Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [14]
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: