Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [57]
‘So much has changed,’ Vyann complained. They were passing through a steel companionway whose double doors, now open, allowed egress from deck to deck. She indicated them lightly, saying: ‘These doors, for instance – in some places they are open, in some closed. And all the ones along Main Corridor are closed – which is fortunate, otherwise every marauder aboard ship would make straight for Forwards. But we cannot open or shut the doors at will, as the Giants must have been able to do when they owned the ship. As they stand now, so they have stood for generations; but somewhere must be a lever which controls them all. We are so helpless. We control nothing.’
Her face was tense, the pugnacity of her jaw more noticeable. With a flash of intuition which surprised him, Complain thought, ‘She’s getting an occupational disease like Scoyt’s, because she’s identifying her job with him.’ Then he doubted his own perceptions and, with a terrifying mental picture of the great ship with them all in it hurtling forever on its journey, had to admit the facts were enough to worry anyone. But it was still with the idea of checking her reactions that he asked Vyann, ‘Are you and Master Scoyt the only ones working on this problem?’
‘For hem’s sake, no!’ she said. ‘We’re only subordinates. A group calling itself the Survival Team has recently been constituted, and it and all other Forwards officers apart from guard officers are also devoting attention to the problem. In addition, two of the Council of Five are in charge of it; one of them you met, Priest – Councillor Zac Deight, the tall, longhaired man. The other of them I’m taking you to see now – Councillor Tregonnin. He is the librarian. He must explain the world to you.’
So it was that Roy Complain and the priest came to their first astronomy lesson. Tregonnin, as he talked to them, hopped about the room from object to object; he was almost ludicrously small and nervous. Although he was neat in a womanish way, the room he ruled over was heaped with lookers and miscellaneous bric-à-brac in disorderly fashion. Confusion had here been brought to a fine art. Tregonnin explained first that until very recently in Forwards – as was the rule still in Quarters – anything like a looker or a video had been destroyed, either from superstition or from a desire to preserve the power of the rulers by maintaining the ignorance of the ruled.
‘That, no doubt, was how the idea of the ship became lost to begin with,’ Tregonnin said, strutting in front of them. ‘And that is why what you see assembled round you represents almost all the records intact in the area of Forwards. The rest has perished. What remains allows us only a fragment of the truth.’
As the councillor began his narrative, Complain forgot the odd gestures with which he accompanied it. He forgot everything but the wonder of the tale as it had been pieced together, the mighty history patched up in this little room.
Through the space in which their world moved, other worlds also moved – two other sorts of worlds, one called sun, from which sprang heat and light, one called planet. The planets depended on the suns for heat and light. At one planet attached to a sun called Sol lived people; this planet was called Earth and the people lived all over the outside of it, because the inside was solid and had no light.
‘The folk did not fall off it, even when they lived on the bottom of it,’ Tregonnin explained. ‘For they had discovered a force called gravity. It is gravity which enables us to walk all the way round a circular deck without falling off.’
Many other secrets the men discovered. They found a way to leave their planet and visit the other planets attached to their sun. This must have been a difficult secret, for it took them a long while. The other planets were different from theirs, and