I sighed, from my tentacle tips, and noted with approval that Sharrock did finally seem a little embarrassed.
“These creatures are not your enemies,” I said. “We are all of us in this together.”
Sharrock made a sharp exclamation-it was his version of a laugh, I realised. But there was no humour in his tone.
“Fuck your anus!” Sharrock said viciously. “Those tree-fuckers bit my nose off! They broke my arm, my legs, then they tried to take my intestines out with a sharpened branch. Those shit-eaters deserve to die by choking on the barbed cock of a [untranslatable]!” Sharrock concluded, spitting with rage again by now.
“Make peace with them,” I said.
“Never!”
“You can’t,” I told him, “go on like this.”
He glared at me.
“Sai-ias, you mean well,” Sharrock said, icily, with what I felt was odious condescension. “You have a good soul. But the truth is,” and now Sharrock’s contempt for me shone through in every syllable, “you are nothing but a fucking coward.”
Sharrock’s scorn was hard to bear; but bear it I will and must.
For I have learned, over many aeons, to ignore the disdain of others, as warriors shrug off ghastly wounds without showing even a flicker of pain.
This is my tale; the tale how I shaped my world.
I was but a child when the Ka’un invaded my home world; just fifteen years old, two or three years away from my metamorphosis.
And I remembered how we young ones were amused when the alien spaceships first appeared in the sky. We made a game of swiftly dodging their bombs as they crashed to the ground, scattering earth and terrifying the land animals. And then we ran home and told our parents.
My parents comforted me, and told me we would be safe. But they did not fight, they fled, using flying ships to convey us at speeds faster than sound, as far away as we could get from the alien ship. And when the bombs continued to fall from the sky, we and millions of our kind took refuge deep in the earth’s crust. We would, my mother said, wait it out. When the enemy tired of destroying our cities and houses, such as they were, we would emerge and rebuild our planet. Or we would find another planet. It would be easy enough.
But when the earthquakes began my father was crushed by a wall of rock that collapsed on to him. He cut himself free, knowing he could, eventually, regrow his lost limbs. But he was worried now.
Then poison gas came through the rock and my brothers and sisters died in agony. My mother nursed them all, stroking them with her tentacle tips and mouth and thus absorbing the poison into her own body. And then she too died, while holding me in her tentacles, exhaling deadly air upon me, killing me with foolish love, for by then she had lost her senses with grief.
My father found me in time and sucked out the poisoned air out of my lungs and into his own body, dooming himself but saving me. Then he wrapped me in protective shielding, and placed me in a space capsule. And he fired the capsule into orbit, with a course set for another of the worlds occupied by our kind, so that one of us at least should live.
When he said goodbye, my father vowed that I would live a happy life, and that these invaders would not find it so easy to invade our other planets. For mind-messages had been sent with instantaneous effect to all my people-to those living on alien soil and also those who lived on artificial orbiting cities and those who chose to slowly drift in space, living on the energy from distant suns-to warn them that the ways of peace must come to an end. We must, as a species, resort to war, using all of our formidable powers.
All this he told me; and I marvelled at the rage in his voice, and the anger-fuelled expansion of his normally compact body. And I sorrowed for him, and for my dead mother; they were kind and full of joy and I loved them, and they will live for ever in my memories and in the depth of my soul.
Then, as I grieved, a child forced to confront evil for the first time, my father sealed the capsule and I was shot out into space in a cylinder of metal that was, my father hoped, to be my home for the next one thousand years.
However, his plans failed; and I was captured by the alien invaders as my craft made its way out the atmosphere. I lay in semi-sleep and woke abruptly when I felt my capsule lose all its momentum in a moment.
And later the capsule was broken open and I was confronted by an ugly tiny creature with two legs and fur, which I later learned was clothing. This was a Kindred; but at the time I thought it was a Ka’un.
I clambered out of my capsule to confront the creature, and lashed at him with my tentacles; and found he was made of air. A projection.
I realised I was alone inside a huge room shaped like a globe, made of some kind of glass; and beneath me and all around was the blackness of space, and the stars. And shining in the midst of the emptiness of space was a planet, my own planet; which our people had called Tendala. I knew this view of Tendala well; for I had flown in orbit around her many times; and as I looked now at the planet in space, I saw the oceans that I had swum in, and the mountains I had climbed.
I was confused, and frightened, and baffled. My confining shell was large and had no features and no visible doors; and because the floor too was made of glass it felt as if I were floating in space.
And, there, from my vantage point inside the glass belly of the Ka’un spaceship, I saw my planet start to break into pieces.
It was an impossible yet haunting image. I saw none of the terror and destruction that must have existed on the ground-the cities and forests burning, the seas racked with storms, the volcanoes erupting. All I saw was a beautiful blue globe breaking apart like smashed glass, and fragments the size of entire countries tumbling into space.
And my soul was rent with pain.
I knew I would never seen my loved ones again; never again would I feel the winds of Tendala, or swim in the Parago Seas, or watch the beauteous birds of Tharbois in colourful flight. Child though I was, I knew by now that these monsters took joy in the extermination of other sentient beings. And I knew them to be, by our own moral code, “evil.”
But though I was full of rage back then, my anger eventually, over the ensuing months, dimmed into a calm acceptance.
I was, I admit, grievously disappointed that others of my kind did not come to rescue me; but I did not resent them for this failure. Perhaps, I mused, they had decided to forgive the alien invaders? For forgiveness is the way of my species. We will, if absolutely necessary, fight; but continuing hatred is not in our nature, and indeed runs counter to our philosophy of life.
So I did not, as many Kau’un captives do, wallow in thoughts of vengeance. Nor did my captivity terrify me; and the prospect of spending eternity as a slave caused me little grief. For my kind are long-lived, and patient, and we endure.
And yet!
Even now the memories of the horrors that I saw in those early years on the Hell Ship cause me pain. The savagery! The cruelty! I arrived, a fresh slave, and was greeted by a slavering mob of creatures of all shapes and sizes, with claws and beaks and horns and soft pulsing flesh and hard scales and thick hides, creatures who flew and creatures who crawled and creatures who walked on a hundred legs and others who were nightmares made manifest. And all these monsters taunted and mocked me. And then they advanced upon me in a ruthless mass and savaged me, and tried to rip the outer shell off my three segments with their teeth and claws and horns and feelers and feet. One of the creatures spat acid upon my skin. Another wrapped its coils around me and tried to crush my body into a state of suffocation. And then one of them, a giant flying biped, picked me up in its claws and carried me up to the summit of the mountain range, over bleak and terrible terrain, and there he dropped me from a great height upon the sharpest crag. And I tried to fly away to safety, but my cape was shattered and I could not see because my eyes had been pecked out, and I could not hear because small worms were crawling in my brain and affecting my ability to sense my surroundings or to think.
When I hit the rocky crag the wind
was driven out of my body and my carapace was cracked and my heart ruptured and my back spine was shattered.
And I was in agony for many months until I managed to drag myself down from the mountain. And then I hauled myself across the grasslands in the baking heat, until I found a well full of soothing water and dived in. And this, I later learned, was the well of the water of life; and these waters healed me.
Within months, I was restored to health; my spine was restored; my eyes grew back; my wounds healed; though my fear of my fellow captives was undimmed.
Carulha was the dominant warrior on the Hell Ship back then. A giant red polypod with spear-like protrusions on his flesh and a hundred bony arms that could cut and sever flesh and a thousand snake-tails that could spit venom and lash like whips. Carulha had led the mob that tortured and taunted me. And when I was healed, it was Carulha who sought me out and told me the laws of my new world. I must obey him, and him alone; for I was his slave, just as he was the slave of the Masters of the Ship. And I must, he told me, at all times use my strength to intimidate and humiliate the smaller bipeds (though not the Kindred) and the arboreals and the sentient aerials and the multi-legs and the swamp-dwellers, for that was the way of things on this ship.
I refused.
So Carulha went away and when he returned he once more led a mob of huge and deadly creatures. I can remember them now: Sairyrd, the hairy three-legged grey-skinned breaker of bones. Marosh, a serpentine with wings and teeth that could rip and tear in all the many mouths that ran the length of her slithering body. And Tarang, a creature with no fixed form, who oozed and shapeshifted and had the power to hurt by absorbing the bodies of her prey into her own soft sucking loathsome body. And more, many more. The bipeds fought too, for they served Carulha then, not the Kindred as they do now; and though they were small, they were armed with bows and spears and knives and wooden machines that could hurl rocks and balls of fire. The arboreals also joined this army; they were agile and guileful, and used their teeth and tails to maim and hurt at Carulha’s behest. And the aerials flocked at his command, and could peck out the eyes of a helpless new slave in a matter of seconds.
This was the mob that for the second time faced me. But this time, I was no longer a child; for I had been prematurely metamorphosed into my adult self through pain and grief. Thus, my strength and powers were enhanced a thousandfold, as is the way of our kind.
And so, sorrow in my heart, adulthood forced upon me, I defended myself.
After six hours of combat, I left behind me a trail of broken bodies and screaming, agonised monsters, and slept that night by the shores of the lake, watching the sun go down above the Tower. The wind was cold.
I missed my world.
Naturally, once I had proved my superior strength, Carulha and the others left me undisturbed. And that made me glad; and yet also broke my soul. For it is not in my nature to be alone, and unloved.
And even though I now enjoyed a protected existence, Carulha and his gang continued to hound and humiliate all the other slaves; and everything I saw brought me fresh torment.
For in those days, the lives of the slaves on the Hell Ship were truly dark and desperate. We were our own worst enemies, there was no comfort to be got, and no comradeship, and no kindness or compassion, and, most appallingly of all, no routine.
And those facts made me, deeply and wretchedly, sad.
And indeed it makes me sad even now, looking back, to remember how when I was a new slave, no one helped me; no one trained me. And there were no cabins either, not back then. No sanctuary, no friendship, just savagery.
Thus, in my first few years on the Ship, I lived in a state of perpetual disgust with the ways of my world. For all was hate! In the days, the slaves would fight and rip each other limb from limb, with pointless brutality. And at night their bodies would lie still and bleeding before they, slowly and painfully, began to heal.
And also, every night, after all the bickering and warring, we Ka’un slaves would lie on the grass while the sun set; and we would be filled with terror as the sheer blackness descended. A night so dark that nocturnal animals were blinded; a night where nothing moved, and no sound carried, and creatures possessed of echo-location were as helpless as those with eyes. A night of total and terrifying silence.
Then, after a few hours, screams would rend the night. As the absence of all light sent creature after creature to the brink of madness, or into the arms of cold Despair.
Then, eventually, the sun would rise, and cold light would leach across the land. And we would see before us the forests of the Despairing: dead and petrified figures that stretched as far as the eye could see, their warm bodies turned to icy stone, their screams of agony preserved for all eternity in rock. Such are the consequences of the bodily apocalypse we call Despair.
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 Ca
rulha 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.
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