Again Scoyt and Vyann looked at each other; Scoyt nodded in answer to an unspoken question.
‘Since you appear to have stumbled on part of the secret,’ Vyann told Marapper, ‘we may as well tell you the whole of it. Understand this is not general knowledge even among the people of Forwards — we of the élite keep it to ourselves in case it causes madness and unrest. As the proverb has it, the truth never set anyone free. The Ship is a ship, as you rightly say. There is no Captain. The ship is plunging on unguided through space, non-stop. We can only presume it is lost. We presume it will travel for ever, till all aboard have made the Long Journey. It cannot be stopped — for though we have searched all Forwards for the Control Room, it does not exist!’
She was silent, looking at Marapper with sympathy as he digested this unpalatable information; it was almost too ghastly to accept.
‘… some terrible wrong of our forefathers,’ he murmured, drawing his right index finger superstitiously across his throat. Then he pulled himself together. ‘But at least the Control Room exists,’ he said. ‘Look, I have proof!’
From under his dirty tunic, he drew the looker containing circuit diagrams and waved it at them.
‘You were searched at the barriers,’ Scoyt said. ‘How did you manage to retain that?’
‘Shall we say — thanks to a luxuriant growth of underarm hair?’ the priest asked, winking at Vyann. He had them impressed again, and was at once back on form. Now he spread the small looker on the Inspector’s desk and pointed dramatically to the diagram he had previously shown Complain; the little bubble of the Control Room was clearly indicated at the front of the ship. As the other two stared, he explained how he came by the looker.
‘This object was made by the Giants,’ he said. ‘They undoubtedly owned the ship.’
‘We know that much,’ Scoyt said. ‘But this book is valuable. Now we have a definite location to check for the Control Room. Come on, Vyann, my dear, let’s go and look at once.’
She pulled open a deep drawer in her desk, picked out a dazer and belt and strapped them round her slender waist. It was the first dazer Marapper had seen here: they were evidently in short supply. He recalled that the Greene tribe was so well armed only because old Bergass’s father had stumbled on a supply of them in Deadways, many decks from Forwards.
They were about to leave when the door opened and a tall man entered. He was dressed in a good robe and his hair was worn long and neat. As if respect were due to him, Scoyt and Vyann drew themselves up deferentially.
‘Word has come to me that you have prisoners, Master Scoyt,’ the newcomer said slowly. ‘Have we caught some of Gregg’s men at last?’
‘I fear not, Councillor Deight,’ Scoyt said. ‘They are only three wanderers from Deadways. This is one of them.’
The councillor looked hard at Marapper, who looked away.
‘The other two?’ the councillor prompted.
‘They are in Cell Three, Councillor,’ Scoyt said. ‘We shall question them later. Inspector Vyann and I are testing this prisoner now.’
For a moment, the councillor seemed to hesitate. Then he nodded and quietly withdrew. The priest, impressed, stared after him — and it was rarely the priest was impressed.
‘That’, Scoyt said for Marapper’s benefit, ‘was Councillor Zac Deight, one of our Council of Five. Watch your manners in front of any of them, and particularly in front of Deight.’
Vyann pocketed the priest’s circuit looker. They left the room in time to see the old councillor disappear round the curve of the corridor. Then began a long march towards the extremity of Forwards, where the diagram indicated the controls to be; it would have taken them several sleep-wakes to make the distance had it been uncharted and overgrown with ponics and their attendant obstacles.
Marapper, engrossed though he was with future plans — for the discovery of the ship’s controls would undoubtedly put him in a strong position — kept an interested eye on his surroundings. He soon realized that Forwards was far from being the wonderful place that Deadways’ rumour painted, or that he had supposed at first sight. They passed many people, of whom a good proportion were children. Everyone wore less than in Quarters; the few clothes they had looked washed and neat, and the general standard of cleanliness was good, but bodies were lean, running to bone. Food was obviously short. Marapper surmised shrewdly that being less in contact with the tangles, Forwards could count on fewer hunters than Quarters, and those perhaps of inferior quality. He found also, as they progressed, that though all Forwards, from the barriers at Deck 24 to the dead end at Deck 1, was under Forwards’ sway, only Decks 22 to 11 were occupied, and they but partially.
As they passed beyond Deck 11, the priest saw part of the explanation for this. For three entire decks, the lighting circuits had failed. Master Scoyt switched on a light at his belt, and the three proceeded in semi-darkness. If darkness had been oppressive in Deadways, it was doubly so here, where footsteps rang hollow and nothing stirred. When they circled into Deck 7, and light shone falteringly again, the prospect was no more cheerful. The echo still followed them and devastation lay on all sides.
‘Look at that!’ Scoyt exclaimed, pointing to where a section of wall had been cut entirely away and curled back against the bulkheads. ‘There were once weapons on the ship which could do that! I wish we had something that would cut through a wall. We should soon find our way into space then.’
‘If only windows had been built somewhere, the original purpose of the ship might not have been forgotten,’ Vyann said.
‘According to the plan,’ Marapper remarked, ‘there are large enough windows in the Control Room.’
They fell silent. The surroundings were dreary enough to annihilate all conversation. Most doors stood open; the rooms they revealed became increasingly full of machines, silent, broken, smothered under the dust of generations.
‘Many strange things of which we have no knowledge happen in this ship,’ Scoyt said gloomily. ‘Ghosts are among us, working against us.’
‘Ghosts?’ Marapper asked. ‘You believe in them, Master Scoyt?’
‘What Roger means,’ Vyann said, ‘is that we are confronted with two problems here. There is the problem of the Ship, where it is going, how it is to be stopped; that is the background problem, always with us. The other problem grows; it did not face our great-grandfathers: there is a strange race on this ship that was not here before.’
The priest stared at her. She was glancing carefully into each doorway as they went by; Scoyt was being as cautious. He felt the hair on his neck bristle uncomfortably.
‘You mean — the Outsiders?’ he asked.
She nodded.’ A supernatural race masquerading as men…’ she said. ‘You know, better than we, that three-quarters of the ship is jungle. In the hot muck of the tangles, somewhere, somehow, a new race has been born, masquerading as men. They are not men; they are enemies; they come in from their secret places to spy on us and kill us.’
‘We have to be always on the look-out,’ Scoyt said.
From then on, Marapper also looked in every doorway.
Now the layout changed. The three concentric corridors on each deck became two, their curvature sharpened. Deck 2 consisted of one corridor only with one ring of rooms around it, and in the middle the great hatch at the beginning of Main Corridor, sealed forever. Scoyt tapped it lightly.
‘If this corridor, the only straight one in the ship, were opened up,’ he said, ‘we could walk to Sternstairs at the other end of the ship in less than a wake!’