Non-Stop (9 page)

‘We can sleep here,’ Marapper said shortly. ‘Roy, have a look through that door over there.’

The door at the far side of the room was half open. Skirting a broken desk, Complain pushed at the jamb; a small lavatory was revealed, the china bowl broken, piping torn away. A path of ancient rust ran down the wall, but the water had long ceased to flow. As Complain looked, a shaggy white rat sped from the wreckage past him with a drop-sided scamper; Fermour kicked at it and missed, and it vanished into the ponic tangle of the corridor.

‘This will do,’ Marapper repeated. ‘We will eat and then you will draw lots for guard duty.’

They ate frugally from the supplies in their packs, wrangling over the meal as to whether or not a guard was necessary. Since Complain and Fermour held it was necessary and Roffery and Wantage held it was not, the sides were equally balanced, and the priest did not find himself bound to join the disagreement. He ate in silence, wiped his hands delicately on
a rag, and then said, from a still full mouth, ‘Roffery, you will guard first, then Wantage, so that you two will have the earliest opportunity of proving yourselves right. Next sleep, Fermour and Complain will guard.’

‘You said we should draw lots,’ Wantage said angrily.

‘I changed my mind.’

He said it so bluntly that Roffery instinctively abandoned that line of attack and remarked, ‘You, I suppose, father, never guard?’

Marapper spread his hands and edged a look of childlike innocence on to his face. ‘My dear friends, your priest guards you all the time, awake or asleep.’

Rapidly, he pulled a round object from under his cloak and continued, changing the subject, ‘With this instrument, which I had the forethought to relieve Zilliac of, we can scientifically regulate our spells of guard so that no man does more than another. You see that it has on this side a circle of numbers and three hands or pointers. It is called a watch, so called after a period of guard, which is – as you know – also a watch. The Giants made it for this purpose, which shows that they too had Outsiders and madmen to deal with.’

Complain, Fermour and Wantage inspected the watch with interest; Roffery, who had handled such things in his job as valuer, sat back superciliously. The priest retrieved his possession and began to press a small stud on its side.

‘I do this to make it work,’ he explained grandly. ‘Of the three pointers, the little one goes very rapidly; that we can disregard. The two big ones go at different speeds, but we need only bother with the slower one. You see it is now touching the figure eight. Ern, you will stay awake until it touches the figure nine; then you will rouse Wantage. Wantage, when the pointer points to ten, you will rouse us all, and we will begin our journey. Clear?’

‘Where are we going?’ Wantage inquired sullenly.

‘We will go into all that when we have slept,’ Marapper said, in a tone of finality. ‘Sleep comes first. Wake me if you
hear anybody moving outside – and don’t wake me for false alarms. I am apt to be irritable if my dreams are disturbed.’

He rolled over into a corner, kicked a shattered office stool away and composed himself for sleep. Without much hesitation, the others did likewise, except Roffery, who watched them unlovingly.

They were all lying on the floor when Wantage spoke hesitantly. ‘Father, Father Marapper,’ he called, with a note of pleading in his voice. ‘Will you not give us a prayer for the safety of our skins?’

‘I’m too tired to intercede for anyone’s skin,’ Marapper replied.

‘A short prayer, father.’

‘As you wish. Children, expansion to our egos, let us pray.’ He commenced to pray as he lay hunched on the dirty floor, his words coming indifferently at first, and then gaining power as he drew interest from his train of thought.

‘O Consciousness, we gathered here are doubly unworthy to be thy vessels, for we know we have imperfections and do not seek to purge them as we ought to do. We are a poor lot, in a poor way of life; yet as we contain thee there is hope for us. O Consciousness, direct particularly these five of the poor vessels here, for there is more hope for us than for those we left behind, and therefore there is more room for thee in us. We know that when thou art not here there is only the adversary, Subconscious, in us; make our thoughts to swim solely in thee. Make our hands quicker, our arms stronger, our eyes sharper, and our tempers fiercer: that we may overcome and kill all who oppose us. May we smite and sunder them! May we scatter their entrails through the length of the ship! So that we come in the end to a position of power, in full possession of thee, and in thy full possession. And may thy spark breathe in us until that last dread moment when the adversary claims us, and we too take the Long Journey.’

As he had intoned, the priest had risen to his knees and stretched his hands above his head. Now he, with all the
others copying the movement, drew his outstretched right index finger symbolically, ritualistically, across his throat.

‘Now shut up, the lot of you,’ he said, in his normal tone, and settled again in his corner.

Complain lay with his back to a wall and his head on his pack; he slept usually like an animal, lightly, and with no dozing stages between sleep and waking. But in these strange surroundings he lay for some while with his eyes half-shut, trying to think. He thought only in generalized pictures: Gwenny’s empty bunk; Marapper standing triumphant over Zilliac; Meller, with the jumping animal growing under his fingers; a greasy broth bubbling out Ozbert Bergass’s life; the tensed muscles on Wantage’s neck, ready to twitch his head away from prying eyes; the Guard, Twemmer, tumbling tiredly into Marapper’s arms. And behind the pictures lay the significant fact that they concerned only what had passed, and that for what was to come he could find no pictures, for he was following into unknown realms: he was moving into the other darkness his mother had spoken of and feared.

He drew no conclusions, wasted no time in worry; indeed, he felt a kind of hope, for, as a village saying had it, the devil you don’t know may conquer the one you do.

He could see, before he slept, the desolate room lit by the light percolating from the corridor and, through the outer door, a section of the everlasting tangle. In the changeless, draughtless heat, the ponics rustled ceaselessly; occasionally, a click sounded near at hand as a seed was flicked into the room. The plants grew so rapidly that, when Complain woke, the younger ones would be inches taller and the older ones wilting against the restriction of the bulkheads; then, choking and choked would alike be nipped by the next dark. But he failed to see in this ceaseless jostling a parallel with the human lives about him.

‘You snore, priest,’ Roffery said pleasantly, as they ate together at the beginning of the next wake.

The relationship between them had subtly changed, as if some occult power had been active during the sleep. The feeling that they were five rivals snatched almost casually from Quarters had vanished; they were still rivals, in the sense that all men were rivals, but now there was a mute acknowledgement of union against the forces about them. The period of watch had undoubtedly been good for Roffery’s soul, and he seemed almost submissive. Of the five of them, Wantage alone appeared to be in no way altered. His character had been eroded by constant loneliness and mortification, as the flow of water wears away a wooden post, and he no longer had anything in him amenable to change; he could only be broken or killed.

‘We must move as far as possible this wake,’ Marapper said. ‘The coming sleep-wake is a dark, as you know, and it may not be advisable to travel then, when our torches will give us away to any watchers. Before we go, however, I will condescend to tell you something of our plans; and for that it is necessary to say something about the ship.’

He looked round at them, grinning and eating extravagantly as he spoke.

‘And the first point is, that we are in a ship. All agreed there?’

His gaze forced some sort of a reply from each of them; an ‘Of course’ from Fermour; an impatient grunt from Wantage, as if he found the question irrelevant; an airy wave of the hand, meaningless, from Roffery; and from Complain ‘No’.

To the latter, Marapper immediately turned his full attention.

‘Then you’d better understand quickly, Roy,’ he said. ‘Firstly, the proofs. Listen hard – I feel strongly on this question, and a show of determined stupidity might make me regrettably angry.’

He walked round the shattered furniture as he spoke, very emphatic and solid, his face heavy with seriousness.

‘Now, Roy – the great thing is, that not being in a ship is vastly different from being in it. You know – we all know – only what being in one is like; it is that which makes us think there is only ship. But there are many places which are
not
ship – huge places, many of them . . . This I know because I have seen records left by the Giants. The ship was made by the Giants, for their own purposes which are – as yet – hidden from us.’

‘I’ve heard this argument in Quarters,’ Complain said unhappily. ‘Suppose I believe all you say, Marapper. What then? Ship or world, what’s the difference?’

‘You don’t see. Look!’ Savagely, the priest leant forward and snatched a handful of ponic leaves, waving them before Complain’s face.

‘These are
natural
, something grown,’ he said.

He burst into the rear room, giving the broken china bowl a resounding kick.

‘That is
made
, artificial,’ he said. ‘Now do you see? The ship is an artificial thing. The world is natural. We are natural beings, and our rightful home is not here. The whole ship is made by the Giants.’

‘But even if it is so –’ Complain began.

‘It
is
so! It
is
so! The proof is round you all the time – corridors, walls, rooms, all artificial – but you are so used to it, you can’t see it is proof.’

‘Never mind if he can’t see it,’ Fermour told the priest. ‘What does it matter?’

‘I can see it,’ Complain said angrily. ‘I just can’t accept it.’

‘Well, sit there and be quiet and chew it over, and meanwhile we’ll go on,’ Marapper said. ‘I have read books, and I know the truth. The Giants built the ship for a purpose; somewhere, that purpose has been lost, and the Giants themselves have died. Only the ship is left.’

He stopped pacing and leant against a wall, resting his forehead against it. When he spoke again, it was almost to himself.

‘Only the ship is left. Only the ship and, trapped in it, all the tribes of man. There was a catastrophe: something went terribly awry somewhere, and we have been left to a terrible fate. It is a judgement passed on us for some awful, unguessable sin committed by our forefathers.’

‘To the hull with all this chatter,’ Wantage said angrily. ‘Why don’t you try and forget you’re a priest, Marapper? Let’s hear how this has any bearing on what we are going to do.’

‘It has every bearing,’ Marapper said, sticking his hands sulkily into his pockets, and then withdrawing one to pick at a tooth. ‘Of course, I’m only really interested in the theological aspects of the question. But the point as far as you are concerned is that the ship, by definition, has come
from
somewhere and is going
to
somewhere. These somewheres are more important than the ship; they are where we should be. They are natural places.

‘All that is no mystery, except to fools; the mystery is, why is there this conspiracy to keep us from knowing where we are? What is going on here behind our backs?’

‘Something’s gone wrong somewhere,’ Wantage answered eagerly. ‘It’s what I’ve always said: something’s gone wrong.’

‘Well, cease to say it in my presence,’ the priest snapped. It seemed to him that his position of authority was weakened by allowing others to agree with him. ‘There is a conspiracy. We have been plotted against. The driver or captain of this ship is concealed somewhere, and we are forging on under his direction, knowing neither the journey nor the destination. He
is a madman who keeps himself shut away while we are all punished for this sin our forefathers committed.’

This sounded to Complain both horrifying and unlikely, although no more unlikely than the whole idea of being in a moving vessel. Presumably accepting one premise meant accepting the other, so he said nothing. A vast feeling of insecurity engulfed him. Looking round unobtrusively at the others present, he detected no particular signs that they agreed enthusiastically with the priest: Fermour was smiling rather derisively, Wantage’s face presented its usual meaningless glare of disagreement, and Roffery was tugging impatiently at his moustache.

‘Now here is my plan,’ said the priest, ‘and unfortunately I need your co-operation to help carry it out. We are going to find this captain, hunt him down wherever he may be hiding. He is well concealed, but no locked doors shall save him from us. When we reach him, we kill him – and we shall be in control of the ship!’

‘And what do we do with it when we’ve got it?’ Fermour asked, in a tone carefully designed to counteract Marapper’s runaway enthusiasm.

The priest looked blank only for a moment.

‘We will find a destination for it,’ he said. ‘You leave that sort of detail to me.’

‘Where exactly do we discover this captain fellow?’ Roffery enquired.

For anwer, the priest flung back his cloak and felt inside his tunic; with a flourish, he produced the looker Complain had already seen. He waved the title under their eyes, but this meant little except to Roffery, the only fluent reader among them. To the others, the syllables were intelligible, but they were unable to master unfamiliar words without long effort. Pulling the looker out of their reach again, Marapper explained condescendingly that it was called ‘Manual of Electrical Circuits of Starship’. He also explained – for this explanation gave him an opportunity for boasting – how the
looker had come into his possession. It had been lying in the store in which Zilliac’s Guards had found the cache of dyes, and had been confiscated and added to a pile of goods awaiting inspection in the Lieutenancy. There Marapper had seen it and, recognizing its value instantly, had pocketed it for his own use. Unfortunately, one of the Guards had caught him, and the silence of this loyal man could only be bought by the promise that he should go with Marapper and find power for himself.