Hawl! Look at half the poor devils I had under me! And look at the ones so deformed we put ’em out of their misery when we came across them in Deadways! Let’s see, seven off twenty-three… Yes, you let sixteen generations live and die here, as near as this to Earth, suffering the tortures we suffered, and you think you deserve a medal for it! Give me that knife, Marapper — I want a peep at the colour of this little bloody hero’s giblets.’
‘You’ve got it wrong!’ Fermour shouted. ‘Complain, you tell him! I’ve explained about the speed-up of your lives. Your generations are so brief that twenty of them had passed before “Big Dog” was first boarded and dragged into orbit. They’re studying the main problem down in the laboratories of Little Dog all the while, that I swear to you. At any time now, they may find a chemical agent which can be injected into you to break down the alien peptic chains in your cells. Then you’d be free. Even now –’
He broke off suddenly, staring.
They followed his gaze. Even Gregg looked round. Something like smoke, filtering out into the blinding sunshine, rose from a gash in one of the wrecked panels.
‘Fire!’ Fermour said.
‘Rubbish!’ Complain said. He pushed himself towards the growing cloud. It was composed of moths, thousands of them. They flew high into the dome, circling towards the unexpected sun. Behind the first phalanx of small ones came larger ones, struggling to get out of the hole in the panel. Their endless squadrons, droning ahead of their rodent allies, had managed to reach the spaces behind the control board before the rats gained this deck. They poured forth in increasing numbers. Marapper pulled out his dazer and downed them as they emerged.
A bemused sensation furred over all their brains, half sentient ghost thoughts emanating from the mutated swarm. Dazedly, Marapper ceased firing, and the moths poured out again. High voltage crackled behind the panels, where other hordes of moths jammed naked connections, causing short circuits.
‘Can they do any real damage?’ Vyann asked Complain.
He shook his head uneasily, to show he did not know, fighting away the feeling of having a skull stuffed with muslin.
‘Here comes the ship!’ Fermour said relievedly, pointing into the gleaming dark. Tiny beside the bulk of the mother planet, a chip of light seemed hardly to move towards them.
Head swimming, Vyann stared out at the bulk of their own ship, ‘Big Dog’. Here, in this blister, they had a splendid view over its arching back. On impulse, she kicked herself up to the top of the dome where the outlook was still clearer; Complain swam up alongside, and they clung to one of the narrow tubes into which the shutters had rolled themselves. The moths, it suddenly occurred to her, must accidentally have activated the shutters in their struggle behind the controls. Now the moths whirred about them, uniformly radiating hope.
Vyann stared longingly out. The sight of the planet was like toothache; she had to look away.
‘To think they’ll come all the way up here from Earth and lock us back away from the sun…’ she said.
‘They won’t… they can’t,’ Complain said. ‘Fermour’s only a fool: he doesn’t know. When these others come, Laur, they’ll understand we’ve earned freedom, a right to try life on Earth. Obviously they’re not cruel or they’d never have taken so much trouble over us. They’ll see we’d rather die there than live here.’
A startling explosion came from below them. Shards of plastic panelling blew out into the room, mingling with dead moths and smoke. Vyann and Complain looked down to see Gregg and Fermour floating away to a far corner, away from danger; the priest followed them more slowly — his cloak had been blown over his head. Another explosion sounded, tossing out more dead moths, among which live ones fluttered. Before too long, the control room would be packed with moths. With this second explosion, a rumbling began far away in the middle bowels of the ship, audible even through all the intervening doors, a rumble which, growing, seemed to express all the agony of the years. It grew louder and louder until Complain felt his body tremble with it.
Wordlessly, Vyann pointed to the outside of the ship. Fissures were appearing like stripes all across its hull. After four and a half centuries, ‘Big Dog’ was breaking up; the rumbling was its death-cry, something at once mighty and pathetic.
‘It’s the Emergency Stop!’ Fermour shouted. His voice seemed far away. ‘The moths have activated the Ultimate Emergency Stop! The ship’s splitting into its component decks!’
They could see it all. The fissures on that noble arch of back were swelling into canyons. Then the canyons were gulfs of space. Then there was no longer a ship: only eighty-four great pennies, becoming smaller, spinning away from one another, falling forever along an invisible pathway. And each penny was a deck, and each deck was now a world of its own, and each deck, with its random burden of men, animals or ponics sailed away serenely round Earth, buoyant as a cork in a fathomless sea.
This was a break there could be no mending.
‘Now they’ll have no alternative but to take us back to Earth,’ Vyann said in a tiny voice. She looked at Complain; she tried, woman-like, to guess at all the new interests that awaited them. She tried to guess at the exquisite pressures which would attend the adjustment of every ship-dweller to the sublimities of Earth. It was as if everyone was about to be born, she thought, smiling into Complain’s awakened face. He was her sort; neither of them had ever been really sure of what they wanted: so they would be most likely to find it.
About the Author
Brian Aldiss was born in 1925. During WWII he served in the Royal Signals in Burma and Sumatra. In 1948 he was demobilized and started work as an assistant in an Oxford bookshop. His first published SF story was ‘Criminal Record’ which appeared in
His first SF novel was
By now, Aldiss’ stylistic concerns and unconventional themes had much in common with the New Wave movement, and he was instrumental in helping obtain an Arts Council grant for
More recent writings have been either straight fiction focussing on aspects of Aldiss’ own life (such as
ALSO BY BRIAN ALDISS
The Brightfount Diaries (1955)
Non-Stop (1958)
Bow Down to Nul (1960)
The Primal Urge (1961)
