Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [39]
Shielding his torch till it gave the barest whisper of light, Complain moved to the door and looked out at blackness. As far as he could see, a gulf stretched infinitely before him. He slid out, feeling along to the right, and found a row of doors. Using the light again, he found damp, bare tile underfoot. Then he knew where he was; a hollowness in his ear reinforced the certainty. The Giant had brought him back to what Roffery had called the sea.
Getting his bearings, Complain flashed the light cautiously. The sea itself had gone. He walked to the edge of the pit into which Roffery had fallen. It was empty, all but dry. Roffery had gone. The walls of the pit glinted with festoons of rust, blood-coloured; in the warm air, the floor of the pit was drying rapidly.
Complain turned and walked from the chamber, minding not to wake the haggard echoes. He headed back to Marapper’s camp. The ground still squelched lightly underfoot, holding its moisture. He brushed gently by the sagging muck of last season’s ponics, and came to the camp door. He whistled eagerly, wondering who would be on guard: Marapper? Wantage? Fermour? Almost lovingly, he thought of them, reversing the old Quarters’ adage to whisper to himself: ‘Better the devils you know than the ones you don’t.’
His signal went unanswered. Holding himself tense, he pushed into the room. It was empty. They had moved on. Complain was alone in Deadways.
Self-control snapped then; he had gone through too much. Giants, rats, rabbits, he could bear – but not the scabrous solitudes of Deadways. He rioted round the room, flinging up the splintered wood, kicking, cursing, out into the corridor, roaring, swearing, tearing a way through the vegetable mash, howling, blaspheming.
A body cannoned into him from behind. Complain sprawled in the tangle, fighting insanely to turn and tackle his assailant. A hand clamped itself unshakeably over his mouth.
‘Shut up, you drab-spawned he-hag!’ a voice snarled in his ear.
He ceased struggling. A light was turned on to him and three figures hunched over him.
‘I – I thought I’d lost you!’ he said. Suddenly, he began to cry. Reaction turned him into a child again. His shoulders heaved, the tears poured down his cheeks.
Marapper smacked him efficiently across the face.
IV
They travelled. Grimly, cutting, pushing, they worked through the ponics; circumspectly, they moved through dark regions where no lights burned and no ponics grew. They passed through badly plundered areas, whose doors were broken, whose corridors were piled high with wreckage. Such life as they met was timid, eluding them where possible; but few creatures lived here – a rogue goat, a crazed hermit, a pathetic band of sub-men who fled when Wantage clapped his hands. This was Deadways, and the emptiness held unrecorded eras of silence. Quarters was left far behind the travellers, and forgotten. Even their nebulous destination was forgotten, for the present, with its ceaseless call upon their physical reserves, required all their attention.
Finding the subsidiary connections between decks was not always easy, even with the help of Marapper’s plan. Liftshafts were often blocked, levels frequently proved dead ends. But they gradually moved forward; the fifties decks were passed, then the forties, and so they came, on the eighth wake after leaving Quarters, to Deck 29.
By now, Roy Complain had begun to believe in the Ship theory. The reorientation had been insensible but thorough. To this, the intelligent rats had greatly contributed. When Complain had told his companions of his capture by the Giants, he had omitted the rat incident; something fantastic about it, he knew instinctively, would have defied his powers of description and awoken Marapper’s and Wantage’s derision; but he now found his thoughts turning frequently to those fearsome creatures. He saw a parallel between the lives of the rats and the human lives emphasized in their man-like conduct of ill-treating a fellow creature, the rabbit. The rats survived where