Non-Stop

I

Like a radar echo bounding from a distant object and returning to its source, the sound of Roy Complain’s beating heart seemed to him to fill the clearing. He stood with one hand on the threshold of his compartment, listening to the rage hammering through his arteries.

‘Well, go on out then if you’re going! You said you were going!’

The shrill sarcasm of the voice behind him, Gwenny’s voice, propelled him into the clearing. He slammed the door without looking back, a low growl rasping the back of his throat, and then rubbed his hands together painfully in an attempt to regain control of himself. This was what living with Gwenny meant, the quarrels arising out of nothing and these insane bursts of anger tearing like illness through his being. Nor could it ever be clean anger; it was muddy stuff, and even at its full flood the knowledge was not hidden from him that he would soon be back again, apologizing to her, humiliating himself. Complain needed his woman.

This early in the waking period, several men were about; later, they would be dispersed about their business. A group of them sat on the deck, playing Travel-Up. Complain walked over to them, hands in pockets, and stared moodily down between their ragged heads. The board, painted on the deck, stretched twice as far as the span of a man’s outstretched arms. It was scattered with counters and symbols. One of the players leant forward and moved a pair of his blocks.

‘An outflank on Five,’ he said, with grim triumph, looking up and winking at Complain conspiratorially.

Complain turned away indifferently. For long periods of his life, this game had exerted an almost uncanny attraction on him. He had played it till his adolescent limbs cracked from squatting and his eyes could hardly focus on the silver tokens. On others too, on nearly all the Greene tribe, Travel-Up cast its spell; it gave them a sense of spaciousness and power lacking in their lives. Now Complain was free of the spell, and missed its touch. To be absorbed in anything again would be good.

He ambled moodily down the clearing, hardly noticing the doors on either hand. Instead, he darted his eyes about among the passers-by, as if seeking a signal. He saw Wantage hurrying along to the barricades, instinctively keeping the deformed left side of his face away from others’ eyes. Wantage never played at the long board: he could not tolerate people on both sides of him. Why had the council spared him as a child? Many deformities were born in the Greene tribe, and only the knife awaited them. As boys, they had called Wantage ‘Slotface’, and tormented him; but he had grown up strong and ferocious, which had decided them to adopt a more tolerant attitude towards him: their jibes now were veiled.

Hardly realizing the change from aimlessness to intent, Complain also headed in the direction of the barricades, following Wantage. The best of the compartments, naturally appropriated for council use, were down here. One of the doors was flung open and Lieutenant Greene himself came out, followed by two of his officers. Although Greene was now an old man, he was still an irritable one, and his jerky gait held something yet of the impetuous stride of his youth. His officers, Patcht and Zilliac, walked haughtily beside him, dazers prominent in their belts.

To Complain’s great pleasure, Wantage was panicked by their sudden appearance into saluting his chief. It was a shameful gesture, almost a bringing of the head to the hand rather than the reverse, which was acknowledged by a ghastly grin from Zilliac. Subservience was the general lot, although pride did not admit the fact.

When Complain’s turn came to pass the trio he did it in the customary manner, turning his head away and scowling. Nobody should think he, a hunter, was not the equal of any other man. It was in the Teaching: ‘No man is inferior until he feels the need to show respect for another.’

His spirits now restored, he caught up with Wantage, clapping his hand on the latter’s left shoulder. Spinning in the other direction, Wantage presented a short fencing stick to Complain’s stomach. He had an economical way of moving, like a man closely surrounded by naked blades. His point lodged neatly against Complain’s navel.

‘Easy now, my pretty one. Is that how you always greet a friend?’ Complain asked, turning the point of the stick away.

‘I thought — Expansion, hunter. Why are you not out after meat?’ Wantage asked, sliding his eyes away from Complain.

‘Because I am walking down to the barricades with you. Besides, my pot is full and my dues paid: I have no need of meat.’

They walked in silence, Complain attempting to get on the other’s left side, the other eluding his efforts. Complain was careful not to try him too far, in case Wantage fell on him. Violence and death were pandemic in Quarters, forming a natural balance to the high birth rate, but nobody cheerfully dies for the sake of symmetry.

Near the barricades, the corridor was crowded; Wantage, muttering that he had cleaning work to do, slipped away. He walked close to the wall, narrowly upright, with a sort of bitter dignity in his step.

The leading barricade was a wooden partition with a gate in it which entirely blocked the corridor. Two Guards were posted there continually. There, Quarters ended and the mazes of ponic tangle began. But the barrier was a temporary structure, for the position itself was subject to change.

The Greene tribe was semi-nomadic, forced by its inability to maintain adequate crops or live food to move along on to new ground frequently. This was accomplished by thrusting forward the leading barricade and moving up the rear ones, at the other end of Quarters, a corresponding distance. Such a move was now in progress. The ponic tangle, attacked and demolished ahead, would be allowed to spring up again behind them: the tribe slowly worked its way through the endless corridors like a maggot through a mushy apple.

Beyond the barricade, men worked vigorously, hacking down the tall ponic stalks, the edible sap, miltex, spurting out above their blades. As they were felled, the stalks were inverted to preserve as much sap as possible. This would be drained off and the hollow poles dried, cut to standard lengths and used eventually for a multitude of purposes. Almost on top of the busy blades, other sections of the plants were also being harvested: the leaves for medicinal use, the young shoots for table delicacies, the seed for various uses, as food, as buttons, as loose ballast in the Quarters’ version of tambourines, as counters for the Travel-Up boards, as toys for babies (into whose all-sampling mouths they were too large to cram).

The hardest job in the task of clearing ponics was breaking up the interlacing root structure, which lay like a steel mesh under the grit, its lower tendrils biting deep into the deck. As it was chopped out, other men with spades cleared the humus into sacks; here the humus was particularly deep, almost two feet of it covering the deck: evidence that these were unexplored parts, across which no other tribe had ever worked. The filled sacks were carted back to Quarters, where they would be emptied to provide new fields in new rooms.

Another body of men were also at work before the barricade, and these Complain watched with especial interest. They were of a more exalted rank than the others present; they were Guards, recruited only from the hunters, and the possibility existed that one day, through fortune or favour, Complain might rise to that enviable class.

As the almost solid wall of tangle was bitten back, doors were revealed, presenting black faces to the onlookers. The rooms behind these doors would yield mysteries: a thousand strange articles, useful, useless or meaningless, which had once been the property of the vanished race of Giants. The duty of the Guards was to break open these ancient tombs and appropriate whatever lay within for the good of the tribe, meaning themselves. In due time the loot would be distributed or destroyed, depending on the whim of the council. Much that emerged into the light of Quarters in this fashion was declared by the Lieutenancy to be dangerous, and was burnt.

The business of opening these doors was not without its hazards, imaginary if not real. Rumour had it in Quarters that other small tribes, also struggling for existence in the tangle warrens, had silently vanished away after opening such doors.

Complain by now was not the only one caught by the perennial fascination of watching people work. Several women, each with an ample quota of children, stood by the barricade, getting in the way of the procession of humus and ponic bearers. To the constant small whine of flies, from which Quarters was never free, was added the chatter of small tongues: and to this chorus the Guards broke down the next door. A moment’s silence fell, in which even the workers paused to stare half in fear at the opening.

The new room was a disappointment. It did not even contain the skeleton of a Giant to horrify and fascinate. It was a small store merely, lined with shelves loaded with little bags. The little bags were full of variously coloured powders. A bright yellow and a scarlet one fell and broke, forming two fans on the deck, and in the air two intermingling clouds. Shouts of delight from the children, who rarely saw much colour, caused the Guards to bark orders brusquely and begin to carry their discoveries away, forming a living chain to a truck behind the barricade.

Aware of a vague sense of anti-climax, Complain drifted away. Perhaps, after all, he would go hunting.

‘But why is there light in the tangles when nobody is there to need it?’

The question came to Complain above the general bustle. He turned and saw the questioner was one of several small boys who clustered round a big man squatting in their midst. One or two mothers stood by, smiling indulgently, their hands idly fanning away the flies.

‘There has to be light for the ponics to grow, just as you could not live in the dark,’ came the answer to the boy. Complain saw the man who spoke was Bob Fermour, a slow fellow fit only for labouring in the fieldrooms. He was genial — rather more so than the Teaching entirely countenanced — and consequently popular with the children. Complain recalled that Fermour was reputed to be a storyteller, and felt suddenly eager to be diverted. Without his anger he was empty.

‘What was there before the ponics were there?’ a little girl demanded. In their unpractised way, the children were trying to start Fermour on a story.

‘Tell ’em the tale about the world, Bob!’ one of the mothers advised.

Fermour glanced quizzically up at Complain.

‘Don’t mind me,’ Complain said. ‘Theories are less than flies to me.’ The powers of the tribe discouraged theorizing, or any sort of thought not on severely practical lines; hence Fermour’s hesitation.

‘Well, this is all guesswork, because we don’t have any records of what happened in the world before the Greene tribe began,’ Fermour said. ‘Or if we do find records, they don’t make much sense.’ He glanced sharply at the adults in his audience before adding quickly, ‘Because there are more important things to do than puzzle over old legends.’

‘What is the tale about the world, Bob? Is it exciting?’ a boy asked impatiently.

Fermour smoothed the boy’s fringe back from his eyes and said earnestly, ‘It is the most exciting tale that could possibly be, because it concerns all of us, and how we live. Now the world is a wonderful place. It is constructed of layers and layers of deck, like this one, and these layers do not end, because they eventually turn a circle on to themselves. So you could walk on and on for ever and never reach the end of the world. And all those layers are filled with mysterious places, some good, some evil; and all those corridors are blocked with ponics.’

‘What about the Forwards people?’ the boy asked. ‘Do they have green faces?’

‘We are coming to them,’ Fermour said, lowering his voice so that the youthful audience crowded nearer. ‘I have told you what happens if you keep to the lateral corridors of the world. But if you can get on to the main corridor you get on to a highway that takes you straight to distant parts of the world. And then you may arrive in the territory of Forwards.’

‘Have they really all got two heads?’ a little girl asked.

‘Of course not,’ Fermour said. ‘They are more civilized than our small tribe’ — again the scanning of his adult listeners — ‘but we know little about them because there are many obstacles between their lands and ours. It must be the duty of all of you, as you grow up, to try and find out more about our world. Remember there is much we do not know, and that outside our world may be other worlds of which we cannot at present guess.’

The children seemed impressed, but one of the women laughed and said, ‘Fat lot of good it’ll do them, guessing about something nobody knows exists.’

Mentally, Complain agreed with her as he walked away. There were a lot of these theories circulating now, all differing, all unsettling, none encouraged by authority. He wondered if it would improve his standing to denounce Fermour; but unfortunately everybody ignored Fermour: he was too slow. Only last wake, he had been publicly stroked for sloth in the fieldrooms.

Complain’s more immediate problem was, should he go hunting? A memory of how often recently he had walked restlessly like this, to the barricade and back, caught him unawares. He clenched his fists. Time passing, opportunities lacking, and always something missing, missing. Again — as he had done since a child — Complain whirled furiously round his brain, searching for a factor which promised to be there and was not, ever. Dimly, he felt he was preparing himself — but quite involuntarily — for a crisis. It was like a fever brewing, but this would be worse than a fever.

He broke into a run. His hair, long and richly black, flopped over his wide eyes. His expression became disturbed. Usually his young face showed strong and agreeable lines under a slight plumpness. The line of jaw was true, the mouth in repose heroic. Yet over the countenance as a whole worked a wasting bitterness; and this desolation was a look common to almost the whole tribe. It was a wise part of the Teaching which said that one man’s eyes should not meet another’s directly.

Complain ran almost blindly, sweat bursting out on his forehead. Sleep or wake, it was perpetually warm in Quarters, and sweat started easily. Nobody he passed regarded him with interest: much senseless running took place in the tribe, many men fled from inner phantoms. Complain only knew he had to get back to Gwenny. Women held the magic salve of forgetfulness.

She was standing motionless, a cup of tea in her hand, when he broke into their compartment. She pretended not to notice him, but her whole attitude changed, the narrow planes of her face going tense. She was sturdily built, her stocky body contrasting with the thinness of her face. This firmness seemed to emphasize itself now, as though she braced herself against a physical attack.

‘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 heading 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 over the cup.

He knew her well enough. Her rages were not like his; his had to subside slowly; hers were there, then gone: she would make love to him within a moment of slapping his face. And then she made love best.

‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘You know we were quarrelling over nothing, as usual.’

‘Nothing! Is Lidya nothing? Just because she died at birth… our only little babe, and you call her nothing.’

‘Better to call her nothing than use her as a weapon between us, eh?’ As Gwenny took the cup back, he slid his hand up her bare arm and slipped his fingers adroitly into the top of her blouse.

‘Stop it!’ she screamed, struggling. ‘Don’t be so foul! Is that all you can think of, even when I’m talking to you? Let me go, you nasty beast.’

But he did not. Instead, he put his other arm round her waist and pulled her closer. She tried to kick. He neatly butted her behind the knee with his knee, and they fell to the floor. When he brought his face close, she tried to bite his nose.

‘Take your hands away!’ she gasped.

‘Gwenny… Gwenny, come on, sweet,’ he coaxed.

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

‘Will you take me hunting with you after?’

‘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, and Gwenny had already been once to his distant apartment to see him. It was thought he would not last long: 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 these times of ultimate 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 enquire 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 labourer 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 Roffery 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 humour 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.

‘Go to, larrup 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 shan’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 and made off. 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 enquired.

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 honour.

‘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 who 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 only been formed two generations ago, by Grandfather Greene, and would not be entirely self-sufficient for some while. Indeed, a serious accident or set-back 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. Complain 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 towards the light in bursts of short-lived energy, clustering overhead. The general illumination was consequently of a sickly kind, rather better for imagining things in 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 drawing a bead on them, or otherwise 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, even before it could be smelt. 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 unmistakeable 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, commenced 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 ponies 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 beside 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 broadflank for the readying arrow. She raised her head suspiciously and probed with her little eye through the poles round her.

‘Roy! Roy! Help –’

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

The pig family took fright instantly, breaking through the stalks at speed, 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 the startlement of Gwenny’s first cry, he had dropped his arrow. Without attempting to pick it up, he 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 and he ran that way. 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 settled 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 grovelled 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 altogether. 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 oiled 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 there was nothing for it but to 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 round me. I should come to no harm but death…

Only if I stay alive can I find the something missed, the big something. Something I promised myself as a kid. 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.

I can almost imagine something. It’s big. Big as… you couldn’t have anything bigger than the world or it would be the world. World, ship, earth, planet… other people’s theories, no concern of mine: theories solve nothing. Mere unhappy muddles, more unhappy muddles, middles, mutters.

Get up, you weak fool.

He got himself up. If there was 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 practised indifference there: the guarded look away, 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, Janus-faced, 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 muddled by with a variety of fabrics and skins.

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

‘What the devil’s happening here, Butch?’ 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 honey of 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, navy blue, skyblue, green and copper, the separate liquids boiled, bubbled and steamed, and round 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 floor. Now the whole village was decorated with round bursts or slashes or fans of bright colour.

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 leapt up with him, clapping her hands. Another rattled a tambourine. More and more joined in the throng, singing, stamping round the cauldrons, up the deck, turning about, breathlessly but gladly. They were drunk on colour: most of them had hardly known it before.

Now the artificers and 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 to the Lieutenancy.

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

Losing a woman could be a serious matter. The Greene tribe comprised some nine hundred souls, of which nearly half were under age and only about one hundred and thirty were women. Mating duels were the commonest form of trouble in Quarters.

He was marched in front of the Lieutenant. Guard-flanked, the old man sat at an ancient desk, eyes carefully guarded under grizzled eyebrows. Without a movement or sign he conveyed displeasure.

‘Expansion to your ego, sir,’ Complain offered humbly.

‘At your expense,’ came the stock response. And then, growled, ‘How did you manage to lose your woman, Hunter Roy Complain?’

Haltingly, he explained how she had been seized at the top of Sternstairs. ‘It may have been the work of Forwards,’ he suggested.

‘Don’t raise that bogey here,’ Zilliac, one of Greene’s attendants, barked. ‘We’ve heard those tales of super-races before, and don’t believe them. The Greene tribe is master of everything this side of Deadways.’

As Complain gave his story, the Lieutenant grew gradually more angry. His limbs began to shake; his eyes filled with tears; his mouth distorted till his chin was glistening with saliva; his nostrils filled with mucus. The desk commenced to rock in unison with his fury. As he rocked, he growled, and under the shaggy white hair his skin turned a pale maroon. Through his fear Complain had to admit it was a brilliant, daunting performance.

Its climax came when the Lieutenant, vibrating like a top with the wrath pouring from him, fell suddenly to the ground and lay still. At once Zilliac and his fellow, Patcht, stood over the body, dazers at the ready, faces twitching with reciprocal anger.

Slowly, very slowly and tremblingly, the Lieutenant climbed back on to his chair, exhausted by the necessary ritual. ‘He’ll kill himself one day, doing that,’ Complain told himself. The thought warmed him a little.

‘Now to decide your punishments under the law,’ the old man said, in a husk of a voice. He glanced round the room in a helpless fashion.

‘Gwenny was not a good woman for the tribe, despite her brilliant father,’ Complain said, moistening his lips. ‘She couldn’t produce any children, sir. We did have one, a girl, who died before weaning. She could not have any more, sir — Marapper the priest said so.’

‘Marapper’s a fool!’ Zilliac exclaimed.

‘Your Gwenny was a well-figured girl,’ Patcht said. ‘Nicely set up. Quite a beddable girl.’

‘You know what the laws say, young man,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘My grandfather formed them when he formed the tribe. They are next to the Teaching in importance in our… in our lives. What is all that row outside? Yes, he was a great man, my grandfather. I remember on the day he died he sent for me…’

Fear glands were still working copiously in Complain, but in a sudden moment of detachment he saw the four of them, each pursuing an elusive thread in his own being, conscious of the others only as interpretations or manifestations of his own fears. They were isolated, and every man’s hand was against his neighbour.

‘What shall the sentence be?’ Zilliac growled, cutting into the Lieutenant’s reminiscences.

‘Oh, ah, let me see. You are already punished by losing your woman, Complain. There is no other available woman for you at present. What is all that noise outside?’

‘He must be punished or it may be thought you are losing your grip,’ Patcht suggested craftily.

‘Oh, quite, quite; I was going to punish him. Your suggestion was unnecessary, Patcht. Hunter — er, huh, Complain, for the next six sleep-wakes you will suffer six strokes, to be administered by the Guard captain before each sleep, starting now. Good. You can go. And, Zilliac, for hem sake go and see what all that row is outside.’

So Complain found himself outside again. A wall of noise and colour met him. Everyone seemed to be here, dancing senselessly in an orgy of enjoyment. Normally he would have flung himself in too, being as eager as anyone to throw off the oppressive routines of life; but in his present mood he merely slunk round the outside of the crowd, avoiding their eyes.

Nevertheless, he delayed the return to his compartment. (He would be turned out of there now: single men did not have their own rooms.) He loitered sheepishly on the fringes of the merriment, his stomach heavy with expectation of the coming punishment, while the bright dance whirled by. Several groups, divided from the main one in biparous fashion, jigged rapturously to the sound of stringed instruments. The noise was incessant, and in the frenetic movements of the dancers — heads jerking, fingers twitching — an onlooker might have found cause for alarm. But there were few non-participants. The tall, saturnine doctor, Lindsey, was one; Fermour was another, too slow for this whirl; Wantage was another, pressing his maimed face away from the throng; the Public Stroker was another. The latter had his appointments to keep, and at the proper time appeared before Complain with a guard escort. Roughly, the clothes were stripped from his back and the first instalment of his punishment was administered.

A crowd of eyes usually watched these events. For once there was something better happening: Complain suffered almost privately. Tomorrow he might expect more attention.

Pulling his shirt down over his wounds, he went sickly back to his compartment. He entered, and found Marapper the priest awaiting him.

III

Henry Marapper the priest was a bulky man. He squatted patiently on his haunches, his big belly dangling. The posture was not an unconventional one for him, but his time of calling was. Stiffly, Complain stood before the crouching figure, awaiting greeting or explanation; neither came and he was forced to say something first. Pride stifled everything but a grunt. At this Marapper raised a grubby paw.

‘Expansion to your ego, son.’

‘At your expense, father.’

‘And turmoil in my id,’ capped the priest piously, making the customary genuflection of rage without troubling to rise.

‘I have been stroked, father,’ Complain said heavily, taking a mug of yellowish water from a pitcher; he drank some and used some to smooth down his hair.

‘So I heard, Roy, so I heard. I trust your mind is eased by the degradation?’

‘At considerable cost to my spine, yes.’

He began to haul his shirt over his shoulders, taking his time, flinching a little. The pain, as the fibres of the garment tugged out of the wounds, was almost pleasant. It would be worse next sleep-wake. Finally he flung the bloody garment on to the floor and spat at it. Irritation moved in him to see how indifferently the priest had watched his struggle.

‘Not dancing, Marapper?’ he asked tartly.

‘My duties are with the mind, not the senses,’ the other said piously. ‘Besides, I know better ways to oblivion.’

‘Such as being snatched away into the tangles, I suppose?’

‘It pleases me to hear you taking your own part so sharply, my friend; that is how the Teaching would have it. I feared to find you in the doldrums: but happily it seems my comfort is not needed.’

Complain looked down at the face of the priest, avoiding the bland eyes. It was not a handsome face. Indeed, at this moment it hardly seemed a face at all, but a totem roughly moulded in lard, a monument perhaps to the virtues by which man survived: cunning, greed, self-seeking. Unable to help himself, Complain warmed to the man; here was someone he knew and could consequently deal with.

‘May my neuroses not offend, father,’ he said. ‘You know I have lost my woman, and my life feels considerably down at heel. Whatever I have laid claim to — and that’s little enough — has gone from me, or what remains will be forcibly taken. The guards will come, the guards who have already whipped and will whip me again tomorrow, and turn me out of here to live with the single men and boys. No rewards for my hunting, or comfort for my distress! The laws of this tribe are too harsh, priest — the Teaching itself is cruel cant — the whole stifling world nothing but a seed of suffering. Why should it be so? Why should there not be a chance of happiness? Ah, I will run amok as my brother did before me; I’ll tear through that fool crowd outside and cut the memory of my discontent into every one of them!’

‘Spare me more,’ the priest cut in. ‘I have a large parish to get round; your confessions I will hear, but your rages must be kept to entertain yourself.’ He rose to his feet, stretching, and adjusted the greasy cloak round his shoulders.

‘But what do we get out of life here?’ Complain asked, fighting down an impulse to clamp his hands round that fat neck. ‘Why are we here? What is the object of the world? You’re a priest — tell me straightforwardly.’

Marapper sighed windily, and raised his palms in a gesture of rejection. ‘My children, your ignorance staggers me: what determination it has! “The world”, you say, meaning this petty, uncomfortable tribe. The world is more than that. We — everything: ponics, Deadways, the Forwards people, the whole shoot — are in a sort of container called a Ship, moving from one bit of the world to another. I’ve told you this time and time again, but you won’t grasp it.’

‘That theory again!’ Complain said sullenly. ‘What if the world is called Ship, or Ship the world, it makes no difference to us.’

For some reason, the ship theory, well known although generally disregarded in Quarters, upset and frightened him. He tightened his mouth and said, ‘I wish to sleep now, father. Sleep at least brings comfort. You bring only riddles. Sometimes I see you in my sleep, you know; you are always telling me something I ought to understand, but somehow I never hear a word.’

‘And not only in your dreams,’ said the priest pleasantly, turning away. ‘I had something important to ask you, but it must wait. I shall return tomorrow, and hope to find you less at the mercy of your adrenalin,’ he added, and with that was gone.

For a long while Complain stared at the closed door, not hearing the sounds of revelry outside. Then, wearily, he climbed up on to the empty bed.

Sleep did not come. His mind ran over the endless quarrels he and Gwenny had suffered in this room — the search for a more cruel and crushing remark, the futility of their armistices. It had gone on for so long and now it was finished: Gwenny was sleeping with someone else from now on. Complain felt regret and pleasure mixed.

Suddenly, tracing over the events which led to Gwenny’s abduction, he recalled the ghostly figure that had faded into the ponics at their approach. He sat up in bed, uneasy at something more than the uncanny expertise with which the figure had vanished. Outside his door, all was now quiet. The race of his thoughts must have gone on for longer than he had imagined; the dance was done, the dancers overcome by sleep. Only he with his consciousness pierced the tomb-like veil that hung over the corridors of Quarters. If he opened his door now, he might hear the distant, never-ending rustle of ponic growth.

But nervousness made the thought of opening his door dreadful to him. Complain recalled in a rush the legends of strange beings which were frequently told in Quarters.

There were, firstly, the mysterious peoples of Forwards. Forwards was a distant area; the men there had alien ways and weapons, and powers unknown. They were slowly advancing through the tangle and would eventually wipe out all the small tribes: or so the legends ran. But however formidable they might be, it was acknowledged they were at least human.

The mutants were sub-human. They lived as hermits, or in small bands amid the tangles, driven there from the tribes. They had too many teeth, or too many arms, or too few brains. They could sometimes only hobble or creep or scuttle, owing to a deformity in the joints. They were shy; and because of this a number of weird attributes had been wished on them.

And then there were the Outsiders. The Outsiders were inhuman. Dreams of old men like Eff were troubled perpetually by the Outsiders. They had been created supernaturally out of the hot muck of the tangles. Where nobody penetrated, they had stirred into being. They had no hearts nor lungs, but externally resembled other men, so that they could live undetected among mortals, gathering power, and syphoning off the powers of men, like vampires drawing blood. Periodically among the tribes witch-hunts were held; but the suspects, when carved up for examination, always had hearts and lungs. The Outsiders invariably escaped detection — but everyone knew they were there: the very fact that witch-hunts took place proved it.

They might be gathering outside the door now, as menacingly as that silent figure had faded into the ponics.

This was the simple mythology of the Greene tribe, and it did not vary radically from the hierarchy of hobgoblins sustained by the other tribes moving slowly through that region known as Deadways. Part of it, yet entirely a separate species, were the Giants. The Forwarders, the mutants and the Outsiders were all known to exist; occasionally a mutant would be dragged in living from the tangles and made to dance before the people until, tiring of him, they despatched him on the Long Journey; and many warriors would swear they had fought solitary duels with Forwarders and Outsiders; but there was in these three orders of beings an elusive quality. During wakes, in company, it was easy to discount them.

The Giants could not be discounted. They were real. Once everything had belonged to them, the world had been theirs, some even claimed that men were descended from them. Their trophies lay everywhere and their greatness was plain. If ever they returned, there would be no resisting.

Dimly, behind all these phantasmal figures, lived another: less a figure than a symbol. His name was God and he was nothing to be scared of: but nobody ever spoke his name any more, and it was a curious thing to wonder how it was still handed on from generation to generation. It had some undefined connection with the phrase ‘for hem sake’, which sounded emphatic without meaning anything precise. God had finished as a mild swear word.

What Complain had glimpsed that wake in the ponics was altogether more alarming than that.

In the midst of his anxiety, Complain recalled something else: the sound of crying he and Gwenny had heard. The two separate facts slipped smoothly together. The man — the approaching tribe. The man had not been an Outsider, or anything so mysterious. He had merely been a flesh and blood hunter from the other tribe. As simple, as obvious as that…

Complain lay back, relaxing. His stupidity had been gently nuzzled out of the way by a little deduction. Although slightly appalled to think how the obvious had eluded him, he was nevertheless proud to consider this new lucidity. He never ratiocinated enough. Everything he did was too automatic, governed by the local laws or the universal Teaching, or his own private moods; this should not be from now on. From now on, he would be more like — well, Marapper, for instance, valuing things — but immaterial things, as Roffrey valued the material ones.

Experimentally, he cast round for other facts to match up. Perhaps if you could collect enough facts, even the ship theory might be turned into sense.

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.’

So Complain went back to his compartment, stomach slowly unknotting. Somewhere in a narrow side corridor, someone played a stringed instrument; he caught the words, sung in a tenor voice:

An old song, poorly remembered; he shut it off sharply with his closing door. Once again Marapper waited for him, greasy face cupped in his hands, rings glittering on his fat fingers.

Complain was suddenly undermined by the sensation that he knew what the priest was going to say; he seemed to have lived this scene over before. He tried to break through the web-like illusion, but could not.

‘Expansion, son,’ said the priest, languidly making the rage sign. ‘You look bitter; are you?’

‘Very bitter, father. Only killing could ease it.’ Through his words, try as he would to say something unexpected, Complain’s sense of re-enacting a scene persisted.

‘There are more things than killing. Things you do not dream of.’

‘Don’t give me that crap, father. You’ll be telling me next that life is a mystery and rambling on like my mother. I feel I need to kill someone.’

‘You shall, you shall,’ the priest soothed. ‘And it is good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all. We are being punished here for some wrong our forefathers committed. We are all maimed! We are all blind — we thrust out in wrong directions…’

Complain had climbed wearily on to his bunk. The illusion of re-living the scene had gone, and directly it was gone, it was forgotten. Now he wanted only to sleep. Tomorrow he would be evicted from his single room and stroked; now he wanted only to sleep. But the priest had stopped talking. Complain glanced up and found Marapper leaning on his bunk, gazing at him. Their eyes met for a moment, before Complain pulled his hurriedly away.

One of the strongest taboos in their society was directed against one man’s looking another straightly in the eyes; honest, well-intentioned men gave each other only side glances. Complain stuck out his lower lip truculently.

‘What the hem do you want with me, Marapper?’ he exploded. He was tempted to tell the priest that he had just learned of his bastardy.

‘You didn’t get your six strokes, Roy, boy, did you?’

‘What’s that to you, priest?’

‘A priest knows no self-seeking. I ask for your good; besides, I have a personal interest in your answer.’

‘No, I wasn’t beaten. They’re all flat out, as you know — even the Public Stroker.’

The priest’s eyes were after his again. Complain heaved over uncomfortably and faced the wall; but the priest’s next question brought him round again.

‘Do you ever feel like running amok, Roy?’

Despite himself, Complain had a vision: he was running through Quarters with his dazer burning, everyone scattering, fearing him, respecting him, leaving him master of the situation. His heart beat uncomfortably. Several of the best and most savage men of the tribe — even Gregg, one of his own brothers — had run amok, bursting through the settlement, some escaping to live afterwards in unexplored areas of tangle, or joining other communities, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an honourable thing to do; but it was not a priest’s business to incite it. A doctor might recommend it if a man were mortally sick; a priest should unite, not disrupt his tribe, by bringing the frustration in human minds up to the surface, where it might flow freely without curdling into neurosis.

For the first time, he realized Marapper was wrestling with a crisis in his own life, and wondered momentarily if it had any connection with the fact of Bergass’s illness.

‘Look at me, Roy. Answer me.’

‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ He was sitting up now, almost forced there by the urgency in the priest’s voice.

‘I must know what you are made of.’

‘You know what the Litany tells us: we are the sons of cowards, our days are passed in fear.’

‘This you believe?’ the priest asked.

‘Naturally. It is the Teaching.’

‘I need your aid, Roy. Would you follow where I led you — even out of Quarters, into Deadways?’

All this was spoken low and fast. And low and fast beat the indecision in Complain’s blood. He made no effort to come to a consciously debated decision; the nerves must be arbiter: mind was not trustworthy — it knew too much.

‘That would require courage,’ he said at length.

The priest slapped his great thighs, yawning in nervous enthusiasm with a sound like a tiny shriek.

‘No, Roy, you lie, true to the list of liars who begot you. If we went, we should be escaping, fleeing, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. Ha, we shall slip away furtively. It will be the old back-to-nature act, boy, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. Why, it would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now, will you come with me?’

Some meaning beyond the words themselves hardened a decision in Complain. He would go! Always there had been that cloud just beyond his comprehension, from which he must escape. He slid off the bunk, trying to hide this decision from Marapper’s wily eyes until he had learnt more of the venture.

‘What should we two do alone in the tangles of Deadways, priest?’

The priest thrust a great thumb searchingly up one nostril and spoke with his gaze steady over his fist. ‘We shall not go alone. Four others come with us, picked men. I have been preparing for this for some while, and all is now ready. You are discontented, your woman is taken: what have you to lose? I strongly advise you to come — for your own sake, of course — although it will suit me to have someone about with a weak will and a hunter’s eye.’

‘Who are the four others, Marapper?’

‘I will tell you that when you say you are coming. If I were betrayed to the Guards, they would slit all our throats — mine especially! — in twenty places.’

‘What are we going to do? Where are we going?’

Marapper rose slowly to his feet and stretched. With long fingers he raked through his hair, making at the same time the most hideous sneer he could devise, twisting the two great slabs of his cheeks, one up, one down, until his mouth coiled between them like knotted rope.

‘Go by yourself, Roy, if you so distrust my leadership! Why, you’re like a woman, all bellyache and questioning. I’ll tell you no more, except that my scheme is something too grand for your comprehension. Domination of the ship! That’s it! Nothing less! Complete domination of the ship — you don’t even know what the phrase means.’

Cowed by the priest’s ferocious visage, Complain merely said, ‘I was not going to refuse to come.’

‘You mean you will come?’

‘Yes.’

Marapper gripped his arm fervently, without a word. His cheeks gleamed.

‘Now tell me who the other four are who come with us,’ Complain said, alarmed the moment he had committed himself.

Marapper released his arm.

‘You know the old saying, Roy: the truth never set anyone free. You will learn soon enough. It is better that I do not tell you now. I plan we shall start early next sleep. Now I shall leave you; I have work still to do. Not a word to anyone.’

Half out of the door, he paused. Thrusting a hand into his tunic, he pulled something out and waved it triumphantly. Complain recognized it as a looker, the collection of reading matter used by the extinct Giants.

‘This is our key to power!’ Marapper said dramatically, thrusting it back into its place of concealment. Then he closed the door behind him.

Idle as statuary, Complain stood in the centre of the floor, only his head working. And in his head there was only a circle of thought, leading nowhere. But Marapper was the priest, Marapper had knowledge most others could not share, Marapper must lead. Belatedly, Complain went to the door, opened it and peered out.

The priest had already gone from sight. Nobody was near except Meller, the bearded artist. He was painting a bright fresco on the corridor wall outside his room, dabbing on with shrewdly engrossed face the various dyes he had collected the sleep-wake before. Beneath his hand, a great cat launched itself up the wall. He did not notice Complain.

It was growing late. Complain went to eat in the almost deserted Mess. He fed in a trance. He returned, and Meller was still painting in a trance. He shut his door and prepared slowly for bed. Gwenny’s grey dress still hung on a hook by the bed; he snatched it down suddenly and flung it out of sight behind a cupboard. Then he lay down and let silence prolong itself.

Suddenly into the room burst Marapper, bulbously, monumentally out of breath. He slammed the door behind him, gasping and tugging the corner of his cloak which had caught in the jamb.

‘Hide me, Roy — quick! Quickly, don’t stare, you fool. Get up, get your knife out. The Guards’ll be here, Zilliac’ll be here. They’re after me. They’d massacre poor old priests as soon as look at them.’

As he spoke, he ran to Complain’s bunk, swung it out from the wall and began to crouch behind it.

‘What have you done?’ Complain demanded. ‘Why are they after you? Why hide here? Why drag me into it?’

‘It’s no compliment. You just happened to be near and my legs were never constructed for running. My life’s in danger.’

While he was talking, Marapper stared wildly about, as if for a better hiding place, and then evidently decided to stay where he was. By adjusting a blanket over the far side of the bed he was screened from the doorway.

‘They must have seen me come in here,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I care for my own skin, but I’ve got plans. I let one of the Guards in on this scheme of ours and he went straight in and told it to Zilliac.’

‘Why should I—’ Complain began hotly. A scuffle outside gave them the briefest warning and then the door was hurled open, rebounding on its hinges. It missed Complain by inches only, for he stood half behind it.

The crisis powered his inspiration. Flinging both hands over his face, he bent forward, groaning loudly and staggering, making believe the edge of the door had struck him. Through his fingers he saw Zilliac, the Lieutenant’s right-hand man, next in line for the lieutenancy, burst into the room and kick the door shut behind him. He glared contemptuously at Complain.

‘Hold your filthy row, man,’ Zilliac shouted. ‘Where’s the priest? I saw him come in here.’

As he turned, dazer ready, to survey the room, Complain whipped up Gwenny’s wooden stool by one leg and brought it down at the base of Zilliac’s skull, square across the tense neck. A delightful splintering sound of wood and bone, and Zilliac toppled full length. He had barely hit the deck before Marapper stood up. With a heave, all teeth showing, he tipped the heavy bunk over sideways, sending it falling across the fallen man.

‘I’ve got him!’ the priest exclaimed. ‘Hem’s guts, I’ve got him!’ He gathered up Zilliac’s dazer, moving with agility for a heavy man, and faced the door.

‘Open up, Roy! There’ll doubtless be others outside, and it’s now or never if we’re getting out of this with breathable throats.’

But the door swung open at that moment without Complain’s aid. Meller the artist stood there, sheathing a knife, his face pale as boiled fowl.

‘Here’s an offering for you, priest,’ he said. ‘I’d better bring him in before someone comes along.’

He grabbed the ankles of a guard who lay crumpled in the corridor. Complain went to his aid, and together they dragged the limp body in and closed the door. Meller leaned against the wall mopping his forehead.

‘I don’t know what you’re up to, priest,’ he said, ‘but when this fellow heard the rumpus in here, he was off to fetch his friends. I thought it looked most convenient to despatch him before you had a party.’

‘May he make the Long Journey in peace,’ Marapper said weakly. ‘It was well done, Meller. Indeed, we’ve all done well for amateurs.’

‘I have a throwing blade,’ Meller explained. ‘Fortunately — for I dislike hand-to-hand fighting. Mind if I sit down?’

Moving dazedly, Complain knelt between the bodies and felt for a heart beat. Directly action had started, the ordinary Complain had been shuffled away for another, an automatic man with defter movement and sure impulse. He it was who took over when the hunt was on. Now his hand searched Zilliac and the crumpled Guard and found there was no pulse between the two of them.

Death was as common as cockroaches in the small tribes. ‘Death is the longest part of a man’, said a folk poem. This stretched-out spectacle, so frequently met with, was the subject of much of the Teaching: there had to be a formal way of dealing with it. It was fearful, and fear must not be allowed to lodge in a man. The automatic man in Complain, confronted with death now, fell straight into the first gesture of prostration, as he had been brought up to do.

Seeing their cue, Marapper and Meller instantly joined him, Marapper crying softly aloud. Only when their intricate business was over and the last Long Journey said did they lapse back into something like normality.

Then they sat looking at each other, scared, sheepishly triumphant, across the quiet bodies. Outside, all was silence; only the prevailing indolence after the recent merry-making saved them from a crowd of sightseers and inevitable exposure. Slowly, Complain found himself able to think again.

‘What about the Guard who passed on your scheme to Zilliac?’ he asked. ‘We shall have trouble from him soon, Marapper, if we stay here.’

‘If we stayed here forever he would not trouble us,’ the priest said, ‘except to offend our nostrils. He lies here before us now.’ He pointed to the man Meller had dragged in, adding: ‘Which makes it look as if my plans have been passed on no further. So we are fortunate: we still have a little while before a search starts for Zilliac. He, I suspect, was nourishing some little scheme of his own on the quiet, otherwise he would have had an escort. So much the better for us. Come, Roy, we must move at once. Quarters is no longer healthy for us.’

He stood up on legs unexpectedly shaky and promptly sat down again. He rose again with more care, saying defensively: ‘For a man of sensibility, I worked neatly with that bunk, eh?’

‘I’ve yet to hear what they were after you for, priest,’ Meller said.

‘The greater credit to the speed of your assistance,’ said Marapper smoothly, making towards the door. Meller put his arm across it and answered, ‘I want to hear what you are involved in. It seems to me I am now involved in it too.’

When Marapper drew up but did not speak, Complain said impetuously, ‘Why not let him come with us, Marapper?’

‘So…’ the artist said reflectively. ‘You’re both leaving Quarters! Good luck to you, friends — I hope you will find whatever you are going looking for. Myself, I’d rather stay here safely and paint, thanks for the invitation.’

‘Brushing aside the minor point that no invitation was offered, I agree with all you say,’ Marapper said. ‘You showed up well just now, friend, but I need only real men of action with me: and at that I want a handful, not an army.’

As Meller stepped aside and Marapper took hold of the door handle, the latter’s attitude softened and he said, ‘Our lives are of microscopically small moment, but I believe that we now owe them to you, painter. Back to your dyes now with our thanks, and not a word to anyone.’

He made off down the corridor, Complain hurrying to get by his side. Sleep had closed over the tribe. They passed a late sentry, going to one of the rear barricades; two young men and two girls in bright rags were attempting to recapture the spirit of the past revelry; otherwise, the place was deserted.

Turning sharply down a side corridor, Marapper led the way to his own quarters. Glancing about him furtively, he produced a magnetic key and opened the door, pushing Complain in ahead of him. It was a large room, but crowded with the acquisitions of a lifetime, a thousand articles bribed or begged, things meaningless since the extinction of the Giants, and now merely fascinating totems of a more varied and advanced civilization than theirs. Complain stared about him almost helplessly, regarding without recognizing a camera, electric fans, jigsaw puzzles, books, switches, condensers, a bed pan, a bird cage, vases, fire extinguishers, keys in bundles, two oil paintings, a scroll labelled ‘Map of the Moon (Devizes Sector)’, a toy telephone and a crate full of bottles containing a thick sediment called ‘Shampoo’. Loot, all loot, with little perhaps but curiosity value.

‘Stay here while I get the other three rebels,’ Marapper said, making to go. ‘Then we’ll be on the move.’

‘Supposing they betray you as the Guard did?’

‘They won’t — as you’ll know when you see them,’ Marapper said shortly. ‘I only let the Guard in on it because he saw this going in here.’ He thumped the looker inside his tunic.

After he had gone, Complain heard the magnetic lock click into place. If something did go awry with the priest’s plans, he would be trapped here with much awkward explaining to do on his release, and would probably die for Zilliac’s death. He waited tensely, picking nervously at an irritation in one hand. He glanced down at length, and saw a minute splinter embedded in the flesh of his palm. The legs of Gwenny’s stool had always been rough.