Brian Aldiss: Non-Stop

‘Have they really all got two heads?’ a little girl asked.

‘Of course not,’ Fermour said. ‘They are more civilized than our small tribe’ — again the scanning of his adult listeners — ‘but we know little about them because there are many obstacles between their lands and ours. It must be the duty of all of you, as you grow up, to try and find out more about our world. Remember there is much we do not know, and that outside our world may be other worlds of which we cannot at present guess.’

The children seemed impressed, but one of the women laughed and said, ‘Fat lot of good it’ll do them, guessing about something nobody knows exists.’

Mentally, Complain agreed with her as he walked away. There were a lot of these theories circulating now, all differing, all unsettling, none encouraged by authority. He wondered if it would improve his standing to denounce Fermour; but unfortunately everybody ignored Fermour: he was too slow. Only last wake, he had been publicly stroked for sloth in the fieldrooms.

Complain’s more immediate problem was, should he go hunting? A memory of how often recently he had walked restlessly like this, to the barricade and back, caught him unawares. He clenched his fists. Time passing, opportunities lacking, and always something missing, missing. Again — as he had done since a child — Complain whirled furiously round his brain, searching for a factor which promised to be there and was not, ever. Dimly, he felt he was preparing himself — but quite involuntarily — for a crisis. It was like a fever brewing, but this would be worse than a fever.

He broke into a run. His hair, long and richly black, flopped over his wide eyes. His expression became disturbed. Usually his young face showed strong and agreeable lines under a slight plumpness. The line of jaw was true, the mouth in repose heroic. Yet over the countenance as a whole worked a wasting bitterness; and this desolation was a look common to almost the whole tribe. It was a wise part of the Teaching which said that one man’s eyes should not meet another’s directly.

Complain ran almost blindly, sweat bursting out on his forehead. Sleep or wake, it was perpetually warm in Quarters, and sweat started easily. Nobody he passed regarded him with interest: much senseless running took place in the tribe, many men fled from inner phantoms. Complain only knew he had to get back to Gwenny. Women held the magic salve of forgetfulness.

She was standing motionless, a cup of tea in her hand, when he broke into their compartment. She pretended not to notice him, but her whole attitude changed, the narrow planes of her face going tense. She was sturdily built, her stocky body contrasting with the thinness of her face. This firmness seemed to emphasize itself now, as though she braced herself against a physical attack.

‘Don’t look like that, Gwenny. I’m not your mortal enemy.’ It was not what he had meant to say, nor was its tone placating enough, but the sight of her brought some of his anger heading back.

‘Yes, you are my mortal enemy!’ she said distinctly, still looking away. ‘No one I hate like you.’

‘Give me a sip of your tea then, and we’ll both hope it poisons me.’

‘I wish it would,’ she said venomously, passing over the cup.

He knew her well enough. Her rages were not like his; his had to subside slowly; hers were there, then gone: she would make love to him within a moment of slapping his face. And then she made love best.

‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘You know we were quarrelling over nothing, as usual.’

‘Nothing! Is Lidya nothing? Just because she died at birth… our only little babe, and you call her nothing.’

‘Better to call her nothing than use her as a weapon between us, eh?’ As Gwenny took the cup back, he slid his hand up her bare arm and slipped his fingers adroitly into the top of her blouse.

‘Stop it!’ she screamed, struggling. ‘Don’t be so foul! Is that all you can think of, even when I’m talking to you? Let me go, you nasty beast.’

But he did not. Instead, he put his other arm round her waist and pulled her closer. She tried to kick. He neatly butted her behind the knee with his knee, and they fell to the floor. When he brought his face close, she tried to bite his nose.

‘Take your hands away!’ she gasped.

‘Gwenny… Gwenny, come on, sweet,’ he coaxed.

Her manner changed abruptly. The haggard watchfulness of her face was submerged in dreaminess.

‘Will you take me hunting with you after?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Anything you say.’

What Gwenny said or did not say, however, had small effect on the irresistible roll of events. Two girls, Ansa and Daise, remote relations by marriage of Gwenny’s, arrived breathless to say that her father, Ozbert Bergass, had taken a turn for the worse and was asking for her. He had fallen ill with the trailing rot a sleep-wake ago, and Gwenny had already been once to his distant apartment to see him. It was thought he would not last long: people who fell ill in Quarters seldom lasted long.

‘I must go to him,’ Gwenny said. The independence children had to maintain of their parents was relaxed at these times of ultimate crisis; the law permitted visiting of sick beds.

‘He was a great man in the tribe,’ Complain said solemnly. Ozbert Bergass had been senior guide for many sleep-wakes, and his loss would be felt. All the same, Complain did not offer to go and see his father-in-law; sentiment was one of the weaknesses the Greene tribe strove to eradicate. Instead, when Gwenny had gone, he went down to the market to see Ern Roffery the Valuer, to enquire the current price of meat.

On his way, he passed the pens. They were fuller of animals than ever before, domesticated animals fitter and more tender than the wild ones the hunters caught. Roy Complain was no thinker, and there seemed to him a paradox here he could not explain to himself. Never before had the tribe been so prosperous or its farms so thriving; the lowest labourer tasted meat once in a cycle of four sleep-wakes. Yet Complain himself was less prosperous than formerly. He hunted more, but found less and received less for it. Several of the other hunters, experiencing the same thing, had already thrown up the hunt and turned to other work.

This deteriorating state of affairs Complain simply attributed to a grudge Roffery the Valuer held against the hunter clan, being unable to integrate the lower prices Roffery allowed for wild meat with the abundance of domestic fare.

Consequently, he pushed through the market crowd and greeted the valuer in surly fashion.

‘’spansion to your ego,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Your expense,’ the Valuer replied genially, looking up from an immense list he was painfully compiling. ‘Running meat’s down today, hunter. It’ll take a good sized carcass to earn six loaves.’

‘Hem’s guts! And you told me wheat was down the last time I saw you, you twisting rogue.’

‘Keep a civil turn of phrase, Complain: your own carcass isn’t worth a crust to me. So I did tell you wheat was down. It is down — but running meat’s down more.’

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.’