Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I sighed, from my tentacle tips, sadly but philosophically; then I closed and locked the door.

Day the Second dawned.

For me, this Day is always an arduous delight. The Temple reaches nearly to the clouds now, it is a magnificent achievement and a beautiful one, and it will soon be finished. The final curved stones will be placed at the summit; and the rooms within will be decorated with the names and images of those beloved and mourned by our most gifted artisans.

But every ten years, to my infinite regret, it is decreed that the Temple is imperfect and must be demolished, brick by brick. And so we demolish it, brick by carefully hewn brick, until the ground is bare and the rocks have been returned to the quarries and smashed into fragments; then we begin again. A new Temple, identical to the first, is build with new bricks, and fresh labour; until magnificent imperfection is once more achieved; and then the Temple is once more destroyed.

This has happened, by my reckoning, at least twice ten thousand times.

I watched the sun rise over the Tower.

The Tower was a soaring magnificence of brooding tallness; its walls were made of grey brick mortared with gold; and it shimmered in the sun like the light in a lover’s eyes, or so I am told.

It was, without doubt, a creation of great beauty. And yet, forgiving though I am by nature, I hated the Tower with all my soul. For it was the fortress of the Ka’un, where our oppressors dwelled. The sight of it was a daily reproach to all of us; a reminder of their power, and our utter helplessness.

No one could ever reach the Tower. Many had tried, and failed. I knew all their names; they numbered scores of thousands; all doomed by the Tower’s wrath.

The Tower was there to mock us; it was a clear token that the Ka’un could never be defeated.

Nor, as I knew well, was there any way to escape from the Ka’un and the planet-sized spaceship they used as our prison. Many had tried that too; including myself.

For when I had first arrived on the Hell Ship I was full of a child’s blind rage at the killing of my parents and my people. And when I was told that my enemies dwelled in the huge Tower on the lake, I swam out to it in fury, determined to confront them; and was caught up in a huge storm. And, battered and appalled, I found myself entirely unable to reach the island’s shore, because of an invisible force barrier of some kind which surrounded the Tower.

So I returned to land and brooded; and then was told there was a way off the ship: through the hull-hatch in the vessel’s glass belly. Here it was possible to throw waste objects off the ship-such as bodies-and I excitedly made one of my fellow captives explain the mechanism of the hatch, and its inner cavity that was used to prevent air from the ship from billowing out into space.

And so one day I crept to the glass belly and entered the hatch; and secured myself in the inner cavity; then opened the outer door and toppled out of the ship into deep space.

This of course would have meant certain death for most species; but not for my kind. For we were once creatures of the sea who then journeyed to the land; and then over many years we made a second journey into space, in which bleak environment we can comfortably survive. So my plan was simple; soar off into the vastness of the universe and travel until I found another planet inhabited by my own kind. It was an idiotic plan-I was but a child after all!-for as I now know huge distances separate each star; and in any case, I had no notion around which suns the remainder of my people dwelled, or how to reach there.

But I didn’t care. I would rather, I recall angrily thinking to myself, die free than live a slave.

But the Ka’un were far smarter than I; and I soon discovered that their entire spaceship was surrounded by an invisible force barrier, of the same kind that encircled the Tower. Thus, after two cold and futile days trapped in space, I was forced to come clambering back on board and never spoke of it to anyone.

We could not fight; we could not flee, so I was sure that the only way was my way: Live each day, and enjoy it as best you can.

And to encourage my new ones into that contented and calmly resigned state of mind, I treated them gently at times, but at other times with implacable cruelty. For only in this manner were they able to learn the hard lessons that they needed to learn.

Kindness alone does not work; I have tried it and it has always failed.

Thus Sharrock, a nomad, had been deliberately kept by me trapped in a small confining cabin for many cycles. It was making him claustrophobic and desperate; he was by now talking to himself, and occasionally (as I could glimpse through his door) he became engaged in imaginary conversations with his lost loved ones. And so revenge was daily becoming less important to him than having at least some measure of freedom. It was all proceeding according to plan. And when I was with him, Sharrock’s rages were fewer; his language was becoming less coarse and offensive; the spittle associated with his ranting tirades was far less often spat in my direction. And so I decided he was now ready to venture out into our world, where he would discover what his life really had to offer.

I opened my eyes, after several hours of not sleeping, and I sighed.

Around me were the bodies of Fray and Quipu and Cuzco and Lirilla, all like me savouring the pleasure of pretending to sleep, in the dimly lit spherical cabin that was our home and womb.

There was no trace of Doro; then I noticed that Quipu had six heads. I was amused; Quipu hated that particular jest.

I left my cabin and made my way through circular corridors until I reached the confining cells. I could look through the metal of the door-though prisoners could not look out-and thus I could see that Sharrock was practising his combat moves, in the slowest of motion.

I spoke the codes that Gilgara had taught me so long ago, and the door slid open. Sharrock waited inside patiently, motionless now, poised for action.

“What do you want?” he said, puzzled, for I never came to him at this hour.

“Come with me,” I said.

I led Sharrock down another long corridor, past the numerous unoccupied cabins. Once, or so Quipu believed, the ship was equipped to carry colonists by the million, and these cabins were the lonely remnant of that time.

Finally, the white corridor walls came to an end and a single black wall was before us, blocking the way. “I am Sai-ias, four five six oh two one seven, let me through,” I told the wall, and it became a door, and opened.

I stepped through, and Sharrock followed. Then he blinked, and looked around.

The sun was rising over the empty lake; the clouds were stripes of scarlet-and-orange splendour; the silhouette of the Tower on its rocky summit loomed blackly against the dappled-redness of the sky. And I wondered once again if the colours of the dawn today were slightly different to the colours of yesterday, and the day before.

I noticed that a flock of aerials were hovering, warming themselves in the sun’s beams. And I glanced at Sharrock, and I decided that, despite his air of unimpressable contempt, he was awed at the sight.

“Is it an illusion?” Sharrock asked, with open astonishment.

“It’s a construction,” I qualified.

“The sight of it could, in some creatures, lead to a sensation of dizziness,” Sharrock conceded.

Then Sharrock stepped forward, still blinking in the glaring light, staring up at the empyrean. And that clever-thinking look came upon him again, as he analysed what he saw and tried to make sense of it.

“Artificial downwardness,” he speculated. “Whirling-force creates a…”

“I know nothing of such matters,” I explained warily.