question will perhaps remain forever clouded in conjecture; mankind has its umwelt, however bravely it strives to enlarge that confining universe of its perceptions. To become part of a greater umwelt may prove biologically impossible. Or perhaps not. It must be sufficient to admit that if something unprecedentedly magnificent, something quantally different, happened, it happened in a greater umwelt than mankind’s.
If it happened, then it was a cooperation, and perhaps a cooperation of various factors not unlike the cooperation forced on differing individuals on the trail to Kharnabhar.
If it happened, then it left an effect. That effect can be traced by looking at the contrasting fates of Earth, where Gaia resided, and New Earth, which was without a tutelary biospheric spirit…
To start with the case of Earth, after which New Earth was named:
The intermission between the two postnuclear ice ages has been understood as the swing of a pendulum. Gaia was trying to regulate her clock. But it was less simple than that, just as the biosphere was less simple than the mechanism of a clock. The truth may be put more accurately. Gaia had been almost terminally ill. She was now convalescent, and subject to relapses.
Or, abandoning the dangers of personifying a complex process, it may be said that the carbon dioxide released by the deep oceans initiated a period during which the ice retreated. At the end of the period of greenhouse heating, there was an overshoot of the return to normal, as the whole biosphere and its ruined biosystems strove for adjustment. The ice returned.