Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  In Sai-ias’s absence, her world had turned to anarchy. But now, order had been restored.

  And, eventually, as the babble continued, I walked across to Sai-ias, and stroked the soft skin of her face with my hand. The old Sharrock was gone. Today I was a shit-stained, blood-smeared orator who carried no weapons, other than his wits; and fought no battles, save the battle against sloth, bitterness, and Despair.

  “Sharrock,” Sai-ias acknowledged.

  “Sai-ias,” I said to her, warmly, “welcome back.”

  Sai-ias

  Sharrock was naked, his body marked with scars and muscle ridges; and he walked out into the lake and dived under the water. With a sigh from my tentacle tips, I slithered out to join him.

  Ah! The touch of water on my soft skin was sublime. I swam deep out into the lake, still underwater; and Sharrock clung on to me by my side-flaps.

  I surfaced, and he took deep breaths, and clambered up my body and stood upon my head Then he looked across at the Tower; his naked body gleaming with moisture, cleansed now of all the shit and blood.

  I wrapped a tentacle around his body gently and lifted him higher in the air; then began swinging him around in a circle.

  “This is how,” he gasped, “the whirling force creates-”

  “Please, you make my head hurt. Does this give you pleasure?”

  I swung him round and round in the air and he screamed and screamed as if in pain but I knew it was not pain. Finally I stopped and put him back on my head.

  “That was,” he gasped, “so fucking-” And he stood up tall and roared with pleasure, “-wonderful!”

  I laughed, and savoured his joy; his sensuality; his sheer delight at being alive.

  Sharrock was not of course aware I could do this; for I was eating his joy. Just as I had done with Cuzco during our act of sex. It is an ability my kind possess; intense empathy, verging on emotional telepathy.

  And thus, I could feel what it was to be, at this moment in time, a biped with hairless skin, alive to every taste and touch of the exterior world, naked and damp and with a pulse that raced and pounded!

  I would not, I decided, ever tell Sharrock about my sensual ecstasy this day. It would, I suspected, constitute a violation of his privacy that would affront him. And so I could never tell him that I had, vicariously, for these few exhilarating moments, experienced what it was like to be

  Sharrock.

  That night we slept, all of us who dwelled upon the Hell Ship, a long and dreamless sleep.

  And when I awoke, fear consumed me; for I knew what must have occurred during the first night’s sleep I had experienced in nearly half a century.

  Another Ka’un apocalypse.

  I carried Sharrock on my back to the Valley of the Kindred, and there we counted the Kindred warriors who were remaining.

  Fifty had been lost in our long night-which spanned weeks or even months of actual time. Twelve of the giant sentients were also missing. The grasses of the Great Plain had grown, the snows had melted on the mountain tops. Time had passed, but we knew not how much. And warriors had been killed in battles, but we knew not in which battles, or how long it would be before they were returned to us, rejuvenated.

  And then, to my dismay, I discovered there was a new one awaiting me in the confining cell in the corridor below my cabin.

  “Welcome,” I said to the creature, a white-hided beast which squatted on all fours and had heads at each end.

  “You bastard! You fucking bastard!” screamed the beast. “I will kill you and rape all your kin!”

  Sharrock was with me, at his own request; he wished to learn how this was done.

  “We are not your enemies,” said Sharrock patiently, “we are-”

  The white-hided beast charged him, and I grabbed it with my tentacle and held it aloft. Sharp blades emerged from the two mouths of the head that faced us; deadly and triple-pronged.

  “We are your friends!” insisted Sharrock, but there was a quaver in his voice.

  “I will kill you, all of you, all of you,” whimpered the beast which was, I realised, quite mad.

  “What can be done?” asked Sharrock.

  “The Kindred will hurl the body from the hull-hatch. Nothing can be done,” I said.

  Sharrock paused, and swallowed.

  “We cannot allow that,” he protested.

  “Really? Then you should stop it,” I suggested sweetly.

  “But-I cannot!” argued Sharrock, “I can’t fight the entire Kindred! There are still nearly a thousand of them remaining. It would be-”

  “Then you must allow it; the beast has to die.”

  “ You could do something. You could stop them. You could save-”

  “Save this mad gibbering beast? What would be achieved?”

  “Nothing,” Sharrock admitted.

  “Then nothing is what we can do.”

  Sharrock thought about my words.

  “So be it,” said Sharrock.

  The beast was gone; the cell was empty. I looked at the uninhabited room and wondered what kind of creature it had been, before grief had ripped away its sanity.

  Our world recovered; we never learned any more of the apocalypse in which our warriors had played a role.

  Sharrock asked me once about it; about what might have happened in the battles on the world of the four-legged two-headed sentient, and how the Ka’un had prevailed. I had no answer to give. We did not know. We simply did not know. So to speculate was futile.

  And so time passed, as time always does. We grew no older, no younger, no wiser. We merely were.

  Sharrock became my constant companion over the following many cycles; and a joyful time it was, often and for prolonged periods, insofar as “joyful” could exist in our world.

  We took part in the Day of Races; with Sharrock sprinting against the grazers and the pack predators and winning. However, he also rashly challenged Quipu to a test of mathematical acumen and lost, shamingly. Then he fought with sticks against Mangan and all the other arboreals; and won, triumphantly, without anyone sustaining any serious injuries.

  Sharrock debated science avidly each Day the Last; and I could tell he was humbled at the intellectual greatness to be found on the ship. And I showed him too the lower decks where Quipu had supervised the building of forges and electrical generators, using minerals and cannibalised hull metal and reconstituted doors complete with electronic locks and hydraulics.

  With these limited means at his disposal, Quipu had built electrical lights, torches, sound recording devices and books made up out of the barks of tree branches pulped and shaped and dried. And in these books, using ink taken from the blood of sea creatures and sessiles, Quipus One, Two, Three and Five had transcribed many of the great works of fiction of our varied species. Any sentient being who loved to read could peruse these tales of strange worlds and fantastical creatures. The Quipus wrote down their own tales about a variety of one headed monsters; Cuzco’s civilisation had myths about peace-loving philosopher kings; my own people wrote novels about creatures that burrow deep under the earth, for this is a thing we ourselves never did.

  Thus for a while-a long joyous while!-Sharrock was content.

  Then that familiar impatience settled upon him.

  And I began to fear the worst. For Sharrock was starting to brood and fester and-worst of all- hope. And my fear was that he would drive himself to the brink and beyond of madness. Or even, as had happened to Cuzco, into the pit of Despair.

  “Why,” Sharrock asked me, “the Tower?”

  His face bore the “curiosity” expression that I found so charming, and yet so worry-inducing.

  “It is a symbol set to taunt us,” I said patiently.

  “Fair answer. But why so visible? They could make their home in a mountain, and we would never know.”

  “That wouldn’t be sufficiently taunting.”

  “True, true. Except-” Sharrock’s mind was racing again.

  “We could be happy now
,” I pointed out. “We don’t need to fight, or worry, or scheme. We could simply accept our lot, and lives our days in peace and relative contentment.”

  “A fine philosophy,” Sharrock conceded.

  “But?”

  “But that is not a satisfactory way to live, for one such as I,” Sharrock admitted, almost sheepishly.

  Sharrock was already remarkably fit and strong, at least by biped standards; but every day from that moment on he swam in the lake for twelve hours or more.

  He slept; he swam; he consumed gloop and drank the water of life. He did nothing else. He was clearly building up his strength for his next great adventure; but he would tell me nothing of his plans.

  I have to admit that I missed Sharrock during this period. I missed his companionship, his wit, his unexpected shafts of humour, his sensual love of life that leached the pleasure from every moment, and his excessive energy that made all the other creatures on the ship seem like sun-basking idlers. Sharrock annoyed me constantly and deeply, but he invigorated me also.

  But as the Rhythm of Days continued in its usual steady and pleasingly predictable way, Sharrock spent all his time swimming, until his body was puckered and white and his shoulders and arms and legs were even more disproportionately large than before.

  I knew of course what was going to happen next; it was hardly a challenge to my acumen to guess what Sharrock had in mind.

  Day the Fourth: a terrible storm raged, and most of the creatures on the ship huddled in their cabins. I however stood by the side of the lake, drenched and buffeted, staring out across the water.

  The storm continued for three days and three nights and then ceased.

  And, several hours after the rains stopped, Lirilla appeared in front of me as I was attempting to bask in sunlight, feeling my moist black skin drying up in the sun’s steady heat.

  Her wings beat against my face, and I blinked her into focus. “Come,” said Lirilla,

  “What is it, sweet bird?” I said, grumpily.

  “Sharrock,” Lirilla said.

  It was the news I had been expecting. Even so, dread consumed me.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “Dead,” Lirilla trilled.

  My soul lurched, and I got up and followed the bird; flinging myself through air as fast as I could until I reached the lake.

  The fish had found Sharrock’s body in the lake, and had summoned the arboreals, who had dragged him to shore. His flesh was puffy, and he was covered in blood. He wasn’t breathing. He had been dead, the arboreals told me, for about twelve hours.

  “How did it happen?” I asked, though I already knew.

  “He tried,” said Mangan, “to swim to the Tower.”

  Oh Sharrock! I raged inwardly. How could you do this to me! I cannot lose you, not so soon after losing Cuzco! And indeed, not at all.

  But I showed no trace of my turbulent emotions; for no one on this world expected me to have any such intense and tragic feelings; and I preferred it so.

  “I’ll stay with him,” I said, calmly.

  After five days of lying fully immersed in a brook fed by the well of the water of life, Sharrock came back to life.

  His eyes flickered and he coughed. I sprayed him with spirit-calming moisture from my tentacle tips, and forced well-water along a tube into his mouth. It would take a while for his broken bones to mend, but his skin was already back to normal and there were no signs of major brain damage.

  I hated the black nights on the interior planet but I was determined to stay with Sharrock until he was fully revived. I could imagine his fear at waking in the darkness and being alone.

  Even though he was still unconscious most of the time, I began to talk to him. I told him my innermost thoughts and fears. I told him of my love for Cuzco, and our single night of passion that had led to his stony death. I told him my fantasies of achieving liberation and of finding true love again; though I knew that such dreams could never come true.

  No one else had heard these words from me; and Sharrock was too groggy to understand. But I needed to tell someone.

  “Sai-ias.” His voice was a croak, but it filled me with relief.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  I dribbled moisture on his lips. He breathed slowly, and forced himself to talk:

  “I reached it, Sai-ias!” he told me. “I reached the Tower.”

  “I know.”

  “I-” He coughed and spluttered.

  “You stayed too long there; the longer you stay, the worse the storms,” I said, rather primly perhaps.

  He took deep breaths. Gathering his energies.

  “I know. But Sai-ias-I swam it! I swam around the entire island, touching the force shield at every point. If there had been a crack, a gap-I would have perceived it. I would have known. And I could see the Tower! And the pebbly beach. And the tides.”

  “Sleep, Sharrock. You have a long way to go before you are well.”

  “The tides, Sai-ias, do you hear me? The tides.”

  That day I carried Sharrock on my back to the well of life, so that he could drink its waters directly. I tipped a pail of water over his head and saw his skin start to regain its dark-scarlet colour. I sucked the water in through my own tentacle tips and felt my own energy grow.

  The water was, I knew, haunted by the spirit of the Ka’un; but it was also possessed of a truly magical power. It was the power of revival; water from the lake or from the rivers was merely water. This water however had the power to heal, and could even hold Despair at bay.

  “The sun,” said Sharrock.

  “Too bright?”

  “Warm,” said Sharrock. “It’s good.”

  Sharrock stood up totteringly, and eventually got his balance.

  Then he practised walking on his weak but now unbroken legs. It was clumsy, like a barrel turning corners, but he didn’t fall once.

  “You did well,” I conceded, “to swim to shore, through waters so angrily turbulent. Even though it took you several days.”

  Sharrock made the sound that I knew to be his laugh.

  “Once,” he bragged, “a warrior of my tribe swam the entire Halian Sea. And then, once he reached the other side, he slew a dozen warriors of the Southern Tribe.”

  I made a tinkling noise which I used with many bipeds to indicate my laugh. (In reality, for most species my laughter is of too low a tone to hear.)

  Then I stopped laughing, abruptly, and said: “Why?”

  Sharrock was disconcerted by the question.

  “There was a war,” he explained. “It was a noble cause. The warriors of the South had failed to pay fealty to our empire. War was inevitable.”

  “But was anything achieved?”

  “Much glory was got,” he said feebly.

  “The only glory is in love,” I told him, softly.

  “Not so!” Sharrock retorted.

  “You fool! You blood-thirsty savage!” I raged.

  Sharrock’s face was bright scarlet now with emotion.

  “You are a fool, your people were fools, I have no patience with you any longer,” I continued, unable to stem my flow of fury.

  “Maybe,” said Sharrock softly, “you are right. But Sai-ias-the tides! I saw the tides.”

  Over the days that followed, I nursed Sharrock. I brought him food, I bathed his body with healing waters. And I made him walk to strengthen his legs. I would slither along behind him, ready to prop him up with my tentacles if need be. But he resisted all assistance, and wobbled and waddled along the path that leads beside the well of the waters of life; the path that I had designed and which Quipu had built out of small jewelled stones hewn from the mountains.

  And as his strength grew, we talked.

  “Perhaps there is,” Sharrock said to me, “glory in love. But there’s no love here, on this weeping-tears-of-blood fucking ship. We are prisoners, and we have to kill our gaolers and escape.”

  “Impossible,” I explained, but he persisted in his folly.

/>   “Listen to me! You said there would be storms. And yes, there were indeed storms. You said I would not be able to reach the Tower. And you were right, I could not reach the Tower. There is an invisible shell surrounding it.”

  “So I am entirely right, and you are entirely wrong?” I summarised.

  “Hear me out! It’s more complicated.” Sharrock paused. He was out of breath. I expanded a tentacle until it became a chair for him to perch on. He sat on my limb. I listened, attentively, to his words.

  “Here’s the strange stuff. When I first touched the invisible shell, there were no storms. A touch of rain; no clouds; no more. But the longer I stayed, the worse the weather got. And I could hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  “A high-pitched whine. Like a nocturnal animal’s echoing cry. Or, more accurately, like a proximity detector. We used them to guard our buildings; it’s a simple electronic safety device. No magic.”

  There was an urgency to his tone; a certainty that commanded my rapt attention.

  “And I was so close, I could see the Tower clearly,” Sharrock continued. “It is made of silver brick; and is indeed a beautiful creation, tall and vast, yet seemingly gracefully slender, its oval windows filled with coloured glass. We have buildings in our cities of this shape, but this was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen.”

  As he spoke, I could picture the scene. Sharrock had the gift of storytelling, the ability to make you feel that you were there.

  “Above me,” he said, “flew the aerials but none of them could fly close to the Tower, as you know. But then I looked at the pebbly beach, and I saw the waves sweep over the pebbles. And I waited, treading water, for half a cycle until the tide had gone out and the full reach of pebbles was revealed.”

  And finally Sharrock reached his point: “The lake has tides! It’s an artificial effect, I assume the Dreaded are fond of waves. But the fact that the tide can go out on this pebbly island beach means-it means there must be a gap. An underwater path or route from the island’s shore to the main body of the lake. There’s a hole in the force projection field, in other words, below the water line.