Starship

by Brian W Aldiss

  The continued advance of the tribe had added to this neglect, for a few ponics, seeding themselves determinedly across the rear barrier, grew in shaggy, stunted procession along the dirty deck, thigh high only.

  Uncomfortably, Complain banged on Bergass's door. It opened, and a babel of sound and steam emerged, wreathing like a cloud of insects around Complain's face.

  "Your ego, mother," Complain said politely to the old witch who peered out at him.

  "Your expense, warrior. Oh, it's you, Roy Complain, is it? What do you want? I thought every fool young man was drunk. You'd better come in. Don't make a noise."

  A smell of broth filled the place, emanating from a great steaming caldron in one corner. A young girl stirred this stew. Other women, Complain saw through the steam, stood about the room. Ozbert Bergass himself, surprisingly enough, sat on a rug in the middle of the room. He was delivering a speech which nobody heeded, all being busy talking to each other. Complain wondered how his knock had ever been heard.

  He knelt down beside the old man. The trailing rot was far advanced. Starting, as always, from his stomach, it was working its short way up to the heart. Soft brown rods as long as a man's hand trailed out of his flesh, giving the withered body the aspect of a corpse pierced by decaying sticks.

  ". . . and so the ship was lost, and man was lost, and the very losing was lost," the old man said huskily, fixing blank eyes on Complain. "And I have climbed all among the wreckage and I know, and I say that the longer time goes on the less chance we have of finding ourselves again. Yon fool women do not understand, you do not care, but I've told Gwenny many a time he does wrong by his tribe. 'You're doing wrong,' I've told him, 'destroying everything you come across just because it is not necessary to you. These books you burn, these rolls of film,' I said, 'you destroy them because you think someone might use them against you. But they hold secrets we ought to know,' I said, 'and you're a fool; we ought to be piecing things together, not destroying them. I tell you I've traveled more decks than you know exist,' I said . . . what do you want, sir?"

  Since this interruption in the monologue seemed to be addressed to him, Complain answered that he came to be of service if possible.

  "Service?" Bergass asked. "I've always fended for myself. And my father before me. My father was the greatest guide of them all. Do you know what has made us the tribe we are? I'll tell you. My father was out searching with me when I was a youngster and he found what the Giants used to call an armory. Yes, chambers full of dazers— full of 'em! But for that discovery the Greenes would not be what we are; we would have died out by now. Yes, I could take you to the armory now; if you dare to come. Away beyond the center of Deadways, where feet turn into hands and the floor moves away from you and you swim in the air like an insect------"

  "He's babbling now," Complain thought. Pointless to tell him about Gwenny while he was jabbering about feet turning into hands. But the old guide stopped suddenly and said, "How did you get here, Roy Complain? Give me some more broth, my stomach's dry as wood."

  Beckoning to one of the women for a bowl, Complain said, "I came to see how you were faring. You are a great man: I am sorry to find you like this."

  "A great man," the other muttered stupidly, then, with a burst of fire, "Where's my broth?"

  A young woman hastily passed over a bowl of broth.

  Bergass was too feeble to help himself, and Complain spooned the fatty stuff into his mouth. The guide's eyes, Complain observed, were seeking his, as if with a secret to impart; it was said that the dying always tried to look into someone else's eyes, but habit made Complain reluctant to meet that bright gaze. Turning away, he was suddenly conscious of the filth everywhere. There was enough dirt on the deck for ponics to seed in; even the dead ponic poles were caked.

  "Why is not the lieutenant here? Where is Lindsey, the doctor? Should not Marapper, the priest, be attending you?" he burst out angrily. "You should have better attendance here."

  "Steady with that spoon. The doctor— I had my women send the doctor away. Old Greene, he won't come, he's afraid of the rot. Besides, he's getting as old as I am; Zilliac'll knock him off one of these fine sleep-wakes and take control himself. . . . Now there's a man . . ."

  Seeing Bergass was wandering again, Complain said desperately, "Can I get you the priest?"

  "The priest? Who, Henry Marapper? Come nearer, and I'll tell something, just between us two. A secret. Never told anyone else. Easy. . . Henry Marapper's a son of mine. Yes! I don't believe in his bag of lies any more than I believe------"

  He interrupted himself with a fit of croaking which for a moment Complain took for gasps of pain; then he realized it was laughter, punctuated by the words, "My son!" There was no point in staying. With a curt word to one of the women, he got up, suddenly disgusted, leaving Bergass shaking so violently that his stomach growths clapped together. The other women stood about disinterestedly, hands on hips or making the perpetual fanning gesture against the flies.

  Back in the dark corridor, he leaned for a time against a wall, sighing with relief. He had done nothing, had not even broken the news of Gwenny's death that he had come to tell Bergass, yet something had happened inside him. It was as if a great weight were rolling forward in his brain; it brought pain, but it enabled him to see more clearly. From it, he instinctively knew, some sort of climax would crystallize.

  It had been overpoweringly hot in Bergass's room; Complain was dripping. From the corridor he could hear voices. Suddenly a vision of Quarters as it really was came into his mind. It was a great cavern, filled exhaustingly with the twitter of many voices. Nowhere any real action, only voices, dying voices.

  IV

  The wake wore slowly on and, as the sleep-period drew nearer, Complain's stomach, in anticipation of the next dose of his punishment, grew more uneasy. One sleep-wake in four, in all the known territories, was dark. Not an absolute dark, for here and there in the corridors square pilot lights burned like moons; in the apartments it was entirely dark and moonless. This was an accepted law of nature. There were old people to say that their parents recalled how in their youth the darks had not lasted so long; but old people notoriously remember wrongly, spinning out strange tales from the stuff of their vanished childhoods.

  In the dark, the ponics crumpled up like sacking. Their slender rods cracked, and all but the lustiest shoots turned black. This was their brief winter. When the light returned, fresh shoots and seedlings climbed energetically up, sweeping away the sacking in a new wave of green. And they in turn would be nipped in four more sleep-wakes. Only the toughest or most favored survived this cycle.

  Throughout this wake, most of the few hundred Quarterers remained inert, the greater part supine. Their barbaric outbreaks of festivity were always succeeded by this mass quiescence. They were expended but, more than that, they were unable to plunge once more into the rigors of routine. Inertia overcame the whole tribe. Despondence lay over them like sheets, and outside the barricades the ponic tangle made inroads on the clearings. Only hunger would get them to their feet again.

  "You could murder the whole tribe without a hand being raised against you," Wantage said, something like inspiration showing on the right side of his face.

  "Why don't you then?" Complain said jeeringly. "It's in the Litany, you know: an evil desire suppressed multiplies itself and devours the mind it feeds in."

  Instantly, he was seized by the wrist and a sharp blade whisked horizontally to within an inch of his throat. Glaring into his face was a terrible visage, one half creased in fury, the other creased permanently into a meaningless smile; a large gray eye stared detachedly beyond them, absorbed in its own private vision.

  Wantage snarled. Then he twitched his face away, dropping his knife hand, turning his back, anger fading to mortification as he recalled his deformity.

  "I'm sorry." Complain regretted the remark as he uttered it, but the other did not turn around again.

  Slowly, Complain also moved on, nerves jan
gled by the encounter. He had run into Wantage on his return from the tangles, where he had been investigating the approaching tribe. If they made contact with the Greene tribe, which was by no means certain, it would not be for some while; the first trouble would be clashes between rival hunters. That might mean death; certainly it would mean release from monotony. Meanwhile, he would keep the knowledge to himself. Let someone with a fondness for authority break the news to the lieutenant.

  On his way to the guards' quarter for punishment he encountered nobody but Wantage. Inertia still ruled; even the public stroker refused to be drawn forth to perform.

  "There'll be other sleep-wakes," he said. "What are you in such a hurry for? Clear off and let me lie."

  So Complain went back to his compartment, stomach slowly unknotting. Somewhere in a narrow side corridor, someone played a stringed instrument; he caught the words, sung in a tenor voice:

  ". . . this continuum . . . far too long . . . Gloria."

  An old song, poorly remembered; he shut it off sharply with his closing door. Once again Marapper waited for him, face cupped in his hands, rings glittering on his fat fingers.

  Complain was suddenly undermined by the sensation that he knew what the priest was going to say; he seemed to have lived this scene before. He tried to break through the weblike illusion, but could not.

  "Expansion, son," said the priest, languidly making the rage sign. "You look bitter; are you?"

  "Very bitter, father. Only killing could ease it." Through his words, try as he would to say something unexpected, Complain's sense of re-enacting a scene persisted.

  "There are more things than killing. Things you do not dream of."

  "Don't hand me that. You'll be telling me next that life is a mystery and rambling on like my mother. I feel I need to kill someone."

  "You shall, you shall," the priest soothed. "And it is good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all. We are being punished here for some wrong our forefathers committed. We are all maimed! We are all blind—we thrust out in wrong directions . . ."

  Complain had climbed wearily on to his bunk. The illusion of reliving the scene had gone. Now he wanted only to sleep. Tomorrow he would be evicted from his single room and stroked; now he wanted only to sleep. But the priest had stopped talking. Complain glanced up and found Marapper leaning on his bunk, gazing at him. Their eyes met for a moment, before Complain pulled his hurriedly away.

  One of the strongest taboos in their society was directed against one man's looking at another straight in the eyes; honest, well-intentioned men gave each other only side glances. Complain stuck out his lower lip truculently.

  "What the hem do you want with me, Marapper?" he exploded.

  "You didn't get your six strokes, did you?"

  "What's that to you, priest?"

  "A priest knows no self-seeking. I ask for your good; besides, I have a personal interest in your answer."

  "No, I wasn't beaten. They're all flat asleep, as you know —even the public stroker."

  The priest's eyes were after his again. Complain heaved over uncomfortably and faced the wall; but the priest's next question brought him round again.

  "Do you ever feel like running amok, Roy?"

  Despite himself, Complain had a vision: he was running through Quarters with his dazer burning, everyone scattering, fearing him, respecting him, leaving him master of the situation. His heart beat uncomfortably. Several of the best and most savage men of the tribe—even Gregg, one of his own brothers—had run amok, bursting through the settlement, some escaping to live afterwards in unexplored areas of tangle, or joining other communities, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an honorable thing to do; but it was not a priest's business to incite it. A doctor might recommend it if a man were mortally sick; a priest should unite, not disrupt, his tribe by bringing the frustration in human minds up to the surface, where it might flow freely without curdling into neurosis.

  For the first time, he realized Marapper was wrestling with a crisis in his own life, and wondered momentarily if it had any connection with the fact of Bergass's illness.

  "Look at me, Roy. Answer me."

  "Why are you speaking to me like this?" He was sitting up now, struck by the urgency in the priest's voice.

  "I must know what you are made of."

  "You know what the Litany tells us: we are the sons of cowards, our days are passed in fear."

  "This you believe?" the priest asked.

  "Naturally. It is the Teaching."

  "I need your aid, Roy. Would you follow where I led you—even out of Quarters, into Deadways?"

  All this was spoken low and fast. And low and fast beat the indecision in Complain's blood. He made no effort to come to a consciously debated decision; the nerves must be arbiter: mind was not trustworthy—it knew too much.

  "That would require courage," he said at length.

  The priest slapped his great thighs, yawning in nervous enthusiasm.

  "No, Roy, you lie, true to the list of liars who begot you. If we went, we would be escaping, fleeing, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. Ha, we will slip away furtively: It will be the old back-to-nature act, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. Why, it would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now, will you come with me?"

  Some meaning beyond the words themselves hardened a decision in Complain. He would go! Always there had been that cloud just beyond his comprehension, from which he must escape. He slid off the bunk, trying to hide this decision from Marapper's wily eyes until he had learned more of the venture.

  "What would we two do alone in the tangles of Deadways, priest?"

  The priest thrust a great thumb searchingly up one nostril and spoke with his gaze steady over his fist. "We shall not go alone. Four others come with us, picked men. I have been preparing for this for some while, and all is now ready. You are discontented, your woman is taken: what have you to lose? I strongly advise you to come—for your own sake, of course—although it will suit me to have someone about with a weak will and a hunter's eye."

  "Who are the four others, Marapper?"

  "I will tell you that when you say you are coming. If I were betrayed to the guards, they would slit all our throats —mine especially!—in twenty places."

  "What are we going to do? Where are we going?"

  Marapper rose slowly to his feet and stretched. With long fingers he raked through his hair, making at the same time the most hideous sneer he could devise.

  "Go by yourself, Roy, if you so distrust my leadership! Why, you're like a woman, all bellyache and questioning. I'll tell you no more, except that my scheme is something too grand for your comprehension. Domination of the ship! That's it! Nothing less! Complete domination of the ship— you don't even know what the phrase means."

  Cowed by the priest's ferocious visage, Complain merely said, "I was not going to refuse to come."

  "You mean you will come?"

  "Yes."

  Marapper gripped his arm fervently, without a word. His cheeks gleamed.

  "Now tell me who the other four are who come with us," Complain said, alarmed the moment he had committed himself.

  Marapper released his arm.

  "You know the old saying, Roy: the truth never set anyone free. You will learn soon enough. It is better that I do not tell you now. I plan that we shall start early next sleep. Not a word to anyone."

  Half out of the door, he paused. Thrusting a hand into his tunic, he pulled something out and waved it triumphantly. Complain recognized it as a book, the collection of reading matter used by the extinct Giants.

  "This is our key to power!" Marapper said dramatically, thrusting it back into its place of concealment. Then he closed the door behind him.

  Idle as statuary, Complain stood in the center of the floor, only his head working. And in his head there was only a circle of thought, leading nowhere. Bu
t Marapper was the priest, Marapper had knowledge most others could not share, Marapper must lead. Belatedly, Complain went to the door, opened it and peered out.

  The priest had already gone from sight. Nobody was near except Meller, the bearded artist. He was painting a bright fresco on the corridor wall outside his room, dabbing on with shrewdly engrossed face the various dyes he had collected the sleep-wake before. Beneath his hand, a great cat launched itself up the wall. He did not notice Complain.

  It was growing late. Complain went to eat in the almost deserted Mess. He fed in a trance. He returned, and Meller was still painting in a trance. He shut his door and prepared slowly for bed. Gwenny's gray dress still hung on a hook by the bed; he snatched it down suddenly and flung it out of sight behind a cupboard. Then he lay down and let silence prolong itself.

  Suddenly into the room burst Marapper, bulbously, monumentally out of breath. He slammed the door behind him, gasping and tugging the corner of his cloak which had caught in the jamb.

  "Hide me, Roy—quick! Quickly, don't stare, you fool. Get up, get your knife out. The guards'll be here, Zilliac'll be here. They're after me. They'd massacre poor old priests as soon as look at them."

  As he spoke, he ran to Complain's bunk, swung it out from the wall, and began to crouch behind it.

  "What have you done?" Complain demanded. "Why are they after you? Why hide here? Why drag me into it?"

  "It's no compliment. You just happened to be near and my legs were never constructed for running. My life's in danger."

  While he was talking, Marapper stared wildly about, as if for a better hiding place, and then evidently decided to stay where he was. By adjusting a blanket over the far side of the bed he was screened from the doorway.

  "They must have seen me come in here," he said. "It's not that I care for my own skin, but I've got plans. I let one of the guards in on this scheme of ours and he went straight in and told it to Zilliac."