Non-Stop

by Brian W Aldiss

  Another body was handed up through the opening, the original Giant climbing up after it. A muttered conversation took place. From the little Complain could hear, he gathered that the body was that of the Giant Roffery had killed. The other Giant was explaining what had happened. It soon became apparent he was talking to two others, although Complain, from where he lay, could see only wall.

  He slumped back into a mindless state, trying to breathe the dirty odour out of his lungs.

  Another Giant entered from a side room and began talking in a peremptory tone suggestive of command. Complain’s captor began to explain the situation over again, but was cut short.

  ‘Did you deal with the flooding?’ the newcomer asked.

  ‘Yes, Mr Curtis. We fitted a new stopcock in place of the rusted one and switched the water off. We also unblocked the drainage and fitted a length of new piping there. We were just finishing off when Sleepy Head here turned up. The pool should be empty by now.’

  ‘All right, Randall,’ the peremptory voice addressed as Curtis said. ‘Now tell me why you started chasing these two dizzies.’

  There was a pause, then the other said apologetically, ‘We didn’t know how many of them there were. For all we knew, we might have been ambushed in the inspection pit. We had to get out and see. I suppose that if we had realized to begin with that there were only two of them, we should have let them go without interfering.’

  The Giants spoke so sluggishly that Complain had no difficulty in understanding most of this, despite the strange accent. Of its general intention he could make nothing. He was almost beginning to lose interest when he became the topic of conversation, and his interest abruptly revived.

  ‘You realize you are in trouble, Randall,’ the stern voice said. ‘You know the rules: it means a court martial. You will have difficulty in proving self-defence, to my mind. Especially as the other dizzy was drowned.’

  ‘He wasn’t drowned. I fished him out of the water and put him on the closed inspection hatch to recover in his own time.’ Randall sounded surly.

  ‘Leaving that question aside — what do you propose doing with this specimen you’ve brought here?’ Curtis demanded.

  ‘He’d have drowned if I had left him there.’

  ‘Why bring him here?’

  ‘Couldn’t we just knock him off and have done with it, Mr Curtis?’ One of the Giants spoke for the first time since Curtis had come in.

  ‘Out of the question. Criminal breach of the rules. Besides, could you kill a man in cold blood?’

  ‘He’s only a dizzy, Mr Curtis,’ spoken defensively.

  ‘Could he go for rehabilitation?’ Randall suggested, in the tone of one dazzled by the brightness of his own idea.

  ‘He’s far too old, man! You know they only take children. What the deuce was the idea of bringing him here?’

  ‘Well, as I say, I couldn’t leave him there, and after I fished his pal out, I — well, it’s pretty creepy there and — I thought I heard something. So I — nipped him to safety with me quickly.’

  ‘It’s quite obvious you panicked, Randall,’ Curtis said. ‘We certainly don’t want a spare dizzy here. You’ll have to take him back, that’s all.’ The voice was curt and decisive. Complain took heart from it; nothing would suit him better than to be taken back. Not, he realized, that he had much fear of the Giants; now he was among them, they seemed too slow and gentle for malice. Curtis’s was not an attitude he understood, but it was certainly convenient.

  There was some argument between the Giants as to how Complain’s return should be effected. Randall’s friends sided with him against the one in command, Curtis; the latter lost his temper.

  ‘All right,’ he snapped, ‘come into the office, the lot of you, and we’ll buzz through to Little Dog and get an authoritative ruling.’

  ‘Losing your nerve, Curtis?’ one of the others asked, as they followed him through — with that crazy, slow-motion walk the Giants had — into the other room, slamming the door on Complain without a glance at him. Complain’s immediate thought was that they were fools to leave him unguarded; he could now escape back through the hole in the floor by which he had come. This illusion burst the moment he tried to roll over. As soon as he attempted to move a muscle, it filled with a brittle ache, and the pervasive stench in his lungs seemed to turn solid. He groaned and lay back, his head against the curve of wall.

  Complain was alone only for a second after the Giants had gone. A grating noise sounded from the region of his knees. Craning his neck slightly, Complain saw a small section of the wall, a jagged patch roughly six inches square, slide out. From this hole, nightmare figures emerged.

  There were five of them, bursting out at an immense rate, circling Complain, jumping him, and then reporting back like lightning to the hole. They evidently carried some sort of reassurance, for three more figures promptly whisked into view, beckoning to others behind them. They were all rats.

  The five scouts wore spiked collars round their necks; they were small and lean of body; one had lost an eye, in the vacant socket of which gristle twitched sympathetically with the glances of the surviving pupil. Of the next three to appear, one was jet black and obviously the leader. He stood upright, pawing the air with little mauve hands. He wore no collar, but the upper half of his body was accoutred with an assembly of bits of metal — a ring, a button, a thimble, nails — evidently intended for armour; round his waist was a buckler with an instrument like a small sword attached. He squeaked furiously and the five scouts circuited Complain again, flashing along his leg, grinning momentarily into his eye, scrapping over his neck, slithering down his blouse.

  The rat-leader’s two bodyguards waited nervously, ever glancing back, flicking their whiskers. They stood on all fours, and wore only shabby little patches like cloaks over their backs.

  During this activity, Complain did an amount of involuntary flinching. He was used to rats, but there was an organized quality to these that disturbed him; also, he fancied that he could manage little by way of defence should they decide it suited their cause to gnaw his eyes out.

  But the rats were on something other than a delicacy hunt. The rearguard now appeared. Panting from a hole in the wall came four more buck rats. They dragged a small cage which, under the whistled orders of the rat-leader, was pulled rapidly to a position before Complain’s face, where he had every opportunity of inspecting it and inhaling the odour from it.

  The animal in the cage was larger than the rats. From the fur at the top of its oval skull sprouted two long ears; its tail was merely a white scut of fluff. Complain had not seen a creature of this species before, but he recognized it from the descriptions of old hunters back in Quarters. It was a rabbit, scarce because natural prey for the rat. He looked at it with interest, and it stared nervously back at him.

  As the rabbit was drawn up, the five original scout rats spread out by the inner door, keeping watch for the Giants’ return. The leader-rat whisked forward to the cage; the rabbit shrank away, but was tethered by all four legs to the bars of his prison. The leader-rat ducked his head at the sword in his buckler, standing erect again with a fierce little blade fitting over his two front teeth, a tiny scythe which he twitched avidly about in the direction of the rabbit’s neck.

  This display of menace over, he sheathed the blade again and darted vigorously between cage and Complain’s face, gesticulating. Obviously, the rabbit understood what was intended. Complain stared puzzledly at it. The pupils of its eyes appeared to swell, and he flinched in his mind from a feeling of tentative discomfort. The feel remained. It soaked about his brain with the cautious advance of a puddle round cobbles. He tried to shake his head, but the eerie sensation maintained itself and strengthened. It was seeking something, witlessly, like a dying man blundering round darkened rooms, feeling for the light switch. Complain broke into a sweat, grinding his teeth as he tried mentally to repel the beastly contact. Then it found its correct port of entry.

  His mind blos
somed into an immense shout of interrogation.

  WHY ARE –

  WHO IS –

  WHAT DO –

  HOW CAN –

  DO YOU –

  CAN YOU –

  WILL YOU –

  Complain screamed with anguish.

  Instantly, the desolating gibberish ceased, the formless inquiry died. The scout rats leapt from their posts, and they and the four driver rats spun the imprisoned rabbit round and shot the cage back into the wall. Spurring them savagely, the ratleader followed with his guard. Next moment, the square of wall banged down behind them — only just in time, for a Giant burst into the room to find what the screaming was about.

  He rolled Complain over with his foot. The latter stared up hopelessly at him, trying to speak.

  Reassured, the Giant lumbered back to the other room, this time leaving open the connecting door.

  ‘The Dizzy’s got a headache,’ he announced.

  Complain could hear their voices. They sounded to be talking at some kind of machine. But he was almost totally absorbed by the ordeal with the rats. A madman had lived for a moment within his skull! The Teaching warned him that his mind was a foul place. The holy trinity, Froyd, Yung and Bassit, had gone alone through the terrible barriers of sleep, death’s brother; there they found — not nothing, as man had formerly believed — but grottoes and subterranean labyrinths full of ghouls and evil treasure, leeches, and the lusts that burn like acid. Man stood revealed to himself: a creature of infinite complexity and horror. It was the aim of the Teaching to let as much of this miasmic stuff out to the surface as possible. But supposing the Teaching had never gone far enough?

  It spoke, allegorically, of conscious and subconscious. Supposing there was a real Subconscious, a being capable of taking over the mind of a man? Had the trinity been down all the slimy corridors? Was this Subconscious the madman who screamed inside him?

  Then he had the answer, simple yet unbelievable. The caged creature had brought its mind into contact with his. Reviewing that fizzing questionnaire, Complain knew it had come from the animal and not some dreadful creature inside his own head. The ordeal was at once made tolerable. One can shoot rabbits.

  Ignoring the how of it with true Quarters’ philosophy, Complain dismissed the matter.

  He lay still, resting, trying to breathe the clinging smell from his lungs, and in a short while the Giants returned.

  Complain’s captor, Randall, picked him up without further ado and opened the trapdoor in the floor. Their argument had evidently been settled in Curtis’s favour. Randall eased himself and his burden back into the low tunnel. He put Complain on to the conveyance and, by the sound of things, climbed on himself behind his captive’s head.

  With a quiet word to the Giants above, he started the motor. Again the grey roof flowed overhead, punctuated by crisscrossing pipe, wire and tube.

  At length they stopped. Fumbling on the roof, the Giant pressed his fingers to it, and a square opened above them. Complain was hauled out of the hole, carried a few yards, bundled through a door, and dropped. He was back in Deadways: its smell to a hunter was unmistakeable. The Giant hovered over him wordlessly, a shadow in shadows, and then vanished.

  The darkness of the dim sleep-wake embraced Complain like a mother’s arms. He was back home, among dangers he was trained to face. He slept.

  Phantom legions of rats swarmed over him, pinning him down. The rabbit came; it climbed into his head and slithered down the long warrens of his brain.

  Complain woke, groaning, humiliated by the beastliness of his dream. It was still dark. The rigidity in his limbs, induced by the gas pellet, had relaxed, his lungs were clear. Carefully, he stood up.

  Shielding his torch till it gave the barest whisper of light, Complain moved to the door and looked out at blackness. As far as he could see, a gulf stretched infinitely before him. He slid out, feeling along to the right, and found a row of doors. Using the light again, he found damp, bare tile underfoot. Then he knew where he was; a hollowness in his ear reinforced the certainty. The Giant had brought him back to what Roffery had called the sea.

  Getting his bearings, Complain flashed the light cautiously. The sea itself had gone. He walked to the edge of the pit into which Roffery had fallen. It was empty, all but dry. Roffery had gone. The walls of the pit glinted with festoons of rust, blood-coloured; in the warm air, the floor of the pit was drying rapidly.

  Complain turned and walked from the chamber, minding not to wake the haggard echoes. He headed back to Marapper’s camp. The ground still squelched lightly underfoot, holding its moisture. He brushed gently by the sagging muck of last season’s ponics, and came to the camp door. He whistled eagerly, wondering who would be on guard: Marapper? Wantage? Fermour? Almost lovingly, he thought of them, reversing the old Quarters’ adage to whisper to himself: ‘Better the devils you know than the ones you don’t.’

  His signal went unanswered. Holding himself tense, he pushed into the room. It was empty. They had moved on. Complain was alone in Deadways.

  Self-control snapped then; he had gone through too much. Giants, rats, rabbits, he could bear — but not the scabrous solitudes of Deadways. He rioted round the room, flinging up the splintered wood, kicking, cursing, out into the corridor, roaring, swearing, tearing a way through the vegetable mash, howling, blaspheming.

  A body cannoned into him from behind. Complain sprawled in the tangle, fighting insanely to turn and tackle his assailant. A hand clamped itself unshakeably over his mouth.

  ‘Shut up, you drab-spawned he-hag!’ a voice snarled in his ear.

  He ceased struggling. A light was turned on to him and three figures hunched over him.

  ‘I — I thought I’d lost you!’ he said. Suddenly, he began to cry. Reaction turned him into a child again. His shoulders heaved, the tears poured down his cheeks.

  Marapper smacked him efficiently across the face.

  IV

  They travelled. Grimly, cutting, pushing, they worked through the ponics; circumspectly, they moved through dark regions where no lights burned and no ponics grew. They passed through badly plundered areas, whose doors were broken, whose corridors were piled high with wreckage. Such life as they met was timid, eluding them where possible; but few creatures lived here — a rogue goat, a crazed hermit, a pathetic band of sub-men who fled when Wantage clapped his hands. This was Deadways, and the emptiness held unrecorded eras of silence. Quarters was left far behind the travellers, and forgotten. Even their nebulous destination was forgotten, for the present, with its ceaseless call upon their physical reserves, required all their attention.

  Finding the subsidiary connections between decks was not always easy, even with the help of Marapper’s plan. Liftshafts were often blocked, levels frequently proved dead ends. But they gradually moved forward; the fifties decks were passed, then the forties, and so they came, on the eighth wake after leaving Quarters, to Deck 29.

  By now, Roy Complain had begun to believe in the Ship theory. The reorientation had been insensible but thorough. To this, the intelligent rats had greatly contributed. When Complain had told his companions of his capture by the Giants, he had omitted the rat incident; something fantastic about it, he knew instinctively, would have defied his powers of description and awoken Marapper’s and Wantage’s derision; but he now found his thoughts turning frequently to those fearsome creatures. He saw a parallel between the lives of the rats and the human lives emphasized in their man-like conduct of ill-treating a fellow creature, the rabbit. The rats survived where they could, giving no thought to the nature of their surroundings; Complain could only say the same of himself until now.

  Marapper had listened to the tale of the Giants intently, commenting little. Once he said, ‘Then do they know where the Captain is?’

  He was particularly pressing for full details of what the Giants had said to each other. He repeated the names ‘Curtis’ and ‘Randall’ several times, as if muttering a spell.

  ‘
Who was this little dog they went to speak to?’ he asked.

  ‘I think it was a name,’ Complain said. ‘Not a real little dog.’

  ‘A name of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I tell you I was half-conscious.’ Indeed the more he thought, the less clear he was as to what exactly had been said. Even at the time, the episode had been sufficiently outside his normal experience to render it half incredible to him.

  ‘Was it another Giant’s name, do you think, or a thing’s name?’ the priest pressed, tugging at the lobe of his ear, as if to extract the facts that way.

  ‘I don’t Know, Marapper. I can’t remember. They just said they were going to talk to “little dog” — I think.’

  At Marapper’s insistence, the party of four inspected the hall marked ‘Swimming Pool’, where the sea had been. It had completely dried up now. There was no sign of Roffery, which was baffling, considering that one of the Giants had said that the valuer would recover from the gas pellet as Complain had done. They searched and called, but Roffery did not appear.

  ‘His moustache will be hanging over a mutant’s bunk by now,’ Wantage said. ‘Let’s get a move on!’

  They could find no hatch which might have led to the Giants’ room. The steel lid covering the inspection pit where Complain and Roffery had first seen the two Giants was as secure as if it had never opened. The priest shot Complain a sceptical glance, and there the matter was left. Taking Wantage’s advice, they moved on.

  The whole incident lowered Complain’s stock considerably. Wantage, quick to seize advantage, became undisputed second-in-command. He followed Marapper, and Fermour and Complain followed him. At least it made for peace in the ranks, and outward accord.

  If, during the periods of intent silence when they pushed along the everlasting rings of deck, Complain changed into someone more thoughtful and self-sufficient, the priest’s nature also changed. His volubility had gone, and the vitality from which it sprang. At last he realized the true magnitude of the task he had set himself, and was forced to put his whole will to enduring.