Non-Stop

by Brian W Aldiss

  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.

  II

  ‘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. Th
ey 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.

  ‘That being the Guard, presumably, which Meller despatched outside my room?’ Complain asked.

  ‘The same,’ said the priest, automatically making the token of mourning. ‘When he had thought over the scheme he very likely decided he could get most profit from it by revealing it all to Zilliac.’

  ‘Who knows he was wrong about that?’ Roffery commented sardonically.

  Ignoring this thrust, the priest spread his looker open and thumped a diagram.

  ‘Here is the whole key to my campaign,’ he said impressively. ‘This is a plan of the entire ship.’

  To his annoyance, he had to interrupt his speech at once to explain what a plan was, the concept being entirely new to them. This was Complain’s turn to be superior to Wantage, for while he quickly grasped the idea, the latter could not be made to comprehend the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object as large as the ship; analogies with Meller’s sub-life-size paintings did not help him, and eventually they had to leave the matter as assumed, just as Complain now had to ‘assume’ they were in a ship without anything he could regard as rational evidence.

  ‘Nobody has ever had a plan of the complete ship before,’ Marapper told them. ‘It was fortunate it fell into my hands. Ozbert Bergass knew as much about the layout as anyone, but he was only really familiar with the Sternstairs region and a part of Deadways.’

  The plan showed the ship to be shaped like an egg, elongated so that the middle was cylindrical, both ends coming to a blunted point. The whole was composed of eighty-four decks, which showed a circular cross-section when the ship was opened through its width, each being proportioned like a coin. Most of the decks (all but a few at each end) consisted of three concentric levels, upper, middle and lower; these had corridors in them, connected by lifts and companion ways; round these corridors were ranged the apartments. Sometimes the apartments were just a nest of offices, sometimes they were so big they filled a whole level. All decks were connected together by one large corridor running right through the longitudinal axis of the ship: the Main Corridor. But there were also subsidiary connections between the circular corridors of one deck and those of the decks on either side.

  One end of the ship was clearly labelled ‘Stern’. At the other end was a small blister labelled ‘Control’; Marapper planted his finger on it.

  ‘This is where we shall find the captain,’ he said. ‘Whoever is here has power over the ship. We are going there.’

  ‘This plan makes it as easy as signing off a log,’ Roffery declared, rubbing his hands. ‘All we’ve got to do is strike along the Main Corridor. Perhaps we weren’t such fools to join you after all.’

  ‘It won’t be as easy as that,’ Complain said. ‘You’ve spent all your wakes comfortably in Quarters, you don’t know what conditions are like. Main Corridor is fairly well known to hunters, but it does not go anywhere, as a proper corridor should.’

  ‘Despite your naïve way of putting things, you are correct, Roy,’ the priest agreed. ‘But I have found in this looker the reason why it does not go anywhere. All along the Main Corridor, between each deck, were emergency doors. Each circle of deck was built to be more or less self-sufficient, so that in time of crisis it could be cut off on its own and its inhabitants still survive.’

  He flicked through series of complex diagrams.

  ‘Even I cannot pretend to understand all this, but it is clear that there was an emergency, a fire or something, and the doors of the Main Corridor have remained closed ever since.’

  ‘That’s why — ponics apart — it’s so difficult to get anywhere,’ Fermour added. ‘All you can do is go round in circles. What we have to do is find the subsidiary connections which are still open, and advance through them. It means constant detouring instead of just moving straightforwardly.’

  ‘I’ll give you the instructions, thanks,’ said the priest, shortly. ‘Since you all seem to be so clever, we’ll be on our way without further ado. Get that pack on your back, Fermour, and get moving!’

  They shuffled obediently to their feet. Outside the compartment, Deadways waited; it was not inviting.

  ‘We’ll have to get through Forwards area to reach control,’ Complain said.

  ‘Frightened?’ Wantage sneered.

  ‘Yes, Slotface, I am.’

  Wantage turned away, resentful but too preoccupied to quarrel, even over the use of his nickname.

  They moved through the tangles in silence. Progress was slow and exhausting. A solitary hunter on his own ground might creep among ponics without cutting them, by keeping close to the wall. Moving in file, they found this method less attractive, since branches were apt to whip back and catch the man behind. This could be avoided by spacing themselves out, but by common consent they were keeping as close together as possible, it being uncomfortable on the nerves to be exposed either at the front or the rear of the little party. There was, too, another objection to walking by the walls: here the chitinous ponic seeds lay thickest, where they had dropped after being shot a
gainst this barrier, and they crunched noisily as they were trodden on. To Complain’s experienced hunter’s eye, their plenitude was a sign that there were few wild animals in the area, the seeds being delicacies to dog and pig alike.

  No diminution in the plague of flies was noticeable. They whined endlessly about the travellers’ ears. As Roffery in the lead swung his hatchet at the ponics, he wielded it frequently round his head, in a dangerous attempt to rid himself of this irritation.

  When they came to the first subsidiary connection between decks, it was clearly enough marked. It stood in a short side corridor and consisted of two single metal doors a yard apart, each capable of closing off the corridor, although now blocked open with the ubiquitous green growth. Before one, the words ‘Deck 61’ were stencilled and, after the other, ‘Deck 60’. Marapper grunted in satisfaction at this, but was too hot to make further comment. Complain on his hunting had come across such connections before, and seen similar inscriptions, but they had meant nothing; now he tried to integrate the previous knowledge into the conception of a moving ship: but as yet the idea was too new to be acceptable.

  On Deck 60 they met other men.

  Fermour was now in the lead, hacking his way stoically ahead, when they came level with an open door. Open doors always signified danger, but since they had to pass the thresholds, they grouped together and passed en bloc. So far, these distractions had been uneventful. This time, they were confronted by an old woman.

  She lay naked on the floor, a tethered sheep sleeping by her side. She was looking away from them, so that they had an excellent view of her left ear. This, by the humour of some strange disease, had swollen up like a sponge, standing out from her skull and pushing back a mat of rancid grey hair. The tissue of this abnormality was a startling pink, in contrast to the pallor of her face.

  Slowly she swung her head round, fixing them with two owl eyes. Without changing her expression, she began to scream hollowly. Even as she did so, Complain noticed that her right ear was normal.