Non-Stop (6 page)

‘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? By hem’s bladders, what are those whores doing? Washing their —s in it?’

A young woman hastily passed over a bowl of broth, winking mischievously at Complain as she did so. 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 in greasy condensation.

‘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, laddie. Just a minute while I make water . . . ah, my damned belly. Tight. Very tight . . . 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 you 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. Snatches of their talk beat unheeded against Complain’s ears as he left.

‘. . . and where’s he get all those clothes from, I’d like to know. He’s only a common farm hand. I tell you he’s an informer . . .’

‘You’re too free with your kisses, young Wenda. Believe me, when you get to my age –’

‘. . . nicest dish of brains I’ve
ever
had.’

‘. . . that Ma Cullindram has just had a litter of seven. All still-born but one poor little tyke. It was quins last time, if you remember. I told her straight, I said “You want to be firm with your man –”’

‘. . . gambling away his earnings –’

‘. . . lying . . .’

‘. . . never laughed so much . . .’

Back in the dark corridor, he leant 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 sweat. From the corridor, now he listened, he could still hear the rumble of women’s 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 the voices, dying voices.

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 Quarters and in all the known territories round about, 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 darks, 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 favoured 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 rigours 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 lot 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. Go to, Slotface!’

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 grey eye stared detachedly beyond them, absorbed in its own private vision.

‘Don’t dare call me that again, you filthy meat,’ 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 round again.

Slowly, Complain also moved on, nerves jangled 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’ quarters 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. Go and find a new woman.’

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, greasy 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 over before. He tried to break through the web-like 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 give me that crap, father. 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 re-living the scene had gone, and directly it was gone, it was forgotten. 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 another straightly 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. He was tempted to tell the priest that he had just learned of his bastardy.

‘You didn’t get your six strokes, Roy, boy, 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 out, 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 honourable 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, almost forced there 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 with a sound like a tiny shriek.

‘No, Roy, you lie, true to the list of liars who begot you. If we went, we should be escaping, fleeing, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. Ha, we shall slip away furtively. It will be the old back-to-nature act, boy, 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 learnt more of the venture.

‘What should 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, twisting the two great slabs of his cheeks, one up, one down, until his mouth coiled between them like knotted rope.