Starship

by Brian W Aldiss

  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 would have let them go without interfering."

  The Giants spoke so sluggishly that Complain had no difficulty in understanding, 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-defense, 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 kill him, Mr. Curtis?" One of the Giants spoke for the first time.

  "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.

  "He's too old, man! You know they only take children. 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, we'll contact 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. 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 niches 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 around 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 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.

  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 defense, should they decide it suited their cause to gnaw his eyes out.

  But the rats were on something other than a delicacy hunt. The rear guard 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 odor 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 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. 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 around 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 around 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 blossomed 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 leaped from their posts, and they and the four driver rats spun the imprisoned rabbit around and shot the cage back into the wall. Spurring them savagely, the rat-leader 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 seemed to be talking to 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's 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 favor. 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 gray roof flowed overhead, punctuated by criss-crossing 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 unmistakable. The Giant hovered over him wordlessly, a shadow in shadows, and then vanished.

  Shielding his flashlight till it gave the barest whisper of illumination, 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.

  Complain turned and walked from the chamber, careful not to wake the 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?

  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 around 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 unshakably over his mouth.

  "Shut up!" a voice snarled in his ear.

  He ceased struggling. A light was turned on 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 traveled. 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 submen who fled when Wantage clapped his hands. This was Deadways, and the emptiness held unrecorded eras of silence. Quarters was left far behind the travelers, 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. Shafts 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 wakened Marapper's and Wantage's derision. But now he found his thoughts turning frequently to those fearsome creatures. He saw a parallel between the lives of the rats and humans in their manlike 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 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.

  "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 had inspected the hall marked swimming pool where the sea had been.

  It had completely dried up. 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 had searched and called, but Roffery had not appeared. 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 skeptical 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 toward enduring.

  "Been trouble here— old trouble," he said at one place in their trek, leaning against the wall and looking ahead into the middle level of Deck 29. The others paused with him. The tangles stretched for only a few yards in front of them, then began the darkness in which they could not grow. The cause of the light failure was obvious: ancient weapons, such as Quarters did not possess, had blasted holes in the roof and walls of the corridor. A heavy cabinet of some kind protruded through the roof, and the nearby doors had been buckled out of their sockets. For yards around, everything was curiously pockmarked and pitted from the force of the explosion.

  "At least we'll be free of the cursed tangle for a while," Wantage remarked, drawing his flashlight. "Come on, Marapper."

  The priest continued to lean where he was, pulling at his nose between first finger and thumb.

  "We must be getting close to Forwards' territory," he said. "I'm afraid our lights may give us away."

  "You walk in the dark if you feel like it," Wantage retorted. He moved forward, and Fermour did the same. Without a word, pushing past Marapper, Complain followed suit. Grumbling, the priest tagged on; nobody suffered indignity with more dignity than he.

  Getting near the edge of shadow, Wantage flicked his light on, probing ahead. Then the strangeness began to take them. The first thing that Complain observed which went against natural law was the lie of the ponics. As always, they tailed off and grew stunted toward the lightless passage, but here they were peculiarly wispy, their stalks flaccid, as if unable to support their weight; they ventured further from the overhead glow than usual.

  Then his footsteps failed to bite on ground.

  Already, Wantage was floundering ahead of him. Fermour ha
d gone into an odd, high-stepping walk. Complain felt strangely helpless; the intricate gears of his body had been thrown out of kilter— it was as if he was trying to march through water, yet he had an unaccountable sensation of lightness. His head swam. Blood roared in his ears. He heard Marapper exclaim in astonishment, and then the priest blundered into his back. Next moment, Complain was sailing on a long trajectory past Fermour's right shoulder. He doubled up as he went, striking the wall with his hip. The ground rose slowly to meet him and, spreading both arms, he landed on his chest and went sprawling. When he looked into the darkness, he saw Wantage, still gripping his flashlight, descending even more slowly.

  On the other side of him, Marapper was floundering, his eyes bulging, his mouth speechlessly opening and shutting. Taking the priest's arm, Fermour spun him around and pushed him back into the safe area. Then Fermour bunched his stocky form and dived out into the dark for Wantage, who was blaspheming quietly near the floor; glissading off the wall, Fermour seized him, braked himself with an out-thrust heel, and floated softly back on the rebound. He steadied Wantage, who staggered like a drunken man.

  Thrilled by this display, Complain saw at once that here was an ideal way of travel. Whatever had happened in the corridor —he dimly supposed that the air had changed in some way, although it was still breathable— they could proceed quickly along it in a series of leaps. Getting cautiously to his feet and snapping on his light, he took a tentative jump forward.

  His cry of surprise echoed loudly down the empty corridor. Only by putting up his hand did Complain save himself a knock on the head. The gesture sent him into a spin, so that he eventually landed on his back. He was dizzy: everything had been the wrong way up. Nevertheless, he was ten yards down the corridor. The others, fixed in a drum of light with a green backcloth, looked distant. Complain recalled the rambling memories of Ozbert Bergass; what had he said, in the truth Complain had mistaken for delirium? "The place where hands turn into feet and you fly through the air like an insect." Then the old guide had roved this far! Complain marveled to think of the miles of festering tunnel that lay between them and Quarters.