Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  Then, as his face dampened still further, he lay down and curled his body up in an unnatural posture which I presumed to be defensive and defeated. So I waved my arms and blew soft air on him through my tentacle-tips, and was appalled when he began to scream.

  I withdrew a few paces and, still in my gentlest tones, explained the truth about our lives, the thing that we all of us have to face.

  “Your body has been improved,” I said. “Your rejuvenation powers have been enhanced. A bullet cannot kill you. A knife cannot kill you. A broken neck cannot kill you. Age cannot kill you. Disease cannot kill you. But if you do not eat, you will become a living skeleton and the pain will drive you to the brink of insanity.”

  “This is evil beyond evil, you creature-who-should-never-have-been-born!” he roared.

  Then he began to writhe and spasm, and he howled in horror, fists tight-clenched, tortured by the fact that his formidable (by small biped standards) physical strength could not be used against an enemy such as this: his own body.

  “You must,” I told him sternly, “eat, or you will regret it, bitterly and self-reproachfully, for all eternity.”

  That night, Quipu recited to us a poem; it took six hours to perform, using a complex system of calls and responses between his five garrulous heads. His poem was extremely good but a little repetitive. It was the story of a god who played tricks with all his creatures by disguising himself as various exotic animals indigenous to Quipu’s home planet. The final trick was when the god arrived on Quipu’s world disguised as an alien invader.

  We all roared with laughter at that.

  I watched the dawn. It seemed to me that the dawn was a slightly different colour every day, though Quipu told me I was deluded.

  I felt a breeze on my cheek.

  “Enjoy your day,” I said to Lirilla, as she hovered next to my head, also savouring the dawn, and cooling me with the rapid beating of her multi-coloured wings.

  “I shall,” Lirilla replied, in a voice so soft it was like a memory distantly recalled.

  After five hours of cutting and biting with my claws and teeth, I fabricated a perfect stone, and then I carried it on my back from the quarry to the Temple.

  The path was long, and winding; I passed herds of grazing creatures dawdling in the fields, savouring the sun on their variously coloured hides; I skirted the swamplands, where drowsy mud-beasts were wallowing, occasionally splashing each other with shit and mud; and finally I reached the Great Plain, where stood the Temple of the Interior World.

  It reached, by now, almost to the clouds; a double-cylinder 8 shape with oval windows built, brick by brick, out of carved rock, modelled on a constellation visible from the night skies of my own home planet. The rays of the sun shone down upon the polished surfaces of the stone; it gleamed white in the soft light, a squat beast with its head striving to angrily butt the sky.

  I placed my perfectly-shaped stone down on the grass for just one moment, and admired the beauty of the magnificent edifice we had conceived and built: a doubly circular obelisk set amidst rich grassland, with the snow-capped mountains in the distance peering down at the child of their rocky loins.

  And I felt proud; just for a moment; the very briefest of moments.

  And then I clambered up the side of the Temple until I reached the top and levered the stone into position. And I spat the fast-mortar I had been carrying in my mouth into the thick join between stone and stone, to secure the block in place.

  This trick of mine always annoyed Fray. There were cranes and ramps that were specifically designed to allow workers to raise up the stone blocks, and hordes of skilful builders of various highly dextrous species standing by to mortar the stones into position. I was, Fray argued, spoiling it for everyone else by “showing off.”

  I did not care; this was one of my rare moments of purely selfish joy.

  From the top of the Temple I had a perfect high view of my entire world. I savoured it for a while, till Fray screamed at me to come down and stop being such a forsaken-by-good-manners turd-mountain braggart.

  I visited the prisoner again. He had not eaten, nor had he drunk his water of life. His skin was paler than it had been when he first joined us. He looked terrible. He wasn’t pleased to see me.

  I watched as Fray ran across the savannah. Her hooves thundered, her vast bulk blurred; she could run faster than any land animal I knew of on this world.

  Fray’s savannah however was small, and not very plausible. When she reached the forest, she stopped abruptly, and tossed her head, and staggered around in half-circles to come to terms with the fact she was no longer running like the wind; and then she roared to the skies.

  Lirilla laughed. She hovered next to my cheek, a whirlwind of colour and grace, lit by the sun.

  Above us, Cuzco was flying loops in the air, with extraordinary grace. Fray snorted, getting ready for another run.

  “Tell that fat fuck,” I said to Lirilla, of Fray, “that she’s a useless lumbering fat fuck.” This was a phrase I had learned from Fray; among her kind it is considered a term of endearment. (Or so I have been led to believe; for it is what she so very often calls me.)

  Lirilla vanished, and was back in the beat of a wing.

  “She says that she has seen great steaming mounds of shit more active than you,” Lirilla told me.

  “Cruel,” I observed.

  “I think she meant it kindly,” said Lirilla, anxiously.

  “Tell her,” I said, “that she’s an awkward dim-witted loose-bowelled cart-carrier.” And Lirilla vanished; and flew across the savannah so fast it was as if she were rifting through space; and whispered in Fray’s ear. From my vantage point, I could see Fray snort and roar and crash her hooves on the ground.

  I looked up; Cuzco, the orange-bellied giant, was flying on updrafts of warm air, not moving his six wings at all; like a cloud made of golden armour held up by hope and poetry.

  And Lirilla was back, whispering in my ear. “Watch this,” she said, quoting Fray.

  I saw Fray begin another run across the savannah; hooves pounding; dust rising up in clouds; her ugly ungainly body turned into pure graceful motion as she traversed the savannah with extraordinary speed. Finally, she came to a halt, steam billowing off her hide, and pounded her hooves on the ground and stood up on her three back feet and roared.

  “Tell Fray,” I said to Lirilla, “that for someone who is so-clumsy-she-falls-over-her-own-huge-tits-all-the-time, that was not at all bad.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  The prisoner shook his head, stubbornly. Three days had passed, and I was making little progress with him. But I was still patient. It takes time.

  It always takes time.

  “Tell me your name.” My voice was gentle; I was using my sweetest tones to make it clear that I was on his side, and that I cared.

  “Why are you doing this to me, you bitch from Hell?” he said, in calm fearless tones that betrayed his underlying panic.

  “Because I want to be your friend,” I said.

  He blinked. “How could that be possible?” he said accusingly. “You destroyed my entire world!”

  “Not I. They. I am like you. A captive. A slave.”

  He considered this assertion; clearly considering it to be an outrageous lie.

  “You are an evil ugly loathsome vomit-inducing monster,” he pointed out. “Are you telling me my enemies are even worse than you?”

  “I am not,” I suggested, “so very bad.”

  He stared at me, his angry features trembling. His skin was soft, reddish in hue, marked with diagonal ridges, and it undulated slightly when he spoke.

  “You’re really not my gaoler?” he asked, eventually.

  “No.” I replied.

  “You were captured as I was?” he said.

  “Indeed.”

  He considered this. “If that is so, perhaps I have wronged you,” he conceded.

  “It was an easy mistake to make; I just want you to know I am
here to help you.”

  “Then I thank you for that,” he said courteously.

  “So, what is your name?” I asked him.

  “They call me,” he said proudly, then paused and uttered, as if bestowing a precious gift, his name: “Sharrock.”

  And he stared at me, clearly expecting a reaction.

  “In my world,” he added proudly, “I am-” But then he broke off, and did not conclude his train of thought.

  For there no longer was, of course, a “his world”; and no one would ever again sing songs about him and his heroic exploits, whatever they might have been.

  “My name is Sai-ias,” I told him gravely.

  “What language are we speaking?” he asked, quietly; his spirits clearly dashed.

  “It is not a language. We are not speaking. Or rather, we speak, but the ship transforms the sounds, via invisible translators in the air, into patterns of meaning in our minds.”

  “The air does that?”

  “It does.”

  “How is such a thing possible?”

  “I do not know,” I admitted.

  “And who is in charge? Who controls this ship? Who are our masters?”

  “I do not know.”

  “How can you not know?”

  I sighed, through my tentacle tips, and patiently explained:

  “I was captured, as you were, by a spaceship. I have never seen my captors. Other slaves explained to me what I had to do, and how.”

  “So you don’t know who these creatures are? The ones who destroyed my planet?”

  “My people called them Ka’un. In my language, that means ‘Feared Ones.’ ”

  “What do they call themselves?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “I don’t-”

  “I get it. You don’t know. Have you asked? Did you try to find out? Do you know where on the ship they dwell? Do they look like you, or like me? What are their intentions? Do they have weaknesses? What is their purpose in attacking worlds like mine? Can we negotiate with them in any way?”

  “They dwell in a Tower which no creature can approach. That’s all I know about the Ka’un,” I said.

  Sharrock stared at me, intensity building in him like molten rock in a volcano approaching eruption.

  “Then Sharrock,” he said, in the tones of a person making a vow that will change his life, “will find all the answers to all these questions, and more. And then he shall study the flaws and weaknesses of these accursed creatures. And then-”

  “Then you shall wreak your wrathful vengeance upon the Ka’un?” I intercepted.

  “Yes,” he admitted. And with some chagrin, he said: “You’ve heard that said before, I take it?”

  I sighed, through my tentacle tips.

  “Many times,” I told him.

  A little while later Sharrock, with heart-broken eloquence, told me his tale. The dark and terrible story of the End Of All Days for his species.

  He was a brave and proud warrior, he told me, and he came from a brave and proud and noble family. His people were exceptionally gifted at science and engineering, as well as being courageous fighters. He was, I learned, at some length, incredibly proud of his people and their status among the other tribes on his planet.

  He also told me that on his planet there were two biped species living as one family unit: his kind, comprised of warriors of either gender and their spouses, guided by a Chieftain such as himself, but all equal in law and status; and the three-gendered Philosophers, who were small, tiny-tailed creatures of remarkable kindness.

  The Maxolu warriors, he explained, were as clever as they were brave; and when they weren’t in combat, or stealing from other tribes, they were hunters, and farmers, and masters of mathematics and science.

  The Philosophers, by contrast, knew little of science, and less still of war; but they had the gift of dreaming great things. And out of these dreams, Sharrock’s people had created skyships and spaceships and satellites and devices that make it possible to fly without experiencing the effects of acceleration.

  I understood very little of all this but I knew it made Sharrock calmer to talk, so I let him talk.

  Philosophers on his world, he continued, were treated like honoured guests, or small children; they weren’t expected to work, or to fend for themselves. All they had to do was dream; and those dreams were inspired, and had yielded an endless succession of extraordinary inventions and discoveries and concepts. In consequence, his own people were the masters of their solar system, and also of all the habitable planets within two hundred light-years of their sun.

  I marvelled at the power of their Philosophers’ dreaming; and it gave me a strong sense of kinship with these now-extinct creatures. For my people too once knew how to dream.

  Although their technology was advanced, he explained, Sharrock’s people were nomads. They lived in tents in the desert for large parts of the year, and loved to feel the desert sandstorms on their flesh. But even so, their cities were magnificent; and they could build machines of great complexity that could walk and talk and think, and kill at a distance; or could convey objects from here to there in less time than the blink of an eye. And they had become, through the manipulation of their own biology, extremely long lived.

  Sharrock talked too about the historic rivalry between his people of the North, and the Southern Tribes who had occupied the equatorial zones and who, after a long battle the details of which held little interest to me, were banished into space, where they had created an empire of many planets. Shortly before the End of All Days, Sharrock had been on a mission in Sabol, the capital planet of this empire, a place steeped in luxury and decadence where (as he explained it) fat and effete Southerners lived inside machines, oblivious to the joys of the natural world.

  He then explained to me how-after acquiring without purchasing some priceless artefact or other, which now of course was worthless-he had returned home to find his village laid waste, and his people dead.

  He had then, he told me, taken to the sky in some kind of vessel and after various adventures had fought with a large alien female with red hair streaked with silver.

  My heart sank when he told me this; I was confident I knew who it was he had fought, and I hoped I would be able to keep the two of them apart.

  Sharrock had then been engulfed in lava as the planet began to fall apart; and had lost consciousness, only to wake up inside the bowels of the Hell Ship, his burned limbs and body miraculously healed.

  He had subsequently witnessed his planet’s destruction through the glass walls of the prisoner-hold of the Hell Ship; a place I knew only too well. Trapped and alone, he had seen his sun flaring, like a wounded beast spitting bile and entrails from its shredded guts; he had seen comets and asteroids crashing into his planet’s atmosphere; he had seen earthquakes and volcanoes devastate his world with their hot burning horror; and then he had seen the planet itself break into a million parts like carved and coloured glass shattered by a blow.

  The image haunted him, and I understood how he felt. For I, too had seen my world explode into many parts, and the memory of it has never left me.

  “Let me tell my tale,” I said to Sharrock.

  “My kind,” I told him, “are not warriors. We do not-or rather we did not-have weapons. And nor did we believe these creatures from space would hurt us. By the time we realised our error, our planet itself was in the process of being destroyed; racked with earthquakes and terrible storms.”

  He listened carefully, but with a certain detachment. It was clear that in his mind what happened to me could not in any way compare to what had happened to him.

  “And I was captured, and held in a spaceship, just as you were, and saw my planet fall into pieces, just as you did.”

  “How do they do that?” Sharrock asked. “The earthquakes? To do that requires a radical sundering of the planet’s structural integrity.” His features were alert; he was thinking hard n
ow, and it made him look like a hunter eyeing his about-to-be-captured prey. “Bombs fired into the planet’s core? Missiles made of un-matter?”

  “I do not know.”

  He nodded, absorbing the sheer depths of my ignorance. “I think so,” he said. “Un-matter would do it. You know what un-matter is?”

  “No.”

  “The opposite of matter; when the two collide, Poof!” He clapped his hands, to demonstrate the explosion resulting from the happening of whatever he was talking about. “Or maybe a collapsor sun. You know what that is? A sun so massive it collapses in on itself?”

  “We have no such concept; I have heard talk of such things though, from my friends on this ship,” I said.

  “The physics is formidable,” said Sharrock, grinning with relish, “but the engineering is simple. Put your un-matter or your mini-collapsor in a big missile, fire it into the planet’s crust; set it to detonate when it reaches the liquid outer core. Bang!” He clapped his hands; so skilful was his storytelling that I could see the very same image that he was seeing. “The planet is gone. Brutal. Our Philosophers have dreamed of such a weapon; but even the Southern Tribes would not be so entirely fucking evil as to do that.”

  “The Ka’un,” I said, “are undeniably that entirely fucking evil.”

  He nodded. “Continue,” he said, as if I were his servant, and he my king; and I did.

  “My planet was lost to me,” I told him, “and no more can be said of that. And then I came to the Ka’un ship, and I was shocked at what I encountered.”

  I had his attention fully grasped by now; and I needed him to heed these words. For those who do not comprehend how it was then, cannot exist now.

  “It was,” I said, “back then, so many years ago, a bleak and barren world. The lake was stagnant, the grasses were knotted with weeds that stank like corpses. My fellow captives slept outdoors, and every night when the sun was switched off, the blacker-than-black night was filled with screaming.”

  For a brief moment, I allowed myself to touch the memory of those days; and it seared my soul.

  “And so I learned,” I said, “in those early years, the way to survive. And this I must now teach you.”