Free Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss Page B

with a note of pleading in his voice. ‘Will you not give us a prayer for the safety of our skins?’
    ‘I’m too tired to intercede for anyone’s skin,’ Marapper replied.
    ‘A short prayer, father.’
    ‘As you wish. Children, expansion to our egos, let us pray.’ He commenced to pray as he lay hunched on the dirty floor, his words coming indifferently at first, and then gaining power as he drew interest from his train of thought.
    ‘O Consciousness, we gathered here are doubly unworthy to be thy vessels, for we know we have imperfections and do not seek to purge them as we ought to do. We are a poor lot, in a poor way of life; yet as we contain thee there is hope for us. O Consciousness, direct particularly these five of the poor vessels here, for there is more hope for us than for those we left behind, and therefore there is more room for thee in us. We know that when thou art not here there is only the adversary, Subconscious, in us; make our thoughts to swim solely in thee. Make our hands quicker, our arms stronger, our eyes sharper, and our tempers fiercer: that we may overcome and kill all who oppose us. May we smite and sunder them! May we scatter their entrails through the length of the ship! So that we come in the end to a position of power, in full possession of thee, and in thy full possession. And may thy spark breathe in us until that last dread moment when the adversary claims us, and we too take the Long Journey.’
    As he had intoned, the priest had risen to his knees and stretched his hands above his head. Now he, with all theothers copying the movement, drew his outstretched right index finger symbolically, ritualistically, across his throat.
    ‘Now shut up, the lot of you,’ he said, in his normal tone, and settled again in his corner.
    Complain lay with his back to a wall and his head on his pack; he slept usually like an animal, lightly, and with no dozing stages between sleep and waking. But in these strange surroundings he lay for some while with his eyes half-shut, trying to think. He thought only in generalized pictures: Gwenny’s empty bunk; Marapper standing triumphant over Zilliac; Meller, with the jumping animal growing under his fingers; a greasy broth bubbling out Ozbert Bergass’s life; the tensed muscles on Wantage’s neck, ready to twitch his head away from prying eyes; the Guard, Twemmer, tumbling tiredly into Marapper’s arms. And behind the pictures lay the significant fact that they concerned only what had passed, and that for what was to come he could find no pictures, for he was following into unknown realms: he was moving into the other darkness his mother had spoken of and feared.
    He drew no conclusions, wasted no time in worry; indeed, he felt a kind of hope, for, as a village saying had it, the devil you don’t know may conquer the one you do.
    He could see, before he slept, the desolate room lit by the light percolating from the corridor and, through the outer door, a section of the everlasting tangle. In the changeless, draughtless heat, the ponics rustled ceaselessly; occasionally, a click sounded near at hand as a seed was flicked into the room. The plants grew so rapidly that, when Complain woke, the younger ones would be inches taller and the older ones wilting against the restriction of the bulkheads; then, choking and choked would alike be nipped by the next dark. But he failed to see in this ceaseless jostling a parallel with the human lives about him.

II
     
    ‘You snore, priest,’ Roffery said pleasantly, as they ate together at the beginning of the next wake.
    The relationship between them had subtly changed, as if some occult power had been active during the sleep. The feeling that they were five rivals snatched almost casually from Quarters had vanished; they were still rivals, in the sense that all men were rivals, but now there was a mute acknowledgement of union against the forces about them. The period of watch had undoubtedly been good for