Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [38]
His mind blossomed into an immense shout of interrogation.
WHY ARE –
WHO IS –
WHAT DO –
HOW CAN –
DO YOU –
CAN YOU –
WILL YOU –
Complain screamed with anguish.
Instantly, the desolating gibberish ceased, the formless inquiry died. The scout rats leapt from their posts, and they and the four driver rats spun the imprisoned rabbit round and shot the cage back into the wall. Spurring them savagely, the ratleader followed with his guard. Next moment, the square of wall banged down behind them – only just in time, for a Giant burst into the room to find what the screaming was about.
He rolled Complain over with his foot. The latter stared up hopelessly at him, trying to speak.
Reassured, the Giant lumbered back to the other room, this time leaving open the connecting door.
‘The Dizzy’s got a headache,’ he announced.
Complain could hear their voices. They sounded to be talking at some kind of machine. But he was almost totally absorbed by the ordeal with the rats. A madman had lived for a moment within his skull! The Teaching warned him that his mind was a foul place. The holy trinity, Froyd, Yung and Bassit, had gone alone through the terrible barriers of sleep, death’s brother; there they found – not nothing, as man had formerly believed – but grottoes and subterranean labyrinths full of ghouls and evil treasure, leeches, and the lusts that burn like acid. Man stood revealed to himself: a creature of infinite complexity and horror. It was the aim of the Teaching to let as much of this miasmic stuff out to the surface as possible. But supposing the Teaching had never gone far enough?
It spoke, allegorically, of conscious and subconscious. Supposing there was a real Subconscious, a being capable of taking over the mind of a man? Had the trinity been down all the slimy corridors? Was this Subconscious the madman who screamed inside him?
Then he had the answer, simple yet unbelievable. The caged creature had brought its mind into contact with his. Reviewing that fizzing questionnaire, Complain knew it had come from the animal and not some dreadful creature inside his own head. The ordeal was at once made tolerable. One can shoot rabbits.
Ignoring the how of it with true Quarters’ philosophy, Complain dismissed the matter.
He lay still, resting, trying to breathe the clinging smell from his lungs, and in a short while the Giants returned.
Complain’s captor, Randall, picked him up without further ado and opened the trapdoor in the floor. Their argument had evidently been settled in Curtis’s favour. Randall eased himself and his burden back into the low tunnel. He put Complain on to the conveyance and, by the sound of things, climbed on himself behind his captive’s head.
With a quiet word to the Giants above, he started the motor. Again the grey roof flowed overhead, punctuated by crisscrossing pipe, wire and tube.
At length they stopped. Fumbling on the roof, the Giant pressed his fingers to it, and a square opened above them. Complain was hauled out of the hole, carried a few yards, bundled through a door, and dropped. He was back in Deadways: its smell to a hunter was unmistakeable. The Giant hovered over him wordlessly, a shadow in shadows, and then vanished.
The darkness of the dim sleep-wake embraced Complain like a mother’s arms. He was back home, among dangers he was trained to face. He slept.
Phantom legions of rats swarmed over him, pinning him down. The rabbit came; it climbed into his head and slithered down the long warrens of his brain.
Complain woke, groaning, humiliated by the beastliness of his dream. It was still dark. The rigidity in his limbs, induced by the gas pellet, had relaxed,