Non-Stop (18 page)

Waiting tensely for trouble to start, Complain could see other people turning from their meal to look at him. Scoyt opened his mouth and then shut it again, staring beyond Complain as a heavy hand fell on the latter’s shoulder.

‘Mourning for me is not only foolish but premature,’ a familar voice said. ‘Still taking on the world single-handed, eh, Roy?’

Complain turned, amazed, and there stood the priest, beaming, scowling, rubbing his hands. He clutched Marapper’s arm incredulously.

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

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

‘You were dead!’ Complain said.

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

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

‘But I touched you – you were cold,’ Complain protested.

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

‘Strychnine, I believe it’s called,’ Scoyt said.

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

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

‘I’m no ghost, Roy,’ he said. ‘Ghosts don’t drink.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her face was tense, the pugnacity of her jaw more noticeable. With a flash of intuition which surprised him, Complain thought, ‘She’s getting an occupational disease like Scoyt’s, because she’s identifying her job with him.’ Then he doubted his own perceptions and, with a terrifying mental picture of the great ship with them all in it hurtling forever on its journey, had to admit the facts were enough to worry anyone. But it was still with the idea of checking her reactions that he asked Vyann, ‘Are you and Master Scoyt the only ones working on this problem?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For some lost reason, men found it hard to decide which sun to go to, but eventually, with the aid of instruments in which they were cunning, they picked on a bright sun called Procyon to which planets were attached, and which was only a distance called eleven light years away. To cross this distance was a considerable undertaking even for the ingenious men, since space had neither heat nor air, and the journey would be very long: so long that several generations of men would live and die before it was completed.

Accordingly, men built this ship in which they now were, built it of inexhaustible metal in eighty-four decks, filled it with everything needful, stocked it with their knowledge, powered it with charged particles called ions.

Tregonnin crossed rapidly to a corner.

‘See!’ he exclaimed. ‘Here is a model of the planet our ancestors left long ago – Earth!’

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

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

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

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

‘You’re used to the magnificence of the tale, I’m not,’ Marapper sobbed, unabashed. ‘To think of all that power . . .’

Tregonnin put the globe carefully down and said in a petulant tone to Vyann, ‘Inspector, if this objectionable fellow doesn’t stop sniffing, you will have to take him away. I cannot stand sniffing. You know I cannot.’

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

‘A sound question, young man,’ Tregonnin said, looking at him for what was practically the first time. ‘And I’ll try to give you a sound answer. It seems that the flight to Procyon’s planets had two main objectives. The ship was made so big because not only would the confinement of a small ship be unendurable on such a long journey, but it had to carry a number of people called colonists. These colonists were to land on the new planet and live there, increasing and multiplying; the ship transported a lot of machines for them – we have found inventories of some of the things – tractors, concrete mixers, pile drivers – those are some of the names I recall.

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

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

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

‘Then I don’t see –’ Complain began puzzledly, but the councillor held up a hand.

‘I’ll read you the labels on the tins,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll understand. Only the labels survive. This one says, “
FILM
: Survey New Earth, Aerial, Stratospheric, Orbital. Mid-Summer,
N. Hemisphere.” This one says, “F
ILM
: Flora and Fauna Continent A, New Earth”. And so on.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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