Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I was convulsed by a sudden unexpected paroxysm; my body was attacked from within by an unfamiliar choking feeling; my emotions clashed and collided; and I exhaled stale air from my rectum, violently and loudly.

“What happened then?” said Cuzco, alarmed.

“It is the way my species,” I said, amused, “expresses affection and abiding love.”

Cuzco glared at me, and acid dripped out of his eyes again: “And you’re not extinct?”

I knew all Cuzco’s stories, his tales of valour and loves lost and battles fought and great deeds performed in faster-than-light space ships that carried his kind amongst the stars.

But over the next few weeks, he told me all the stories again, and I listened rapt and fascinated, and then I told mine.

I talked of how my people first learned to fly through space; and how we danced and mated among the stars; and how we gave birth in caves and cherished our young. And I talked too of the day my father took me to the moon of Shallomar, perched on his back as he flew through vacuum.

“Did you love your father?” Cuzco asked.

“Of course I did.” I replied.

Cuzco sighed; I suspected he felt a pang of jealousy.

“And you? Did you love your father?” I asked, intrigued. “Or, rather, do your species leave their aged parents out in the desert to die the moment they begin to forget occasional facts? As the Frayskind, so lamentably, do.”

“We do not do such a thing.”

“But love? Did you love him?”

“No, I did not love him,” Cuzco said, soberly. “He was a cruel tyrant; such as fathers are meant to be. My mother too was brutal to me; she taught me through pain, and taught me well, the evil bitch.”

“I find that sad.”

“Do not pity me!” said Cuzco angrily. “Our people do have love. We love many things.”

“Name one thing that you love, that doesn’t involve ripping the throat out of a vulnerable fellow creature?”

Cuzco thought hard, clearly angry at my words.

“We love our comrades in arms,” he said proudly, “and would happily die for them, and they for us! And we love our sexual partners too. Yes, we do! With a rare and overwhelming passion! Or rather, we love them until we tire of them, and find their breath stale and loathsome, and then we feel compelled to batter them and seek fresh fucks. But for a while at least, then-yes, romantic love-I do know the meaning of that joy!!”

“Hmm,” I said.

“But as for children,” continued Cuzco, “well, that’s a different thing entirely. For I did not know a parent could love a child, and a child a parent, until I came to this place.”

“That’s sad,” I concluded, having won my case, I felt, beyond all doubt.

“No it’s not. It’s normal,” Cuzco said, stubbornly. “For my kind.”

“I had always believed,” I admitted, “it was a universal thing. That all species know the joy of love, even the violent ones.”

“Not Doro’s kind.”

“Fair point. His species are single-sex.”

“Perhaps he loves himself?” Cuzco suggested.

“That is not true love, it is just vanity.”

“And Frayskind? Do they know love?”

“Who could love a Frayskind! The great lumbering oaf!” I suggested.

“Yet magnificent too,” Cuzco argued.

“In her way, perhaps. Certainly loyal; and a good friend; unless you are a mischievous Frayskind teen, then Fray would eat you alive.”

“Give us credit; my kind are not great parents, but we do not eat our young.”

“You swallow sentient bipeds,” I said accusingly.

Cuzco chuckled; an eerie sound. “Only when they are young and fresh; the older kind are chewy.”

“You immoral beast!”

“You should try it. Biped haunch. It has a tang.”

And so it went on; we threw out ideas, exchanged memories, mused on the peculiarities of the strange other species with whom we inhabited this ship, told jokes, teased each other, and talked endless nonsense that amused us both.

Cuzco and I were far from kindred spirits. His kind were fierce, wrathful, brutal, murderous, and cared for nothing more than honour, which they defined as the ability to kill or to die with skill and grace. While my kind were timid, pacifist, cowardly in his eyes; but full of an unquenchable love for others and for life itself.

But we had one thing in common: our need for each other. For I needed him, desperately and limitlessly. And he needed me too, with the same crazy intensity. And the bond it created dwarfed any love I had ever known.

Cuzco-I would fight and die in war for you!

That’s how much I love you.

“Why did you do it? The fight with Djamrock?”

“He begged me to.”

“You thought you’d win?”

Cuzco sighed wearily. “Yes that was my plan.”

“Could you have endured it? An eternity without body?”

“An eternity of joy. Knowing I had died with honour.”

“You would have abandoned me?”

“We are all alone,” said Cuzco. “Love is an illusion.”

He was right. Love is an illusion. And so is hope.

But are illusions really so very bad?

“Where did you learn to fight like that?” Cuzco asked one night, after we had spent a day flying on the updrafts above the highest summits.

“I never learned,” I admitted. “I had never fought a battle until I arrived on the Hell Ship. But in the early days, there were two huge combats, which I won. That is why the world is as it is. Because I fought, and won, and claimed obedience.”

“Before my time?” asked Cuzco.

“Before your time.”

“I thought Djamrock was the leader of the world. Or Miaris. They were the dominant predators. When they spoke, all listened.”

“They listened; but Djamrock and Miaris never said anything that wasn’t nonsense. My words mattered.”

“Yes but-”

“What?”

“You spoke to us all, true, and often we heeded you; but no one feared you.”

“I did not want anyone to fear me.”

Cuzco thought about that.

“Explain how you can fight,” he said, “if your kind are not predators.”

“Once,” I said, telling the tale of my people:

“Once, the oceans of our world were ruled by a magnificent and beautiful sentient species called Tula. Tula means ‘all’ in my language; the Tula were our all. We were their symbiotes, their slaves. They were born as soft sea creatures, and developed a calcareous exoskeleton to become underwater reefs as they aged. The ocean bed was ruled by them; the ocean bed was them.

“And they fed us and taught us, and in return we protected them.

“These are not legends; this is the archaeological biology of my kind. We were giant plant-eating sea creatures with tentacles and a cape and the ability to expand our bodies to appear more threatening than we were. Then we formed a symbiosis with the Tula and we used our fearsome aspect to discourage predators who liked to eat the soft Tula flesh inside their bony frame. Browsing sea creatures like the Uoolsa and the Jaybkok could eat an entire Tula reef in a single sitting; but they were wary of us.

“But as time went by the predators grew more bold and they began to eat my kind, before consuming our Tula hosts. So we learned to fight, using our tentacles as weapons to choke and our quills-our sexual organs, for males and females alike-as weapons.

“And the Tula, who were sentient, saw what we were doing and they cleverly decided to ‘breed’ us. They paired us in combinations that amplified certain traits: size, strength, toughness of carapace, deadliness of our quills and so on.

“All this took place over many tens of thousands of years; but selective breeding can be a remarkably effective process. We became fighting monsters, strong and remorseless. And so the Tula were safe, for we guarded them; and were bred to do so with terrifying effect.