Non-Stop

mother. I feel I need to kill someone.’

‘You shall, you shall,’ the priest soothed. ‘And it is good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all. We are being punished here for some wrong our forefathers committed. We are all maimed! We are all blind — we thrust out in wrong directions…’

Complain had climbed wearily on to his bunk. The illusion of re-living the scene had gone, and directly it was gone, it was forgotten. Now he wanted only to sleep. Tomorrow he would be evicted from his single room and stroked; now he wanted only to sleep. But the priest had stopped talking. Complain glanced up and found Marapper leaning on his bunk, gazing at him. Their eyes met for a moment, before Complain pulled his hurriedly away.

One of the strongest taboos in their society was directed against one man’s looking another straightly in the eyes; honest, well-intentioned men gave each other only side glances. Complain stuck out his lower lip truculently.

‘What the hem do you want with me, Marapper?’ he exploded. He was tempted to tell the priest that he had just learned of his bastardy.

‘You didn’t get your six strokes, Roy, boy, did you?’

‘What’s that to you, priest?’

‘A priest knows no self-seeking. I ask for your good; besides, I have a personal interest in your answer.’

‘No, I wasn’t beaten. They’re all flat out, as you know — even the Public Stroker.’

The priest’s eyes were after his again. Complain heaved over uncomfortably and faced the wall; but the priest’s next question brought him round again.

‘Do you ever feel like running amok, Roy?’

Despite himself, Complain had a vision: he was running through Quarters with his dazer burning, everyone scattering, fearing him, respecting him, leaving him master of the situation. His heart beat uncomfortably. Several of the best and most savage men of the tribe — even Gregg, one of his own brothers — had run amok, bursting through the settlement, some escaping to live afterwards in unexplored areas of tangle, or joining other communities, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an honourable thing to do; but it was not a priest’s business to incite it. A doctor might recommend it if a man were mortally sick; a priest should unite, not disrupt his tribe, by bringing the frustration in human minds up to the surface, where it might flow freely without curdling into neurosis.

For the first time, he realized Marapper was wrestling with a crisis in his own life, and wondered momentarily if it had any connection with the fact of Bergass’s illness.

‘Look at me, Roy. Answer me.’

‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ He was sitting up now, almost forced there by the urgency in the priest’s voice.

‘I must know what you are made of.’

‘You know what the Litany tells us: we are the sons of cowards, our days are passed in fear.’

‘This you believe?’ the priest asked.

‘Naturally. It is the Teaching.’

‘I need your aid, Roy. Would you follow where I led you — even out of Quarters, into Deadways?’

All this was spoken low and fast. And low and fast beat the indecision in Complain’s blood. He made no effort to come to a consciously debated decision; the nerves must be arbiter: mind was not trustworthy — it knew too much.

‘That would require courage,’ he said at length.

The priest slapped his great thighs, yawning in nervous enthusiasm with a sound like a tiny shriek.

‘No, Roy, you lie, true to the list of liars who begot you. If we went, we should be escaping, fleeing, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. Ha, we shall slip away furtively. It will be the old back-to-nature act, boy, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. Why, it would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now, will you come with me?’

Some meaning beyond the words themselves hardened a decision in Complain. He would go! Always there had been that cloud just beyond his comprehension, from which he must escape. He slid off the bunk, trying to hide this decision from Marapper’s wily eyes until he had learnt more of the venture.

‘What should we two do alone in the tangles of Deadways, priest?’

The priest thrust a great thumb searchingly up one nostril and spoke with his gaze steady over his fist. ‘We shall not go alone. Four others come with us, picked men. I have been preparing for this for some while, and all is now ready. You are discontented, your woman is taken: what have you to lose? I strongly advise you to come — for your own sake, of course — although it will suit me to have someone about with a weak will and a hunter’s eye.’

‘Who are the four others, Marapper?’

‘I will tell you that when you say you are coming. If I were betrayed to the Guards, they would slit all our throats — mine especially! — in twenty places.’

‘What are we going to do? Where are we going?’

Marapper rose slowly to his feet and stretched. With long fingers he raked through his hair, making at the same time the most hideous sneer he could devise, twisting the two great slabs of his cheeks, one up, one down, until his mouth coiled between them like knotted rope.

‘Go by yourself, Roy, if you so distrust my leadership! Why, you’re like a woman, all bellyache and questioning. I’ll tell you no more, except that my scheme is something too grand for your comprehension. Domination of the ship! That’s it! Nothing less! Complete domination of the ship — you don’t even know what the phrase means.’

Cowed by the priest’s ferocious visage, Complain merely said, ‘I was not going to refuse to come.’

‘You mean you will come?’

‘Yes.’

Marapper gripped his arm fervently, without a word. His cheeks gleamed.

‘Now tell me who the other four are who come with us,’ Complain said, alarmed the moment he had committed himself.

Marapper released his arm.

‘You know the old saying, Roy: the truth never set anyone free. You will learn soon enough. It is better that I do not tell you now. I plan we shall start early next sleep. Now I shall leave you; I have work still to do. Not a word to anyone.’

Half out of the door, he paused. Thrusting a hand into his tunic, he pulled something out and waved it triumphantly. Complain recognized it as a looker, the collection of reading matter used by the extinct Giants.

‘This is our key to power!’ Marapper said dramatically, thrusting it back into its place of concealment. Then he closed the door behind him.

Idle as statuary, Complain stood in the centre of the floor, only his head working. And in his head there was only a circle of thought, leading nowhere. But Marapper was the priest, Marapper had knowledge most others could not share, Marapper must lead. Belatedly, Complain went to the door, opened it and peered out.

The priest had already gone from sight. Nobody was near except Meller, the bearded artist. He was painting a bright fresco on the corridor wall outside his room, dabbing on with shrewdly engrossed face the various dyes he had collected the sleep-wake before. Beneath his hand, a great cat launched itself up the wall. He did not notice Complain.

It was growing late. Complain went to eat in the almost deserted Mess. He fed in a trance. He returned, and Meller was still painting in a trance. He shut his door and prepared slowly for bed. Gwenny’s grey dress still hung on a hook by the bed; he snatched it down suddenly and flung it out of sight behind a cupboard. Then he lay down and let silence prolong itself.

Suddenly into the room burst Marapper, bulbously, monumentally out of breath. He slammed the door behind him, gasping and tugging the corner of his cloak which had caught in the jamb.

‘Hide me, Roy — quick! Quickly, don’t stare, you fool. Get up, get your knife out. The Guards’ll be here, Zilliac’ll be here. They’re after me. They’d massacre poor old priests as soon as look at them.’

As he spoke, he ran to Complain’s bunk, swung it out from the wall and began to crouch behind it.

‘What have you done?’ Complain demanded. ‘Why are they after you? Why hide here? Why drag me into it?’