Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [17]
‘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