Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I looked up; Cuzco, the orange-bellied giant, was flying on updrafts of warm air, not moving his six wings at all; like a cloud made of golden armour held up by hope and poetry.

And Lirilla was back, whispering in my ear. “Watch this,” she said, quoting Fray.

I saw Fray begin another run across the savannah; hooves pounding; dust rising up in clouds; her ugly ungainly body turned into pure graceful motion as she traversed the savannah with extraordinary speed. Finally, she came to a halt, steam billowing off her hide, and pounded her hooves on the ground and stood up on her three back feet and roared.

“Tell Fray,” I said to Lirilla, “that for someone who is so-clumsy-she-falls-over-her-own-huge-tits-all-the-time, that was not at all bad.”

“Tell me your name.”

The prisoner shook his head, stubbornly. Three days had passed, and I was making little progress with him. But I was still patient. It takes time.

It always takes time.

“Tell me your name.” My voice was gentle; I was using my sweetest tones to make it clear that I was on his side, and that I cared.

“Why are you doing this to me, you bitch from Hell?” he said, in calm fearless tones that betrayed his underlying panic.

“Because I want to be your friend,” I said.

He blinked. “How could that be possible?” he said accusingly. “You destroyed my entire world!”

“Not I. They. I am like you. A captive. A slave.”

He considered this assertion; clearly considering it to be an outrageous lie.

“You are an evil ugly loathsome vomit-inducing monster,” he pointed out. “Are you telling me my enemies are even worse than you?”

“I am not,” I suggested, “so very bad.”

He stared at me, his angry features trembling. His skin was soft, reddish in hue, marked with diagonal ridges, and it undulated slightly when he spoke.

“You’re really not my gaoler?” he asked, eventually.

“No.” I replied.

“You were captured as I was?” he said.

“Indeed.”

He considered this. “If that is so, perhaps I have wronged you,” he conceded.

“It was an easy mistake to make; I just want you to know I am here to help you.”

“Then I thank you for that,” he said courteously.

“So, what is your name?” I asked him.

“They call me,” he said proudly, then paused and uttered, as if bestowing a precious gift, his name: “Sharrock.”

And he stared at me, clearly expecting a reaction.

“In my world,” he added proudly, “I am-” But then he broke off, and did not conclude his train of thought.

For there no longer was, of course, a “his world”; and no one would ever again sing songs about him and his heroic exploits, whatever they might have been.

“My name is Sai-ias,” I told him gravely.

“What language are we speaking?” he asked, quietly; his spirits clearly dashed.

“It is not a language. We are not speaking. Or rather, we speak, but the ship transforms the sounds, via invisible translators in the air, into patterns of meaning in our minds.”

“The air does that?”

“It does.”

“How is such a thing possible?”

“I do not know,” I admitted.

“And who is in charge? Who controls this ship? Who are our masters?”

“I do not know.”

“How can you not know?”

I sighed, through my tentacle tips, and patiently explained:

“I was captured, as you were, by a spaceship. I have never seen my captors. Other slaves explained to me what I had to do, and how.”

“So you don’t know who these creatures are? The ones who destroyed my planet?”

“My people called them Ka’un. In my language, that means ‘Feared Ones.’ ”

“What do they call themselves?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do they come from?”

“I don’t-”

“I get it. You don’t know. Have you asked? Did you try to find out? Do you know where on the ship they dwell? Do they look like you, or like me? What are their intentions? Do they have weaknesses? What is their purpose in attacking worlds like mine? Can we negotiate with them in any way?”

“They dwell in a Tower which no creature can approach. That’s all I know about the Ka’un,” I said.

Sharrock stared at me, intensity building in him like molten rock in a volcano approaching eruption.

“Then Sharrock,” he said, in the tones of a person making a vow that will change his life, “will find all the answers to all these questions, and more. And then he shall study the flaws and weaknesses of these accursed creatures. And then-”

“Then you shall wreak your wrathful vengeance upon the Ka’un?” I intercepted.

“Yes,” he admitted. And with some chagrin, he said: “You’ve heard that said before, I take it?”

I sighed, through my tentacle tips.

“Many times,” I told him.

A little while later Sharrock, with heart-broken eloquence, told me his tale. The dark and terrible story of the End Of All Days for his species.

He was a brave and proud warrior, he told me, and he came from a brave and proud and noble family. His people were exceptionally gifted at science and engineering, as well as being courageous fighters. He was, I learned, at some length, incredibly proud of his people and their status among the other tribes on his planet.

He also told me that on his planet there were two biped species living as one family unit: his kind, comprised of warriors of either gender and their spouses, guided by a Chieftain such as himself, but all equal in law and status; and the three-gendered Philosophers, who were small, tiny-tailed creatures of remarkable kindness.

The Maxolu warriors, he explained, were as clever as they were brave; and when they weren’t in combat, or stealing from other tribes, they were hunters, and farmers, and masters of mathematics and science.

The Philosophers, by contrast, knew little of science, and less still of war; but they had the gift of dreaming great things. And out of these dreams, Sharrock’s people had created skyships and spaceships and satellites and devices that make it possible to fly without experiencing the effects of acceleration.

I understood very little of all this but I knew it made Sharrock calmer to talk, so I let him talk.

Philosophers on his world, he continued, were treated like honoured guests, or small children; they weren’t expected to work, or to fend for themselves. All they had to do was dream; and those dreams were inspired, and had yielded an endless succession of extraordinary inventions and discoveries and concepts. In consequence, his own people were the masters of their solar system, and also of all the habitable planets within two hundred light-years of their sun.

I marvelled at the power of their Philosophers’ dreaming; and it gave me a strong sense of kinship with these now-extinct creatures. For my people too once knew how to dream.

Although their technology was advanced, he explained, Sharrock’s people were nomads. They lived in tents in the desert for large parts of the year, and loved to feel the desert sandstorms on their flesh. But even so, their cities were magnificent; and they could build machines of great complexity that could walk and talk and think, and kill at a distance; or could convey objects from here to there in less time than the blink of an eye. And they had become, through the manipulation of their own biology, extremely long lived.

Sharrock talked too about the historic rivalry between his people of the North, and the Southern Tribes who had occupied the equatorial zones and who, after a long battle the details of which held little interest to me, were banished into space, where they had created an empire of many planets. Shortly before the End of All Days, Sharrock had been on a mission in Sabol, the capital planet of this empire, a place steeped in luxury and decadence where (as he explained it) fat and effete Southerners lived inside machines, oblivious to the joys of the natural world.