Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [6]
The Valuer preened his great moustaches and burst out laughing. Several other men idling nearby laughed too. One of them, a burly, stinking fellow called Cheap, bore a pile of round cans he was hoping to exchange in the market. With a savage kick, Complain sent the cans flying. Roaring with rage, Cheap scrambled to retrieve them, fighting to get them back from others already snatching them up. At this Roffery laughed the louder, but the tide of his humour had changed, and was no longer against Complain.
‘You’d be worse off living in Forwards,’ he said consolingly. ‘They are a people of miracles there. Create beasts for eating from their breath, catching them in the air, they do. They don’t need hunters at all.’ He slammed violently at a fly settling on his neck. ‘And they have vanquished the curse of flying insects.’
‘Rubbish!’ said an old man standing nearby.
‘Don’t contradict me, Eff,’ the Valuer said. ‘Not if you value your dotage higher than droppings.’
‘So it is rubbish,’ Complain said. ‘Who would be fool enough to imagine a place without flies?’
‘I can imagine a place without Complains,’ roared Cheap, who had now recovered his cans and stood ferociously by Complain’s shoulder. They faced each other now, poised for trouble.
‘Go to, larrup him,’ the Valuer called to Cheap. ‘Show him I want no hunters interrupting my business.’
‘Since when was a scavenger of tins of more merit in Quarters than a hunter?’ the old man called Eff asked generally. ‘I warn you, a bad time’s coming to this tribe. I’m only thankful I shan’t be here to see it.’
Growls of derision for the old man and dislike for his sentiments arose on all sides. Suddenly tired of the company, Complain edged away and made off. He found the old man following and nodded cautiously to him.
‘I can see it all,’ Eff said, evidently anxious to continue his tidings of gloom. ‘We’re growing soft. Soon nobody will bother to leave Quarters or clear the ponics. There won’t be any incentives. No brave men will be left – only eaters and players. Disease and death and attacks by other tribes will come; I see it as sure as I see you. Soon only tangles will exist where the Greene tribe was.’
‘I have heard that Forwards folk are good,’ Complain said, cutting into this tirade. ‘That they have sense and not magic.’
‘You’ve been listening to that fellow Fermour then,’ Eff replied grumpily, ‘or one of his ilk. Some men are trying to blind us to who are our real enemies. I call them men but they aren’t men, they’re – Outsiders. That’s what they are, hunter, Outsiders: supernatural entities. I’d have ’em killed if I had my way. I’d have a witch-hunt. Yes, I would. But we don’t have witch-hunts here any more. When I was a kid we always used to be having them. I tell you, the whole tribe’s going soft, soft. If I had my way . . .’
His breathless voice broke off, drying up perhaps before some old megalomaniac vision of massacre. Complain moved away from him almost unnoticed: he saw Gwenny approaching across the clearing.
‘Your father?’ he enquired.
She made a faint gesture with one hand, indicative of nothing.
‘You know the trailing rot,’ she said tonelessly. ‘He will be making the Long Journey before another sleep-wake is spent.’
‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ he said solemnly: Bergass was a man of honour.
‘And the Long Journey has always begun,’ she replied, finishing the quotation from the Litany for him. ‘There is no more to be done. Meanwhile, I have my father’s heart and your promise of a hunting. Let us go now, Roy. Take me into the ponics with you – please.’
‘Running meat’s down to six loaves a carcass,’ he told her. ‘It’s not worth going, Gwenny.’
‘You can buy a lot with a loaf. A pot for my father’s skull, for instance.’
‘That’s the duty of your step-mother.’
‘I want to come with you hunting.’
He knew that note in her voice. Turning angrily on his heel, he made for the leading barricade without another word. Gwenny followed demurely.
II
Hunting had become Gwenny’s