Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [5]
‘Yes, you are my mortal enemy!’ she said distinctly, still looking away. ‘No one I hate like you.’
‘Give me a sip of your tea then, and we’ll both hope it poisons me.’
‘I wish it would,’ she said venomously, passing over the cup.
He knew her well enough. Her rages were not like his; his had to subside slowly; hers were there, then gone: she would make love to him within a moment of slapping his face. And then she made love best.
‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘You know we were quarrelling over nothing, as usual.’
‘Nothing! Is Lidya nothing? Just because she died at birth . . . our only little babe, and you call her nothing.’
‘Better to call her nothing than use her as a weapon between us, eh?’ As Gwenny took the cup back, he slid his hand up her bare arm and slipped his fingers adroitly into the top of her blouse.
‘Stop it!’ she screamed, struggling. ‘Don’t be so foul! Is that all you can think of, even when I’m talking to you? Let me go, you nasty beast.’
But he did not. Instead, he put his other arm round her waist and pulled her closer. She tried to kick. He neatly butted her behind the knee with his knee, and they fell to the floor. When he brought his face close, she tried to bite his nose.
‘Take your hands away!’ she gasped.
‘Gwenny . . . Gwenny, come on, sweet,’ he coaxed.
Her manner changed abruptly. The haggard watchfulness of her face was submerged in dreaminess.
‘Will you take me hunting with you after?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Anything you say.’
What Gwenny said or did not say, however, had small effect on the irresistible roll of events. Two girls, Ansa and Daise, remote relations by marriage of Gwenny’s, arrived breathless to say that her father, Ozbert Bergass, had taken a turn for the worse and was asking for her. He had fallen ill with the trailing rot a sleep-wake ago, and Gwenny had already been once to his distant apartment to see him. It was thought he would not last long: people who fell ill in Quarters seldom lasted long.
‘I must go to him,’ Gwenny said. The independence children had to maintain of their parents was relaxed at these times of ultimate crisis; the law permitted visiting of sick beds.
‘He was a great man in the tribe,’ Complain said solemnly. Ozbert Bergass had been senior guide for many sleep-wakes, and his loss would be felt. All the same, Complain did not offer to go and see his father-in-law; sentiment was one of the weaknesses the Greene tribe strove to eradicate. Instead, when Gwenny had gone, he went down to the market to see Ern Roffery the Valuer, to enquire the current price of meat.
On his way, he passed the pens. They were fuller of animals than ever before, domesticated animals fitter and more tender than the wild ones the hunters caught. Roy Complain was no thinker, and there seemed to him a paradox here he could not explain to himself. Never before had the tribe been so prosperous or its farms so thriving; the lowest labourer tasted meat once in a cycle of four sleep-wakes. Yet Complain himself was less prosperous than formerly. He hunted more, but found less and received less for it. Several of the other hunters, experiencing the same thing, had already thrown up the hunt and turned to other work.
This deteriorating state of affairs Complain simply attributed to a grudge Roffery the Valuer held against the hunter clan, being unable to integrate the lower prices Roffery allowed for wild meat with the abundance of domestic fare.
Consequently, he pushed through the market crowd and greeted the valuer in surly fashion.
‘’spansion to your ego,’ he said grudgingly.
‘Your expense,’ the Valuer replied genially, looking up from an immense list he was painfully compiling. ‘Running meat’s down today, hunter. It’ll take a good sized carcass to earn six loaves.’
‘Hem’s guts! And you told me wheat was down the last time I saw you, you twisting rogue.’
‘Keep a civil turn of phrase, Complain: your own carcass isn’t worth a crust to me. So