by Brian Aldiss
He should have reported the approaching tribe to Lieutenant Greene. That was an error. If the tribes met, there would be hard fighting; the Greenes must be prepared. Well, that report must go in later.
Almost surreptitiously, he dropped asleep.
No aroma of cooking greeted Complain when he woke. He sat up stiffly, groaned, scratched his head and climbed out of bed. For a time he thought that nothing but wretchedness filled him; then he felt, underneath the wretchedness, a resilience stirring. He was going to act, was going to be driven to act: how, would resolve itself later. The big something was promising itself to him again.
Hauling on his slacks, he paddled over to the door and pulled it open. Outside, a strange silence beckoned. Complain followed it into the Clearing.
The revels were now over. The actors, not bothering to return to their apartments, lay where irresistible sleep had found them, among the bright ruins of their gaiety. On the hard deck they lay sleeping stupidly, or woke without troubling to move. Only children called as usual, prodding somnolent mothers into action. Quarters looked like a broad battlefield; but the slain had not bled, and suffering was not yet finished for them.
Complain walked quietly among the sleepers. In the Mess, patronized by single men, he might be able to get food. He stepped by a pair of lovers sprawled over the Travel-Up pitch. The man, Complain saw, was Cheap; he still had his arm round a plump girl, tucked inside her tunic; his face was in Orbit; their feet straggled across the Milky Way. Little flies crept up her leg and under her skirt.
A figure was approaching. Not without misgiving, Complain recognized his mother. The law in Quarters, not rigorously enforced, was that a child should cease to communicate with his brothers and sisters when he was hip high, and with his mother when he was waist high. But Myra was a garrulous woman; what her waist proscribed, her tongue discarded, and she talked firmly to her many children whenever possible.
‘Greetings, Mother,’ Complain grunted. ‘Expansion to your ego.’
‘At your expense, Roy.’
‘May your womb likewise expand.’
‘I’m getting too old for that courtesy, as you well know,’ she said, irritated that he should choose to be so formal with her.
‘I’m off to get a meal, Mother.’
‘Gwenny is dead then. I knew it! Bealie was there at your stroking and heard the announcement. It’ll finish her poor old father off, you see. I was sorry I couldn’t get there for it – for the stroking I mean – I shan’t miss the others if I can possibly help it – but I got the most glorious shade of green in the scrambles. I dyed everything. I dyed this smock I’ve got on now; do you like it? It really is the most exciting thing –’
‘Look, Mother, my back hurts: I don’t feel like talking.’
‘Of course it hurts, Roy; you mustn’t expect it not to. What it’ll be like when you’ve finished your punishment, I shudder to think. I’ve got some fat I’ll rub on it for you, and that’ll ease the pores. Doctor Lindsey ought to look at it later, if you’ve got a spare bit of game to exchange for his advice – and you ought to have now, with Gwenny gone. Never did really like her –’
‘Look, Mother –’
‘Oh, I’ll come with you if you’re going to Mess. I wasn’t really going anywhere special. I did hear, quite on the quiet of course – from old Toomer Munday, although hem knows where she got it from – that the Guards found some tea and coffee in the dye store. You notice they didn’t scrabble that around! The Giants grew better coffee than we can manage.’
The flow of words wove round him, as abstractedly he ate. Later, she took him to her room and smoothed fat across the welts on his back. As she did so, she offered him advice he had heard from her before.
‘Remember, Roy, things won’t always be bad; you’ve just struck a bad patch. Don’t let it get you down.’
‘Things are always bad, Mother, what’s there to live for?’
‘You shouldn’t talk like that. I know the Teaching says about not hiding any bitterness within you, but you don’t look at things the way I do. As I always say, life is a mystery. The mere fact of being alive –’
‘Oh, I know all that. Life’s a drug on the market, as far as I’m concerned.’
Myra looked hard at his angry face, and the lines on hers rearranged themselves into an expression of softness.
‘When I want to comfort myself,’ she said, ‘I think of a great stretch of blackness, sweeping off for ever in all directions. And in this blackness, a host of little lanterns begin to burn. Those lanterns are our lives, burning bravely. They show us our surroundings. But what the surroundings mean, who lit the lamps, why they were lit . . .’ She sighed. ‘When we make the Long Journey, when our lamp goes out, perhaps we shall know more.’
‘And you say that comforts you?’ Roy asked scornfully. It was a long while since he had heard the lantern parable from his mother, and soothing to hear it again now, but he could not allow her to see this.
‘Yes. Yes, it comforts me. You see, our lanterns are burning together here.’ She touched a spot on the table between them with a small finger. ‘I’m thankful mine isn’t burning alone here, out in the unknown.’ She indicated a spot an arm’s length away.
Shaking his head, Complain stood up.
‘I don’t see it,’ he confessed. ‘It might very well be better out over there.’
‘Oh, yes, it might. But it would be different. That’s what I’m afraid of. It would all be different: everything would be different.’
‘I expect you’re probably right. I just wish it was different here. By the way, Mother, my brother Gregg who left the tribe and went alone into the tangles –’
‘You still think of him?’ the old lady asked eagerly. ‘Gregg was a good one, Roy; he’d have made a Guard if he had stayed.’
‘Do you think he might still be alive?’
She shook her head decisively. ‘In the tangles? You may be certain the Outsiders got him. Pity, a great pity – Gregg would have made a good Guard. I’ve always said so.’
Complain was about to go when she said sharply, ‘Old Ozbert Bergass still breathes. They tell me he calls for his daughter Gwenny. It is your duty to go to him.’
She spoke, for once, undeniable truth. And for once duty was coloured with pleasure: Bergass was a tribal hero.
One-armed Olwell, carrying a brace of dead duck over the crook of his good arm, gave Complain a surly greeting; otherwise, he did not meet a moving soul. The rooms in which Bergass had his household were now far in the rear of Quarters. Once, these rooms had been at the leading barricade. As the tribe inched its way forward, they had gradually slipped back; when they had been in the midst of the tribe, Ozbert Bergass had been at the height of his power. Now, in his old age, his rooms lay far to the rear of anyone else’s. The last barrier, the barricade between humanity and Deadways, stood just beyond his doors. Indeed, several empty rooms separated him from his nearest neighbours: his former neighbours, weaklings, had evacuated some while since, moving back to the centre of things; he, stubborn old man, stayed where he was, stretching lines of communication and living in glorious squalor with an inordinate number of women.
Down here had been no revelry. In contrast with the temporary cheerfulness of the rest of Quarters, Bergass’s passage looked sinister and chill. Long ago, probably in the time of the Giants, some sort of an explosion had taken place. The walls were blackened for some distance, and in the deck overhead a hole bigger than a man’s length gaped. Here, outside the old guide’s doors, no lights burned.
The continued advance of the tribe had added to this neglect, for a few ponics, seeding themselves determinedly across the rear barrier, grew in shaggy, stunted procession along the dirty deck, thigh high only.
Uncomfortably, Complain banged on Bergass’s door. It opened, and a babel of sound and steam emerged, wreathing like a cloud of insects round Complain’s face.
‘Your ego, mother,’ Complain said politely to the old witch who peered
out at him.
‘Your expense, warrior. Oh, it’s you, Roy Complain, is it? What do you want? I thought every fool young man was drunk. You’d better come in. Don’t make a noise.’
It was a large room, absolutely cluttered with dried ponic poles. They lined all the walls, making of the room a dead forest. Bergass had had an obsession that the very fabric of their world, walls and deck, might be demolished, and the tribe live in the ponic tangles in rooms built of these poles. He had tried this experiment himself in a broad part of Deadways and survived; but nobody else had taken up his idea.
A smell of broth filled the place, emanating from a great steaming cauldron in one corner. A young girl stirred this stew. Other women, Complain saw through the steam, stood about the room. Ozbert Bergass himself, surprisingly enough, sat on a rug in the middle of the room. He was delivering a speech which nobody heeded, all being busy talking to each other. Complain wondered how his knock had ever been heard.
He knelt down beside the old man. The trailing rot was far advanced. Starting, as always, from his stomach, it was working its short way up to the heart. Soft brown rods as long as a man’s hand trailed out of his flesh, giving the withered body the aspect of a corpse pierced by decaying sticks.
‘. . . and so the ship was lost and man was lost and the very losing was lost,’ the old man said huskily, fixing blank eyes on Complain. ‘And I have climbed all among the wreckage and I know, and I say that the longer time goes on the less chance we have of finding ourselves again. Yon fool women do not understand, you do not care, but I’ve told Gwenny many a time he does wrong by his tribe. “You’re doing wrong”, I’ve told him, “destroying everything you come across just because it is not necessary to you. These books you burn, these rolls of film”, I said, ‘You destroy them because you think someone might use them against you. But they hold secrets we ought to know”, I said, “and you’re a fool; we ought to be piecing things together, not destroying them. I tell you I’ve travelled more decks than you know exist”, I said . . . What do you want, sir?’
Since this interruption in the monologue seemed to be addressed to him, Complain answered that he came to be of service if possible.
‘Service?’ Bergass asked. ‘I’ve always fended for myself. And my father before me. My father was the greatest guide of them all. Do you know what has made us the tribe we are? I’ll tell you. My father was out searching with me when I was a youngster and he found what the Giants used to call an armoury. Yes, chambers full of dazers – full of ’em! But for that discovery the Greenes would not be what we are; we should have died out by now. Yes, I could take you to the armoury now, if you dare to come. Away beyond the centre of Deadways, where feet turn into hands and the floor moves away from you and you swim in the air like an insect . . .’
‘He’s babbling now,’ Complain thought. Pointless to tell him about Gwenny while he was jabbering about feet turning into hands. But the old guide stopped suddenly and said, ‘How did you get here, Roy Complain? Give me some more broth, my stomach’s dry as wood.’
Beckoning to one of the women for a bowl, Complain said, ‘I came to see how you were faring. You are a great man: I am sorry to find you like this.’
‘A great man,’ the other muttered stupidly, then, with a burst of fire, ‘Where’s my broth? By hem’s bladders, what are those whores doing? Washing their —s in it?’
A young woman hastily passed over a bowl of broth, winking mischievously at Complain as she did so. Bergass was too feeble to help himself, and Complain spooned the fatty stuff into his mouth. The guide’s eyes, Complain observed, were seeking his, as if with a secret to impart; it was said that the dying always tried to look into someone else’s eyes, but habit made Complain reluctant to meet that bright gaze. Turning away, he was suddenly conscious of the filth everywhere. There was enough dirt on the deck for ponics to seed in; even the dead ponic poles were caked in greasy condensation.
‘Why is not the Lieutenant here? Where is Lindsey the doctor? Should not Marapper the priest be attending you?’ he burst out angrily. ‘You should have better attendance here.’
‘Steady with that spoon, laddie. Just a minute while I make water . . . ah, my damned belly. Tight. Very tight . . . The doctor – I had my women send the doctor away. Old Greene, he won’t come, he’s afraid of the rot. Besides, he’s getting as old as I am; Zilliac’ll knock him off one of these fine sleep-wakes and take control himself . . . Now there’s a man –’
Seeing Bergass was wandering again, Complain said desperately, ‘Can I get you the priest?’
‘The priest? Who, Henry Marapper? Come nearer, and I’ll tell you something, just between us two. A secret. Never told anyone else. Easy . . . Henry Marapper’s a son of mine. Yes! I don’t believe in his bag of lies any more than I believe –’
He interrupted himself with a fit of croaking which for a moment Complain took for gasps of pain; then he realized it was laughter, punctuated by the words, ‘My son!’ There was no point in staying. With a curt word to one of the women, he got up, suddenly disgusted, leaving Bergass shaking so violently that his stomach growths clapped together. The other women stood about disinterestedly, hands on hips or making the perpetual fanning gesture against the flies. Snatches of their talk beat unheeded against Complain’s ears as he left.
‘. . . and where’s he get all those clothes from, I’d like to know. He’s only a common farm hand. I tell you he’s an informer . . .’
‘You’re too free with your kisses, young Wenda. Believe me, when you get to my age –’
‘. . . nicest dish of brains I’ve ever had.’
‘. . . that Ma Cullindram has just had a litter of seven. All still-born but one poor little tyke. It was quins last time, if you remember. I told her straight, I said “You want to be firm with your man –”’
‘. . . gambling away his earnings –’
‘. . . lying . . .’
‘. . . never laughed so much . . .’
Back in the dark corridor, he leant for a time against a wall, sighing with relief. He had done nothing, had not even broken the news of Gwenny’s death that he had come to tell Bergass, yet something had happened inside him. It was as if a great weight were rolling forward in his brain; it brought pain, but it enabled him to see more clearly. From it, he instinctively knew, some sort of climax would crystallize.
It had been overpoweringly hot in Bergass’s room; Complain was dripping sweat. From the corridor, now he listened, he could still hear the rumble of women’s voices. Suddenly a vision of Quarters as it really was came into his mind. It was a great cavern, filled exhaustingly with the twitter of many voices. Nowhere any real action, only the voices, dying voices.
IV
The wake wore slowly on and, as the sleep period drew nearer, Complain’s stomach, in anticipation of the next dose of his punishment, grew more uneasy. One sleep-wake in four, in Quarters and in all the known territories round about, was dark. Not an absolute dark, for here and there in the corridors square pilot lights burned like moons; in the apartments it was entirely dark and moonless. This was an accepted law of nature. There were old people to say that their parents recalled how in their youth the darks had not lasted so long; but old people notoriously remember wrongly, spinning out strange tales from the stuff of their vanished childhoods.
In the darks, the ponics crumpled up like sacking. Their slender rods cracked, and all but the lustiest shoots turned black. This was their brief winter. When the light returned, fresh shoots and seedlings climbed energetically up, sweeping away the sacking in a new wave of green. And they in turn would be nipped in four more sleep-wakes. Only the toughest or most favoured survived this cycle.
Throughout this wake, most of the few hundred Quarterers remained inert, the greater part supine. Their barbaric outbreaks of festivity were always succeeded by this mass quiescence. They were expended but, more than that, they were unable to plunge once more into the rigours of routine. Inertia overcame the whole tribe.
Despondence lay over them like sheets, and outside the barricades the ponic tangle made inroads on the clearings. Only hunger would get them to their feet again.
‘You could murder the lot without a hand being raised against you,’ Wantage said, something like inspiration showing on the right side of his face.
‘Why don’t you then?’ Complain said jeeringly. ‘It’s in the Litany, you know: an evil desire suppressed multiplies itself and devours the mind it feeds in. Go to, Slotface!’
Instantly, he was seized by the wrist and a sharp blade whisked horizontally to within an inch of his throat. Glaring into his face was a terrible visage, one half creased in fury, the other creased permanently into a meaningless smile; a large grey eye stared detachedly beyond them, absorbed in its own private vision.
‘Don’t dare call me that again, you filthy meat,’ Wantage snarled. Then he twitched his face away, dropping his knife hand, turning his back, anger fading to mortification as he recalled his deformity.
‘I’m sorry.’ Complain regretted the remark as he uttered it, but the other did not turn round again.
Slowly, Complain also moved on, nerves jangled by the encounter. He had run into Wantage on his return from the tangles, where he had been investigating the approaching tribe. If they made contact with the Greene tribe, which was by no means certain, it would not be for some while; the first trouble would be clashes between rival hunters. That might mean death; certainly it would mean release from monotony. Meanwhile, he would keep the knowledge to himself. Let someone with a fondness for authority break the news to the Lieutenant.
On his way to the Guards’ quarters for punishment he encountered nobody but Wantage. Inertia still ruled; even the Public Stroker refused to be drawn forth to perform.
‘There’ll be other sleep-wakes,’ he said. ‘What are you in such a hurry for? Clear off and let me lie. Go and find a new woman.’