Starship

by Brian W Aldiss

  "Don't look like that, Gwenny. I'm not your mortal enemy." It was not what he had meant to say, nor was its tone placating enough, but the sight of her brought some of his anger back.

  "Yes, you are my mortal enemy!" she said distinctly, still looking away. "No one I hate like you."

  "Give me a sip of your tea then, and we'll both hope it poisons me."

  "I wish it would," she said venomously, passing the cup.

  He knew her well enough. Her rages were not like his; his had to subside slowly; hers were there, then gone.

  "Gwenny . . . Gwenny, come on," he coaxed.

  Her manner changed abruptly. The haggard watchfulness of her face was submerged in dreaminess.

  "Will you take me hunting with you?"

  "Yes," he said. "Anything you say."

  What Gwenny said or did not say, however, had small effect on the irresistible roll of events. Two girls, Ansa and Daise, remote relations by marriage of Gwenny's, arrived breathless to say that her father, Ozbert Bergass, had taken a turn for the worse and was asking for her. He had fallen ill with the trailing rot a sleep-wake ago. It was thought he would not last: people who fell ill in Quarters seldom lasted long.

  "I must go to him," Gwenny said. The independence children had to maintain of their parents was relaxed at times of crisis; the law permitted visiting of sick beds.

  "He was a great man in the tribe," Complain said solemnly. Ozbert Bergass had been senior guide for many sleep-wakes, and his loss would be felt. All the same, Complain did not offer to go and see his father-in-law; sentiment was one of the weaknesses the Greene tribe strove to eradicate. Instead, when Gwenny had gone, he went down to the market to see Ern Roffery the Valuer, to ask the current price of meat.

  On his way, he passed the pens. They were fuller of animals than ever before, domesticated animals fitter and more tender than the wild ones the hunters caught. Roy Complain was no thinker, and there seemed to him a paradox here he could not explain to himself. Never before had the tribe been so prosperous or its farms so thriving; the lowest laborer tasted meat once in a cycle of four sleep-wakes. Yet Complain himself was less prosperous than formerly. He hunted more, but found less and received less for it. Several of the other hunters, experiencing the same thing, had already thrown up the hunt and turned to other work.

  This deteriorating state of affairs Complain simply attributed to a grudge the Valuer held against the hunter clan, being unable to integrate the lower prices Roffery allowed for wild meat with the abundance of domestic fare.

  Consequently, he pushed through the market crowd and greeted the Valuer in surly fashion.

  " 'spansion to your ego," he said grudgingly.

  "Your expense," the Valuer replied genially, looking up from an immense list he was painfully compiling. "Running-meat's down today, hunter. It'll take a good sized carcass to earn six loaves."

  "Hem's guts! And you told me wheat was down the last time I saw you, you twisting rogue."

  "Keep a civil turn of phrase, Complain: your own carcass isn't worth a crust to me. So I did tell you wheat was down. It is down— but running-meat's down more."

  The Valuer preened his great moustaches and burst out laughing. Several other men idling nearby laughed too. One of them, a burly, stinking fellow called Cheap, bore a pile of round cans he was hoping to exchange in the market. With a savage kick, Complain sent the cans flying. Roaring with rage, Cheap scrambled to retrieve them, fighting to get them back from others already snatching them up. At this Roffery laughed the louder, but the tide of his humor had changed, and was no longer against Complain.

  "You'd be worse off living in Forwards," he said consolingly. "They are a people of miracles there. Create beasts for eating from their breath, catching them in the air, they do. They don't need hunters at all." He slammed violently at a fly settling on his neck. "And they have vanquished the curse of flying insects."

  "Rubbish!" said an old man standing nearby.

  "Don't contradict me, Eff," the Valuer said. "Not if you value your dotage higher than droppings."

  "So it is rubbish," Complain said. "Who would be fool enough to imagine a place without flies?"

  "I can imagine a place without Complains," roared Cheap, who had now recovered his cans and stood ferociously by Complain's shoulder. They faced each other now, poised for trouble.

  "Give it to him," the Valuer called to Cheap. "Show him I want no hunters interrupting my business."

  "Since when was a scavenger of tins of more merit in Quarters than a hunter?" the old man called Eff asked generally. "I warn you, a bad time's coming to this tribe. I'm only thankful I won't be here to see it."

  Growls of derision for the old man and dislike for his sentiments arose on all sides. Suddenly tired of the company, Complain edged away. He found the old man following and nodded cautiously to him.

  "I can see it all," Eff said, evidently anxious to continue his tidings of gloom. "We're growing soft. Soon nobody will bother to leave Quarters or clear the ponics. There won't be any incentives. No brave men will be left— only eaters and players. Disease and death and attacks by other tribes will come; I see it as sure as I see you. Soon only tangles will exist where the Greene tribe was."

  "I have heard that Forwards folk are good," Complain said, cutting into this tirade. 'That they have sense and not magic."

  "You've been listening to that fellow Fermour then," Eff replied grumpily, "or one of his ilk. Some men are trying to blind us to who are our real enemies. I call them men but they aren't men, they're— Outsiders. That's what they are, hunter, Outsiders: supernatural entities. I'd have 'em killed if I had my way. I'd have a witch-hunt. Yes, I would. But we don't have witch-hunts here any more. When I was a kid we always used to be having them. I tell you, the whole tribe's going soft, soft. If I had my way. . . ."

  His breathless voice broke off, drying up perhaps before some old megalomaniac vision of massacre. Complain moved away from him almost unnoticed: he saw Gwenny approaching across the clearing.

  "Your father?" he inquired.

  She made a faint gesture with one hand, indicative of nothing.

  "You know the trailing rot," she said tonelessly. "He will be making the Long Journey before another sleep-wake is spent."

  "In the midst of life we are in death," he said solemnly: Bergass was a man of honor.

  "And the Long Journey has always begun," she replied, finishing the quotation from the Litany for him. "There is no more to be done. Meanwhile, I have my father's heart and your promise of a hunting. Let us go now, Roy. Take me into the ponics with you— please."

  "Running-meat's down to six loaves a carcass," he told her. "It's not worth going, Gwenny."

  "You can buy a lot with a loaf. A pot for my father's skull, for instance."

  "That's the duty of your step-mother."

  "I want to come with you hunting."

  He knew that note in her voice. Turning angrily on his heel, he made for the leading barricade without another word. Gwenny followed demurely.

  II

  Hunting had become Gwenny's great passion. It gave her freedom from Quarters, for no woman was allowed to leave the tribal area alone, and it gave her excitement. She took no part in the killing, but she crept like Complain's shadow after the beasts that inhabited the tangles.

  Despite its growing stock of domesticated animals and the consequent slump in the value of wild stock, Quarters had not enough meat for its increasing needs. The tribe was always in a state of unbalance; it had been formed only two generations before, by Grandfather Greene, and would not be self-sufficient for some while. Indeed, a serious accident or setback might still shatter it, sending its component families to seek what reception they could find with other tribes.

  Complain and Gwenny followed a tangle trail for some way beyond the leading Quarters barricade and then branched into the thicket. The one or two hunters and catchers they had been passing gave way to solitude, the crackling solitude of the tangles. Compla
in led them up a small companionway, pushing through the crowded stalks rather than cutting them, so that their trail should be less obvious. At the top he halted, Gwenny peering eagerly, anxiously over his shoulder.

  The individual ponics pressed up toward the light in bursts of short-lived energy, clustering overhead. The general illumination was consequently of a sickly kind, rather better for imagining things than actually seeing them. Added to this were the flies and clouds of tiny midges that drifted among the foliage like smoke: vision was limited and hallucinatory. But there was no doubt a man stood watching them, a man with beady eyes and chalk-white forehead.

  He was three paces ahead of them. He stood alertly. His great torso was bare and he wore only shorts. He seemed to be looking at a point a little to their left. Yet so uncertain was the light that the harder one peered the harder it was to be sure of anything, except that the man was there. And then he was not there.

  "Was it a ghost?" Gwenny hissed.

  Slipping his dazer into his hand, Complain pressed forward. He could almost persuade himself he had been tricked by a pattern of shadow, so silently had the watcher vanished. Now there remained no sign of him but trampled seedlings where he had stood.

  "Don't let's go on," Gwenny whispered nervously. "Suppose it was a Forwards man— or an Outsider."

  "Don't be silly," he said. "You know there are wild men who have run amok and live solitary in the tangles. He will not harm us. If he had wanted to shoot us, he would have done so then."

  All the same, his skin crawled uneasily to think that even now this stray might be planning their deaths as surely and invisibly as if he had been a disease.

  "But his face was so white," Gwenny protested.

  He took her arm firmly, and led her forward. The sooner they were away from the spot, the better.

  They moved fairly swiftly, once crossing a pig run, and passed into a side corridor. Here Complain squatted with his back to the wall and made Gwenny do the same.

  "Listen, and see if we are being followed," he said.

  The ponics slithered and rustled, and countless small insects gnawed into the silence. Together, they formed a din which seemed to Complain to grow until it would split his head. And in the middle of the din was a note which should not be there.

  Gwenny had heard it too.

  "We are getting near another tribe," she whispered. "There's one down this alley."

  The sound they could hear was the inevitable one of babies crying and calling, which announced a tribe long before its barricades were reached. Only a few wakes ago, this area had been pig territory, which meant that a tribe had come up from another level and was slowly approaching the Greene hunting preserves.

  "We'll report this when we get back," Complain said, and led her the other way.

  He worked easily along, counting the turns as they went, so as not to get lost. When a low archway appeared to their left, they moved through it, picking up a pig trail. This was the area known as Sternstairs, where a great hill led down to lower levels. A crashing sounded from over the brink of the slope, followed by an unmistakable squealing. Pig!

  Motioning Gwenny to stay where she was at the top of the hill, Complain, dexterously sliding his bow from his shoulder and fitting an arrow to it, began the descent. His hunter's blood was up, all worries forgotten, and he moved like a wraith. Gwenny's eye sped him an unnoticed message of encouragement.

  With room for once to reach something like their full stature, the ponics on the lower level had grown up into thin trees, arching overhead. Complain slipped to the brink of the drop, peering down through the tall ponics. An animal moved down there, rooting contentedly; he could see no litter, although the squealing had sounded like the cries of small creatures.

  As he worked cautiously down the slope, also overwhelmed with the ubiquitous tangle, he felt a momentary pang for the life he was about to take. A pig's life! He squashed the pang at once; the Teaching did not approve of softness.

  There were three piglets besides the sow. Two were black and one brown; shaggy, long-legged creatures like wolves, with prehensile noses and scoop jaws. The sow obligingly turned a broad flank for the readying arrow. She raised her head suspiciously and probed with her little eye through the poles around her.

  "Roy! Help------"

  The cry came from above: Gwenny's voice raised to the striking pitch of fear.

  The pig family took fright instantly, disappearing through the stalks, the young determinedly keeping up their mother's pace. Their noise did not quite cover the sounds of a scuffle above the hunter's head.

  Complain did not hesitate. At Gwenny's first cry, he dropped his arrow, whipped the bow over his shoulder, pulled out his dazer and dashed back up the slope of Sternstairs. But a stretch of uphill tangle is not good running ground. When he got to the top, Gwenny was gone.

  A crashing sounded to his left. He ran doubled up, making himself as small a target as possible, and was rewarded by the sight of two bearded men bearing Gwenny off. She was not struggling; they must have knocked her unconscious.

  It was the third man Complain did not see who nearly finished him. This man had dropped behind his two companions, stepping back into the stalks to cover their retreat. Now he set an arrow whipping back along the corridor. It twanged past Complain's ear. He dropped instantly, avoiding a second arrow, and groveled quickly back along the trail. Being dead helped nobody.

  Silence now, the usual crumbling noise of insane plant growth. Being alive helped nobody either. The facts hit him one by one and then all together. He had lost the pigs; he had lost Gwenny; he would have to face the council and explain why they were now a woman short. Shock for a moment obscured the salient fact: he had lost Gwenny. Complain did not love her, often he hated her; but she was his, necessary.

  Comfortingly, anger boiled up in his mind, drowning the other emotions. Anger! This was the salve the Teaching taught. Wrenching up handfuls of root-bound soil, he pelted them from him, distorting his face, working up the anger, creaming it up like batter in a bowl. Mad, mad, mad . . . he flung himself flat, beating the ground, cursing and writhing. But always quietly.

  At last the fit worked itself off, and he was left empty. For a long time he just sat there, head in hand, his brain washed as bare as tidal mud. Now he must get up and go back to Quarters. He had to report. In his head his weary thoughts ran.

  I could sit here forever. The breeze so slight, never changing its temperature, the light only seldom dark. The ponics rearing up and failing, decaying around me. I should come to no harm but death. . . ,

  Only if I stay alive can I find the something missed, the big something. Perhaps now I'll never find it, or Gwenny could have found it for me— no she couldn't: she was a substitute for it, admit it. Perhaps it does not exist. But when something so big has non-existence, that in itself is existence. A hole. A wall. As the priest says, there's been a calamity.

  Get up, you weak fool.

  He got himself up. If there were no reason for returning to Quarters, there was equally no reason for sitting here. Possibly what most delayed his return was the foreknowledge of all the practiced indifference there: the guarded look, the smirk at Gwenny's probable fate, the punishment for her loss. He headed slowly back through the tangle.

  Complain whistled before coming into view of the clearing in front of the barricade, was identified, and entered Quarters. During the short period of his absence a startling change had taken place; even in his dull state, he did not fail to notice it.

  That clothing was a problem in the Greene tribe, the great variety of dress clearly demonstrated. No two people dressed alike, from necessity rather than choice, individuality not being a trait fostered among them. The function of dress in the tribe was less to warm the body than to serve as guard of modesty and agent of display; and to be a rough and ready guide to social standing. Only the élite, the guards, the hunters, and people like the Valuer, could usually manage something like a uniform. The rest wore a variety
of fabrics and skins.

  But now the drab and the old in costume were as bright as the newest. The lowliest laborer sported flaring green rags!

  "What's happening here?" Complain asked a passing man.

  "Expansion to your ego, friend. The guards found a cache of dye earlier. Get yourself a soak! There's going to be a celebration."

  Further on, a crowd was gathered, chattering excitedly. A series of stoves were ranged along the deck; over them, like so many witches' cauldrons, boiled the largest utensils available. Yellow, scarlet, pink, mauve, black, blue, green, and copper, the separate liquids boiled, bubbled, and steamed, and around them churned the people, dipping one garment here, another there. Through the thick steam their unusual animation sounded shrilly.

  This was not the only use to which the dye was being put. Once it had been decreed that the dye was no use to the council, the guards had thrown the bags out for anyone to have. Many bags had been slit open and their contents thrown against walls or floors. Now the whole village was decorated with round bursts or slashes of bright color.

  Dancing had started. In still wet clothes, trailing rainbows which merged into brown puddles, women and men joined hands and began to whirl about the open spaces. A hunter jumped on to a box, beginning to sing. A woman in a yellow robe leaped up with him, clapping her hands. Another rattled a tambourine. More and more joined in the throng, singing, stamping around the cauldrons, breathlessly but gladly. They were drunk on color; most of them had hardly known it before.

  Some of the guards, aloof at first, joined in too, unable to resist the excitement in the humid air. The men were pouring in from the fieldrooms, sneaking back from the various barricades, eager for their share of pleasure.

  Complain eyed it all dourly, turned on his heel and went to report.

  An officer heard his story in silence and curtly ordered him before Lieutenant Greene himself.