Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop

‘I’ve a mind to have you both flung into cells,’ he said. ‘How long have you been back from Gregg’s stronghold? Why did you not report straight back to me or the Council, as you were instructed to do? Where’ve you been together, I want to know?’

‘But, Roger –’ Vyann protested. ‘We haven’t been back long! Besides, you were all out on a chase when we arrived. We didn’t know the thing was so urgent, or we should have –’

‘Just a minute, Laur,’ Scoyt interrupted. ‘You’d better save the excuses: we’ve a crisis on hand. Never mind all that, I’m not interested in the frills; just tell me about Gregg.’

Seeing the hurt and angry look on Vyann’s face, Complain stepped in and gave a brief account of their interview with his brother. At the end of it, Scoyt nodded, relaxing slightly.

‘Better than I dared hope,’ he said. ‘We will send scouts to get Gregg’s party here as soon as possible. It is expedient that they move in here at once.’

‘No, Roger,’ Vyann said quickly. ‘They can’t come here. With all respects to Roy, his brother’s nothing but a brigand! His followers are nothing but a mob. They and their wives are maimed and mutated. The whole pack would bring endless trouble on to our hands if we had them living with us. They are absolutely no good for anything but fighting.’

‘ That ’, Scoyt said grimly, ‘is just what we want them for. You’d better get abreast with events, Laur.’ Rapidly, he told her what Marapper had seen and what was now going on.

‘Had you hurt Fermour?’ Complain asked.

‘No — just a preliminary flogging to soften him up.’

‘He was used to that sort of thing in Quarters, poor devil,’ Complain said. His own back tingled in sympathetic memory.

‘Why should all this make it so urgent to get Gregg’s mob here?’ Vyann said.

Master Scoyt sighed heavily and answered with emphasis.

‘Because’, he said, ‘here we have for the first time incontestable proof that the Outsiders and the Giants are in alliance — against us!’

He looked at them hard as this soaked in. ‘Nice position we’re in, eh?’ he said ironically. ‘That’s why I’m going to have up every trap in the ship, and a man posted by it. Eventually we’ll hunt the enemy out; I swear I won’t rest till we do.’

Complain whistled. ‘You’ll certainly need Gregg’s ruffians; manpower will be the crucial problem,’ he said. ‘But just how did Marapper manage to open that trap-door?’

‘Simply because that fat priest is the man he is, I’d say,’ Scoyt remarked with a short laugh. ‘Back in your tribe, I suppose he was pretty much of a magpie?’

‘Picked up anything he could get,’ Complain agreed, recalling the lumber in Marapper’s room.

‘One thing he picked up was a ring: a ring with an eight-sided stone, which someone must at some time have removed from a corpse. It’s not a stone actually, it’s some little mechanical device, and it fits exactly into a kind of keyhole in each trap-door: press it in and the trap opens at once. Originally — way back before the catastrophe — everybody whose duty it was to go down into these traps must have had one of these ring-keys. Councillor Tregonnin, by the way, says these between-deck places are called inspection ways; he found a reference to them in his lumber; and that’s just what we’re going to do — inspect them! We’re going to comb every inch of them. My men have Marapper’s ring now and are opening up every trap aboard.’

‘And Bob Fermour had a similar ring to Marapper’s!’ Complain exclaimed. ‘I often remember seeing it on his finger.’

‘We think all Outsiders may wear them,’ Scoyt said. ‘If so, it explains how easily they elude us. It explains a lot — although it doesn’t explain how in the past they’ve managed to spirit themselves out of cells carefully guarded on the outside. On the assumption that all who wear these rings are our enemies, I’ve got some of the Survival Team working through the entire population, looking for the giveaway. Anyone caught wearing that ring makes the Journey! Now I must go. Expansions!’

He ushered them back into the clanging corridor. At once he was surrounded by underlings wanting orders; he became gradually separated from Complain and Vyann. They heard him delegating a junior officer to bear the news to Gregg, then he turned away and his voice was lost.

‘Union with Gregg…’ Vyann said, and shivered. ‘Now what do we do? It looks as if Roger intends to give me no more work.’

‘You’re going to bed,’ Complain said. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘You don’t think I could sleep with all this noise going on, do you?’ she asked, smiling rather tiredly.

‘I think you could try.’

He was surprised with what submissiveness she let him lead her away, although she stiffened suddenly as they met Marapper loitering in a side corridor.

‘You are the hero of the hour, priest, I understand,’ she said.

Marapper’s face was ponderous with gloom; he wore injury round him like a cloak.

‘Inspector,’ he said with a bitter dignity. ‘You are taunting me. For half my wretched lifetime I go about with a priceless secret on my finger without realizing it. And then when I do realize it — behold, in a moment of quite uncharacteristic panic, I give it away to your friend Scoyt for nothing!’

We’ve got to get out of the ship somehow,’ Vyann murmured. Her eyes were shut as she spoke, her dark head down on the pillow. Softly, Complain crept from the dark room; she would be asleep before he closed the door, despite the chaos of sound two decks away. He stood outside Vyann’s door, half afraid to go away, wondering if this was a good time to bother the Council or Scoyt with news of the ruined controls. Indecisively, he fingered the heat gun tucked in his belt, as gradually his thoughts wandered back to more personal considerations.

Complain could not help asking himself what part he was playing in the world about him; because he was undecided what he wanted from life, he seemed to drift on a tide of events. The people nearest to him appeared to have clear-cut objectives. Marapper cared for nothing but power; Scoyt seemed content to grapple with the endless problems of the ship; and Complain’s beloved Laur wanted only to be free of the restraints of life aboard. And he? He desired her, but there was something else, the something he had promised himself as a kid without finding it, the something he could never put into words, the something too big to visualize…

‘Who’s that?’ he asked, roused suddenly by a close footstep.

A square pilot light near at hand revealed a tall man robed in white, a distinctive figure whose voice, when he spoke, was powerful and slow.

‘I am Councillor Zac Deight,’ he said. ‘Don’t be startled. You are Roy Complain, the hunter from Deadways, are you not?’

Complain took in his melancholy face and white hair, and liked the man instinctively. Instinct is not always the ally of intelligence.

‘I am, sir,’ he answered.

‘Your priest, Henry Marapper, spoke highly of you.’

‘Did he, by hem?’ Marapper often did good by stealth, but it was invariably to himself.

‘He did,’ Zac Deight said. Then his tone changed. ‘I believe you might know something about that hole I see in the corridor wall.’

He pointed at the gap Complain and Vyann had made earlier in the wall of her room.

‘Yes I do. It was made with this weapon here,’ Complain said, showing the weapon to the old Councillor and wondering what was coming next.

‘Have you told anyone else you have this?’ Zac Deight asked, turning the heat gun over with interest.