Starship

by Brian W Aldiss

  PART FOUR

  The Big Something

  I

  ONLY the occasional stale glow of a pilot light illuminated the coiled miles of corridor. At one end of the ship, the ponics were beginning to collapse in the death each dark sleep-wake inevitably brought; at the other end of the ship, Master Scoyt still drove his men in a torchlight search for the Giant. Scoyt's party, working along the lower levels of the Drive Floors, had drained the "20" decks of Forwards almost clear of life.

  As the dark came down, it caught Henry Marapper, the priest, going from Councillor Tregonnin's room to his own without a flashlight. Marapper had been carefully ingratiating himself into the librarian's favor, against the time when the Council of Five should be reconstituted as the Council of Six— Marapper, of course, visualizing himself as the sixth councillor. He walked now through the dimness warily, half-afraid a Giant might pop up in front of him.

  Which was almost exactly what happened.

  A door ahead of him was flung open, a wash of illumination pouring into the corridor. Startled, Marapper shrank back. The light flapped and churned, transforming shadows into frightened bats as the bearer of the light hustled about his nocturnal business in the room. Next moment, two great figures emerged, bearing between them a smaller figure, who slumped as if ill. Undoubtedly, these were Giants: they were over six feet high.

  The light, of exceptional brilliance, was worn as a fitting on one Giant's head; it sent the uneasy shadows scattering as its wearer bent and half-carried the small figure. They went only half a dozen paces down the corridor before stopping in the middle of it, kneeling there with their faces away from Marapper. And now the light fell upon the face of the smaller man. It was Fermour!

  With a word to the Giants, Fermour, leaning forward, put his knuckles to the deck in a curious gesture. His hand, fingertips upward, was for a moment caught alone in the cone of light; then a section of deck, responding to his pressure, rose and seized by the Giants, lifted to reveal a large manhole. The Giants helped Fermour into it, climbed down themselves, and closed the hatch over their heads. The glow from a square pilot light on the wall was again the only illumination in a deserted corridor.

  Then Marapper found his tongue.

  "Help!" he bellowed. "Help! They're after me!"

  He pounded on the nearest doors, flinging them open when no reply came. These were workers' apartments, mainly deserted by their owners, who were away following Scoyt and the Survival Team. In one room, Marapper discovered a mother suckling her babe by a dim light. She and the baby began to howl with fear.

  The rumpus soon brought running feet and flashing lights. Marapper was surrounded by people and reduced to a state of coherence. These were mainly men who had been on the Giant-hunt, men with blood roused by the unaccustomed excitement; they let out wilder cries than Marapper to hear that Giants had been here, right in their midst. The crowd swelled, the noise increased. Marapper found himself crushed against the wall, repeating his tale endlessly to a succession of officers, until an icy man, co-captain of the Survival Team, pushed his way through the group.

  "Show me this hole you say the Giants disappeared down," he ordered. "Point to it."

  "This would have terrified a less brave man than I," Marapper said, still shaking. He pointed: a rectangular line in the deck outlined the Giants' exit. It was a hair-fine crack, hardly noticeable. Inside the rectangle at one end was a curious octagonal indentation, not half an inch across; apart from that, there was nothing to distinguish the trapdoor from the rest of the deck.

  Two men tried to lever open the trapdoor, but the crack was so fine they could do no more than poke their fingernails down it.

  "It won't come up, sir," one of the men said.

  "Thank Hem for that!" Marapper exclaimed, visualizing a stream of Giants emerging upon them.

  By this time, somebody had brought Scoyt. The Master's face was hard set; his long fingers restlessly caressed the runnels of his cheek as he listened to Marapper. Though he looked tired, he revealed that his brain was the widest awake of those present.

  "You see what this means," he said. "These traps are set in the floor about a hundred paces apart throughout the ship; we've never recognized them as such because we could never open them, but the Giants can open them easily enough. We no longer need doubt, whatever we once thought to the contrary, that the Giants still exist. For reasons of their own they're coming back— and for what other purpose than to take over the ship again?"

  "But this trap . . ." Marapper said.

  "This trap," Scoyt interrupted, "is the key to the whole matter. Do you remember when your friend Complain was captured by Giants he said he was spirited into a hole and traveled in a low, confined space that sounded like no part of the ship we knew? Obviously, it was a space between decks, and he was taken down a trap just like this one. All traps must intercommunicate— and if the Giants can open one, they can open them all!"

  An uneasy babble of comment rose from the crowd in the corridor. Their eyes were bright, their flashlights dim; they seemed to press more closely together, as if for comfort. Marapper cleared his throat, inserting the tip of his little finger helplessly into his ear, as if that were the only thing in the world he could get clear.

  "This means— this means our world is entirely surrounded by a sort of thin world the Giants can get to and we can't," he said. "Is that so?"

  Scoyt nodded curtly.

  "Not a nice thought, priest, eh?" he said.

  Scoyt turned impatiently to find that three of the Council of Five, Billyoe, Dupont, and Ruskin, had arrived behind him. They looked both unhappy and annoyed.

  "Please say no more, Master Scoyt," Billyoe said. "We've heard most of this, and it hardly sounds like the sort of thing which should be discussed in public. You'd better bring this— er, this priest along with you to the council room; we'll talk there."

  Scoyt hardly hesitated.

  "On the contrary, Councillor Billyoe," he said distinctly, "this matter affects every man on board. Everyone must know about it as quickly as possible. I'm afraid we are being swept to a time of crisis,"

  Although he was contradicting the Council, Scoyt's face bore such a heavy look of pain that Billyoe avoided making an issue of the matter. Instead he asked, "Why do you say a crisis?"

  Scoyt spread his hands.

  "Look at it this way," he said. "A Giant suddenly appears on Deck 14 and ties up the first girl he finds in such a way that she escapes in no time. Why? So that an alarm could be given. Later he appears again down on the Drive Floors— at little risk to himself, let me add, because he can duck down one of these traps whenever he feels like it! Now; from time to time, we've had reports of sightings of Giants, but obviously in those cases the meeting was completely accidental; in this case, it looks as if it was not. For the first time, a Giant wanted himself to be seen; you can't explain the pointless tying-up of the girl otherwise."

  "But why should he want to be seen and hunted?" Councillor Ruskin asked plaintively.

  "I can see why, Councillor," said Marapper. "The Giant wanted to create a diversion while these other Giants rescued Fermour from his cell."

  "Exactly," agreed Scoyt, without pleasure. "This all happened just as we began to question Fermour; we had scarcely started to soften him up. It was a ruse to get everyone out of the way while the Giants helped Fermour to escape. Now that the Giants know we know they are about, they'll be forced to do something— unless we do something first! Priest Marapper, get down on your hands and knees and show me exactly what you think it was that Fermour did to make the trapdoor open."

  Puffing, Marapper got down as directed. Every light present centered on him. He scuffled to one corner of the trap, looking up dubiously.

  "I think Fermour was about here," he said. "And then he leaned forward like this . . . and put his fist down on the deck like this— with his knuckles along the floor like this. And then— no, by Hem, I know what he did! Scoyt, look!"

  Marappe
r moved his clenched hand. A faint click sounded. The trapdoor rose, and the way of the Giants lay open.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  Laur Vyann and Roy Complain came slowly back to the inhabited part of Forwards. The shock of finding the controls ruined had been almost too much for both of them. Once again, but now more insistently than ever before, the desire to die had come over Complain; a realization of the total bleakness of his life swept through him like a poison. The brief respite in Forwards, the happiness Vyann afforded him, were absolutely nothing beside the overriding frustration he had endured since birth.

  One thing rescued him: the old Teaching of Quarters, which a little while ago he had told himself proudly he had eschewed.

  Back to him echoed the voice of the priest: "We are the sons of cowards, our days are passed in fear. . . . The Long Journey has always begun: let us rage while we can, and by so discharging our morbid impulses we may be freed from inner conflict. . . ." Instinctively, Complain made the formal gesture of rage. He let the anger steam up from the recesses of his misery and warm him in the withering darkness. Vyann had begun to weep on his shoulder; that she should suffer too added fuel to his fury.

  He foamed it all up inside him with increasing excitement, distorting his face, calling up all the injuries he and everyone else had ever undergone, churning them together like batter in a bowl. Muddy, bloody anger, keeping his heart a-beat.

  After that, feeling much saner, he was able to comfort Vyann and lead her back to the regions of her own people.

  As they approached the inhabited part, a curious clanging grew louder in their ears. It was an odd noise without rhythm, an ominous noise, at the sound of which they increased their pace, glancing at each other anxiously.

  Almost the first person they met, a man of the farmer class, came up quickly to them.

  "Inspector Vyann," he said, "Master Scoyt is looking for you; he's been shouting everywhere!"

  "It sounds as if he's pulling the ship apart for us," Vyann said wryly. "We're on our way, thank you."

  They quickened their step, and so came upon Scoyt at Deck 20, from which Fermour had been rescued. A squad of men was pacing along the corridor, bending every so often and opening a series of traps in the deck. The heavy covers, flung aside, accounted for the strange clanging Vyann and Complain had heard. As each hole was revealed, a man was left to guard it while other men hurried on to the next trap.

  Directing operations, Scoyt saw Vyann. For once, no welcoming smile softened his mouth.

  "Come in here," he said, opening the door nearest to him. Scoyt shut the door when they were all three inside and confronted them angrily.

  "I've a mind to have you both flung into cells," he said. "How long have you been back from Gregg's stronghold? Why did you not report straight back to me or the Council, as you were instructed to do? Where've you been together, I want to know?"

  "But, Roger," Vyann protested, "we haven't been back long! Besides, you were all out on a chase when we arrived. We didn't know the thing was so urgent, or we would have––"

  "Just a minute, Laur," Scoyt interrupted. "You'd better save the excuses: we've a crisis on hand. Never mind all that, I'm not interested in the frills; just tell me about Gregg."

  Seeing the hurt and angry look on Vyann's face, Complain stepped in and gave a brief account of their interview with his brother. Scoyt nodded, relaxing slightly.

  "Better than I dared hope," he said. "We will send scouts to get Gregg's party here as soon as possible. It is expedient that they move in here at once."

  "No, Roger," Vyann said quickly. "They can't come here. With all respects to Roy, his brother's nothing but a brigand! His followers are nothing but a mob. They and their wives are maimed and mutated. The whole pack would bring endless trouble on to our hands if we had them living with us. They are absolutely no good for anything but fighting."

  "That," Scoyt said grimly, "is just what we want them for. You'd better get abreast of events, Laur." Rapidly, he told her what Marapper had seen and what was now going on.

  "Had you hurt Fermour?" Complain asked.

  "No— just a preliminary flogging to soften him up."

  "He was used to that sort of thing in Quarters, poor devil," Complain said. His own back tingled in sympathetic memory.

  "Why should all this make it so urgent to get Gregg here?" Vyann said.

  Master Scoyt sighed heavily and answered with emphasis.

  "Because," he said, "here we have for the first time incontestable proof that the Outsiders and the Giants are in alliance— against us!"

  He looked at them hard as this soaked in. "Nice position we're in, eh?" he said ironically. "That's why I'm going to have up every trap in the ship, and a man posted by it. Eventually we'll hunt the enemy out; I swear I won't rest till we do."

  Complain whistled. "You'll certainly need Gregg's ruffians; manpower will be the crucial problem," he said. "But just how did Marapper manage to open that trapdoor?"

  "Simply because that fat priest is the man he is, I'd say," Scoyt remarked with a short laugh. "Back in your tribe, I suppose he was pretty much of a pack-rat?"

  "Picked up anything he could get," Complain agreed, recalling the lumber in Marapper's room.

  "One thing he picked up was a ring: a ring with an eight-sided stone, which someone must at some time have removed from a corpse. It's not a stone actually, it's some little mechanical device, and it fits exactly into a kind of keyhole in each trapdoor: press it in and the trap opens at once. Originally —way back before the catastrophe— everybody whose duty it was to go down into these traps must have had one of these ring-keys. Councillor Tregonnin, by the way, says these between-deck places are called inspection-ways; he found a reference to them; and that's just what we're going to do— inspect them! We're going to comb every inch of them. My men have Marapper's ring now and are opening up every trap aboard."

  "And Bob Fermour had a similar ring to Marapper's!" Complain exclaimed. "I remember often seeing it on his finger."

  "We think all Outsiders may wear them," Scoyt said. "If so, it explains how easily they elude us. It explains a lot— although it doesn't explain how in the past they've managed to spirit themselves out of cells carefully guarded on the outside. On the assumption that all who wear these rings are our enemies, I've got some of the Survival Team working through the entire population, looking for the giveaway. Anyone caught wearing that ring makes the Journey! Now I must go. Expansions!"

  He ushered them back into the clanging corridor. At once he was surrounded by underlings wanting orders; he became gradually separated from Complain and Vyann. They heard him delegating a junior officer to bear the news to Gregg, then he turned away and his voice was lost.

  "Union with Gregg . . ." Vyann said, and shivered. "Now what do we do? It looks as if Roger intends to give me no more work."

  "You're going to bed," Complain said. "You look exhausted."

  "You don't think I could sleep with all this noise going on, do you?" she asked, smiling rather tiredly.

  "I think you could try."

  He was surprised with what submissiveness she let him lead her away, although she stiffened suddenly as they met Marapper loitering in a side corridor.

  "You are the hero of the hour, priest, I understand," she said.

  Marapper's face was ponderous with gloom; he wore injury around him like a cloak.

  "Inspector," he said with a bitter dignity. "You are taunting me. For half my wretched lifetime I go around with a priceless secret on my finger without realizing it. And then when I do realize it— behold, in a moment of quite uncharacteristic panic, I give it away to your friend Scoyt for nothing!"

  II

  "We've got to get out of the ship somehow," Vyann murmured. Her eyes were shut as she spoke, her dark head on the pillow. Softly, Complain crept from the dark room; she would be asleep before he closed the door, despite the chaos of sound two decks away. He stood outside Vyann's door, half-afraid to go away, wondering it
this was a good time to bother the Council or Scoyt with news of the ruined controls. Indecisively, he fingered at the heat gun tucked in his belt, as gradually his thoughts wandered back to more personal considerations.

  Complain could not help asking himself what part he was playing in the world about him; because he was undecided what he wanted from life, he seemed to drift on a tide of events. The people nearest to him appeared to have clear-cut objectives. Marapper cared for nothing but power; Scoyt seemed content to grapple with the endless problems of the ship; and Complain's beloved Laur wanted only to be free of the restraints of life aboard. And he? He desired her, but there was something else, the something he had promised himself as a kid without finding it, the something he could never put into words, the something too big to visualize...

  "Who's that?" he asked, roused suddenly by a close footstep.

  A square pilot light near at hand revealed a tall man robed in white, a distinctive figure whose voice, when he spoke, was powerful and slow.

  "I am Councillor Zac Deight," he said. "Don't be startled. You are Roy Complain, the hunter from Deadways, are you not?"

  Complain took in his melancholy face and white hair, and liked the man instinctively. Instinct is not always the ally of intelligence.

  "I am, sir," he answered.

  "Your priest, Henry Marapper, spoke highly of you."

  "Did he, by Hem?" Marapper often did good by stealth, but it was invariably to himself.

  "He did," Zac Deight said. Then his tone changed. "I believe you might know something about that hole I see in the corridor wall."