Starship

by Brian W Aldiss

  "Yes, I, Roy, and no other: the great subconscious rejected me— and left me confoundedly cold. I hope your scheme worked, Master Scoyt?"

  "Excellently, priest," Scoyt said. "Eat some of this indigestible food and explain yourself to your friend, so that he will look at us less angrily."

  "You were dead!" Complain said.

  "Only a short Journey," Marapper said, seating himself and stretching out for the ale jug. "This witch doctor, Master Scoyt here, thought up an uncomfortable way of testing you and Fermour. He painted my head with rat's blood and laid me out with some drug to stage a death scene for your benefit."

  "Just a slight overdose of chloral hydrate," said Scoyt, with a secretive smile.

  "But I touched you— you were cold," Complain protested.

  "I still am," Marapper said. "It's the effects of the drug. And what would be that antidote your men shot into me?"

  "Strychnine, I believe it's called," Scoyt said.

  "Very unpleasant. I'm a hero, no less, Roy: always a saint, and now a hero as well. The schemers also condescended to give me hot coffee when I came around; I never tasted anything so good in Quarters . . . But this ale is better."

  His eyes met Complain's still dazed ones over the rim of the mug. He winked, and belched with deliberation.

  "I'm no ghost, Roy," he said. "Ghosts don't drink."

  Before they had finished the meal, Master Scoyt was looking fretful. With a muttered apology, he left them.

  "He works too hard," Vyann said, her eyes following him out of the hall. "We must all work hard. Before we sleep, you must be told our plans, for we shall be busy next wake."

  "Ah," Marapper said eagerly, cleaning his bowl, "that is what I want to hear. You understand my interest in this whole matter is purely theological, but what I'd like to know is, what do I get out of it?"

  "First we are going to exorcise the Outsiders," she smiled. "Suitably questioned, Fermour should yield up their secret hiding place. We go there and kill them, and then we are free to concentrate on unraveling the riddles of the ship."

  This she said quickly, as if anxious to avoid questioning, and went on at once to usher them out of the dining-room and along several corridors. Marapper, now fully himself again, took the chance to tell Complain of their abortive search for the Control Room.

  "So much has changed," Vyann complained. They were passing through a steel companionway whose double doors, now open, allowed egress from deck to deck. She indicated them lightly, saying: "These doors, for instance— in some places they are open, in some closed. And all the ones along Main Corridor are closed— which is fortunate, otherwise every marauder aboard ship would make straight for Forwards. But we cannot open or shut the doors at will, as the Giants must have been able to do when they owned the ship. As they stand now, so they have stood for generations; but somewhere must be a lever which controls them all. We are so helpless. We control nothing."

  "Are you and Master Scoyt the only ones working on this problem?" Complain asked.

  "For Hem's sake, no!" she said. "We're only subordinates. A group calling itself the Survival Team has recently been constituted, and it and all other Forwards officers apart from guard officers are also devoting attention to the problem. In addition, two of the Council of Five are in charge of it; one of them you met, priest— Councillor Zac Deight, the tall, longhaired man. The other of them I'm taking you to see now— Councillor Tregonnin. He is the librarian. He must explain the world to you."

  So it was that Roy Complain and the priest came to their first astronomy lesson. Tregonnin, as he talked to them, hopped about the room from object to object; he was almost ludicrously small and nervous. The room he ruled over was heaped with books and miscellaneous bric-a-brac in disorderly fashion. Confusion had here been brought to a fine art. Tregonnin explained first that until very recently in Forwards —as was the rule still in Quarters— anything like a book or a printed page had been destroyed, either from superstition or from a desire to preserve the power of the rulers by maintaining the ignorance of the ruled.

  "That, no doubt, was how the idea of the ship became lost to begin with," Tregonnin said. "And that is why what you see assembled around you represents almost all the records intact in the area of Forwards. The rest has perished. What remains allows us only a fragment of the truth."

  As the councillor began his narrative, Complain forgot the odd gestures with which he accompanied it. He forgot everything but the wonder of the tale as it had been pieced together, the mighty history patched up in this little room.

  Through the space in which their world moved, other worlds also moved— two other sorts of worlds, one called "sun," from which sprang heat and light, one called "planet." The planets depended on the suns for heat and light. At one planet attached to a sun called "Sol" lived men; this planet was called "Earth" and the men lived all over the outside of it, because the inside was solid and had no light.

  "The men did not fall off it, even when they lived on the bottom of it," Tregonnin explained. "For they had discovered a force called gravity. It is gravity which enables us to walk all the way around a circular deck without falling off."

  Many other secrets the men discovered. They found a way to leave their planet and visit the other planets attached to their sun. This must have been a difficult secret, for it took them a long while. The other planets were different from theirs, and had either too little light and heat or too much. Because of this, there were no men living on them. This distressed the men of Earth.

  Eventually they decided they would visit the planets of other suns, to see what they could find there, as their Earth was becoming exceptionally crowded. Here the scanty records in Tregonnin's possession became confusing, because while some said that space was very empty, others said it contained thousands of suns— stars, they were sometimes called.

  For some lost reason, men found it hard to decide which sun to go to, but eventually, with the aid of instruments in which they were cunning, they picked on a bright sun called "Procyon" to which planets were attached, and which was only a distance called "eleven light-years" away. To cross this distance was a considerable undertaking even for the ingenious men, since space had neither heat nor air, and the journey would be very long: so long that several generations of men would live and die before it was completed. Accordingly, men built this ship in which they now were, built it of inexhaustible metal in eighty-four decks, filled it with everything needful, stocked it with their knowledge, powered it with charged particles called "ions." Tregonnin crossed rapidly to a corner. "See!" he exclaimed. "Here is a model of the planet our ancestors left long ago— Earth!"

  He held up a globe above his head. Chipped by careless handlers, worn by the steep passage of time, it still retained on its surface the imprint of seas and continents.

  Moved, he hardly knew why, Complain turned to look at Marapper. Tears were pouring down the old priest's cheeks.

  "What . . . what a beautiful story," Marapper sobbed. "You are a wise man, Councillor, and I believe it all, every word of it. What power those men had, what power! I am only a poor old provincial priest, I know nothing, but . . ."

  "Stop dramatizing yourself, man," Tregonnin said with unexpected severity. "Take your mind off your ego and concentrate on what I am telling you. Facts are the thing— facts, and not emotions!'

  "You're used to the magnificence of the tale, I'm not," Marapper sobbed, unabashed. "To think of all that power . . ." Tregonnin put the globe carefully down and said in a petulant tone to Vyann, "Inspector, if this objectionable fellow doesn't stop sniffing, you will have to take him away. I cannot stand sniffing. You know I cannot."

  "When do we get to this Procyon's planets?" asked Complain quickly. He could not bear the thought of leaving here till everything had been told him.

  "A sound question, young man," Tregonnin said, looking at him for what was practically the first time. "And I'll try to give you a sound answer. It seems that the flight to Procyon's plane
ts had two main objectives. The ship was made to carry a number of people called 'colonists.' These colonists were to land on the new planet and live there, increasing and multiplying; the ship transported machines for them —we have found inventories of some of the things— tractors, concrete mixers, pile-drivers— those are some of the names I recall.

  "The second objective was to collect information on the new planet and samples from it, and bring it all back for the men of Earth to study."

  In his jerky fashion, Councillor Tregonnin moved to a cupboard and fumbled about inside it. He brought out a metal rack containing a dozen round tins small enough to fit in a man's hand. He opened one. Crisp broken flakes like transparent nail parings fell out.

  "Microfilm!" Tregonnin said, sweeping the flakes under , a table with his foot. "It was brought in to me from a far corner of Forwards. Damp has ruined it, but even if it were intact it would be of no use to us: it needs a machine to make it readable."

  "Then I don't see—" Complain began puzzledly, but the councillor held up a hand.

  "I'll read you the labels on the tins," he said. "Then you'll understand. Only the labels survive. This one says, 'film: Survey New Earth, Aerial, Stratospheric, Orbital. Midsummer, N. Hemisphere.' This one says, 'film: Flora and Fauna Continent A, New Earth.' And so on."

  He put the cans down, paused impressively, and added, "So there, young man, is the answer to your question; on the evidence of these tins, it is obvious the ship reached Procyon's planets successfully. We are now traveling back to Earth."

  In the untidy room deep silence fell, as each struggled alone to the very limits of his imagination. At last Vyann rose, shaking herself out of a spell, and said they should be going.

  "Wait!" Complain said. "You've told us so much, yet you've told us so little. If we are traveling back to Earth, when do we get there? How can we know?"

  "My dear fellow," Tregonnin began, then sighed and changed his mind about what he was going to say. "My dear fellow, don't you see, so much has been destroyed . . . The answers aren't always clear. Sometimes even the questions have been lost, if you follow my meaning. Let me answer you like this: we know the distance from New Earth, as the colonists called it, to Earth; it is eleven light-years, as I have said. But we have not been able to find out how fast the ship is traveling."

  "But one thing at least we do know," Vyann interposed. "Tell Roy Complain about the Forwards Roll, Councillor."

  "Yes, I was just about to," Tregonnin said, with a touch of asperity. "Until we of the Council of Five took over command of Forwards, it was ruled by a succession of men calling themselves Governors. Under them, Forwards grew from a pitiful tribe to the powerful state it now is. Those Governors took care to hand down to each other a Roll or Testament, and this Roll or Testament the last Governor handed over to my keeping before he died. It is little more than a list of Governors' names. But under the first Governor's name it says," he shut his eyes and waved a delicate hand to help him recite, " 'I am the fourth homeward-bound captain of this ship, but since the title is only an irony now, I prefer to call myself Governor, if even that is not too grand a name.' "

  The councillor opened his eyes and said, "So you see, although the names of the first three men are lost, we have in the Roll a record of how many generations have lived aboard this ship since it started back for Earth. The number is twenty-three."

  Marapper had not spoken for a while. Now he asked, "Then that is a long time. When do we reach Earth?"

  "That is the question your friend asked," Tregonnin said. "I can only answer that I know how many generations we have been traveling. But no man knows when or how we stop. In the days before the first Governor, came the catastrophe —whatever that was— and since then the ship goes on and on nonstop through space, without captain, without control. One might almost say: without hope."

  For most of that sleep, tired though he was, Complain could not rest. His mind seethed and churned with fearful images, and fretted itself with conjecture. Over and over, he ran through what the councillor had said, trying to digest it.

  It was all disquieting enough. Yet, in the midst of it, one tiny, irrelevant detail of their visit to the library kept recurring to him like toothache. At the time, it had seemed so unimportant that Complain, who was the only one who noticed it, had said nothing; now, its significance grew till it eclipsed even the thought of stars.

  While Tregonnin was delivering his lecture, Complain had chanced to glance up at the library ceiling. Through the grille there, alert as if listening and understanding, peered a tiny rat's face.

  III

  "Contraction take your ego, Roy!" Marapper exploded. "Don't start mixing yourself up with the ideas of Forwards. It's that girl who's doing it, I know— you mark my words, she's playing her own game with you! Just remember: we came here with our own objectives, and they're still our objectives."

  Complain shook his head. He and the priest were eating alone early the next wake. Officers crowded the dining-hall, but Vyann and Scoyt had not yet appeared. Now Marapper was making his old appeal, that they should try for power together.

  "You're out of date, Marapper," he said shortly. "And you can leave Inspector Vyann out of it. These Forwards people have a cause beyond any petty seeking for power. Besides, what if you killed the lot of them? What good would it do? Would it help the ship?"

  "To the hull with the ship. Look, Roy, trust your old priest who never let you down yet. These people are using us for their own ends; it's only common sense to do the same ourselves. And don't forget the Teaching tells you always to seek for yourself so that you may be freed from inner conflict."

  "You're forgetting something," Complain said. "The Litany ends 'And the ship brought home'; it's one of the main tenets of the Teaching. You were always a shockingly bad priest, Marapper."

  They were interrupted by the appearance of Vyann, looking fresh and attractive. She said she had already taken breakfast. With more irritation than he usually showed, Marapper excused himself. Something in Vyann's manner told Complain she was happy enough to let him go; it suited him well also.

  "Has Fermour been questioned yet?" he asked.

  "No. One of the Council of Five, Zac Deight, has seen him, but that's all. Roger —that is, Master Scoyt— will question him later, but at present he is involved with some other, unexpected business."

  He did not ask what this business might be. Seeing her so close again overpowered him, so that he could hardly think of anything to say. Mainly, he longed to tell her that nothing less than a miracle could have arranged her dark hair as it was. Instead, and with an effort, he asked what he was required to do.

  "You are going to relax," she said brightly. "I have come to show you around Forwards."

  It proved an impressive tour. Many rooms, here as in Quarters, were barren and empty; Vyann explained that this must be because their contents had been left on Procyon's planet, New Earth. Others had been turned into farms far surpassing Quarters's in scale. There were varieties of animals Complain had never seen before. He saw fish for the first time, swimming in tanks— here Vyann told him that they yielded the white meat he had enjoyed. There were amazing varieties of crops, some grown under special lighting. Cultivated ponics grew also, and brightly flowering shrubs. In one long room fruit grew, trees against the walls, bushes and plants in raised trenches in the middle.

  Many men and women worked on these agricultural decks, at humble tasks and complicated ones. Essentially a peaceful community, Forwards regarded agriculture as its chief occupation. Yet, despite all the trouble lavished on them, Vyann said, harvests mysteriously failed, animals died without apparent cause. Starvation remained a constant threat.

  They moved on to other decks. Sometimes the way was dark, the walls scarred with tokens of unguessable and forgotten weapons: souvenirs of the catastrophe. They came, feeling lonely now, to the Drive Floors, which Vyann said were strictly forbidden to all but a few officers. Here nobody lived; all was left to the silen
ce and the dust.

  "Sometimes I imagine this as it must once have been," Vyann whispered, sweeping her flashlight to left and right. "It must have been so busy . . . This was the part of the ship where the actual force that made the ship go was produced. Many men must have worked here."

  The doors which stood open along their way were doors with heavy wheels set in them, quite unlike the ordinary metal ship's doors. They passed through a last archway and were in a colossal chamber several floors high. The cone of the flashlight's beam picked out massed banks of strange shapes to either side, and in between, cumbrous structures on wheels, with grapnels and scoops and metal hands.

  "Once it was alive: now it's all dead!" Vyann whispered. There was no echo here; the brutal undulations of metal sucked up every sound. "This is what the Control Room would control if we could find it."

  They retreated, and Vyann led the way into another chamber much like the first, but smaller, though it too was enormous by ordinary standards. Here, though the dust was as thick, a deep and constant note filled the air.

  "You see—the force is not dead!" the girl said. "It still lives behind these steel walls. Come and look here!"

  She led into an adjoining room, almost filled with the gigantic bulk of a machine. The machine, completely paneled over, was shaped like three immense wheels set hub to hub, with a pipe many feet in diameter emerging from either side and curving up into bulkheads. At Vyann's behest, Complain set his hand on the pipe. It vibrated. In the side of one of the great wheels was an inspection panel; Vyann unlatched and opened it, and at once the organ note increased.

  The girl shone her light into the aperture.

  Complain stared, fascinated. Within the darkness, flickering and illusory, something spun and reflected the light, droning deeply as it did so. At the heart of it, a small pipe dripped liquid continually on to a whirling hub.

  "Is this space?" he asked Vyann breathlessly.