Starship

by Brian W Aldiss

  "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 brains if you've got any," Fermour snapped. This unusual outburst was perhaps explained by the anxiety in his next remark. "I think we've made enough racket to bring all Forwards on our trail; we'd better get back 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, 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 toward the center 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 thickets 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 labored beside him. The good side of the man's face was so swollen that his eye hardly showed.

  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 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.

  Wantage 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 light into Wantage's face.

  "Stop that sneezing!" he growled. "We must keep quiet."

  "Turn your light 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 around them.

  "Give us the Litany, priest," Wantage begged. His voice was shaking.

  "Not now, for gods ache," Fermour groaned.

  They heard the priest flop to his knees. Wantage followed suit, wheezing in the thick gloom.

  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 around to each of them in the dark, his confidence restored by his 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 around 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 around 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 around his body.

  Again Complain had him. This time, his blow connected. 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 would continue, some said, when they made the Long Journey.

  "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 light." He clicked his fingers to demonstrate.

  "Never mind the case history,
priest," Fermour said. "What 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."

  "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 had been an outcast, 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 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 flashlight 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 light came on, picking at the greenery, settling dimly on Wantage's retreating back.

  "Put it out, you fool!" 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 around. 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 light. 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 THREE

  Forwards

  I

  FORWARDS was a region like none Roy Complain had seen before. The sweep of Sternstairs, the squalor of Quarters, the 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 active as their small party marched into the camp.

  One radical distinction between Forwards and the villages lost in the festering continent of Deadways soon became obvious. Whereas the Greene tribe and others like it were always slowly on the move, Forwards was firmly established, its boundaries fixed and unchanging. It looked like the result of organization rather than accident. Complain's conception of it had always been vague; in his mind it had featured as a place of dread, the more dreadful for being vague. Now he saw it was immensely larger than a village. It was almost a region in its own right.

  Its very barriers differed from Quarters's make-shift affairs. The skirmishing party, as they pushed unceremoniously through the ponics, came first of all to a heavy curtain which, loaded with small bells, rang as they drew it aside. Beyond the curtain was a section of corridor, dirty and scarred but devoid of ponics, terminating in a barricade formed of desks and bunks, behind which Forwards guards stood ready with bows and arrows.

  After an amount of hailing and calling, the skirmishing party —which numbered four men and two women— was allowed up to and past this last barricade. Beyond it was another curtain, this time of fine net, through which the hitherto ubiquitous midges, one of the scourges of Deadways, could not get. And beyond that lay Forwards proper.

  For Complain, the incredible feature was the disappearance of ponic plants. Inside Quarters, of course, the thickets had been hacked or trampled down, but with indifferent enthusiasm and in the knowledge that the clearance was only temporary; often enough the old root system was allowed to remain covering the deck. And always there had been tokens of them about, from the sour-sweet miltex smell pervading the air to the dried staves used by men and the chitinous seeds played with by children.

  Here the ponics had been swept away as if they had never existed. The detritus and soil that attended them had been completely removed; even the scoured pattern the roots made on the hard deck had been erased. The lighting, no longer filtered through a welter of greedy foliage, shone out boldly. Everywhere wore such a strange aspect —so hard, bare and, above all, so geometrical— that some while was to elapse before Complain realized fully that these doors, corridors and decks were not an independent kingdom but, in fact, only an extension of their counterparts elsewhere; the external appearance was so novel that it blinded him to its real conformity with the layout of Quarters.

  The three prisoners were prodded into a small cell. All their equipment was removed and their hands freed. The door was slammed on them.

  "O Consciousness!" Marapper groaned. "Here's a pretty state for a poor, innocent old priest to be in. Froyd rot their souls for a pack of dirty miltex-suckers!"

  "At least they let you do the death rites for Wantage," said Fermour, trying to pick the filth out of his hair.

  They looked at him curiously.

  "What else would you expect?" Marapper asked. "The brutes are at least human. But that doesn't mean to say that they won't be wearing our intestines around their necks before they eat again."

  "If only they hadn't taken my dazer . . ." Complain said. Not only their dazers, but their packs and all their possessions had been taken. He prowled helplessly around the little room. Like many apartments in Quarters, it was all but featureless. By the door, two broken dials were set into a wall, a bunk was fixed into another wall, a grille in the ceiling provided a slight current of air. Nothing offered itself as a weapon.

  Marapper tried to remove some clotted filth from his cloak. Working half-heartedly, he looked up with eagerness when the door was opened and two men appeared in the open doorway; pushing roughly past Fermour, the priest strode over to them.

  "Take me to your lieutenant and expansion to your egos," he said.
"It is important I see him as soon as possible. I am not a man to be kept waiting."

  "You will all come with us," one of the men said firmly. "We have our orders."

  Marapper saw fit to obey at once, although he kept up a flow of indignant protest as they were ushered into the corridor. They were led deeper into Forwards, passing several curious bystanders on their way.

  His senses stimulated by a scent of danger, Complain took in every detail of their route. Here, as throughout Deadways, what Marapper had called the Main Corridor was blocked at each deck, and they followed a circuitous detour around the curving corridors and through the inter-deck doors.

  By this method they traversed two decks. Complain saw with mild surprise the notice deck 22 stenciled against the interdeck door; it was a link with all the seemingly unending deck numbers which had punctuated their trek; and it implied, unless Deadways began again on the other side of Forwards, that Forwards itself covered twenty-four decks.

  This was too much for Complain to believe. He had to remind himself forcibly how much he was incapable of crediting what had actually proved to be. But— what lay beyond Deck 1? He could picture only a wilderness of super-ponics, growing out into what his mother had called the great stretch of other darkness, where strange lanterns burned. Even the priest's theory of the ship, backed as it was by printed evidence, had little power to thrust out that image he had known since childhood. With a certain pleasure, he balanced the two theories against each other; never before in his life had he felt anything but discomfort at the contemplation of intangibles.

  Complain's interior monologue was interrupted by their guards, who now pushed him with Fermour and the priest into a large compartment, entering themselves and shutting the door. Two other guards were in the room.

  Unusual features distinguished the room from any other Complain had been in. One was a plant bearing bright flowers which stood in a tub, as if for some purpose— though what purpose, the hunter could not guess. The other unusual feature was a girl; she stood regarding them from behind a desk, dressed in a neat gray uniform and with her hands restfully down at her sides. Her hair fell straight and neat about her neck. The hair was black, and her eyes were gray; her face was thin, pale, and intense, the exact curve of her cheek down to her mouth holding, Complain felt compulsively, a message he longed to understand. Although she was young and her brow magnificent, the impression she gave was not so much of beauty as of gentleness— until one's gaze dropped to her jaw. There lay delicate but unmistakable warning that it might be uncomfortable to know this girl too well.