Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [44]
‘Wantage was then a toddling infant – a small thing with his great deformity. His mother became – as unattached women frequently will – one of the guards’ harlots, and was killed in a drunken brawl before her son reached puberty.’
‘Whose nerves do you think this recitation steadies?’ Fermour asked.
‘In fear lies no expansion; our lives are only lent us,’ Marapper said. ‘See the shape of our poor Comrade’s life. As so often happens, his end echoes his beginning; the wheel turns one full revolution, then breaks off. When he was a child, Wantage endured nothing but torment from the other boys – taunts because his mother was a bad lot, taunts because of his face. He came to identify the two as one woe. So he walked with his bad side to the wall, and deliberately submerged the memory of his mother. But being back in the tangle brought back his infant recollections. He was swamped by the shame of her, his mother. He was overwhelmed by infantile fears of darkness and insecurity.’
‘Now that our little object lesson in the benefits of self-confession is over,’ Complain said heavily, ‘perhaps you will recollect, Marapper, that Wantage is not dead. He still lives to be a danger to us.
‘I’m just going to finish him,’ Marapper said. ‘Your torch a moment, dimly. We don’t want him squealing like a pig.’
Bending down gingerly, Complain fought a splitting headache as the blood flow into his skull increased. The impulse came to do just what Wantage had done: hurl away the discomforts of reason, and charge blindly into the ambushed thickets, screaming. It was only later that he questioned his blind obedience to the priest at this dangerous hour; for it was obvious on reflection that Marapper had found some sort of mental refuge from this crisis by turning to the routines of priesthood; his exhumation of Wantage’s childhood had been a camouflaged seeking for his own.
‘I think I’m going to sneeze again,’ Wantage remarked, in a reasonable voice, from the ground. He had regained consciousness without their knowing it.
His face, in the pencil of light squeezed between Complain’s fingers, was scarcely recognizable. Normally pale and thin, the countenance was now swollen and suffused with blood; it might have been a gorged vampire’s mask, had the eyes not been hot, rather than chill with death. And as the light of Complain’s torch fell upon him, Wantage jumped.
Unprepared, Complain went down under a frontal attack. But, arms and legs flailing, Wantage paused only to knock his previous assailant out of the way. Then he was off through the tangles, crashing away from the little party.
Marapper’s torch came on, picking at the greenery, settling dimly on Wantage’s retreating back.
‘Put it out, you crazy fool priest!’ Fermour bellowed.
‘I’m going to get him with my dazer,’ Marapper shouted.
But he did not. Wantage had burst only a short way into the tangle when he paused and swung about. Complain heard distinctly the curious whistling noise he made. For a second, everything was still. Then Wantage made the whistling noise again and staggered back into range of Marapper’s torch. He tripped, collapsed, tried to make his way to them on hands and knees.
Two yards from Marapper, he rolled over, twitched and lay still. His blank eye stared incredulously at the arrow sticking out of his solar plexus.
They were still peering stupidly at the body when the armed guards of Forwards slid from the shadows and confronted them.
PART III
FORWARDS
I
Forwards was a region like none Roy Complain had seen before. The grandeur of Sternstairs, the cosy squalor of Quarters, the hideous wilderness of Deadways, even the spectacle of that macabre sea where the Giants had captured him – none of them prepared him for the differentness of Forwards. Although his hands, like Fermour’s and Marapper’s, were tied behind his back,