Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [99]
Complain’s gesture was angry, but Vyann’s was supplicatory.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why must the ship stay here? It’s so cruel . . . We are Earth people. This terrible double journey to Procyon and back – it’s been made, and somehow it now seems we’ve survived it. Shouldn’t – oh, I don’t know what happens on Earth, but shouldn’t people have been glad to have us back, happy, excited . . .?’
‘When this ship, “Big Dog” – so christened in jocular allusion to the constellation Little Dog for which it set out – was detected in Earth’s telescopes, finally returning from its long journey, everyone on Earth was, as you say – happy, excited, marvelling.’ Fermour paused. This event had taken place before he was born, but the epic had often been retold to him. ‘Signals were sent out to the ship,’ he continued; ‘they were never answered. Yet the ship kept speeding on towards Earth. It seemed inexplicable. We have passed the technological phase of our civilization, but nevertheless factories were speedily built and a fleet of little ships launched towards “Big Dog”. They had to find out what was happening aboard.
‘They matched velocities with this giant vessel, they boarded her. They found – well, they found out about everything; they found that Dark Ages had settled over the whole ship, as the result of an ancient catastrophe.’
‘The Nine Day Ague!’ Vyann breathed.
Fermour nodded, surprised she should know.
‘The ship could not be allowed to go on,’ he said. ‘It would have sped on forever through the galactic night. These controls were discovered as you now see them: ruined – the work, presumably, of some poor madman generations ago. So the Drive was switched off at source, and the ship dragged into an orbit by the little ships which, using gravity for towlines, acted as tugs.’
‘But – why leave us aboard?’ Complain said. ‘Why did you not take us down after the ship was in orbit? As Laur says, it was cruel – inhuman!’
Reluctantly, Fermour shook his head.
‘The inhumanity was in the ship,’ he said. ‘You see, the crew who survived this virus you seem to know about had undergone a slight physiological modification; the new proteins permeating every living cell in the ship increased their metabolic rate. This increase, undetectable at first, has grown with every generation, so that now you are all living at four times the speed you should be.’
He quailed with pity as he told them – but their looks held only disbelief.
‘You’re lying to scare us,’ Gregg said, his eyes glittering amid the wrappings of his face.
‘I’m not,’ Fermour said. ‘Instead of a life expectation for an average human of eighty years, yours is only twenty. The factor does not spread itself evenly over your life: you tend to grow more quickly as children, have a fairly normal adulthood, and then crumble suddenly in old age.’
‘We’d have noticed if this scoundrel scheme were so!’ Marapper howled.
‘No,’ Fermour said. ‘You wouldn’t. Though the signs were all round you, you could not see them, because you have no standards of comparison. For instance, you accepted the fact that one sleep-wake in four was dark. Living at four times the normal rate, naturally four of your days or sleep-wakes only made one ordinary one. When the ship was a going concern – on the voyage out to Procyon – the lights automatically dimmed all over the vessel from midnight to six, partly to give a friendly illusion of night, partly to allow the servicers to work behind scenes, making any necessary repairs. That brief six-hour shift is a whole day to you.’
Now the comprehension was growing on them. It seemed, oddly enough, to soak from the inside to the outside, as if, in some mystical way, the truth had been trapped in them all along. The awful pleasure of making them know the worst – they who had tortured him – filled Fermour.