Starship

by Brian W Aldiss

  Now they had it, knowing it right down to the pits of their stomachs. Fermour turned from their sealed faces, ashamed of himself for feeling triumph. Methodically, he resumed prodding around for the particular panel he wanted. He found it, and they were still all standing in choked silence. Using the saw, he began to work away the seared casing.

  "So we're not human beings at all . . ." Complain exclaimed, as if speaking to himself. "That's what you're saying. All that we've suffered, hoped, done . . ."

  As his voice fell, they all heard the noise. It was the noise they had heard by the personnel lock, the noise of a million rats, flowing irresistibly through the hard honeycomb of the ship.

  "They're heading here!" Fermour yelled. "They're coming this way! It's a dead end. They'll swamp us! We'll be torn to pieces!"

  Now he had the casing off, tearing it away with his hands, flinging it behind him. Beneath it, severed from their toggles, lay eighty-four double strands of wire. Using the side of his saw, Fermour frantically bashed the pairs together. Sparks flew and— the terrible sound of the rodent army cut off abruptly. Every deck was closed from its neighbor; all the interdeck doors, on every level, had clicked firmly shut, tombing off further communication.

  Gasping, Fermour rocked back against the paneling. He had worked the trick just in time. The thought of the horrible death he had so narrowly avoided overcame him, and he was sick on the floor.

  "Look at him, Roy!" Gregg shouted, pointing his sound hand in scorn. "You were wrong about us, Roy! We're as good as he is, or better. He's scared green . . ."

  He advanced to Fermour, clenching his one good fist; Marapper followed, dragging out a knife.

  "Someone's got to be sacrificed for all this deadly wrong," the priest said, through clenched teeth, "and it's going to be you, Fermour— you're going to make the Long Journey on behalf of twenty-three generations of suffering! It would be a nice gesture."

  Dropping the saw helplessly, Fermour stood there without defense. He did not move or speak; it was almost as if he saw the priest's point of view. Marapper and Gregg came on. Complain and Vyann stood unmoving behind them.

  As Marapper's blade came up, an unexpected clangor filled the dome beneath which they were grouped. Mysteriously, the shutters, closed since the days of Captain Gregory Complain, sprang back to reveal the long windows. Three quarters of a great sphere all around the five of them was turned in a twinkling into space. Through the hyaline tungsten, the universe breathed in at them; on one side of the ship, the sun burned tall and strong; on the other, Earth and moon were radiant globes.

  "How did that happen?" Vyann asked, as the clattering echoes died.

  They looked around uneasily. Nothing stirred.

  Rather sheepishly, Marapper tucked his knife away. The view was too mighty to be stained with blood. Gregg, too, turned away from Fermour. Sunlight washed over them, seeming to deafen them. Fermour at last managed to speak.

  "It'll be all right," he said quietly. "None of us needs to be worried. The ship will come up from Little Dog and put the fire out and kill the rats and tidy things up, and then we'll open up the decks again and you'll be able to go on living as before."

  "Never!" Vyann said. "Some of us have devoted our lives to getting out of this tomb. We'll die sooner than stay!"

  "That's what I was afraid of," Fermour said, almost to himself. "We've always thought this day might come. It's not entirely unprepared for— others before you have found out vital secrets, but we've always managed to silence them in time. Now . . . well, you might be all right on Earth: we have taken some of your babies down there, and they've survived, but we've always––"

  "We!" Vyann exclaimed. "You keep saying 'we'! But you are an Outsider, an ally of the Giants. What relation are you to true Earthmen?"

  Fermour laughed without humor.

  "Outsiders and Giants are true Earthmen," he said. "When Big Dog was towed into orbit, we —Earth— fully realized our grave responsibility to you all. Doctors and teachers were your especial need. Holy men were required, to counter the irreligion of the Teaching— which, vile though it was, undoubtedly assisted your survival in some measure. But there were snags: people could not just creep into the air locks and mingle with you, easy though that was, with the inspection-way system and the hydroponic tangles to shelter them. They had to be trained at Little Dog Institute to move and speak as quickly as possible, to sleep in cat naps, to— oh, in short to act like dizzies. And to bear the horrible stench in the ship. And, of course, they had to be abnormally small men, since none of you is above five feet high.

  "Some of these men, performing a dangerous mission, you knew and liked. Lindsey and Meller, the artist, were both Earthmen stationed in Quarters— Outsiders, but your friends."

  ". . . and you," Complain said. He made a sweeping gesture before his face; a moth circled there, eluding his hand.

  "I'm an anthropologist," Fermour said, "although I also tried to help spread the light. There are several of us aboard. This is a unique chance to discover the effects of a closed environment on man; it has taught us more about man and society than we have been able to learn on Earth for centuries.

  "Zac Deight was head of everyone on board whom you would call Outsiders. Our usual term of field work aboard is two years— my time is nearly up. The field work has its personal rewards: it's arduous, yet not particularly dangerous, unless one runs against efficient people like Scoyt. Zac Deight loved dizzies— loved you. He stayed in the ship long beyond his term, to try and soften conditions and lead Forwards's thought back into more normal channels— in which he was very successful, as you can see if you compare conditions in Forwards with conditions in a Deadways tribe like Quarters."

  Discomfort rose in Complain at this, to recall how he and Marapper had shot down the old councillor without compunction.

  "I suppose, then, that Giants are just big humans?" he said, deflecting the subject of conversation.

  "They're just normal-size humans," Fermour said. "Six-footers and such. They did not have to be picked for small stature, since they were never meant to be seen by you, unlike Outsiders; they were the maintenance crew who came aboard when the ship was in orbit and began, secretly, to make the place more suitable for you to live in. They sealed off these controls, in case anybody finding them should start wondering about things; for although we always tried to foster in you the knowledge that you are in a ship —in case a day ever came when you might be able to leave it— the maintenance crews were always careful to destroy any direct evidence which might, by inducing you to investigate on your own account, make their job more dangerous.

  "The rings we and what you call the 'Giants' wear are replicas of the same ring-key the original maintenance crews wore when the ship was a going concern. They, and the inspection-ways to which they give access, have made life aboard with you possible. It means we can have —and occasionally slip away to— a secret H.Q. on the ship, with food and baths,"

  "So you were all just taking care of us! You didn't any of you want to scare us, eh?" Gregg asked.

  "Of course not," Fermour replied. "Our orders are strictly not to kill a dizzy; none of us ever carries a lethal weapon. The legend that Outsiders were spontaneously generated in the muck of the ponics was purely a dizzy superstition. We did nothing to alarm, everything to help."

  Gregg laughed curtly.

  "I see," he said. "Just a bunch of wet nurses for us poor dolts, eh? It never occurred to you that while you studied us we might be going through hell? Look at me! Look at my mate Hawl! Look at half the poor devils I had under me! And look at the ones so deformed we put 'em out of their misery when we came across them in Deadways! Let's see, seven off twenty-three . . . Yes, you let sixteen generations live and die here, as near as this to earth, suffering the tortures we suffered, and you think you deserve a medal for it! Give me that knife, Marapper."

  "You've got it wrong!" Fermour shouted. "Complain, you tell him! I've explained about the speed-up of your liv
es. Your generations are so brief that twenty of them had passed before Big Dog was first boarded and dragged into orbit. They're studying the main problem down in the laboratories of Little Dog all the while, that I swear to you. At any time now, they may find a chemical agent which can be injected into you to break down the alien peptic chains in your cells. Then you'd be free. Even now . . ."

  He broke off suddenly, staring.

  They followed his gaze. Even Gregg looked around. Something like smoke, filtering out into the blinding sunshine, rose from a gash in one of the wrecked panels. It was composed of moths, thousands of them. They flew high into the dome, circling toward the unexpected sun. Behind the first phalanx of small ones came larger ones, struggling to get out of the hole in the panel. Their endless squadrons, droning ahead of their rodent allies, had managed to reach the spaces behind the control board before the rats gained this deck. They poured forth in increasing numbers. Marapper pulled out his dazer and downed them as they emerged. High voltage crackled behind the panels, where other hordes of moths jammed naked connections, causing short circuits.

  "Can they do any real damage?" Vyann asked Complain.

  He shook his head uneasily, to show he did not know, fighting away the feeling of having a skull stuffed with muslin.

  "Here comes the ship!" Fermour said, pointing into the gleaming dark. Tiny beside the bulk of the mother planet, a chip of light seemed hardly to move toward them.

  Head swimming, Vyann stared out at the bulk of their own ship, Big Dog. Here, in this blister, they had a splendid view over its arching back. On impulse, she kicked herself up to the top of the dome where the outlook was still clearer; Complain swam up alongside, and they clung to one of the narrow tubes into which the shutters had rolled themselves.

  Vyann stared longingly out. The sight of the planet was like a toothache; she had to look away.

  "To think they'll come all the way up here from Earth and lock us back away from the sun . . . ." she said.

  "They won't— they can't." Complain said. "Fermour's only a fool: he doesn't know. When these others come, Laur, they'll understand we've earned freedom, a right to try life on Earth. Obviously they're not cruel or they'd never have taken so much trouble over us. They'll see we'd rather die there than live here."

  A startling explosion came from below them. Shards of metal paneling blew out into the room, mingling with dead moths and smoke. Vyann and Complain looked down to see Gregg and Fermour floating away to a far corner, away from danger; the priest followed them more slowly— his cloak had been blown over his head. Another explosion sounded, tossing out more dead moths, among which live ones fluttered. Before too long, the Control Room would be packed with moths. With this second explosion, a rumbling began far away in the middle bowels of the ship, audible even through all the intervening doors, a rumble which, growing, seemed to express all the agony of the years. It grew louder and louder until Complain felt his body tremble with it.

  Wordlessly, Vyann pointed to the outside of the ship. Fissures were appearing like stripes all across its hull. After four and a half centuries, Big Dog was breaking up; the rumbling was its death-cry, something at once mighty and pathetic.

  "It's the Emergency Stop!" Fermour shouted. His voice seemed far away. "The moths have activated the Ultimate Emergency Stop! The ship's splitting into its component decks!"

  They could see it all. The fissures on that noble arch of back were swelling into canyons. Then the canyons were gulfs of space. Then there was no longer a ship: only eighty-four great coins, becoming smaller, spinning away from one another, falling forever along an invisible pathway. And each coin was a deck, and each deck was now a world of its own, and each deck, with its random burden of men, animals, or ponics sailed away serenely around Earth, buoyant as a cork in a fathomless sea.

  "Now they'll have no alternative but to take us back to Earth," Vyann said in a tiny voice. She looked at Complain; she tried, woman-like, to guess at all the new interests that awaited them. She tried to guess at the exquisite pressures which would attend the adjustment of every ship-dweller to the sublimities of Earth. It was as if everyone was about to be born, she thought, smiling into Complain's awakened face. He was her sort; neither of them had ever been really sure of what it was they wanted: so they, after all, had been the ones most likely to find it.

  END OF STARSHIP

  MICROCOSM

  They were humans —or so they believed— the grotesque result of a grandiose experiment which had gone appallingly awry.

  Trapped on a world that was hurtling through space at a fantastic speed, they sought the riddle of their heritage among the only companions they knew— ghosts, mutants, giants and regimented rats.

  This is one of the most extraordinary novels ever written, the spine-tingling story of lost beings who try to find themselves in a world gone mad.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  BRIAN ALDISS, one of the exciting new science fiction writers, was born and educated in England. He spent the war years in the service and the next eight years as a bookseller". Since 1957 he has been Literary Editor of the Oxford Mail. His startling collection of short stories, No Time like Tomorrow, is a Signet book.