After two hours, the sun rose again and I could see for certain that Cuzco had died of Despair.
His body was petrified; a frozen statue. I touched him and his hide was icy. His heart was still. No bodily life remained. His soul was still in there somewhere, but I would never speak to him again.
I howled at the stars, as Cuzco would have done. But there were still no stars.
Then I glided home; and I left Cuzco’s petrified body on the icy mountain peak, where the snows would fall on it, and where birds would peck at it, until one day his body would crack into a million pieces.
Explorer/Jak
For those few minutes after the Death Ship destroyed all the stars, we were the last particle of reality in the universe that used to contain the richest and most beautiful civilisation that-well, that I have ever known.
And then we escaped. We rifted through the nexus of all the realities which I later learned was called the Source. The region of space where all the many universes were, once, spawned.
And found ourselves in another universe. Much like our own. Stars. Planets. Civilisations. All were to be found here.
I saw it all through Explorer’s eyes and remote sensors; and I tried not to think back to what I had lost.
Any trace of the ship? I asked Explorer.
None.
The news was dire. But I could not bear to linger on it. Instead, I focused on the one positive thing: I was alive.
And so for one glorious moment I savoured what it was to be alive!
The moment passed.
The corpses?
They have not yet decayed.
Let me see them. Give me access to the Hub cameras.
No.
I insist.
No purpose will be served. We need to plan.
And so we did.
My name is Jak. I was, once, a Trader.
But that was many years ago. Too many years ago to count. And indeed very many of those years-well, I can no longer recollect them. For the actual memories of much of what I have done, I have to rely upon the computer mind which is part of my consciousness and my being, but which still feels alien to me.
I was once a Trader. Then I was the Master of an Explorer vessel. And now I am a Star-Seeker. I! A mere-male. But that is my destiny and my curse.
And, for anyone who can hear, or read, or decode this message bound into the ripples of reality, here is my story.
It is a tale too long to be told in full. Some of I have already told you about, or parts of it at least; the experiences and companions that burn bright in my memory-the wretched FanTangs, Averil, Mohun, my betrayal and flight from the Trader Fleet, Albinia, the ship, Phylas, Morval, Galamea, the shocking genocide of the FanTangs. Some of it however I was mad for five hundred years, and that is when I lost most of my memories. During that time I-no, that cannot be recalled. We pursued the Death Ship. We encountered many-no, too much, too much. I am drowning in years, and half-forgot horrors.
But there was a particular moment when it all changed. When my old self died and the new self was born. I can recollect that much.
It happened soon after we arrived in our first new universe, after pursuing the Death Ship, and failing to find it. It was when Explorer explained to me her dark plan.
It was a coldly logical plan; but driven by some kind of strange machine-mind passion. I can only suppose that Explorer’s programs were designed to ensure she never faltered in pursuit of revenge for a wrong done against Olara.
I was the flaw, you see. I was nothing but a weak, injured, fallible organic creature who lacked the necessary strength to endure the mission ahead of us. We Olarans are a long-lived species; we can live many hundreds of years. But like all that is flesh, eventually we decline and die.
But in the current circumstances, Explorer had remorselessly explained to me, death was not an option.
Because, to pursue the Death Ship, she told me, we needed time. Time to search. Time to seek for clues. Time that might well be measured in aeons not mere years. The Death Ship it seemed could travel for ever through the many universes; and so must we.
But I had lost limbs, I had suffered internal injuries. And rather than healing me, and coaxing a few more centuries out of me, Explorer wanted to replace my body parts with more robust alternatives. A metal heart; a nervous system made of robotic components; eyes that saw through Explorer’s eyes; a mind that co-existed at all times with Explorer’s mind.
Explorer wanted to let my body die, and yet keep my mind and my rage intact.
And meanwhile, as all this was discussed and decided, all around me the corpses of Phylas and Morval and Galamea and Albinia were rotting. Microbes in the air fed upon them; their flesh had turned to mush. But in due course Explorer would use the water jets to sluice their flesh away. And then she would drain the oxygen to kill the microbes. And then she and I would be immortal.
Why do you need me?
I recalled vividly asking her that question.
Why do you need me? You could take revenge alone. You could let me die and still pursue the Death Ship.
Her reply had chilled me, crippled and despairing as I was.
The answer to your question is: I do not need you, Jak. You contribute little to the running of this ship. Your mind is weak. Your resolve is feeble. Your body is dying, from inevitable age and from your terrible injuries. My sole purpose now is to take revenge for what these creatures did to the Olara, and for this I do not need you at all.
Then why do you want me?
Revenge is not enough, Star-Seeker Jak. Someone must bear witness to that revenge. And that must be you. For you are the last Olaran left, in all the universes. So bear witness, Jak. That is your task, and your inexorable duty.
Explorer’s plan was a good one; and so I agreed to it.
And thus I died.
And I also survived.
There was nothing left of the old me now, except for the brain-of-Jak connected to the ship’s mechanical mind.
Explorer repaired the hull and all her damaged machinery and weapons and restored the engines to their full power again. She closed down all the areas of the vessel that we did not need. She instructed the armoury to fabricate more weapons and vast amounts of ammunition and energy-stocks, and to expand and enhance the hull. She fortified our force shields. She created more robots to service the ship, to replace those destroyed in the battle. She turned herself from an Explorer vessel into a dedicated fighting machine.
I contributed little to all this, except strength and focus of emotion. For in this one respect only, Explorer was wrong. My mind may be weak, true; but my resolve is not feeble. So yes, Explorer is the mind and the body of our new warrior-self; but I am the passion that keeps us on our course. I am the flame that lights the wood that burns the forest. I am a creature beyond Olaran now; an immortal essence.
For I am become Hate; a Hate that, until it is sated, can never die.
Our journey began in that first universe. We dwelled there for a hundred years, cruising from planet to planet, in search of the Death Ship.
And we did not find it. A futile fruitless search.
It is hard to convey how truly painful was that utter bathos. To go from a white heat of rage to-ordinariness. It was not tragic; it was merely banal.
However, while in this new universe Explorer and I studied planets, catalogued civilisations from afar, and we even made direct contact with one such species of sentients. For we encountered an exploratory space ship crewed with bipeds who found us altogether most exotic and strange; a man-machine with a scorched hull and a crazy passion to pursue an evil black-sailed ship!
I became fond of these bipeds; they were curious, witty, and intriguing. And, if I hadn’t been so very insane, I would love to have joined their fleet, to spend my days once more seeking out new civilisations. For though trading was once my passion, I had come to care more about discovery, and about life in all its many forms. Explorer had calculated for me the odds o
f us finding the Death Ship in one of these many (but we could not know how many, or indeed if there was any limit to them) universes; they were not good odds. Even if there were less than an infinite number of such universes-the chance of stumbling upon the one, the very same one, as the Death Ship occupied, were almost laughably small.
So Explorer asked me if wanted to give up our pursuit. I was, after all, still Master-of-the-Ship. I could, in theory, abort her programming. But I refused. We would not falter in our purpose, even though our failure seemed inevitable.
And so we travelled on; and the curious bipeds went about their business. They were of a species called Cruxes. I felt they had potential.
And then the stars in our universe began to go out.
Once we realised what was happening, ours was a desperate scramble to return to the area of space from which we had entered this reality. We rifted ceaselessly; hurtling through un-space with a reckless disregard for the agonies of improbability. As parts of us died and were mangled, Explorer replaced them with identical components. A human crew would have been killed outright.
By the time we had returned to our starting place, the Universe was nearly dead. And so we sought the same gap in space we had found before; and we rifted; we entered a new reality, with moments to spare.
Explorer had by then added twenty sentient species from this universe to our extensive Olaran archive of civilisations.
And, once we entered our new universe, bitterly lamenting the death of the reality we had just fled, Explorer created a new file category; the Log of Lost Civilisations. There were twenty-one of them so far, including our own.
We have been pursuing the Death Ship ever since.
BOOK 7
Sharrock
I stood in the grass amphitheatre surrounded by a baying, howling mob.
The arboreals led by Mangan were throwing rocks at me. Fray was roaring with rage, scratching the ground with her front hooves. The Quipus were assailing me with deadly five-fold sarcasm, screaming at the top of all their voices. And I was damp from the envenomed spittle spat by the serpentines, which made the bare flesh of my legs and arms and face sting.
Then I sensed someone arriving behind me; and from her stench, and the characteristic sound of her tentacle-loping gait, I realised it was Sai-ias. Back after all these many cycles.
But I did not turn around. Instead, I carried on with my angry tirade, carefully making eye contact with my adversaries, and ignoring the many intemperate and vicious heckles; even those relating to the sexual morality of my beloved wife.
“-this day is an opportunity for-” I tried to say.
“-fucking turd-brain arse-kisser-” raged Mangan.
“-a chance for us, to discuss-” I persevered.
“-no point, no fucking point, you fucking no-brained imbecile-” That was Quipu Five or Four, I could never tell them apart.
“-issues, scientific matters, or-”
My words were drowned out utterly by screams and shouts and words of abuse.
“What’s the father-fucking point! Djamrock had the right-”
“-philosophical concepts, stop it all of you, listen-” I persisted.
“The Rhythm of Days, I shit upon the Rhythm of Days!”
“-to me, I implore you to-”
“-masturbatory self-deluding biped fool-”
“-coward-”
“-time-waster-”
“-lick-cock! Lick-cock! Lick-cock! Lick-”
A stone hit me on the temple. I tottered at the blow, which fractured my skull and blinded me in one of my eyes. Then I ducked to the ground, and came up holding the stone. “This stone,” I said. “Look at it!”
Shit balls were hurled at me by the arboreals; some splashed messily upon my body, others, the tight-compacted balls, broke my bones agonisingly. But this time I didn’t even bother to dodge. I was drenched in brown excrement, my ribs had doubled in number, and blood was streaming down my face.
“Why bother, Sharrock?” said Fray, with just a hint of sympathy. “Even the old bitch herself doesn’t care! Look. She’s back now! But she fucked away just when we needed her! “
And now I turned, and looked at Sai-ias, and saw in her ghastly but (to my one eye) strangely beautiful features how distressed she was; and wondered what had caused her such pain. And then I turned my gaze back to Fray.
“Speak with respect of Sai-ias,” I said quietly; and Fray was silenced.
As a result of my rebuke to Fray, the clamour of the mob too was dimmed, so that I could at least hear my own voice and recognise it as mine.
“Sharrock, what are you doing here?” asked Sai-ias; and her voice was weary.
“I am merely,” I said, “asking a question.”
And I turned in a slow circle, making single-eye contact with as many of the malignly ignorant fucking aliens around me as I could. And then I attempted to give the finest and most rousing and most inspiring battle speech of all my life! Except that this speech was not about battle at all.
“This stone,” I said quietly, dropping it to the ground. “Let us ask ourselves; why does it fall?”
At that moment, a total silence descended; a silence born, I feared, of bafflement. For who in all fuckery cared about why stones fall?
“In my civilisation,” I persevered, “we have ‘downwardness,’ as the principle that explains why objects fall, and how planets remain in their orbits. Downwardness is the consequence of distortions in the cloth that comprises space and time. And so it must be on this ship! Our world is on the inside not the outside of the globe, but downwardness still pertains!”
The silence changed, if such a thing be possible, in timbre; it was an angry and resentful silence now.
But, as I had suspected, if you say something idiotically wrong in front of a bunch of incredibly brilliant scientific minds, there’ll always be someone to pipe up and contradict you. And thus it was that one of the Quipus spoke:
“That is nonsense! It’s a different phenomenon entirely!” said Quipu One, angrily. “We’re on the interior of a spaceship travelling through space; not on a planet orbiting a sun. This illusion of ‘downwardness’ as you call it must be what we call Madlora force.”
I turned to him with a smile. “Ah,” I said, “perhaps that corresponds with what we Maxolu call whirling force.”
“Most likely,” said Quipu One, huffily.
“That makes more sense!” I said. “A timely correction, Quipu. But how much force? How fast must our vessel rotate to create this illusion of downwardness?”
Quipu shuffled, and his five heads bobbed in disharmony, a clear sign that he was in a state of inner turmoil.
“All this has been calculated,” said Quipu One.
“The figures are recorded in my brain,” said Quipu Two.
“Since we have no paper!” grumbled Quipu Three.
“We have plenty of paper, but you stubborn four heads keep wasting it on blasted books of fantasy that no one ever reads!” grumbled Quipu Four.
“The walls of my cabin contain the equations which describe our world in its dimensions, velocity, constitution and overall mass,” contributed Lardoi, a small brown ground-hugging creature with twin snouts and fingers that could write like pens.
“All this has already been done, you fool, Sharrock!” raged Quipu Five.
“In a hundred years on this world,” said Lardoi, “I have considered and solved every scientific question that can be posed about our situation; your words are belated, and futile.”
“Teach me what you know then,” I said.
“Why?” asked Lardoi scornfully.
“Because,” I said, “I may have spotted something that you missed.”
Lardoi literally hopped with rage at my words. I stifled a smile.
“That is not even remotely credible!” said Mangan with contempt. Mangan was a mathematician of rare genius, so I had been told, to my considerable surprise. “You are just an ignorant warrior!” Mangan continued. “O
n this ship you will find the greatest minds in existence, and we have applied ourselves to all these topics with no possibility of error.”
“Yes, but have you unified the scientific theories of all the different species?” I asked.
“We have,” said Lardoi, proudly.
“Have you created a single mathematical system that encompasses all those different paradigms?”
“We have,” said Quipu One.
“Have you discovered the secret of the translating air?” I asked, and Quipu’s head trembled with annoyance.
“We have not,” conceded Quipu One.
“Then there is much to do,” I concluded crisply.
“It is an impossible question to solve!” Lardoi protested. “We have no evidence. No theory can explain-”
“Then let’s find a-”
“It’s a waste of time,” snorted Lardoi. “The only sensible approach is to-”
All spoke at once; the words overlapped and became a cacophony in my ears. Mangan berated Lardoi for her stupidity; Quipu’s heads contradicted each other. Then other voices joined in; ten, twenty, thirty, forty of them; then a hundred and more. All the intellects of this interior world joined in an angry debate, wrestling with problems, complaining about the absence of data, and mocking the inadequate and pin-brained extrapolations of others!
And thus the angry mob that had been pelting me with stones and shit had become a scientific forum. The lost and angry creatures of this ship had been united, once again, in a common purpose: the exploration of knowledge, the pooling of insights, the posing and testing of hypothesis and theories.
And I turned to see Sai-ias watching me. And I saw her gaze soften, as she realised what I had just done.
For I had reinstated the Rhythm of Days. I had turned Day the Last into what it always used to be; a chance for minds to engage with other minds in the solving of the darkest, deepest mysteries of the multiverses.
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