Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

“My father,” said Phylas, “was-” Then he ran out of words; clearly there was very little to say about his father.

I sipped my rich-juice; thinking about my own father.

I had not really known him all that well, in all honesty. My mother had been the main presence in our family, as was so often the case with Olarans. He had been an artifice monger; but I could recollect no tales he had ever told about his work. I decided I had nothing much to add to this particular conversation.

“Have I ever told you,” I said, “about the time I tried to sell carpets to the Vengans and-”

I drank too much that night and went to the Command Hub to look at the stars. On a Vassal Ship I could have used the Observation Deck and looked into space with my own eyes, but here I had to make do with camera images.

Albinia was still wired to Explorer; eyes closed and effectively unconscious. I wondered when she slept, or if this for her was sleep.

I conjured up the phantom control display and flicked through different star charts until I found the night sky of my own home world, Shangaria. It brought back fond memories; when I was ten years old I’d wanted to be an astronomer and spent every night looking at the stars. My mother used to name them for me; for she knew each star by heart.

I wondered if my mother had ever loved my father. There was however no evidence for it. She was a wonderfully self-contained female, and intensely serious; my father had been a funny delightful man, but she’d never once laughed at his jokes. Perhaps that was because they were stupid jokes. I had found them incredibly funny; but then, I’d been just a child.

After the divorce my father had visited us every weekend and he always had a smile for me. He told me that no Olaran marriage ever lasts more than twenty years; because females always grow impatient at the intellectual gap between them and their males. “Savour it while you can,” he’d told me, still with a smile.

“You’ve been drinking,” said Albinia. Her voice startled me out of my reverie. I turned to her. Her eyes were open; she’d emerged from trance.

“I am smashed,” I said, extravagantly, “sozzled, delirious, and delighted!”

It was a stupid thing to say; and I said it in an extremely stupid fashion. And after I’d said it, Albinia stared at me for a long while, clearly baffled at my idiocy.

Then she giggled.

I offered to leave of course, after the giggle-moment, but Albinia insisted that I stay.

And so I stayed, and we talked, surrounded by stars, as she plucked absent-mindedly at the cable that led out of her skull.

We talked about aliens we’d encountered, and about missions, successful and unsuccessful, and about other members of the crew. Albinia knew the biographies of every crew member. I knew most of them by their first names from card games and drinking bouts, but she knew their full names including the matronymic and their professional and personal histories and she told me it all. I listened, an expression of rapt interest pinned to my face.

“Are you bored?” she asked abruptly.

“Not in the least,” I protested. “You say something.”

“I would be delighted so to do.”

“Go on then.”

“Shall I tell you,” I said, expansively, “of the time when I was trapped in a cloud on the planet of-”

“Unplug me,” she whispered, urgently, cutting off my words.

“I’m sorry?”

“Please. I’d like to get up and stretch my legs.”

I was startled at her request; but I reached over and gently eased the plug out of her skull; a curiously intimate act.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“You can’t bear to do it yourself, can you?” I said, with dawning comprehension. “Disconnect yourself?”

Albinia blinked, clearly disorientated at being fully in a human body. “I do find it-an effort of will,” she admitted. “Galamea makes me spend an hour in the gym, twice a day. But there are brain-plugs there too. It’s only at meal times that I am-naked.” She touched her skull holes self consciously.

“Here, take a walk with me,” I said.

I changed the settings on the panoramic wall screen; we were in a park now, the sun was shining, and there was a lake.

Albinia got up from her chair, carefully stretching her limbs. Her bald head gleamed in the muted evening lighting.

We promenaded around the Control Hub for several minutes; I held her arm in mine. She was, I noted, a little wobbly on her feet.

“Look,” she whispered, confidingly.

She showed me what was in her hand; it was her skull plate, that she used to cover the holes in her head on social occasions. “It holds a wirefree,” she admitted.

“You wear this when you’re not connected to Explorer?”

“When I wear this, I am connected to Explorer.”

She smiled, like a child confessing a wicked secret; and she slipped the skull plate back into place, covering the holes. It was a silver oval, almost the same shape in miniature as her shapely head.

Her eyes sparkled as the contact was made; Explorer was back in her brain.

I found myself kissing her; I have no idea how that happened.

We went back to my room, and fornicated for several hours.

Albinia was a passionate lover, and it was a pleasure to bring her to climax. I felt curiously detached however; for I hardly knew this woman I was so skilfully orgasming. Because this wasn’t the Albinia I loved; it was the “in trance” Albinia who captivated me. This Albinia, the real one, was just a shy awkward creature, oddly young in her ways, and emotionally needy to a degree that terrified me.

But I copulated her competently enough, then she fell asleep in my arms. And when she woke up she was crying and I had to ask her why; and then she told me what was wrong with her.

“I fear that I’ve lost my olarinity,” said Albinia.

I stroked her naked breast, and she shuddered. Her skin was warm, I could still taste the aroma of her soft flesh on my lips.

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can see,” she said, and held a hand out in front of her, “the galaxies unfolding. I can hear the beat of pulsing stars, I can touch the pull of gravity-well stars, I can count supernovae in a single glance and I can smell the carbon and the iron and the uranium in the clouds of matter circling each and every star in my sightline.”

I touched her cheek with my fingers, and kissed her temples. “Feel that too?”

“I feel that too.”

“You’re Olaran.”

“Some of the time.”

I touched her skull plate, with its wirefree link to Explorer’s brain. I was somewhat shocked by it, in truth, for I’d never heard of such a thing.

“Then cut the link. Turn off Explorer, exist in the here and now.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re supposed to. It’s not customary to be permanently connected. It’s surely in breach of safety protocols.”

“I don’t care. I love it too much. I am the ship, the ship is me.”

“I just fucked a ship?”

“Well, yes.”

“That makes me feel,” I said, “odd.”

And, to my delight, she giggled again.

Here’s a truth I learned at an early age: females are not like males.

When I was twelve years old my six-year-old sister explained to me the fundamental principles of Olaran science. I had no idea what she was talking about, despite my several years of school. But she had accessed a single memory file and had learned it all, instinctively. She could do mathematics the way I could throw a ball. But she could also throw a ball further and more accurately than I ever could.

When I was sixteen years old I was given a degree in astrophysics with a distinction, and was considered to be one of the brightest students in my all-male class. But my sister, by this point, was building suns, with the help of a mind-machine link with the Olaran computer. Her intellect so far surpassed mine that I marvelled at our memories of being kids together, playing in a pool in the garden, creating imaginary friends.