Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [103]
‘Here comes the ship!’ Fermour said relievedly, pointing into the gleaming dark. Tiny beside the bulk of the mother planet, a chip of light seemed hardly to move towards them.
Head swimming, Vyann stared out at the bulk of their own ship, ‘Big Dog’. Here, in this blister, they had a splendid view over its arching back. On impulse, she kicked herself up to the top of the dome where the outlook was still clearer; Complain swam up alongside, and they clung to one of the narrow tubes into which the shutters had rolled themselves. The moths, it suddenly occurred to her, must accidentally have activated the shutters in their struggle behind the controls. Now the moths whirred about them, uniformly radiating hope.
Vyann stared longingly out. The sight of the planet was like toothache; she had to look away.
‘To think they’ll come all the way up here from Earth and lock us back away from the sun . . .’ she said.
‘They won’t . . . they can’t,’ Complain said. ‘Fermour’s only a fool: he doesn’t know. When these others come, Laur, they’ll understand we’ve earned freedom, a right to try life on Earth. Obviously they’re not cruel or they’d never have taken so much trouble over us. They’ll see we’d rather die there than live here.’
A startling explosion came from below them. Shards of plastic panelling blew out into the room, mingling with dead moths and smoke. Vyann and Complain looked down to see Gregg and Fermour floating away to a far corner, away from danger; the priest followed them more slowly – his cloak had been blown over his head. Another explosion sounded, tossing out more dead moths, among which live ones fluttered. Before too long, the control room would be packed with moths. With this second explosion, a rumbling began far away in the middle bowels of the ship, audible even through all the intervening doors, a rumble which, growing, seemed to express all the agony of the years. It grew louder and louder until Complain felt his body tremble with it.
Wordlessly, Vyann pointed to the outside of the ship. Fissures were appearing like stripes all across its hull. After four and a half centuries, ‘Big Dog’ was breaking up; the rumbling was its death-cry, something at once mighty and pathetic.
‘It’s the Emergency Stop!’ Fermour shouted. His voice seemed far away. ‘The moths have activated the Ultimate Emergency Stop! The ship’s splitting into its component decks!’
They could see it all. The fissures on that noble arch of back were swelling into canyons. Then the canyons were gulfs of space. Then there was no longer a ship: only eighty-four great pennies, becoming smaller, spinning away from one another, falling forever along an invisible pathway. And each penny was a deck, and each deck was now a world of its own, and each deck, with its random burden of men, animals or ponics sailed away serenely round Earth, buoyant as a cork in a fathomless sea.
This was a break there could be no mending.
‘Now they’ll have no alternative but to take us back to Earth,’ Vyann said in a tiny voice. She looked at Complain; she tried, woman-like, to guess at all the new interests that awaited them. She tried to guess at the exquisite pressures which would attend the adjustment of every ship-dweller to the sublimities of Earth. It was as if everyone was about to be born, she thought, smiling into Complain’s awakened face. He was her sort; neither of them had ever been really sure of what they wanted: so they would be most likely to find it.
Brian Aldiss was born in 1925. During WWII he served in the Royal Signals in Burma and Sumatra. In 1948 he was demobilized and started work as an assistant in an Oxford bookshop. His first published SF story was ‘Criminal Record’ which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. His first SF novel was Non-Stop, published in 1958. By 1962 he had already won an award for his series of novellas collectively known as Hothouse. During the 60s he wrote some of his most famous titles: Greybeard (1964), Report on Probability A (1968) and Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia (1969).