Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [19]
‘Look at me, Roy. Answer me.’
‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ He was sitting up now, almost forced there by the urgency in the priest’s voice.
‘I must know what you are made of.’
‘You know what the Litany tells us: we are the sons of cowards, our days are passed in fear.’
‘This you believe?’ the priest asked.
‘Naturally. It is the Teaching.’
‘I need your aid, Roy. Would you follow where I led you – even out of Quarters, into Deadways?’
All this was spoken low and fast. And low and fast beat the indecision in Complain’s blood. He made no effort to come to a consciously debated decision; the nerves must be arbiter: mind was not trustworthy – it knew too much.
‘That would require courage,’ he said at length.
The priest slapped his great thighs, yawning in nervous enthusiasm with a sound like a tiny shriek.
‘No, Roy, you lie, true to the list of liars who begot you. If we went, we should be escaping, fleeing, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. Ha, we shall slip away furtively. It will be the old back-to-nature act, boy, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. Why, it would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now, will you come with me?’
Some meaning beyond the words themselves hardened a decision in Complain. He would go! Always there had been that cloud just beyond his comprehension, from which he must escape. He slid off the bunk, trying to hide this decision from Marapper’s wily eyes until he had learnt more of the venture.
‘What should we two do alone in the tangles of Deadways, priest?’
The priest thrust a great thumb searchingly up one nostril and spoke with his gaze steady over his fist. ‘We shall not go alone. Four others come with us, picked men. I have been preparing for this for some while, and all is now ready. You are discontented, your woman is taken: what have you to lose? I strongly advise you to come – for your own sake, of course – although it will suit me to have someone about with a weak will and a hunter’s eye.’
‘Who are the four others, Marapper?’
‘I will tell you that when you say you are coming. If I were betrayed to the Guards, they would slit all our throats – mine especially! – in twenty places.’
‘What are we going to do? Where are we going?’
Marapper rose slowly to his feet and stretched. With long fingers he raked through his hair, making at the same time the most hideous sneer he could devise, twisting the two great slabs of his cheeks, one up, one down, until his mouth coiled between them like knotted rope.
‘Go by yourself, Roy, if you so distrust my leadership! Why, you’re like a woman, all bellyache and questioning. I’ll tell you no more, except that my scheme is something too grand for your comprehension. Domination of the ship! That’s it! Nothing less! Complete domination of the ship – you don’t even know what the phrase means.’
Cowed by the priest’s ferocious visage, Complain merely said, ‘I was not going to refuse to come.’
‘You mean you will come?’
‘Yes.’
Marapper gripped his arm fervently, without a word. His cheeks gleamed.
‘Now tell me who the other four are who come with us,’ Complain said, alarmed the moment he had committed himself.
Marapper released his arm.
‘You know the old saying, Roy: the truth never set anyone free. You will learn soon enough. It is better that I do not tell you now. I plan we shall start early next sleep. Now I shall leave you; I have work still to do. Not a word to anyone.’
Half out of the door, he paused. Thrusting a hand into his tunic, he pulled something out and waved it triumphantly. Complain recognized it as a looker, the collection of reading matter used by the extinct Giants.
‘This is our key to power!’ Marapper said dramatically, thrusting it back into its place of concealment. Then he closed the door behind him.
Idle as statuary, Complain stood in the centre of the floor, only his head working. And in his head there was only a circle of thought, leading