Non-Stop

by Brian W Aldiss

  Moved, he hardly knew why, Complain turned to look at Marapper. Tears were pouring down the old priest’s cheeks.

  ‘What… what a beautiful story,’ Marapper sobbed. ‘You are a wise man, Councillor, and I believe it all, every word of it. What power those men had, what power! I am only a poor old provincial priest, jeezers nose, I know nothing, but…’

  ‘Stop dramatizing yourself, man,’ Tregonnin said with unexpected severity. ‘Take your mind off your ego and concentrate on what I am telling you. Facts are the thing — facts, and not emotions!’

  ‘You’re used to the magnificence of the tale, I’m not,’ Marapper sobbed, unabashed. ‘To think of all that power…’

  Tregonnin put the globe carefully down and said in a petulant tone to Vyann, ‘Inspector, if this objectionable fellow doesn’t stop sniffing, you will have to take him away. I cannot stand sniffing. You know I cannot.’

  ‘When do we get to this Procyon’s planets?’ asked Complain quickly. He could not bear the thought of leaving here till everything had been told him.

  ‘A sound question, young man,’ Tregonnin said, looking at him for what was practically the first time. ‘And I’ll try to give you a sound answer. It seems that the flight to Procyon’s planets had two main objectives. The ship was made so big because not only would the confinement of a small ship be unendurable on such a long journey, but it had to carry a number of people called colonists. These colonists were to land on the new planet and live there, increasing and multiplying; the ship transported a lot of machines for them — we have found inventories of some of the things — tractors, concrete mixers, pile drivers — those are some of the names I recall.

  ‘The second objective was to collect information on the new planet and samples from it, and bring it all back for the men of Earth to study.’

  In his jerky fashion, Councillor Tregonnin moved to a cupboard and fumbled about inside it. He brought out a metal rack containing a dozen round tins small enough to fit in a man’s hand. He opened one. Crisp broken flakes like transparent nail parings fell out.

  ‘Microfilm!’ Tregonnin said, sweeping the flakes under a table with his foot. ‘It was brought in to me from a far corner of Forwards. Damp has ruined it, but even if it were intact it would be of no use to us: it needs a machine to make it readable.’

  ‘Then I don’t see –’ Complain began puzzledly, but the councillor held up a hand.

  ‘I’ll read you the labels on the tins,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll understand. Only the labels survive. This one says, “FILM: Survey New Earth, Aerial, Stratospheric, Orbital. Mid-Summer, N. Hemisphere.” This one says, “FILM: Flora and Fauna Continent A, New Earth”. And so on.’

  He put the cans down, paused impressively and added, ‘So there, young man, is the answer to your question; on the evidence of these tins, it is obvious the ship reached Procyon’s planets successfully. We are now travelling back to Earth.’

  In the untidy room deep silence fell, as each struggled alone to the very limits of his imagination. At last Vyann rose, shaking herself out of a spell, and said they should be going.

  ‘Wait!’ Complain said. ‘You’ve told us so much, yet you’ve told us so little. If we are travelling back to Earth, when do we get there? How can we know?’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Tregonnin began, then sighed and changed his mind about what he was going to say. ‘My dear fellow, don’t you see, so much has been destroyed… The answers aren’t always clear. Sometimes even the questions have been lost, if you follow my meaning. Let me answer you like this: we know the distance from New Earth, as the colonists called it, to Earth; it is eleven light years, as I have said. But we have not been able to find out how fast the ship is travelling.’

  ‘But one thing at least we do know,’ Vyann interposed. ‘Tell Roy Complain about the Forwards Roll, Councillor.’

  ‘Yes, I was just about to,’ Tregonnin said, with a touch of asperity. ‘Until we of the Council of Five took over command of Forwards, it was ruled by a succession of men calling themselves Governors. Under them, Forwards grew from a pitiful tribe to the powerful state it now is. Those Governors took care to hand down to each other a Roll or Testament, and this Roll or Testament the last Governor handed over to my keeping before he died. It is little more than a list of Governors’ names. But under the first Governor’s name it says –’ he shut his eyes and waved a delicate hand to help him recite — ‘“I am the fourth homeward-bound Captain of this ship, but since the title is only an irony now, I prefer to call myself Governor, if even that is not too grand a name”.’

  The councillor opened his eyes and said, ‘So you see, although the names of the first three men are lost, we have in the Roll a record of how many generations have lived aboard this ship since it started back for Earth. The number is twenty-three.’

  Marapper had not spoken for a long while. Now he asked, ‘Then that is a long time. When do we reach Earth?’

  ‘That is the question your friend asked,’ Tregonnin said. ‘I can only answer that I know for how many generations we have been travelling. But no man knows now when or how we stop. In the days before the first Governor, came the catastrophe — whatever that was — and since then the ship goes on and on non-stop through space, without captain, without control. One might almost say: without hope.’

  For most of that sleep, tired though he was, Complain could not rest. His mind seethed and churned with fearful images, and fretted itself with conjecture. Over and over, he ran through what the councillor had said, trying to digest it.

  It was all disquieting enough. Yet, in the midst of it, one tiny, irrelevant detail of their visit to the library kept recurring to him like toothache. At the time, it had seemed so unimportant that Complain, who was the only one who noticed it, had said nothing; now, its significance grew till it eclipsed even the thought of stars.

  While Tregonnin was delivering his lecture, Complain had chanced to glance up at the library ceiling. Through the grille there, alert as if listening and understanding, peered a tiny rat’s face.

  III

  ‘Contraction take your ego, Roy!’ Marapper exploded. ‘Don’t start mixing yourself up with the ideas of Forwards. It’s that girl who’s doing it, I know — you mark my words, she’s playing her own game with you! You’re so busy dreaming about the spicy secrets of her skirts, you can’t see the wood for the ponics. Just remember: we came here with our own objectives, and they’re still our objectives.’

  Complain shook his head. He and the priest were eating alone early the next wake. Officers crowded the dining-hall, but Vyann and Scoyt had not yet appeared. Now Marapper was making his old appeal, that they should try for power together.

  ‘You’re out of date, Marapper,’ he said shortly. ‘And you can leave Inspector Vyann out of it. These Forwards people have a cause beyond any petty seeking for power. Besides, what if you killed the lot of them? What good would it do? Would it help the ship?’

  ‘To the hull with the ship. Look, Roy, trust your old priest who never let you down yet. These people are using us for their own ends; it’s only common sense to do the same ourselves. And don’t forget the Teaching tells you always to seek for yourself so that you may be freed from inner conflict.’

  ‘You’re forgetting something,’ Complain said. ‘The Litany ends “And the ship brought home”; it’s one of the main tenets of the Teaching. You were always a shockingly bad priest, Marapper.’

  They were interrupted by the appearance of Vyann, looking fresh and attractive. She said she had already taken breakfast. With more irritation than he usually showed, Marapper excused himself. Something in Vyann’s manner told Complain she was happy enough to let him go; it suited him well also.

  ‘Has Fermour been questioned yet?’ he asked.

  ‘No. One of the Council of Five, Zac Deight, has seen him, but that’s all. Roger — that is, Master Scoyt — will question him later, but at present he is involved with some other, unexpected business.’

/>   He did not ask what this business might be. Seeing her so close again overpowered him, so that he could hardly think of anything to say. Mainly, he longed to tell her that nothing less than a miracle could have arranged her dark hair as it was. Instead, and with an effort, he asked what he was required to do.

  ‘You are going to relax,’ she said brightly. ‘I have come to show you round Forwards.’

  It proved an impressive tour. Many rooms, here as in Quarters, were barren and empty; Vyann explained that this must be because their contents had been left on Procyon’s planet, New Earth. Others had been turned into farms far surpassing Quarters’ in scale. Many varieties of animal Complain had never seen before. He saw fish for the first time, swimming in tanks — here Vyann told him that they yielded the white meat he had enjoyed. These farm rooms, he was told, were controlled by quantputer. Not understanding the reference, he held his tongue. There were amazing varieties of crops, some grown under special lighting. Cultivated ponics grew also, and brightly flowering shrubs. In one long room fruit grew, trees against the walls, bushes and plants in raised trenches in the middle; Complain inspected his first grapefruit here. The temperature was high in this room, the gardeners working naked to the waist. Sweat stood out on Complain’s face, and he noticed Vyann’s blouse sticking to her breasts; for him they were the sweetest fruits aboard the ship.

  Many men and women worked on these agricultural decks, at humble tasks and complicated ones. Essentially a peaceful community, Forwards regarded agriculture as its chief occupation. Yet, despite all the trouble lavished on them, Vyann said, harvests mysteriously failed, animals died without apparent cause. Starvation remained a constant threat.

  They moved to other decks. Sometimes the way was dark, the walls scarred with tokens of unguessable and forgotten weapons: souvenirs of the catastrophe. They came, feeling lonely now, to the Drive Floors, which Vyann said were strictly forbidden to all but a few officers. Here nobody lived; all was left to the silence and the dust.

  ‘Sometimes I imagine this as it must once have been,’ Vyann whispered, sweeping her torch to left and right. ‘It must have been so busy. The quantputers had not been broken… This was the part of the ship where the actual force that made the ship go was produced. Many men must have worked here.’

  The doors which stood open along their way were doors with heavy wheels set in them, quite unlike the ordinary metal ship’s doors. They passed through a last archway and were in a colossal chamber several floors high. The cone of the torch’s beam picked out massed banks of strange shapes studded by monitors, their eyes dull and dead to either side, and in between, cumbrous structures on wheels, with grapnels and scoops and metal hands.

  ‘Once it was alive: now it’s all dead!’ Vyann whispered. There was no echo here; the brutal undulations of metal sucked up every sound. ‘This is what the Control Room would control if we could find it.’

  They retreated, and Vyann led the way into another chamber much like the first, but smaller, though it too was enormous by ordinary standards. Here, though the dust was as thick, a deep and constant note filled the air.

  ‘You see — the force is not dead!’ the girl said. ‘It still lives behind these plastic walls. Come and look here!’

  She led into an adjoining room, almost filled with the gigantic bulk of a machine. The machine, completely panelled over, was shaped like three immense wheels set hub to hub, with a pipe many feet in diameter emerging from either side and curving up into bulkheads. At Vyann’s behest, Complain set his hand on the pipe. It vibrated. In the side of one of the great wheels was an inspection panel; Vyann unlatched and opened it, and at once the organ note increased, like a proslambanomenos implementing a sustained chord.

  The girl shone her torch into the aperture.

  Complain stared fascinated. Within the darkness, flickering and illusory, something spun and reflected the light, droning deeply as it did so. At the heart of it, a small pipe drip, drip, dripped liquid continually on to a whirling hub.

  ‘Is this space?’ he asked Vyann breathlessly.

  ‘No,’ she said, as she closed the panel again. ‘This is one of three tremendous fans. The little pipe in the middle lubricates it. Those fans never stop; they circulate air to the whole ship.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because Roger brought me down here and explained it to me.’

  Immediately, Complain’s present surroundings meant nothing to him. Before he could think of stopping the words, he said, ‘What is Roger Scoyt to you, Vyann?’

  ‘I love him very much,’ she said tensely. ‘I am an orphan — my mother and father both made the Journey when I was very young. They caught the trailing rot. Roger Scoyt and his wife, who was barren, adopted me; and since she was killed in a raid on Forwards many watches ago, he has trained me and looked after me constantly.’

  In the upsurge of relief that buoyed Complain, he seized Vyann’s hand. At once, she clicked off her torch and pulled away from him, laughing mockingly in the dark.

  ‘I didn’t bring you down here to flirt, sir,’ she said. ‘You must prove yourself before trying that sort of thing with me.’

  He tried to grab her, but in the darkness banged his head, whereupon she at once switched on the torch. At his lack of success he was angry and sulky, turning away from her, rubbing his sore skull.

  ‘Why did you bring me down here?’ he asked. ‘Why be friendly to me at all?’

  ‘You take the Teaching too seriously — it’s what I might expect from someone out of a provincial tribe!’ she said pettishly. Then, relenting a little, she said, ‘But come, don’t look so cross. You need not think because someone shows friendliness they mean you harm. That old-fashioned idea is more worthy of your friend Priest Marapper.’

  Complain was not so easily teased out of his mood, especially as mention of Marapper’s name recalled the priest’s warning. He lapsed into a gloomy silence which Vyann was too haughty to break, and they made their way back rather dejectedly. Once or twice, Complain looked half-imploringly at her profile, willing her to speak. Finally she did — without looking at him.

  ‘There was something I had to ask you,’ she said in a reluctant voice. ‘The lair of the Outsiders must be found; a tribe of raiders has to be destroyed. Because our people are mainly agriculturalists, we have no hunters. Even our trained guards will not venture far into the tangles — certainly they could not cover the vast areas you did on your way here. Roy — we need you to lead us against our enemies. We hoped to show you enough to convince you they were your enemies too.’

  Now she was regarding Complain. She smiled kindly, plaintively.

  ‘When you look at me like that, I could get out and walk to Earth!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘We shall not ask that of you,’ she said, still smiling, and for once the reserve completely left her. ‘Now we must go and see how Roger’s business is coming along. I’m sure he has been taking the work of the entire ship on his shoulders. I told you about the Outsiders; he can explain about Gregg’s band of raiders.’

  Pressing on keenly, she missed the expression of surprise on Complain’s face.

  Master Scoyt had been more than busy: he had been successful. For once, feeling he was achieving something, his brow was clear; he greeted Complain like an old friend.

  The interrogation of Fermour, who was still under surveillance in a nearby cell, had been postponed because of a rumpus in Deadways. Forwards scouts, hearing a commotion among the tangles, had ventured as far as Deck 29 (which, it transpired, was the deck on which Complain and Marapper had been caught). This deck, only two beyond the frontiers of Forwards, was badly damaged, and the scouts never dared to go beyond it. They had returned empty-handed, reporting a fight of some sort, punctuated by the shrill screams of men and women, taking place on Deck 30.

  There the whole matter might have ended. But shortly after this episode, one of Gregg’s ruffians had approached the barriers, calling for truce and begging to see someone in
authority.

  ‘I’ve got him in the next cell,’ Scoyt told Vyann and Complain. ‘He’s a queer creature called Hawl, but beyond referring to his boss as “the Captain”, he seems sane enough.’

  ‘What does he want?’ Vyann asked. ‘Is he a deserter?’

  ‘Better even than that, Laur,’ Scoyt said. ‘This fight our scouts reported in Deadways was between Gregg’s and another gang. Hawl won’t say why, but the episode has seriously put the shakes up them. So much so, that Gregg is suing for peace with us through this fellow Hawl, and wants to bring his tribe to live in Forwards for protection.’

  ‘It’s a ruse!’ Vyann exclaimed. ‘A trick to get in here!’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Scoyt said. ‘Hawl is obviously quite sincere. The only snag is that Gregg, knowing the sort of reputation he has with us, wants a Forwards official to go to him as a token of good faith to arrange terms. Whoever is chosen goes back with Hawl.’

  ‘Sounds fishy to me,’ Vyann said.

  ‘Well, you’d better come and see him. But prepare yourself for a shock. He is not a very lovely specimen of humanity.’

  Two Forwards officers were with Hawl, supposedly guarding him. They had plainly been beating the hull out of him with knotted ropes. Scoyt dismissed them sharply, but for some while could get no sense out of Hawl, who lay face down, groaning, until the offer of another thrashing made him sit up. He was a startling creature, as near a mutant as made no difference. Madarosis had left him completely hairless, so that neither beard nor eyebrows sprouted from his flesh; he was also toothless; and an unfortunate congenital deformity had given his face a crazed top-heaviness, for while he was so undershot that his upper gum hung in air, his forehead was so distended by exostosis that it all but hid his eyes. Yet Hawl’s chief peculiarity was that these minor oddities were set above a normal-sized body on a skull no bigger than a man’s two fists clenched one atop the other.