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nothing but wretchedness filled him; then he felt, underneath the wretchedness, a resilience stirring. He was going to act, was going to be driven to act: how, would resolve itself later. The big something was promising itself to him again.
    Hauling on his slacks, he paddled over to the door and pulled it open. Outside, a strange silence beckoned. Complain followed it into the Clearing.
    The revels were now over. The actors, not bothering to return to their apartments, lay where irresistible sleep had found them, among the bright ruins of their gaiety. On the hard deck they lay sleeping stupidly, or woke without troubling to move. Only children called as usual, prodding somnolent mothers into action. Quarters looked like a broad battlefield; but the slain had not bled, and suffering was not yet finished for them.
    Complain walked quietly among the sleepers. In the Mess, patronized by single men, he might be able to get food. He stepped by a pair of lovers sprawled over the Travel-Up pitch. The man, Complain saw, was Cheap; he still had his armround a plump girl, tucked inside her tunic; his face was in Orbit; their feet straggled across the Milky Way. Little flies crept up her leg and under her skirt.
    A figure was approaching. Not without misgiving, Complain recognized his mother. The law in Quarters, not rigorously enforced, was that a child should cease to communicate with his brothers and sisters when he was hip high, and with his mother when he was waist high. But Myra was a garrulous woman; what her waist proscribed, her tongue discarded, and she talked firmly to her many children whenever possible.
    ‘Greetings, Mother,’ Complain grunted. ‘Expansion to your ego.’
    ‘At your expense, Roy.’
    ‘May your womb likewise expand.’
    ‘I’m getting too old for that courtesy, as you well know,’ she said, irritated that he should choose to be so formal with her.
    ‘I’m off to get a meal, Mother.’
    ‘Gwenny
is
dead then. I knew it! Bealie was there at your stroking and heard the announcement. It’ll finish her poor old father off, you see. I was sorry I couldn’t get there for it – for the stroking I mean – I shan’t miss the others if I can possibly help it – but I got the most glorious shade of green in the scrambles. I dyed everything. I dyed this smock I’ve got on now; do you like it? It really is the most exciting thing –’
    ‘Look, Mother, my back hurts: I don’t feel like talking.’
    ‘Of course it hurts, Roy; you mustn’t expect it not to. What it’ll be like when you’ve finished your punishment, I shudder to think. I’ve got some fat I’ll rub on it for you, and that’ll ease the pores. Doctor Lindsey ought to look at it later, if you’ve got a spare bit of game to exchange for his advice – and you ought to have now, with Gwenny gone. Never did really like her –’
    ‘Look, Mother –’
    ‘Oh, I’ll come with you if you’re going to Mess. I wasn’t really going anywhere special. I did hear, quite on the quiet of course – from old Toomer Munday, although hem knowswhere she got it from – that the Guards found some tea and coffee in the dye store. You notice they didn’t scrabble
that
around! The Giants grew better coffee than we can manage.’
    The flow of words wove round him, as abstractedly he ate. Later, she took him to her room and smoothed fat across the welts on his back. As she did so, she offered him advice he had heard from her before.
    ‘Remember, Roy, things won’t always be bad; you’ve just struck a bad patch. Don’t let it get you down.’
    ‘Things are always bad, Mother, what’s there to live for?’
    ‘You shouldn’t talk like that. I know the Teaching says about not hiding any bitterness within you, but you don’t look at things the way I do. As I always say, life is a mystery. The mere fact of being alive –’
    ‘Oh, I know all that. Life’s a drug on the market, as far as I’m concerned.’
    Myra looked hard at his angry face,