Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [59]
He put the cans down, paused impressively and added, ‘So there, young man, is the answer to your question; on the evidence of these tins, it is obvious the ship reached Procyon’s planets successfully. We are now travelling back to Earth.’
In the untidy room deep silence fell, as each struggled alone to the very limits of his imagination. At last Vyann rose, shaking herself out of a spell, and said they should be going.
‘Wait!’ Complain said. ‘You’ve told us so much, yet you’ve told us so little. If we are travelling back to Earth, when do we get there? How can we know?’
‘My dear fellow,’ Tregonnin began, then sighed and changed his mind about what he was going to say. ‘My dear fellow, don’t you see, so much has been destroyed . . . The answers aren’t always clear. Sometimes even the questions have been lost, if you follow my meaning. Let me answer you like this: we know the distance from New Earth, as the colonists called it, to Earth; it is eleven light years, as I have said. But we have not been able to find out how fast the ship is travelling.’
‘But one thing at least we do know,’ Vyann interposed. ‘Tell Roy Complain about the Forwards Roll, Councillor.’
‘Yes, I was just about to,’ Tregonnin said, with a touch of asperity. ‘Until we of the Council of Five took over command of Forwards, it was ruled by a succession of men calling themselves Governors. Under them, Forwards grew from a pitiful tribe to the powerful state it now is. Those Governors took care to hand down to each other a Roll or Testament, and this Roll or Testament the last Governor handed over to my keeping before he died. It is little more than a list of Governors’ names. But under the first Governor’s name it says –’ he shut his eyes and waved a delicate hand to help him recite – ‘“I am the fourth homeward-bound Captain of this ship, but since the title is only an irony now, I prefer to call myself Governor, if even that is not too grand a name”.’
The councillor opened his eyes and said, ‘So you see, although the names of the first three men are lost, we have in the Roll a record of how many generations have lived aboard this ship since it started back for Earth. The number is twenty-three.’
Marapper had not spoken for a long while. Now he asked, ‘Then that is a long time. When do we reach Earth?’
‘That is the question your friend asked,’ Tregonnin said. ‘I can only answer that I know for how many generations we have been travelling. But no man knows now when or how we stop. In the days before the first Governor, came the catastrophe – whatever that was – and since then the ship goes on and on non-stop through space, without captain, without control. One might almost say: without hope.’
For most of that sleep, tired though he was, Complain could not rest. His mind seethed and churned with fearful images, and fretted itself with conjecture. Over and over, he ran through what the councillor had said, trying to digest it.
It was all disquieting enough. Yet, in the midst of it, one tiny, irrelevant detail of their visit to the library kept recurring to him like toothache. At the time, it had seemed so unimportant that Complain, who was the only one who noticed it, had said nothing; now, its significance grew till it eclipsed even the thought of stars.
While Tregonnin was delivering his lecture, Complain had chanced to glance up at the library ceiling. Through the grille there, alert as if listening and understanding, peered a tiny rat’s face.
III
‘Contraction take your ego, Roy!’ Marapper exploded. ‘Don’t start mixing yourself up with the ideas of Forwards. It’s that girl who’s doing it, I know – you mark my words, she’s playing her own game with you! You’re so busy dreaming about the spicy secrets of her skirts, you can’t see the wood for the ponics. Just remember: we came here with our own objectives, and they’re still our objectives.’
Complain shook his head. He and