Brian Aldiss: Non-Stop

‘I thought — Expansion, hunter. Why are you not out after meat?’ Wantage asked, sliding his eyes away from Complain.

‘Because I am walking down to the barricades with you. Besides, my pot is full and my dues paid: I have no need of meat.’

They walked in silence, Complain attempting to get on the other’s left side, the other eluding his efforts. Complain was careful not to try him too far, in case Wantage fell on him. Violence and death were pandemic in Quarters, forming a natural balance to the high birth rate, but nobody cheerfully dies for the sake of symmetry.

Near the barricades, the corridor was crowded; Wantage, muttering that he had cleaning work to do, slipped away. He walked close to the wall, narrowly upright, with a sort of bitter dignity in his step.

The leading barricade was a wooden partition with a gate in it which entirely blocked the corridor. Two Guards were posted there continually. There, Quarters ended and the mazes of ponic tangle began. But the barrier was a temporary structure, for the position itself was subject to change.

The Greene tribe was semi-nomadic, forced by its inability to maintain adequate crops or live food to move along on to new ground frequently. This was accomplished by thrusting forward the leading barricade and moving up the rear ones, at the other end of Quarters, a corresponding distance. Such a move was now in progress. The ponic tangle, attacked and demolished ahead, would be allowed to spring up again behind them: the tribe slowly worked its way through the endless corridors like a maggot through a mushy apple.

Beyond the barricade, men worked vigorously, hacking down the tall ponic stalks, the edible sap, miltex, spurting out above their blades. As they were felled, the stalks were inverted to preserve as much sap as possible. This would be drained off and the hollow poles dried, cut to standard lengths and used eventually for a multitude of purposes. Almost on top of the busy blades, other sections of the plants were also being harvested: the leaves for medicinal use, the young shoots for table delicacies, the seed for various uses, as food, as buttons, as loose ballast in the Quarters’ version of tambourines, as counters for the Travel-Up boards, as toys for babies (into whose all-sampling mouths they were too large to cram).

The hardest job in the task of clearing ponics was breaking up the interlacing root structure, which lay like a steel mesh under the grit, its lower tendrils biting deep into the deck. As it was chopped out, other men with spades cleared the humus into sacks; here the humus was particularly deep, almost two feet of it covering the deck: evidence that these were unexplored parts, across which no other tribe had ever worked. The filled sacks were carted back to Quarters, where they would be emptied to provide new fields in new rooms.

Another body of men were also at work before the barricade, and these Complain watched with especial interest. They were of a more exalted rank than the others present; they were Guards, recruited only from the hunters, and the possibility existed that one day, through fortune or favour, Complain might rise to that enviable class.

As the almost solid wall of tangle was bitten back, doors were revealed, presenting black faces to the onlookers. The rooms behind these doors would yield mysteries: a thousand strange articles, useful, useless or meaningless, which had once been the property of the vanished race of Giants. The duty of the Guards was to break open these ancient tombs and appropriate whatever lay within for the good of the tribe, meaning themselves. In due time the loot would be distributed or destroyed, depending on the whim of the council. Much that emerged into the light of Quarters in this fashion was declared by the Lieutenancy to be dangerous, and was burnt.

The business of opening these doors was not without its hazards, imaginary if not real. Rumour had it in Quarters that other small tribes, also struggling for existence in the tangle warrens, had silently vanished away after opening such doors.

Complain by now was not the only one caught by the perennial fascination of watching people work. Several women, each with an ample quota of children, stood by the barricade, getting in the way of the procession of humus and ponic bearers. To the constant small whine of flies, from which Quarters was never free, was added the chatter of small tongues: and to this chorus the Guards broke down the next door. A moment’s silence fell, in which even the workers paused to stare half in fear at the opening.

The new room was a disappointment. It did not even contain the skeleton of a Giant to horrify and fascinate. It was a small store merely, lined with shelves loaded with little bags. The little bags were full of variously coloured powders. A bright yellow and a scarlet one fell and broke, forming two fans on the deck, and in the air two intermingling clouds. Shouts of delight from the children, who rarely saw much colour, caused the Guards to bark orders brusquely and begin to carry their discoveries away, forming a living chain to a truck behind the barricade.

Aware of a vague sense of anti-climax, Complain drifted away. Perhaps, after all, he would go hunting.

‘But why is there light in the tangles when nobody is there to need it?’

The question came to Complain above the general bustle. He turned and saw the questioner was one of several small boys who clustered round a big man squatting in their midst. One or two mothers stood by, smiling indulgently, their hands idly fanning away the flies.

‘There has to be light for the ponics to grow, just as you could not live in the dark,’ came the answer to the boy. Complain saw the man who spoke was Bob Fermour, a slow fellow fit only for labouring in the fieldrooms. He was genial — rather more so than the Teaching entirely countenanced — and consequently popular with the children. Complain recalled that Fermour was reputed to be a storyteller, and felt suddenly eager to be diverted. Without his anger he was empty.

‘What was there before the ponics were there?’ a little girl demanded. In their unpractised way, the children were trying to start Fermour on a story.

‘Tell ’em the tale about the world, Bob!’ one of the mothers advised.

Fermour glanced quizzically up at Complain.

‘Don’t mind me,’ Complain said. ‘Theories are less than flies to me.’ The powers of the tribe discouraged theorizing, or any sort of thought not on severely practical lines; hence Fermour’s hesitation.

‘Well, this is all guesswork, because we don’t have any records of what happened in the world before the Greene tribe began,’ Fermour said. ‘Or if we do find records, they don’t make much sense.’ He glanced sharply at the adults in his audience before adding quickly, ‘Because there are more important things to do than puzzle over old legends.’

‘What is the tale about the world, Bob? Is it exciting?’ a boy asked impatiently.

Fermour smoothed the boy’s fringe back from his eyes and said earnestly, ‘It is the most exciting tale that could possibly be, because it concerns all of us, and how we live. Now the world is a wonderful place. It is constructed of layers and layers of deck, like this one, and these layers do not end, because they eventually turn a circle on to themselves. So you could walk on and on for ever and never reach the end of the world. And all those layers are filled with mysterious places, some good, some evil; and all those corridors are blocked with ponics.’

‘What about the Forwards people?’ the boy asked. ‘Do they have green faces?’

‘We are coming to them,’ Fermour said, lowering his voice so that the youthful audience crowded nearer. ‘I have told you what happens if you keep to the lateral corridors of the world. But if you can get on to the main corridor you get on to a highway that takes you straight to distant parts of the world. And then you may arrive in the territory of Forwards.’