Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop

He woke again with a start, full of apprehension. The door now stood wide open. In the corridor, the ponics, most of their light source gone, were dying rapidly. Their tops had buckled, and they huddled against each other like a file of broken-backed old men kneeling beneath a blanket. Ern Roffery was not in the room.

Pulling out his dazer, Complain got up and went to listen at the doorway. It seemed highly unlikely that anything could have abducted Roffery: there would have been a scuffle which would have aroused the others. Therefore he had gone voluntarily. But why? Had he heard something in the corridor?

Certainly there was a distant sound, as throaty as the noise of running water. The longer Complain listened, the louder it seemed. With a glance back at his three sleeping companions, Complain slipped out to trace the sound. This alarming course seemed to him slightly preferable to having to wake the priest and explain that he had dozed.

Once in the corridor, he cautiously flashed a torch and picked up Roffery’s footprints in the sludge, pointing towards the unexplored end of this level. Walking was easier now that the tangle was sagging into the centre, away from the walls. Complain moved slowly, not showing a light and keeping his dazer ready for action.

At a corridor junction he paused, pressing on again with the liquid sound to guide him. The ponics petered out and were replaced by deck, washed bare of soil by a stream of water. Complain allowed it to flow against his boots, walking carefully so as not to splash. This was new in his experience. A light burned ahead. As he neared it, he saw it was shining in a vast chamber beyond two plate-glass doors. When he got to the doors, he stopped; on them was painted a notice, ‘Swimming Pool’, which he pronounced to himself without understanding. Peering through the doors, he saw a shallow flight of steps going up, with pillars at the top of them; behind one pillar stood the shadowy figure of a man.

Complain ducked instantly away. When the man did not move, Complain concluded he had not been seen and looked again, to observe that the figure was staring away from him. It looked like Roffery. Cautiously, Complain opened one of the glass doors; a wave washed against his legs. Water was pouring down the steps, converting them into a waterfall.

‘Roffery!’ Complain called, keeping his dazer on the figure. The three syllables he uttered were seized and blown to an enormous booming, which moaned several times round the cavern of darkness before dying. They washed away with them everything but a hollow stillness, which now sounded loud in its own right.

‘Who’s there?’ challenged the figure, in a whisper.

Through his fright, Complain managed to whisper his name back. The man beckoned him. Complain stood motionless where he was and then, at another summons, slowly climbed the steps. As he came level with the other he saw with certainty that it was the valuer.

Roffery grabbed his arm.

‘You were sleeping, you fool!’ he hissed in Complain’s ear.

Complain nodded mutely, afraid to rouse the echoes again.

Roffery dismissed that subject. Without speaking, he pointed ahead. Complain looked where he was bid, puzzled by the expression on the other’s face.

Neither of them had ever been in such a large space. Lit only by one tube which burned to their left, it seemed to stretch for ever into the darkness. The floor was a sheet of water on which ripples slid slowly outwards. Under the light, the water shone like metal. Breaking this smooth expanse at the far end, was an erection of tubes which suspended planks over the water at various heights, and to either side were rows of huts, barely distinguishable for shadow.

‘It’s beautiful!’ Roffery breathed. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

Complain stared at him in astonishment. The word ‘beautiful’ had an erotic meaning, and was applied only to particularly desirable women. Yet he saw that there was a sight here which needed a special choice of vocabulary. His eyes switched back to the water: it was entirely outside their experience. Previously, water had meant only a dribble from a tap, a spurt from a hose, or the puddle at the bottom of a utensil. He wondered vaguely what this amount could be for. Sinister, uncanny, the view had another quality also, and it was this Roffery was trying to describe.

‘I know what it is,’ Roffery murmured. He was staring at the water as if hypnotized, the lines of his face so relaxed that his appearance was changed. ‘I’ve read about this in old books brought me for valuing, dreamy rubbish with no meaning till now.’ He paused, and then quoted, ‘“Then dead men rise up never, and even the longest river winds somewhere safe to sea.” This is the sea, Complain, and we’ve stumbled on the sea. I’ve often read about it. For me, it proves Marapper’s wrong about our being in a ship; we’re in an underground city.’

This meant little to Complain; he was not interested in labels of things. What struck him was to perceive something he had worried over till now: why Roffery had left his sinecure to come on the priest’s hazardous expedition. He saw now that the other had a reason akin to Complain’s own: a longing for what he had never known and could put no name to. Instead of feeling any bond with Roffery about this, Complain decided he must more than ever beware of the man, for if they had similar objectives, they were the more likely to clash.

‘Why did you come up here?’ he asked, still keeping his voice low to avoid the greedy echoes.

‘While you were snoring, I woke and heard voices in the corridor,’ Roffery said. ‘Through the frosted glass I saw two men pass — only they were too big for men. They were Giants!’

‘Giants! The Giants are dead, Roffery.’

‘These were Giants, I tell you, fully seven feet high. I saw their heads go by the window.’ In his eyes, Complain read the uneasy fascinated memory of them.

‘And you followed them?’ Complain asked.

‘Yes. I followed them into here.’

At this Complain scanned the shadows anew.

‘Are you trying to frighten me?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t ask you to come after me. Why be afraid of the Giants? Dazers’ll despatch a man however long he measures.’

‘We’d better be getting back, Roffery. There’s no point in standing here; besides, I’m meant to be on watch.’

‘You might have thought of that before,’ Roffery said. ‘We’ll bring Marapper here later to see what he makes of the sea. Before we go, I’m just going to look at something over there. That was where the Giants disappeared to.’

He indicated a point hear at hand, beside the huts, where a square of curb was raised some four inches above the water-line. The solitary light which overhung it looked almost as if it had been temporarily erected by the Giants to cast a glow there.

‘There’s a trapdoor inside that curb,’ Roffery whispered. ‘The Giants went down there and closed it after them. Come on, we’ll go and look.’

This seemed to Complain foolhardy in the extreme, but not venturing to criticize he merely said, ‘Well, keep to the shadows in case anyone else comes in here.’

‘The sea’s only ankle deep,’ Roffery said. ‘Don’t be afraid of getting your feet wet.’

He seemed strangely excited, like a child, with a child’s innocent disregard of danger. Nevertheless, he obeyed Complain’s injunction and kept to the cover of the walls. They paddled one behind the other on the fringes of the sea, weapons ready, and so came to the trapdoor, dry behind its protecting curb.

Pulling a face at his companion, Roffery stooped down and slowly lifted the hatch. Gentle light flowed out from the opening. They saw an iron ladder leading down into a pit full of piping. Two overalled figures were working silently at the bottom of the pit, doing something with a stopcock. As soon as the hatch was opened, they must have heard the magnified hiss of running water in the chamber above them, for they looked up and fixed Roffery and Complain with an astonished gaze. Undoubtedly they were Giants: they were monstrously tall and thick, and their faces were dark.