Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  Indeed, each course was a joy to be savoured a dozen times in each of my taste organs. I gorged myself, and drank until my vision swam. Then I circulated around the table, conversing with a wide variety of Traders and Mistresses and crew.

  All agreed the mission looked to be a triumph, and Mohun had already selected the Traders who would remain in the permanent trading post.

  Yet, despite the pleasant company, and the sensory epiphanies of the food and the several buckets of alcohol I consumed, I carried a stone in my soul. For whenever I looked at Averil, I saw she was aglow; and I inwardly wept.

  When the meal was over, the singing and music began, and the table sank into the floor. Cushions replaced our dining chairs, and some brave souls swayed in time to the rhythm of the tabadrums, moving like birds trapped in viscous air across the sway-floor.

  I joined Averil and hugged her hips with my palms, and kissed her temples, and admired the diamond around her neck, which was glowing in time with her heartbeat. It was the pair of my own diamond; the two stones began to glow in synchrony.

  “What are you thinking?” Averil asked, playfully.

  “About how wonderful you are,” I told her.

  “Flatterer.”

  “It’s true.”

  “All males are flatterers.”

  “And all females are angels.”

  “Liar.”

  I smiled. “I worship you, you know that?”

  Averil smiled, and picked a fruit from a floating-tray and ate it with a flamboyant swallow. “I know,” she said casually, and her hand brushed her hair, drawing my attention to the vastness of her exquisite brow.

  And still, she glowed.

  The ship’s Commander approached us. She too was wearing an exquisite white gown, and exuded effortless authority.

  “Congratulations,” said Commander Laeris.

  “Thank you Commander.”

  “They’re a vile bunch, the FanTangs, aren’t they?” the Commander said, laughter in her voice.

  “I’ve rarely seen viler,” I smiled.

  The Commander kissed Averil on the temples, courteously, and the two of them basked in the joy of being female.

  “He’s quite a catch,” the Commander teased, and Averil burst out laughing, and her skin glowed even more brightly.

  And my spirits sank, further than-I have no metaphor for how far they sank-and I felt bleak melancholy sweep over me.

  For, you see, honoured listener to my tale, whoever you might be: the females of my species always glow in the hours after passionate, love-filled sexual congress.

  And yet I had not fucked Averil since yesterday.

  Two of the ship’s most distinguished females stood on the stage and began to sing, unaccompanied, a melody of eerie beauty. I listened, and watched, wallowing in awe, yet sick with despair.

  And I stared at Averil with desperate intensity as she listened to the delightful ditty; rapt and focused, visibly appreciating each tiny nuance; and I marvelled at the lustre of her intellect.

  She glanced at me, with an unexpected look of regret. Then her eyes flickered to one side and her glow increased in radiance.

  I followed her gaze.

  Mohun.

  Mohun!

  The Chief Trader was a hundred years if he was a day. His face was old as parchment. He was physically fragile. How could she prefer him ?

  I left the Banqueting Dome and walked back to my cabin. I sank into my bed, and wrapped the sheets over my face and mouth and tried to pretend I was hibernating, as my ancestors used to do.

  Mohun!

  My pain had an echo; for, many years before I met Averil, I had been married to a stunningly intelligent and percipient female. And she too had betrayed me.

  My beloved was called Shonia, and I had asked her to be my bride when we were holidaying in the Olaran city of Pandorla, on a narrowboat on the river Kal. Amusingly, she claimed to be shocked by my effrontery in proposing to her, and pretended to slap me with rage. However, she misjudged both the distance between us and her own strength, and managed to swipe me off the boat with a single powerful blow. Still laughing, Shonia dived in after me and the two of us swam to shore, followed by the angry curses of the boatman.

  We had been equals, back then. Shonia had refused to be bound by convention; and when we married, she allowed me equal rights and status. She had even tried her utmost to give me sexual pleasure, despite the frustrating limitations of our species biology. (We Olaran males, you see, cannot achieve orgasm; it is nature’s way of keeping us in our place, as my mother always said.)

  For a whole year my soul nearly burst with joy. I believed I was the luckiest Olaran male in all of history; for I was in love, and I knew that the female I loved also loved me.

  And then one day I had woken to find Shonia asleep and glowing, and I had realised this wasn’t my glow. She was connecting, sexually and spiritually, with another.

  A month later I received a note from Shonia revoking our marriage, and asking me to leave our family home. I never saw her again. And that’s when I signed up for the Trader Fleet. To forget my grief.

  Now it had happened for a second time.

  And, after this second betrayal, my old grief had returned and merged with my new grief, to create a doubly-grieving knife (a metaphorical knife, I hasten to add, though perhaps I did not need to) that jutted from my soul.

  “I beg pardon,” I said formally to Averil.

  “You are forgiven.”

  “I have proved an unworthy partner for you,” I said.

  “Another has proved more worthy,” said Averil, concluding the divorce ritual. Then she grinned. “Oh come on Jak-is this really such a big deal?”

  “To me it is,” I said stiffly.

  “In this day and age? Many Olarans don’t mate for life any more. We could just be lovers.”

  “I could not endure that.”

  “They call them ‘fuck-friends.’ ”

  “I could never be that. I love you, Averil.”

  My words resounded like off-key notes.

  “I know you do,” she said.

  “Then I must leave the Fleet.”

  “That’s your choice.”

  “I will join the Explorer ship,” I threatened.

  A wild gamble on my part; it failed utterly.

  “Whatever,” she replied, casually.

  “I could be killed,” I pointed out. “It’s a dangerous universe. We may never see each other again.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Averil in bored tones.

  I sighed, forlornly.

  “Averil, I shall think of you always,” I said, with undimmed ardour.

  “No doubt,” said Averil pleasantly, “you will.”

  I packed my possessions into a box. Holos of my parents. A key-ring with all my metal-mind storage files, from childhood on. My identity pass. My bank folder. It was not much, after a life in service. I was well-off, admittedly, but I’d stock-piled no treasure, and I’d never been assigned my own planet. All the money I’d earned at trading, I’d spent on my women. First Shonia, then Averil.

  I should have been more cunning, I realised. There were many males who kept their independence by embezzling from their own earnings before passing on their pay to their wives. I had never pursued that route; I was too much of a romantic.

  Or, I mused, too much of a fool.

  Mohun snorted. “You’re throwing your fornicatory life away,” he pointed out.

  “I care not.”

  “You have talent.”

  “What do you care-you betraying son-of-a-slattern!” I sneered.

  Mohun forced a smile; but I could tell he was hurt by my words.

  “But you are still my friend,” I added, and the relief shone in his eyes.

  “Listen Jak,” he said to me softly. “ I cannot deny that your former wife Averil has a truly gorgeous mind and lip-smackingly apt judgement. And I am, of course, privileged to be hers.”

  “Indeed you are.”
>
  “Indeed I am.”

  Mohun was holding back his tears; and I respected that. For if he had wept, I would undoubtedly have done so too; and we would both have been lost.

  “However, I should stress, my dear friend,” Mohun continued, “that my love affair with Averil and your consequent humiliation were not my choice, nor my desire.”

  I nodded, to acknowledge that eternal truth; females choose males.

  “I shall never see you again,” I said, and walked out of the Chief Trader’s cabin, to begin my new life.

  BOOK 3

  Sai-ias

  I felt so very sorry for him.

  He was, like all the new ones, angry; and savagely so. And bitter; unreachably so. Possessed by a wild desire to take revenge for what had happened to him and his people; and deranged, too, by grief and sorrow, at the loss of everything he had ever known.

  And, as was always the case, he vented these feelings upon me.

  “You murdering daughter-of-a-pustulent-rapist-who-fucks-whores bitch!” he roared, and then he spat at me, a rich mouthful of acidic spit that stung the soft skin of my face and left a sticky residue on my cheeks.

  “You malice-tainted shit-eating-sloshy-farting father-fucker, how could you do it? How could you do it?” he roared, accusingly.

  I yearned to touch him, and to soothe his rage; but I knew that my-from his perspective-monstrous appearance made my very presence an ordeal to him.

  “Monster! You’re uglier-than-a-two-headed-mutant-baby monster!” he angrily told me, as he paced around his confining cabin.

  “If you say so,” I replied, in the mildest of tones, but that just enraged him all the more.

  All in all, my heart burst with sympathy; I knew just how this poor, sad creature felt.

  For I had once felt that way myself, many years ago. And I remembered my rage then, and marvelled at its absence now.

  “Let me explain to you,” I began gently.

  “I’m going to fuck you with a spear in your throat and your eyes and arsehole!” he screamed.

  “I wouldn’t like that,” I informed him, “very much.”

  “Evil-bitch-that-even-a-fat-arsed-Southerner-wouldn’t screw! Festering cock-meat!” he screamed, spittle falling from his mouth. He was quite hysterical now, and entirely oblivious to the gentle irony of my last comment.

  “Later,” I said, kindly. “I will explain it all, later.”

  “I don’t know how you can tolerate that foul-mouthed creature,” Fray said to me.

  “At least,” I said, as tactfully as I could, since Fray was legendary for her indolent refusal to help her fellow captives, “I’m doing something to help the poor unfortunate soul.”

  “You think so?” sneered Fray, with that tone of hers which implied only a fool would say such a stupid thing.

  “I do,” I said softly. For it is my self-appointed role: I greet the new ones, teach them the ways of our world; and thus I ease the pain of their transition.

  “You sad pathetic arse-sucking beast,” Fray said to me, shaking her head bewilderedly. And then she roared, a powerful rising roar that deafened me, a raw hoarse trumpet sound that embodied all her rage, and pain, and grief.

  I took a moment to let my hearing return to normal.

  “He’ll come to terms with it,” I said, quietly and sensibly, “the same way we have.”

  Fray roared again, implying she had by no means come to terms with “it,” and the sound made my skin prickle with fear and regret.

  I watched the sun go down. It was a beautiful sight. The yellow orb became a red staring eye; its gaze swept slowly across the landscape, shedding a scarlet radiance on the white snow-capped mountains and the calm blue lake. As I watched, ivory clouds were metamorphosing to become daubs of orange upon an orange-black sky.

  The richness and beauty of this setting sun effect was, as it was every night, awe-inspiring.

  Then the sun was switched off, and pitch-darkness swathed my world. I lit a torch, and its faint beams cut a tiny slice out of the night. It was time to retire to my cabin.

  That night I told my cabin friends a long and, in my opinion, delightful story about my mother. She was-or rather had been-a wonderful creature, full of warmth and love, and I had never seen her flustered or angry. (Except of course, at the end, as she embraced me, her only surviving child, in those soul-wrenching minutes before she died.)

  And this was the hilarious story of my mother’s journey to the seabed to fetch pearls from the jaws of the vast and fearsome kar-fish. It was the day of the tenth anniversary of my birth, and when she arrived at my party, bloodied but triumphant, she was able to shower me with the richest of gifts: black pearls that sang and were warm to the touch; shards of coral-fish-fragments that caught the light like a rainbow; and live seabites that I could hold beneath my tongue, and which made me feel as if I were (as my distant ancestors had been) a lazy seabeast swimming through the oceans, allowing food to drift effortlessly into my mouth.

  That was my mother! She’d risked her life to make me happy that day. And such kindness, in my opinion, is a rare and a special thing.

  There was gentle applause when I finished my story.

  “You loved your mother?” asked Fray.

  “I did,” I told her.

  Fray snorted.

  Her species, I knew, had no concept of maternal love. One time Fray had told us, with relish, a story about how Frayskind mothers loved to eat their young; and she’d gone into considerable detail about how enjoyable it was to crunch upon the bones of newborn Frayspawn, and to munch the skulls of toddlers who had, in some unspecified way, been errant. Our response to her tale had been unamused, and indeed hostile.

  Fray had, I recalled, been extremely offended at our narrow-mindedness and lack of empathy for her culture’s moral values.

  I watched the dawn. The sun was a rich and glorious ball of fire, as it always was. And its red rays lit the waters of the lake and made them ripple like flames furiously flickering, as they always did.

  I looked at the Tower, standing bleak and eerie on its craggy summit that loomed upon the island at the centre of our world’s only lake. And I felt a breeze on my face as the wind was turned on, and the fields of purple grass began to sway.

  I drank from the well of life, and it was rich and refreshing, and cold. I tipped the dregs from my cup over my face and felt my black hide moisten.

  “You must eat,” I told the prisoner softly, for the hundredth time. It is one of the most important things the new ones have to learn; the necessity of eating both regularly and well.

  “Eat,” I said, but he ignored me.

  “Please, I beg you, eat,” I implored, but his eyes were blank and he did not move.

  Then he turned to me, and his face became a sneer, and once again he spat at me (clearly a gesture of disdain in his culture), and he screamed, with spectacular fury: “Fuck your puckered-arsehole, you soul-stealing fucking bitch!”

  And I could tell he yearned to be able to attack me, and mutilate my body, and perhaps even kill me; but he dared not, for my every tentacle was larger than his single torso.

  He was, to my eyes, a quaint and tiny creature; very prone to rages, and gifted with an extraordinary breadth of eloquent invective. Most of his insults cast aspersions on aspects of my femininity-for my voice to his ears was unmistakably female-or my inability to practise monogamy, or the size and condition of my sexual organs. Often, he ascribed to me a fondness for eating my own excreta, which in fact I do, so I wasn’t too offended by that one. And, on other occasions, he indulged himself in vivid fantasies about my demise.

  One of his favoured insults, as I recall, was: “May your small-brained children eat your mouldering-fucking-flesh so they can shit it out and feed it to the fucking Baagaa [rodent-like creatures who were indigenous to his planet]!”

  Another classic taunt was: “You’re just an ugly mother-raper-whose -children-ought-to-turn-into-mutant-freaks-so-they-can-fuck-your-arsethen-e
at-you-alive!” Or rather, this is how it came out in translation; in his language, he later told me, all this could be expressed by a single one-syllable word; a miracle of linguistic economy, in my opinion.

  He also, and often, encouraged me to “swallow the cock of a Sjaja [a large furry animal indigenous to his planet] and choke to death on it.”

  His language was, all in all, deplorable, even after being toned down by the translating-air. But I had no linguistic taboos, so his words did not hurt me.

  “If you don’t eat,” I explained to him eventually, “you will be in pain. You will suffer intestinal disorders. Your body will start to consume its own fat reserves. You will not die, but you will wither away.” At this point he began screaming and weeping, but I continued:

  “Your skin will be like parchment,” I told him. “Your heart will be hard as a stone. Your blood vessels will scar your body like blue streams in a rocky desert. And this process cannot be reversed. Eat, or the flesh will fall off you and it will never grow back.”

  “I don’t plan to live that fucking long!” he said savagely.

  “Show me your arms.”

  “Fuck away, you bitch-with-a-withered-arsehole-that-stinks-of-death!” he sneered.

  “Show me.”

  He hugged his arms tightly to his body. I gently but firmly pulled one arm away and looked at the wrist. It was gouged and ugly and full of pus. The teeth marks were still visible. But the artery had resealed and there was no trace of infection in the wound.

  “You must understand,” I pointed out to him, “that you cannot die.”

  “What have you turd-fucking monsters-from-Hell done to me?” he asked, with desperation in his tone.

  I had, I must confess, become fond of the poor wretched creature by this point. Though his ranting did annoy me somewhat; and I found him, to be candid, rather ugly, although these things are of course highly subjective.

  He was a thin biped-a morphology I used to loathe, though I was becoming used to it-with two eyes in the front and one mouth; and, at this very moment, his face was wet, which I knew from considerable experience of this species-type indicated a show of emotion.