Shay Tal rubbed her hands together, looking apprehensively about.
“Well, it’s cold up here.”
“It’s colder still down below, where the gossies lie,” Oyre retorted.
“You keep a watch on your tongue, young woman. You’re no friend of the academy if you distract Vry from her proper work.”
Her face became cold and hawklike; she turned away quickly, as if to shield Oyre and Vry from its sight, and climbed back downstairs without further words.
“Oh, I shall pay for this,” Vry said. “I shall have to be extra humble to make up for this.”
“You’re too humble, Vry, and she’s too haughty. Scumb her academy. She’s scared of the sky, like most people. That’s her trouble, sorceress or no sorceress. She puts up with stupid people like Amin Lim because they pander to her haughtiness.”
She clutched Vry with a sort of angry passion and began to list the stupidities of everyone she knew.
“What upsets me is that we did not get the chance to make her look through our telescope,” Vry said.
It was the telescope that had made the greatest difference to Vry’s astronomical interest. When Aoz Roon had become lord, and had gone to live in the big tower, Oyre had been free to grub through all kinds of decaying possessions stored there in trunks. The telescope had come to light tucked among moth-riddled clothes which fell to pieces at the touch. It was simply made—perhaps by the long-defunct glass-makers corps—being no more than a leather tube which held two lenses in place; but when turned upon the wandering stars, the telescope had the power to change Vry’s perceptions. For the wanderers showed distinct discs. In that, they resembled the sentinels, though they did not emit light.
From this discovery, Vry and Oyre had concluded that the wanderers were near to the earth, and the stars far away—some very far. From trappers who worked by starlight they had the names of the wanderers: Ipocrene, Aganip, and Copaise. And there was the fast one they had named themselves, Kaidaw. Now they sought to prove that these were worlds like their own, possibly even with people in them.
Gazing at her friend, Vry saw only the general outlines of that beautiful face and powerful head, and recognised how much Oyre resembled Aoz Roon. Both Oyre and her father seemed so full of spirit—and Oyre had been born outside agreements. Vry wondered if by chance—by any remote chance—Oyre had been with a man, in the dark of a brassimip or elsewhere. Then she shut the naughty thought away and turned her gaze to the sky.
They stayed rather soberly on the top of their tower until Hour-Whistler sounded again. A few minutes later Kaidaw rose and sailed up to the zenith.
Earth Observation Station Avernus—Vry’s Kaidaw—hung high over Helliconia, while the continent of Campannlat turned beneath it. The station’s crew devoted most of their attention to the world below, but the other three planets of the binary system were also under constant surveillance by automatic instrumentation.
On all four planets, temperatures were rising. Improvement overall was steady, only on the ground did anomalies register on tender flesh.
Helliconia’s drama of generations in travail was set upon a stage sparsely structured by a few overriding circumstances. The planet’s year about Batalix—Star B to the scholars of the Avemus—took 480 days (the “small” year). But Helliconia also had a Great Year, of which the people of Embruddock knew nothing in their present state. The Great Year was the time Star B, and its planets with it, took to make an orbit round Freyr, the Star A of the scholars.
That Great Year took 1825 Helliconian “small” years. Since one Helliconian small year was the equndent of 1.42 terrestrial years, this meant a Great Year of 2592 terrestrial years—a period during which many generations flourished and departed from the scene.
The Great Year represented an enormous elliptical journey. Helliconia was slightly lager than Earth, with a mass 1.28 times Earth’s; in many respects, it was Earth’s sister planet. Yet on that elliptical journey across thousands of years, it became almost two planets—a frozen one at apastron, when farthest from Freyr, an overheated one at periastron, when nearest Frayr.
Every small year, Helliconia drew nearer to Freyr. Spring was about to signify its arrival in spectacular fashion.
Midway between the high stars in their courses and the fessups sinking slowly towards the original boulder, two women squatted one on either side of a bracken bed. The light in the shuttered room was dim enough to render them anonymous, giving them the aspect of two mourning figures set on either side of the prostrate figure on the couch. It could be determined only that one was plump and no longer youthful, and the other gripped by the desiccating processes of age.
Rol Sakil Den shook her grizzled head and looked down with lugubrious compassion on the figure before her.
“Poor dear thing, she used to be so nice as a girl, she’s no right to torture herself as she does.”
“She should have kept to her loaves, I say,” said the other woman, to make herself agreeable.
“Feel how thin she is. Feel her loins. No wonder she’s gone weird.”
Rol Sakil was herself as thin as a mummy, her frame eroded by arthritis. She had been midwife to the community before growing too old for such exertions. She still tended those in pauk. Now that Dol was off her hands, she hung on the fringes of the academy, always ready to criticise, rarely prepared to think.
“She’s got so narrow she couldn’t bring forth a stick from that womb of hers, never mind a baby. Wombs have to be tended—they are the central part of a woman.”
“She has much to look to beside babies,” said Amin Lim.
“Oh, I’ve as much respect for knowledge as the next person, but when knowledge gets in the way of the natural facilities of copulation, then knowledge should move over.”
“As for that,” Amin Lim said with some asperity, from the other side of the bed, “her natural facilities were set aback when your Dol settled herself in Aoz Roon’s bed. She feels deeply for him, as who doesn’t? A presentable man, Aoz Roon, besides being Lord of Embruddock.”
Rol Sakil sniffed. “That’s no reason why she should go off intercourse entirely. She could always fill in time elsewhere, to keep herself in training. Besides, he won’t come round knocking at her door again, you mark my words. He’s got his hands full with our Dol.”
The old woman beckoned Amin Lim nearer to bestow a confidence and they put their heads together over the supine body of Shay Tal. “Dol always keeps him at it—both by inclination and policy. A course I’d recommend to any woman, you included, Amin Lim. I hazard you enjoy a length now and again—it ain’t human not to, at your age. You ask your man.”
“Oh, I daresay there isn’t a woman as hasn’t fancied Aoz Roon, for all his tempers.”
Shay Tal sighed in her pauk. Rol Sakil took her hand in her own withered one and said, still using a confidential mode, “My Dol tells me as he mutters terribly in his sleep. I tell her that’s the sign of a guilty conscience.”
“What’s he got to be guilty about, then?” Amin Lim asked.
“Now, then—there I could tell you a tale… That morning, after all the drinking and carrying on, I was about early, as of old. And as I went out, well wrapped against the cold of morning, I come on a body in the dark and I says to myself, ‘Why here’s some fool drunk out of his wits, lying asleep on the ground.’ There he was, at the base of the big tower.”