Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [46]
‘Take me to your Lieutenant and expansion to your egos,’ he said. ‘It is important I see him as soon as possible. I am not a man to be kept waiting.’
‘You will all come with us,’ one of the pair said firmly. ‘We have our orders.’
Wisely, Marapper saw fit to obey at once, although he kept up a flow of indignant protest as they were ushered into the corridor. They were led deeper into Forwards, passing several curious bystanders on their way. Complain noticed these people stared at them angrily; one middle-aged woman called, ‘You curs, you killed my Frank! Now they’ll kill you.’
His senses nicely stimulated by a scent of danger, Complain took in every detail of their route. Here, as throughout Deadways, what Marapper had called the Main Corridor was blocked at each deck, and they followed a circuitous detour round the curving corridors and through the inter-deck doors. In effect, it meant that to go further forward they took, not the straight course a bullet takes to leave a rifle, but the tight spiral traced by the rifling in the barrel.
‘By this method they traversed two decks. Complain saw with mild surprise the notice ‘Deck 22’ stencilled against the inter-deck door; it was a link with all the seemingly unending deck numbers which had punctuated their trek; and it implied, unless Deadways began again on the other side of Forwards, that Forwards itself covered twenty-four decks.
This was too much for Complain to believe. He had to remind himself forcibly how much he was incapable of crediting which had actually been proved to be. But – what lay beyond Deck 1? He could picture only a wilderness of super-ponics, growing out into what Myra, his mother, had called the great stretch of other darkness, where strange lanterns burned. Even the priest’s theory of the Ship, backed as it was by printed evidence, had little power to thrust out that image he had known since childhood. With a certain pleasure, he balanced the two theories against each other; never before in his life had he felt anything but discomfort at the contemplation of intangibles. He was rapidly sloughing the dry husk that limited Greene tribe thinking.
Complain’s interior monologue was interrupted by their guards, who now pushed him with Fermour and the priest into a large compartment, entering themselves and shutting the door. Two other guards were already in the room.
A couple of unusual features distinguished the room from any other Complain had been in. One was a plant bearing bright flowers which stood in a tub, as if for some purpose – though what purpose, the hunter could not guess. The other unusual feature was a girl; she stood regarding them from behind a desk, dressed in a neat grey uniform and with her hands restfully down at her sides. Her hair fell straight and neat about her neck. The hair was black, and her eyes were grey; her face was thin, pale and intense, the exact curve of her cheek down to her mouth holding, Complain felt compulsively, a message he longed to understand. Although she was young and her brow magnificent, the impression she gave was not so much of beauty as of gentleness – until one’s gaze dropped to her jaw. There lay delicate but unmistakeable warning that it might be uncomfortable to know this girl too well.
She surveyed each of the prisoners in turn.
Complain experienced a strange frisson as her eyes engaged his; and something tense in Fermour’s attitude revealed that he, too, felt an attraction to her. That her direct gaze defied a strict Quarters’ taboo only made it the more disturbing.
‘So you’re Gregg’s ruffians,’ she said finally. Now she had seen them, she was obviously inclined to look at them no more; she tilted her neat head up and studied a patch of wall. ‘It is good that we have caught some of you at last. You have caused us much unnecessary irritation. Now you will be handed over to the torturers; we have to extract information from you. Or do you wish to surrender it voluntarily here and now?’
Her voice had been cold and detached, using the tone the proud employ to the