Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I was shocked the first time I saw this happen; and awed that the Ka’un were able to punish the weariest spirits by changing the very physical constitution of their bodies. No one could understand how they did it.

But I came to understand the reason for it: since the existence of Despair forces us all to be not just obedient, but also hopeful slaves. Knowing as we do that Despair will be our lot if we ever lose our precious will to live.

And the cruellest thing is that those who die of Despair never truly die; their minds are trapped alert yet helpless for all eternity in bodies of stone.

That is what makes the punishment so terrible. There is blind and remorseless cruelty; and there is what the Ka’un do to us, with their curse of Despair. It is, in my view, as different as day is to night.

Our days back then were largely spent disposing of stone corpses through the hull-hatch in the ship’s glass belly. I had no friends. We all lived separate lives, mistrustful of each other, cruelly hating.

Then one day we woke, and a hundred of us were missing.

Some returned, many cycles later, with limbs that had been regrown, or new heads, and with no memory of what had happened to them. And some never returned again.

And this is when I first realised what we slaves were for. Some of us were merely scorned chattels, but many served as the warrior army of the Ka’un. Furthermore, every time we woke from our dreamless sleep, new ones had appeared in our world. Single or several samples of newly captured sentient species. And they arrived full of terror and pain; and were immediately plunged into a world of even greater terror and pain. Carulha used to brag that every new slave needed to be made to feel as he had felt, after the death of his world. The agony of others, he would argue, in his few coherent moments, was the only way to honour the lost dead of his magnificent, arrogant species.

But I believed Carulha to be a brute, as terrible in his way as the Ka’un. His wretched kind, I mused, deserved their fate; it was the rest of we slaves who should be pitied.

And so I resolved to change my world. Instead of fighting, I would make peace. Instead of hating, I tried to spread love.

And this I did. For many long frustrating months.

And I was mocked for it; and despised for my innocence and my foolishness. For I spoke to all I met about the need for love and a new world order. I begged them all to share tales of their past, and to find a commonality in our sentience. I explained that hate and anger will simply feed more hate and anger. And I told them that we needed to accept the frailty and folly of our captors. Not to condone their crimes, but rather so we could forgive them, and thus exalt our own souls.

I spoke to each creature on the ship in such manner, over the space of hundreds of cycles. I told stories of my own people’s history to illustrate my point that violence is an evolutionary dead end. And I conjured up a vision of a world in which all of us would exist in amity and harmony.

For a long while I was ignored; but eventually my words began to take hold. I acquired a following; several of the more vicious predators broke with Carulha and began living their lives according to my principles: routine, comradeship, storytelling, love.

And Carulha was enraged by this. He regarded it as treachery, a threat to his authority.

And so once more his army of bullying cruel monsters gathered to destroy me. To rip me, as they bragged, “limb from fucking limb,” and then to hurl me from the hull-hatch.

They met me on the Great Plain. And there I stood-all alone, for my allies had abandoned me as Carulha approached. I was faced with an encircling army of nearly six hundred giant sentients, two hundred or more hairless bipeds, six thousand many-limbed predators, and all the arboreals. Only the Kindred did not deign to fight me, for they refused to have any part in the workings of our world.

I will admit that I was afraid; for I did not want to hurt anyone, and yet I knew that I would have to.

“No fucking speeches,” yelled Carulha, “die, you fucking cunt!” and the battle began.

And thus for the second time in my entire life, I fought.

And I slew them by the score, and ripped them limb, as Carulha had put it, from “fucking” limb. I smashed the aerials out of the sky with my tentacles and I ripped open the bodies of the giant sentients and tore the arboreals and bipeds and the many-limbed predators into pieces with my tentacle-claws that moved so fast that none could see their motion-thus my foes would abruptly and inexplicably split into many parts, gushing scarlet blood.

All this I did and more. And when it was all over, I threw Carulha’s dismembered body out of the hull-hatch, and the bodies of Marosh, Tarang, and nearly three hundred others. They would not die-I knew this for a fact, as I had known and understood so much from my very first moments on the Hell Ship. The same way that I had known that the waters of the well of life would heal me faster and more fully than allowing nature take its course.

No, they would not die; but their souls would live for eternity in the ripped remnants of their bodies, drifting through the emptiness of space.

And when the surviving slaves saw how I had vanquished Carulha, they swore their loyalty to me. They told me that I would be their new master!

But I refused their plea. For I would not be worshipped. I would not be obeyed.

I would, however, I insisted, be listened to.

And so they listened. And I used my newly acquired power to change our world. And this I have done; all the good that exists on my world, the clear blue waters of the lake, the comradeship, the use of cabins, the division of labours, the fertile plains, the Rhythm of Life itself-all this I caused to be.

Sharrock had no knowledge of all this; he arrogantly assumed I was merely a gullible and docile pawn of the Ka’un.

But in fact, I had defied the Ka’un, without them ever realising. I had turned their nightmare slave ship into a place where sentients of many species could live, and love, and share the joy of friendship.

So I have done; of this I am proud.

I found Cuzco on a crag, on Day the First, looking down at our world.

“The views,” he told me, “are wonderful up here.”

I looked at the views. They were indeed wonderful.

“Are you brooding?” I asked him.

“Fuck away,” Cuzco advised me.

“You are.”

“I am, indeed, you ignorant ugly monster, brooding,” he conceded.

I sat with him, in silence, for an hour.

“I’m still worried,” I said eventually, “about Sharrock.”

Cuzco snorted. “No need; he’s doomed. Forget the little cock-faced biped, for he’ll be marble soon enough. You worry too much, Sai-ias.”

“But I care about him. And it was a hard time for all of us, remember? The first few years. You must have-”

“You are so fucking pathetic!” Cuzco raged at me, cutting off my words. “You’re like a fucking mother to the new ones! You’d feed them the food from your mouth if you could. You sad ingratiating suck-arse! You can’t coddle creatures like this. Fly or die, that’s the way of the world.”

“I helped you. ”

“No one helped me.”

A lie, of course. Cuzco had also been an angry, bitter new one; I had spent many hours trying to teach him how to bank down his rage, and to find the moments of joy concealed in the bleakness of his life. Now, of course, he denied that he had ever needed me, or received any help from me; such was his pride.

“He reminds me a little of you, in fact,” I ventured.

“Go fuck a cloud!” said Cuzco. “He’s a biped. I’m a-a-” And he used a word that the air could not translate, but I knew it meant he had status. He was a giant among beasts, even on our interior world.