Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [15]
‘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