Copyright
About
Prologue
PART ONE
I
II
III
IV
PART TWO
I
II
III
IV
PART THREE
I
II
III
IV
PART FOUR
I
II
III
IV
MICROCOSM
Copyright
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About the
e-Book
TITLE: Starship
AUTHOR: Aldiss, Brian
ABEB Version: 2.0
Hog Edition
VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
Somewhere in the fabled region called Forwards lay the answers to a 400-year-old secret: Who were they? Where did they come from? Where were they going?
But Forwards was far away, through lands of unimaginable horror. And the answers they sought were the jealously guarded secret of the mysterious Unknowns— a secret so hideous that even those superior beings dared not reveal it...
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BRIAN ALDISS
A SIGNET BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive . . .
—R. L. Stevenson
It is safer for a novelist to choose as
his subject something he feels about than
something he knows about.
—L. P. Hartley
Prologue
A community that cannot or will not realize how insignificant a part of the universe it occupies is not truly civilized. That is to say, it contains a fatal ingredient which renders it, to whatever extent, unbalanced. This is a story of one such community.
An idea, which is man-conceived, unlike most of the myriad effects which comprise our universe, is seldom perfectly balanced. Inevitably, it bears the imprint of man's own frailty; it may fluctuate from the meager to the grandiose. This is the story of a grandiose idea.
To the community it was more than an idea: it had become existence itself. For the idea, as ideas will, had gone wrong and gobbled up their real lives.
PART ONE
Quarters
I
LIKE an echo bounding from a distant object and returning to its source, the sound of Roy Complain's beating heart seemed to him to fill the clearing. He stood with one foot on the threshold of his compartment, listening to the rage hammering through his arteries.
"Well, go on out then if you're going! You said you were going!"
The shrill sarcasm of the voice behind him, Gwenny's voice, propelled him into the clearing. He slammed the door without looking back, a low growl rasping the back of his throat, and then rubbed his hands together painfully in an attempt to regain control of himself. This was what living with Gwenny meant, the quarrels arising out of nothing and these insane bursts of anger tearing like illness through his being. Nor could it ever be clean anger; it was muddy stuff, and even at its full flood the knowledge was not hidden from him that he would soon be back again, apologizing to her, humiliating himself. Complain needed his woman.
This early in the waking period, several men were up; later, they would be dispersed about their business. A group of them sat playing Travel-Up. Complain walked over to them, hands in pockets, and stared moodily down between their ragged heads. The board stretched twice as far as the span of a man's outstretched arms. It was scattered with counters and symbols. One of the players leaned forward and moved a pair of his blocks.
"An outflank on Five," he said, with grim triumph, looking up and winking at Complain conspiratorially.
Complain turned away indifferently. For long periods of his life, this game had exerted an almost uncanny attraction on him. He had played it till his adolescent limbs cracked from squatting and his eyes could hardly focus on the silver tokens.
On others, too, nearly all the Greene tribe, Travel-Up cast its spell; it gave them a sense of spaciousness and power lacking in their lives. Now Complain was free of the spell, and missed its touch. To be absorbed in anything again would be good.
He ambled moodily down the clearing, hardly noticing the doors on either hand. Instead, he darted his eyes about among the passers-by, as if seeking a signal. He saw Wantage hurrying along to the barricades, instinctively keeping the deformed left side of his face away from others' eyes. Wantage never played at the long board: he could not tolerate people on both sides of him. Why had the council spared him as a child? Many deformities were born in the Greene tribe, and only the knife awaited them. As boys, they had called Wantage "Slotface," and tormented him; but he had grown up strong and ferocious, which had decided them to adopt a more tolerant attitude toward him. Their jibes now were veiled.
Hardly realizing the change from aimlessness to intent, Complain also headed in the direction of the barricades, following Wantage. The best of the compartments, naturally appropriated for council use, were down here. One of the doors was flung open and Lieutenant Greene himself came out, followed by two of his officers. Although Greene was now an old man, he was still an irritable one, and his jerky gait held something yet of the impetuous stride of his youth. His officers, Patch and Zilliac, walked beside him, dazers prominent in their belts.
To Complain's great pleasure, Wantage was panicked by their sudden appearance into saluting his chief. It was a shameful gesture, almost a bringing of the head to the hand rather than the reverse, which was acknowledged by a grin from Zilliac. Subservience was the general lot, although pride did not admit the fact.
When Complain's turn came to pass the trio he did it in the customary manner, turning his head away and scowling. Nobody should think he, a hunter, was not the equal of any other man. It was in the Teaching: "No man is inferior until he feels the need to show respect for another."
His spirits now restored, he caught up with Wantage, clapping his hand on the latter's left shoulder. Spinning in the other direction, Wantage presented a short fencing stick to Complain's stomach. He had an economical way of moving, like a man closely surrounded by naked blades. His point lodged neatly against Complain's navel.
"Easy now, my pretty one. Is that how you always greet a friend?" Complain asked, turning the point of the stick away.
"I thought— Expansion, hunter. Why are you not out after meat?" Wantage asked, sliding his eyes away from Complain.
"Because I am walking down to the bar
ricades with you. Besides, my pot is full and my dues paid: I have no need of meat."
They walked in silence, Complain attempting to get on the other's left side, the other eluding his efforts. Complain was careful not to try him too far, in case Wantage fell on him. Violence and death were pandemic in Quarters, forming a natural balance to the high birth rate, but nobody cheerfully dies for the sake of symmetry.
Near the barricades, the corridor was crowded; Wantage, muttering that he had cleaning work to do, slipped away. He walked close to the wall, narrowly upright, with a sort of bitter dignity in his step.
The leading barricade was a wooden partition with a gate in it which entirely blocked the corridor. Two guards were posted there continually. There, Quarters ended and the mazes of ponic tangle began. But the barrier was a temporary structure, for the position itself was subject to change.
The Greene tribe was semi-nomadic, forced by its inability to maintain adequate crops or live food to move along on to new ground frequently. This was accomplished by thrusting forward the leading barricade and moving up the rear one, at the other end of Quarters, a corresponding distance. Such a move was now in progress. The ponic tangle, attacked and demolished ahead, would be allowed to spring up again behind them: the tribe slowly worked its way through the endless corridors like a maggot through a mushy apple.
Beyond the barricade, men worked vigorously, hacking down the tall ponic stalks, the edible sap, miltex, spurting out above their blades. As they were felled, the stalks were inverted to preserve as much sap as possible. This would be drained off and the hollow poles dried, cut to standard lengths and used eventually for a multitude of purposes. Almost on top of the busy blades, other sections of the plants were also being harvested: the leaves for medicinal use, the young shoots for table delicacies, the seed for various uses, as food, as buttons, as loose ballast in the Quarters' version of tambourines, as counters for the Travel-Up boards, as toys for babies (into whose all-sampling mouths they were too large to cram).
The hardest job in the task of clearing ponics was breaking up the interlacing root structure, which lay like a steel mesh under the grit, its lower tendrils biting deep. As it was chopped out, other men with spades cleared the humus into sacks; here the humus was particularly deep, almost two feet of it: evidence that these were unexplored parts, across which no other tribe had ever worked. The filled sacks were carted back to Quarters, where they would be emptied to provide new fields in new rooms.
Another body of men was also at work before the barricade, and these Complain watched with especial interest. They were of a more exalted rank than the others present; they were guards, recruited only from the hunters, and the possibility existed that one day, through fortune or favor, Complain might rise to that enviable class.
As the almost solid wall of tangle was bitten back, doors were revealed, presenting black faces to the onlookers. The rooms behind these doors would yield mysteries: a thousand strange articles, useful, useless, or meaningless, which had once been the property of the vanished race of Giants. The duty of the guards was to break open these ancient tombs and appropriate whatever lay within for the good of the tribe, meaning themselves. In due time the loot would be distributed or destroyed, depending on the whim of the council. Much that emerged was declared to be dangerous, and was burned.
The business of opening these doors was not without its hazards, imaginary if not real. Rumor had it that other small tribes, also struggling for existence in the tangle warrens, had silently vanished away after opening such doors.
Complain by now was not the only one caught by the perennial fascination of watching people work. Several women, each with an ample quota of children, stood by the barricade, getting in the way of the procession of humus and ponic bearers. To the constant small whine of flies, from which Quarters was never free, was added the chatter of small tongues: and to this chorus the guards broke down the next door. A moment's silence fell, in which even the workers paused to stare half in fear at the opening.
The new room was a disappointment. It did not even contain the skeleton of a Giant to horrify and fascinate. It was a small store merely, lined with shelves loaded with little bags. The little bags were full of variously colored powders. A bright yellow and a scarlet one fell and broke, forming two fans on the deck, and in the air two intermingling clouds. Shouts of delight from the children, who rarely saw much color, caused the guards to bark orders brusquely and begin to carry their discoveries away.
Aware of a vague sense of anticlimax, Complain drifted on. Perhaps, after all, he would go hunting.
"But why is there light in the tangles when nobody is there to need it?"
The question came to Complain above the general bustle. He turned and saw the questioner was one of several small boys who clustered around a big man squatting in the midst. One or two mothers stood by, smiling indulgently, their hands idly fanning away the flies.
"There has to be light for the ponics to grow, just as you could not live in the dark," came the answer to the boy. Complain saw the man who spoke was Bob Fermour, a slow fellow fit only for laboring in the fieldrooms. He was genial —rather more so than the Teaching entirely countenanced— and consequently popular with the children. Complain recalled that Fermour was reputed to be a storyteller, and felt suddenly eager to be diverted. Without his anger he was empty.
"What was there before the ponics were there?" a little girl demanded. In their unpracticed way, the children were trying to start Fermour on a story.
"Tell 'em the tale about the world, Bob!" one of the mothers advised.
Fermour glanced quizzically up at Complain.
"Don't mind me," Complain said. "Theories are less than flies to me." The powers of the tribe discouraged theorizing, or any sort of thought not on severely practical lines; hence Fermour's hesitation.
"Well, this is all guesswork, because we don't have any records of what happened in the world before the Greene tribe began," Fermour said. "Or if we do find records, they don't make much sense." He glanced sharply at the adults in his audience before adding quickly, "Because there are more important things to do than puzzle over old legends."
"What is the tale about the world, Bob? Is it exciting?" a boy asked impatiently.
Fermour smoothed the boy's hair back from his eyes and said earnestly, "It is the most exciting tale that could possibly be, because it concerns all of us, and how we live. Now the world is a wonderful place. It is constructed of layers and layers, like this one, and these layers do not end, because they eventually turn a circle on to themselves. So you could walk on and on for ever and never reach the end of the world. And all those layers are filled with mysterious places, some good, some evil; and all those corridors are blocked with ponics."
"What about the Forwards people?" the boy asked. "Do they have green faces?"
"We are coming to them," Fermour said, lowering his voice so that the youthful audience crowded nearer. "I have told you what happens if you keep to the lateral corridors of the world. But if you can get on to the main corridor you get on to a highway that takes you straight to distant parts of the world. And then you may arrive in the territory of Forwards."
"Have they really all got two heads?" a little girl asked.
"Of course not," Fermour said. "They are more civilized than our small tribe" —again the scanning of his adult listeners— "but we know little about them because there are many obstacles between their lands and ours. It must be the duty of all of you, as you grow up, to try and find out more about our world. Remember there is much we do not know, and outside our world may be other worlds of which we cannot at present guess."
The children seemed impressed, but one of the women laughed and said, "Fat lot of good it'll do them, guessing about something nobody knows exists."
Mentally, Complain agreed with her as he walked away. There were a lot of these theories circulating now, all differing, all unsettling, none encouraged by authority. He wondered if it wou
ld improve his standing to denounce Fermour; but unfortunately everybody ignored Fermour: he was too slow. Only last wake, he had been publicly stroked for sloth in the fieldrooms.
Complain's more immediate problem was, should he go hunting? A memory of how often recently he had walked restlessly like this, to the barricade and back, caught him unawares. He clenched his fists. Time passing, opportunities lacking, and always something missing, missing. Again —as he had done since a child— Complain whirled furiously around his brain, searching for a factor which promised to be there and was not, ever. Dimly, he felt he was preparing himself —but quite involuntarily— for a crisis. It was like a fever brewing, but this would be worse than a fever.
He broke into a run. His hair, long and richly black, flopped over his wide eyes. His expression became disturbed. Usually his young face showed strong and agreeable lines under a slight plumpness. The line of jaw was true, the mouth in repose heroic. Yet over the countenance as a whole worked a wasting bitterness; and this desolation was a look common to almost the whole tribe. It was a wise part of the Teaching which said that one man's eyes should not meet another's directly.
Complain ran almost blindly, sweat bursting out on his forehead. Sleep or wake, it was perpetually warm in Quarters, and sweat started easily. Nobody he passed regarded him with interest: much senseless running took place in the tribe, many men fled from inner phantoms. Complain only knew he had to get back to Gwenny. Women held the magic salve of forgetfulness.
She was standing motionless, a cup of tea in her hand, when he broke into their compartment. She pretended not to notice him, but her whole attitude changed, the narrow planes of her face going tense. She was sturdily built, her stocky body contrasting with the thinness of her face. This firmness seemed to emphasize itself now, as though she braced herself against a physical attack.