Brian Aldiss: Non-Stop

‘Rubbish!’ said an old man standing nearby.

‘Don’t contradict me, Eff,’ the Valuer said. ‘Not if you value your dotage higher than droppings.’

‘So it is rubbish,’ Complain said. ‘Who would be fool enough to imagine a place without flies?’

‘I can imagine a place without Complains,’ roared Cheap, who had now recovered his cans and stood ferociously by Complain’s shoulder. They faced each other now, poised for trouble.

‘Go to, larrup him,’ the Valuer called to Cheap. ‘Show him I want no hunters interrupting my business.’

‘Since when was a scavenger of tins of more merit in Quarters than a hunter?’ the old man called Eff asked generally. ‘I warn you, a bad time’s coming to this tribe. I’m only thankful I shan’t be here to see it.’

Growls of derision for the old man and dislike for his sentiments arose on all sides. Suddenly tired of the company, Complain edged away and made off. He found the old man following and nodded cautiously to him.

‘I can see it all,’ Eff said, evidently anxious to continue his tidings of gloom. ‘We’re growing soft. Soon nobody will bother to leave Quarters or clear the ponics. There won’t be any incentives. No brave men will be left — only eaters and players. Disease and death and attacks by other tribes will come; I see it as sure as I see you. Soon only tangles will exist where the Greene tribe was.’

‘I have heard that Forwards folk are good,’ Complain said, cutting into this tirade. ‘That they have sense and not magic.’

‘You’ve been listening to that fellow Fermour then,’ Eff replied grumpily, ‘or one of his ilk. Some men are trying to blind us to who are our real enemies. I call them men but they aren’t men, they’re — Outsiders. That’s what they are, hunter, Outsiders: supernatural entities. I’d have ’em killed if I had my way. I’d have a witch-hunt. Yes, I would. But we don’t have witch-hunts here any more. When I was a kid we always used to be having them. I tell you, the whole tribe’s going soft, soft. If I had my way…’

His breathless voice broke off, drying up perhaps before some old megalomaniac vision of massacre. Complain moved away from him almost unnoticed: he saw Gwenny approaching across the clearing.

‘Your father?’ he enquired.

She made a faint gesture with one hand, indicative of nothing.

‘You know the trailing rot,’ she said tonelessly. ‘He will be making the Long Journey before another sleep-wake is spent.’

‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ he said solemnly: Bergass was a man of honour.

‘And the Long Journey has always begun,’ she replied, finishing the quotation from the Litany for him. ‘There is no more to be done. Meanwhile, I have my father’s heart and your promise of a hunting. Let us go now, Roy. Take me into the ponics with you — please.’

‘Running meat’s down to six loaves a carcass,’ he told her. ‘It’s not worth going, Gwenny.’

‘You can buy a lot with a loaf. A pot for my father’s skull, for instance.’

‘That’s the duty of your step-mother.’

‘I want to come with you hunting.’

He knew that note in her voice. Turning angrily on his heel, he made for the leading barricade without another word. Gwenny followed demurely.

Hunting had become Gwenny’s great passion. It gave her freedom from Quarters, for no woman was allowed to leave the tribal area alone, and it gave her excitement. She took no part in the killing, but she crept like Complain’s shadow after the beasts who inhabited the tangles.

Despite its growing stock of domesticated animals and the consequent slump in the value of wild stock, Quarters had not enough meat for its increasing needs. The tribe was always in a state of unbalance; it had only been formed two generations ago, by Grandfather Greene, and would not be entirely self-sufficient for some while. Indeed, a serious accident or set-back might still shatter it, sending its component families to seek what reception they could find with other tribes.

Complain and Gwenny followed a tangle trail for some way beyond the leading Quarters barricade and then branched into the thicket. The one or two hunters and catchers they had been passing gave way to solitude, the crackling solitude of the tangles. Complain led them up a small companionway, pushing through the crowded stalks rather than cutting them, so that their trail should be less obvious. At the top he halted, Gwenny peering eagerly, anxiously over his shoulder.

The individual ponics pressed up towards the light in bursts of short-lived energy, clustering overhead. The general illumination was consequently of a sickly kind, rather better for imagining things in than actually seeing them. Added to this were the flies and clouds of tiny midges that drifted among the foliage like smoke: vision was limited and hallucinatory. But there was no doubt a man stood watching them, a man with beady eyes and chalk-white forehead.

He was three paces ahead of them. He stood alertly. His great torso was bare and he wore only shorts. He seemed to be looking at a point a little to their left. Yet so uncertain was the light that the harder one peered the harder it was to be sure of anything, except that the man was there. And then he was not there.

‘Was it a ghost?’ Gwenny hissed.

Slipping his dazer into his hand, Complain pressed forward. He could almost persuade himself he had been tricked by a pattern of shadow, so silently had the watcher vanished. Now there remained no sign of him but trampled seedlings where he had stood.

‘Don’t let’s go on,’ Gwenny whispered nervously. ‘Suppose it was a Forwards man — or an Outsider.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘You know there are wild men who have run amok and live solitary in the tangles. He will not harm us. If he had wanted to shoot us, he would have done so then.’

All the same, his skin crawled uneasily to think that even now this stray might be drawing a bead on them, or otherwise planning their deaths as surely and invisibly as if he had been a disease.

‘But his face was so white,’ Gwenny protested.

He took her arm firmly, and led her forward. The sooner they were away from the spot, the better.

They moved fairly swiftly, once crossing a pig run, and passed into a side corridor. Here Complain squatted with his back to the wall and made Gwenny do the same.

‘Listen, and see if we are being followed,’ he said.

The ponics slithered and rustled, and countless small insects gnawed into the silence. Together, they formed a din which seemed to Complain to grow until it would split his head. And in the middle of the din was a note which should not be there.

Gwenny had heard it too.

‘We are getting near another tribe,’ she whispered. ‘There’s one down this alley.’

The sound they could hear was the inevitable one of babies crying and calling, which announced a tribe long before its barricades were reached, even before it could be smelt. Only a few wakes ago, this area had been pig territory, which meant that a tribe had come up from another level and was slowly approaching the Greene hunting preserves.

‘We’ll report this when we get back,’ Complain said, and led her the other way.

He worked easily along, counting the turns as they went, so as not to get lost. When a low archway appeared to their left, they moved through it, picking up a pig trail. This was the area known as Sternstairs, where a great hill led down to lower levels. A crashing sounded from over the brink of the slope, followed by an unmistakeable squealing. Pig!

Motioning Gwenny to stay where she was at the top of the hill, Complain, dexterously sliding his bow from his shoulder and fitting an arrow to it, commenced the descent. His hunter’s blood was up, all worries forgotten, and he moved like a wraith. Gwenny’s eye sped him an unnoticed message of encouragement.