Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop

‘The folk did not fall off it, even when they lived on the bottom of it,’ Tregonnin explained. ‘For they had discovered a force called gravity. It is gravity which enables us to walk all the way round a circular deck without falling off.’

Many other secrets the men discovered. They found a way to leave their planet and visit the other planets attached to their sun. This must have been a difficult secret, for it took them a long while. The other planets were different from theirs, and had either too little light and heat or too much. Because of this, there were no men living on them. This distressed the men of Earth.

Eventually they decided they would visit the planets of other suns, to see what they could find there, as their Earth was becoming exceptionally crowded. Here the scanty records in Tregonnin’s possession became confusing, because while some said that space was very empty, others said it contained thousands of suns — stars, they were sometimes called.

For some lost reason, men found it hard to decide which sun to go to, but eventually, with the aid of instruments in which they were cunning, they picked on a bright sun called Procyon to which planets were attached, and which was only a distance called eleven light years away. To cross this distance was a considerable undertaking even for the ingenious men, since space had neither heat nor air, and the journey would be very long: so long that several generations of men would live and die before it was completed.

Accordingly, men built this ship in which they now were, built it of inexhaustible metal in eighty-four decks, filled it with everything needful, stocked it with their knowledge, powered it with charged particles called ions.

Tregonnin crossed rapidly to a corner.

‘See!’ he exclaimed. ‘Here is a model of the planet our ancestors left long ago — Earth!’

He held up a globe above his head. Chipped by careless handlers, obnubilated by the steep passage of time, it still retained on its surface the imprint of seas and continents.

Moved, he hardly knew why, Complain turned to look at Marapper. Tears were pouring down the old priest’s cheeks.

‘What… what a beautiful story,’ Marapper sobbed. ‘You are a wise man, Councillor, and I believe it all, every word of it. What power those men had, what power! I am only a poor old provincial priest, jeezers nose, I know nothing, but…’

‘Stop dramatizing yourself, man,’ Tregonnin said with unexpected severity. ‘Take your mind off your ego and concentrate on what I am telling you. Facts are the thing — facts, and not emotions!’

‘You’re used to the magnificence of the tale, I’m not,’ Marapper sobbed, unabashed. ‘To think of all that power…’

Tregonnin put the globe carefully down and said in a petulant tone to Vyann, ‘Inspector, if this objectionable fellow doesn’t stop sniffing, you will have to take him away. I cannot stand sniffing. You know I cannot.’

‘When do we get to this Procyon’s planets?’ asked Complain quickly. He could not bear the thought of leaving here till everything had been told him.

‘A sound question, young man,’ Tregonnin said, looking at him for what was practically the first time. ‘And I’ll try to give you a sound answer. It seems that the flight to Procyon’s planets had two main objectives. The ship was made so big because not only would the confinement of a small ship be unendurable on such a long journey, but it had to carry a number of people called colonists. These colonists were to land on the new planet and live there, increasing and multiplying; the ship transported a lot of machines for them — we have found inventories of some of the things — tractors, concrete mixers, pile drivers — those are some of the names I recall.

‘The second objective was to collect information on the new planet and samples from it, and bring it all back for the men of Earth to study.’

In his jerky fashion, Councillor Tregonnin moved to a cupboard and fumbled about inside it. He brought out a metal rack containing a dozen round tins small enough to fit in a man’s hand. He opened one. Crisp broken flakes like transparent nail parings fell out.

‘Microfilm!’ Tregonnin said, sweeping the flakes under a table with his foot. ‘It was brought in to me from a far corner of Forwards. Damp has ruined it, but even if it were intact it would be of no use to us: it needs a machine to make it readable.’

‘Then I don’t see –’ Complain began puzzledly, but the councillor held up a hand.

‘I’ll read you the labels on the tins,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll understand. Only the labels survive. This one says, “FILM: Survey New Earth, Aerial, Stratospheric, Orbital. Mid-Summer, N. Hemisphere.” This one says, “FILM: Flora and Fauna Continent A, New Earth”. And so on.’

He put the cans down, paused impressively and added, ‘So there, young man, is the answer to your question; on the evidence of these tins, it is obvious the ship reached Procyon’s planets successfully. We are now travelling back to Earth.’

In the untidy room deep silence fell, as each struggled alone to the very limits of his imagination. At last Vyann rose, shaking herself out of a spell, and said they should be going.

‘Wait!’ Complain said. ‘You’ve told us so much, yet you’ve told us so little. If we are travelling back to Earth, when do we get there? How can we know?’

‘My dear fellow,’ Tregonnin began, then sighed and changed his mind about what he was going to say. ‘My dear fellow, don’t you see, so much has been destroyed… The answers aren’t always clear. Sometimes even the questions have been lost, if you follow my meaning. Let me answer you like this: we know the distance from New Earth, as the colonists called it, to Earth; it is eleven light years, as I have said. But we have not been able to find out how fast the ship is travelling.’

‘But one thing at least we do know,’ Vyann interposed. ‘Tell Roy Complain about the Forwards Roll, Councillor.’

‘Yes, I was just about to,’ Tregonnin said, with a touch of asperity. ‘Until we of the Council of Five took over command of Forwards, it was ruled by a succession of men calling themselves Governors. Under them, Forwards grew from a pitiful tribe to the powerful state it now is. Those Governors took care to hand down to each other a Roll or Testament, and this Roll or Testament the last Governor handed over to my keeping before he died. It is little more than a list of Governors’ names. But under the first Governor’s name it says –’ he shut his eyes and waved a delicate hand to help him recite — ‘“I am the fourth homeward-bound Captain of this ship, but since the title is only an irony now, I prefer to call myself Governor, if even that is not too grand a name”.’

The councillor opened his eyes and said, ‘So you see, although the names of the first three men are lost, we have in the Roll a record of how many generations have lived aboard this ship since it started back for Earth. The number is twenty-three.’

Marapper had not spoken for a long while. Now he asked, ‘Then that is a long time. When do we reach Earth?’

‘That is the question your friend asked,’ Tregonnin said. ‘I can only answer that I know for how many generations we have been travelling. But no man knows now when or how we stop. In the days before the first Governor, came the catastrophe — whatever that was — and since then the ship goes on and on non-stop through space, without captain, without control. One might almost say: without hope.’

For most of that sleep, tired though he was, Complain could not rest. His mind seethed and churned with fearful images, and fretted itself with conjecture. Over and over, he ran through what the councillor had said, trying to digest it.