Luterin:
You will think me hard, but there are those who are harder. They offer you greater danger than ever I could.
Do you recall a conversation we once had about the possible cause of your brother’s death? It took place, unless I dreamed it, after you had recovered from that strange horizontal interlude which followed the death. Your innocence is heroic. Let me say more soon.
I beg you use guile now. Hold “our” new secret for a while, for your own sake.
Insil
“Too late,” he said impatiently, screwing the note up into a ball.
XIV
THE GREATEST CRIME
But how could anyone be sure that those tutelary biospheric spirits, the Original Beholder and Gaia, had a real existence?
There was no objective proof, just as empathy cannot be measured. Microbacterial life has no knowledge of mankind: their umwelts are too disparate. Only intuition can permit mankind to see and hear the footsteps of those geochemical spirits who have managed the life of a functioning whole world as a single organism.
It is intuition, again, which tells humanity that to live according to the spirit it must not possess, must refrain from dominating. It was precisely those men who met so secretively on Icen Hill, shut away from human contact, secure from contact with the outside world, who most feverishly tried to possess the world.
And if they succeeded?
The biospheric spirits are forgiving and adaptable. Intuition tells us that there are always alternatives. Homeostasis is not fossilisation but the balance of vitality.
The early tribal hunters who burned the forests to secure their prey gave birth to the ecosystems of the great savannahs. Mutability informs Gaia’s cybernetic controls.
The Original Beholder’s grey cloak was sweeping across Helliconia. Human beings defied it or accepted it, according to their individual natures.
Beyond the pale of human possession, the creatures of the wild made their own dispositions. The brassimip trees greedily stored food resources far below ground, in order that they might continue to grow. The little land crustaceans, the rickybacks, congregated in their thousands on the underside of stones of alabaster, working lodgements for themselves in the stone with secretions of acid; they would derive such light as they needed to sustain them through the stone itself. The horned sheep of the mountains, the wild asokin, the badgered timoroon, the flambreg on their scoured plains, indulged in fierce courtship battles. There was time for one more mating and perhaps one more: the number of living offspring born would be decided by temperature, by the food supply, by courage, by skill.
All those beings which could not be described as part of the human race, but remained suspended by a quirk of evolution just outside the hearths of humanity—wistfully looking towards the camp fires—those beings too made their dispositions.
The Driat tribes, given the gift of language and well able to curse in it, cursed and moved down from the hills to rocky shores of their continent, where they would find food in abundance. The migratory Madis were driven from their dying ucts to seek shelter in the West and to haunt the ruined cities mankind had deserted. The Nondads burrowed down between the roots of great trees, living their elusive lives little differently from in the scorching days of summer.
As for the ancipital race, each generation saw global conditions reverting to what they had been before the invasion of Freyr into their skies. To their eotemporal minds, the stereotype of the future was coming more nearly to resemble the stereotype of the past. On the broad plains of Campannlat, phagors became increasingly dominant, relying for meat on the herds of yelk and biyelk, which appeared in growing numbers, and becoming bolder in their attacks on the Sons of Freyr. Only in Sibornal, where their presence had never been strong, were they subject to organised counterattacks from humanity.
All these creatures could be seen as vying with one another. In a sense it was true. But in a wider sense, all were a unity. The steady disappearance of green things destroyed their numbers, but they remained intact. For all of them depended on the anaerobic muds on the Helli-conian seabeds, working to bury carbon and maintain the oxygen of the atmosphere, so that the great processes of respiration and photosynthesis were maintained over land and ocean.
All these creatures, again, could be seen as the vital life of the planet. In a sense it was true. But fully half of the mass of Helliconian life lived in the three-dimensional pasturages of the seas. That mass was composed for the most part of single-celled microftora. They were the true monitors of life, and for them little changed, whether Freyr was close or distant.
The Original Beholder held all living forces in balance. How was life possible on the planet? Because there was life on the planet. What would happen without life? There could be no life. The Original Be- holder was a spirit who dwelt over the waters: not a separate spirit endowed with mind, but a vast cooperative entity, creating well-being from the centre of a furious chemical storm. And the Original Beholder was forced to be even more ingenious than her sister goddess, Caia, on nearby Earth.
Somewhat apart from all other living things, from algae and rutting sheep and rickybacks, were the humans of Helliconia. These creatures, although fully as dependent on the homeostatic biosphere as other units of life, had nevertheless elevated themselves to a special category. They had developed language. Within the wordless universe, they had assembled their own umwelt of words.
They had songs and poems, dramas and histories, debate, lament and proclamation, with which to give tongue to the planet. With words came the power to invent. As soon as words came, there was story. Story was to words as Gaia was to Earth and the Original Beholder to Helliconia. Neither planet had a story until mankind came chattering onto the scene and invented it—to fit what each generation saw as the facts. There were visionaries on Helliconia who, at this time of crisis in human affairs, divined the existence of the Original Beholder. But visionaries had always been there, often inarticulate because they worked close to the thresholds of inarticulacy. They perceived something azoi-axic in the universe, something beyond life round which all life revolves, which was itself at once unliving and the Life.
The vision did not fit easily into words. But because there were words, their listeners could not tell whether the vision was true or false. Words have no atomic weight. The universe of words has no ultimate criteria corresponding to life and death in the tongueless universe. This is why it can invent imaginary worlds which have neither life nor death.
One such imaginary world was the perfectly functioning Sibornalese state as visualised by the Oligarchy. Another was the perfectly functioning universe of God the Azoiaxic as visualised by the elders of the Church of the Formidable Peace. With the defiance of the Oligarch’s edicts and the subsequent burning of Priest-Supreme Chubsalid and his fellow ecclesiastics, the two imaginary perfections ceased to coincide. After long periods of near identity, Church and State discovered to their mutual horror that they were in opposition.
Many of the leading clergy, like Asperamanka, were too much in the pocket of the State to protest. It was the rank and file of the Church, the lowly friars, the unlovely monks, those closest to the people, who raised the alarm.