‘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 round, everywhere was curiously pock-marked and pitted from the force of the explosion.
‘At least we’ll be free of the cursed tangle for a space,’ Wantage remarked, drawing his torch. ‘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 torches may give us away.’
‘You walk in the dark if you feel like it,’ Wantage retorted. He moved forward, 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 torch on, probing it ahead. Then the strangeness began to take them. The first thing that Complain, whose eyes were trained to notice such things, observed which went against natural law was the lie of the ponics. As always, they tailed off and grew stunted towards the lightless passage, but here they were peculiarly whispy, their stalks looking flaccid, as if unable to support their weight, and 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 had 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 dizzily into the darkness, he saw Wantage, still gripping his torch, descending even more slowly.
On the other side of him, Marapper was floundering like a hippopotamus, his eyes bulging, his mouth speechlessly opening and shutting. Taking the priest’s arm, Fermour spun him expertly round 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 breatheable — they could proceed quickly along it in a series of leaps. Getting cautiously to his feet and snapping on his torch, 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 marvelled to think of the miles of festering tunnel that lay between them and Quarters.
He rose too hastily, sending himself spinning again. Unexpectedly, he vomited. It floated forward in the air, forming up into globelets, splashing round him as he made a clumsy retreat back to the others.
‘The ship’s gone crazy!’ Marapper was saying.
‘Why doesn’t it show this on your map?’ Wantage asked angrily. ‘I never did trust that thing.’
‘Obviously the weightlessness occurred after the map was made. Use your damned brains if you’ve got any,’ Fermour snapped. This unusual outburst was perhaps explained by the anxiety in his next remark. ‘I should think we’ve made enough racket to bring all Forwards on our trail; we’d better get back from here quickly.’
‘Back!’ Complain exclaimed. ‘We can’t go back! The way to the next deck lies up there. We’ll have to get through one of these broken doors and work our way through the rooms, keeping parallel to the corridor.’
‘How in the hull do we do that?’ Wantage asked. ‘Have you got something that bores through walls?’
‘We can only try, and hope there will be connecting doors,’ Complain said. ‘Bob Fermour’s right — it’s madness to stay here. Come on!’
‘Yes, but look here — ‘Marapper began.
‘Oh, take a Journey!’ Complain said angrily. He burst open the buckled nearest door and pushed his way in; Fermour followed close behind. With a glance at each other, Marapper and Wantage came too.
They were fortunate in that they had chosen a large room. The lights still functioned, and the place was stacked with growth; Complain chopped at it savagely, keeping near the wall next to the corridor. Again the lightness enveloped them as they advanced, but the effect was less serious here, and the ponics afforded them some stability.
They came level with a rent in the wall. Wantage peered past the ragged metal into the corridor. In the distance, a circular light winked out.
‘Someone’s following us,’ he said. They looked uneasily into each other’s faces, and with one accord pressed onward again.
A metal counter on which ponics now sprouted in profusion blocked their way. They were forced to skirt it, going towards the centre of the room to do so. This — in the days of the Giants — had been some kind of mess hall; long tables flanked with tubular steel chairs had covered the length and breadth of it. Now, with slow, vegetable force, ponics had borne up the furniture, entangling themselves in it, hoisting it waist high, where it formed a barrier to progress. The further they went, the more they were impeded. It proved impossible to get back to the wall.
As if in a nightmare, they cut their way past chairs and tables, half-blinded by midges which rose like dust from the foliage and settled on their faces. The thicket grew worse. Whole clumps of ponic had collapsed under this self-imposed strain and were rotting in slimy clumps, on top of which more plants grew. A blight had settled in, a blue blight sticky to the touch, which soon made the party’s knives difficult to handle.
Sweating and gasping, Complain glanced at Wantage, who laboured beside him. The good side of the man’s face was so swollen that his eye hardly showed. His nose ran, and he was muttering to himself. Catching Complain’s eyes upon him, he began to curse monotonously.
Complain said nothing. He was too hot and worried.
They moved through a stippled wall of disease. The going was slow, but finally they broke through to the end of the room. Which end? They had lost all sense of direction. Marapper promptly sat down with his back to the smooth wall, settling heavily among the ponic seeds. He swabbed his brow exhaustedly.
‘I’ve gone far enough,’ he gasped.
‘Well, you can’t go any further,’ Complain snapped.
‘Don’t forget I didn’t suggest all this, Roy.’
Complain drew a deep breath. The air was foul; he had the nasty illusion that his lungs were coated with midges.
‘We’ve only got to work our way along the wall till we come to a door. It’s easier going here,’ he said. Then, despite his determination, he sank down beside the priest.
W
antage began to sneeze.
Each onslaught bent him double. The ruined side of his face was as swollen as the good one; his present distress completely hid his deformity. On his seventh sneeze, all the lights went out.
Instantly, Complain was on his feet, flashing his torch into Wantage’s face.
‘Stop that sneezing!’ he growled. ‘We must keep quiet.’
‘Turn your torch off!’ Fermour snapped.
They stood in indecisive silence, their hearts choking them. Standing in that heat was like standing in a jelly.
‘It could be just a coincidence,’ Marapper said uneasily. ‘I can remember sections of lights failing before.’
‘It’s Forwards — they’re after us!’ Complain whispered.
‘All we’ve got to do is work our way quietly along the wall to the nearest door,’ Fermour said, repeating Complain’s earlier words almost verbatim.
‘Quietly?’ Complain sneered. ‘They’d hear us at once. Best to stand still. Keep your dazers ready — they’re probably trying to creep up on us.’
So they stood there, sweating. Night was a hot breath about them, sampled inside a whale’s belly.
‘Give us the Litany, Priest,’ Wantage begged. His voice was shaking.
‘Not now, for gods ache,’ Fermour groaned.
‘The Litany! Give us the Litany!’ Wantage repeated.
They heard the priest flop down on to his knees. Wantage followed suit, wheezing in the thick gloom.
‘Get down, you two bastards!’ he hissed.
Marapper began monotonously on the General Belief. With an overpowering sense of futility, Complain thought, ‘Here we finish up in this dead end, and the priest prays; I don’t know why I ever mistook him for a man of action.’ He nursed the dazer, cocking an ear into the night, half-heartedly joining in the responses. Their voices rose and fell; by the end of it they all felt slightly better.
‘… and by so discharging our morbid impulses we may be freed from inner conflict,’ the priest intoned.
‘And live in psychosomatic purity,’ they repeated.
‘So that this unnatural life may be delivered down to Journey’s End.’
‘And sanity propagated,’ they replied.
‘And the ship brought home.’ The priest had the last word.
He crept round to each of them in the grubby dark, his confidence restored by his own performance, shaking their hands, wishing expansion to their egos. Complain pushed him roughly away.
‘Save that till we’re out of this predicament,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to work our way out of here. If we go quietly, we can hear anyone who approaches us.’
‘It’s no good, Roy,’ Marapper said. ‘We’re stuck here and I’m tired.’
‘Remember the power you were after?’
‘Let’s sit it out here!’ the priest begged. ‘The ponic’s too thick.’
‘What do you say, Fermour?’ Complain asked.
‘Listen!’
They listened, ears strained. The ponics creaked, relaxing without light, preparing to die. Midges pinged about their heads. Although vibrant with tiny noises, the air was almost unbreathable; the wall of diseased plants cut off the oxygen released by the healthy ones beyond.
With frightening suddenness, Wantage went mad. He flung himself on to Fermour, who cried out as he was bowled over. They were rolling about in the muck, struggling desperately. Soundlessly, Complain threw himself on to them. He felt Wantage’s wiry frame writhing on top of Fermour’s thick body; the latter was fighting to shake off the hands round his throat.
Complain wrenched Wantage away by the shoulders. Wantage threw a wild punch, missed, grabbed for his dazer. He brought it up, but Complain had his wrist. Twisting savagely, he forced Wantage slowly back and then hit out at his jaw. In the dark, the blow missed its target, striking Wantage’s chest instead. Wantage yelped and broke free, flailing his arms wildly about his body.
Again Complain had him. This time, his blow connected properly. Wantage went limp, tottered back into the ponics and fell heavily.
‘Thanks,’ Fermour said; it was all he could manage to say.
They had all been shouting. Now they were silent, again listening. Only the creak of the ponics, the noise that went with them all their lives, and continued when they had made the Long Journey.
Complain put out his hand and touched Fermour; he was shaking violently.
‘You should have used your dazer on the madman,’ Complain said.
‘He knocked it out of my hand,’ Fermour replied. ‘Now I’ve lost the bloody thing in the muck.’
He stooped down, feeling for it in a pulp of ponic stalks and miltex.
The priest was also stooping. He flashed a torch, which Complain at once knocked out of his hand. The priest found Wantage, who was groaning slightly, and got down on one knee beside him.
‘I’ve seen a good many go like this,’ Marapper whispered. ‘But the division between sanity and insanity was always narrow with poor Wantage. This is a case of what we priests term hyper-claustrophobia; I suppose we all have it in some degree. It causes a lot of deaths in the Greene tribe, although they aren’t all violent like this. Most of them just snap out like a torch.’ He clicked his fingers to demonstrate.
‘Never mind the case history, priest,’ Fermour said. ‘What in the name of sweet reason are we going to do with him?’
‘Leave him and clear out,’ Complain suggested.
‘You don’t see how interesting a case this is for me,’ said the priest reprovingly. ‘I’ve known Wantage since he was a small boy. Now he’s going to die, here in the darkness. It’s a wonderful, a humbling thing to look on a man’s life as a whole: the work of art’s completed, the composition’s rounded off. A man takes the Long Journey, but he leaves his history behind in the minds of other men.
‘When Wantage was born, his mother lived in the tangles of Deadways, an outcast from her own tribe. She had committed a double unfaith, and one of the men concerned went with her and hunted for her. She was a bad woman. He was killed hunting: she could not live in the tangle alone, so she sought refuge with us in Quarters.
‘Wantage was then a toddling infant — a small thing with his great deformity. His mother became — as unattached women frequently will — one of the guards’ harlots, and was killed in a drunken brawl before her son reached puberty.’
‘Whose nerves do you think this recitation steadies?’ Fermour asked.
‘In fear lies no expansion; our lives are only lent us,’ Marapper said. ‘See the shape of our poor Comrade’s life. As so often happens, his end echoes his beginning; the wheel turns one full revolution, then breaks off. When he was a child, Wantage endured nothing but torment from the other boys — taunts because his mother was a bad lot, taunts because of his face. He came to identify the two as one woe. So he walked with his bad side to the wall, and deliberately submerged the memory of his mother. But being back in the tangle brought back his infant recollections. He was swamped by the shame of her, his mother. He was overwhelmed by infantile fears of darkness and insecurity.’
‘Now that our little object lesson in the benefits of self-confession is over,’ Complain said heavily, ‘perhaps you will recollect, Marapper, that Wantage is not dead. He still lives to be a danger to us.
‘I’m just going to finish him,’ Marapper said. ‘Your torch a moment, dimly. We don’t want him squealing like a pig.’
Bending down gingerly, Complain fought a splitting headache as the blood flow into his skull increased. The impulse came to do just what Wantage had done: hurl away the discomforts of reason, and charge blindly into the ambushed thickets, screaming. It was only later that he questioned his blind obedience to the priest at this dangerous hour; for it was obvious on reflection that Marapper had found some sort of mental refuge from this crisis by turning to the routines of priesthood; his exhumation of Wantage’s childhood had been a camouflaged seeking for his own.
‘I think I’m going to sneeze again,
’ Wantage remarked, in a reasonable voice, from the ground. He had regained consciousness without their knowing it.
His face, in the pencil of light squeezed between Complain’s fingers, was scarcely recognizable. Normally pale and thin, the countenance was now swollen and suffused with blood; it might have been a gorged vampire’s mask, had the eyes not been hot, rather than chill with death. And as the light of Complain’s torch fell upon him, Wantage jumped.
Unprepared, Complain went down under a frontal attack. But, arms and legs flailing, Wantage paused only to knock his previous assailant out of the way. Then he was off through the tangles, crashing away from the little party.
Marapper’s torch came on, picking at the greenery, settling dimly on Wantage’s retreating back.
‘Put it out, you crazy fool priest!’ Fermour bellowed.
‘I’m going to get him with my dazer,’ Marapper shouted.
But he did not. Wantage had burst only a short way into the tangle when he paused and swung about. Complain heard distinctly the curious whistling noise he made. For a second, everything was still. Then Wantage made the whistling noise again and staggered back into range of Marapper’s torch. He tripped, collapsed, tried to make his way to them on hands and knees.
Two yards from Marapper, he rolled over, twitched and lay still. His blank eye stared incredulously at the arrow sticking out of his solar plexus.
They were still peering stupidly at the body when the armed guards of Forwards slid from the shadows and confronted them.
PART III
FORWARDS
I
Forwards was a region like none Roy Complain had seen before. The grandeur of Sternstairs, the cosy squalor of Quarters, the hideous wilderness of Deadways, even the spectacle of that macabre sea where the Giants had captured him — none of them prepared him for the differentness of Forwards. Although his hands, like Fermour’s and Marapper’s, were tied behind his back, his hunter’s eye was keenly active as their small party was marched into the camp.
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