“And once I had realised this, I dived down. And down, and down, clinging on to the soft force projection field with my finger tips until I touched air. And then I swam under, through the gap, and into the water on the other side of the invisible barrier, and on to the beach itself.
“And I reached the other side, Sai-ias. I was this close to the Tower!
“And then I heard a sound again. Another proximity detector; and that’s when the real storms began. A wind started up; a wind that whipped my face, and made me stagger as I walked.
“Then I saw a giant approach. Ten times my height and made of metal, stomping towards the beach. I had no chance of defeating him, so I dived down into the water again, and swam back under the force projection field.
“And then I was in the midst of the storm; and the winds broke my bones and the water drowned me. And when I woke, I saw your face glaring down at me. Never have I been so glad to see such a forsook-by-all-the-deities ugly fucking face as yours, Sai-ias.
“But there are tides, Sai-ias. And there is a way in. We can reach the Tower, Sai-ias. We can do it!”
I was stunned by Sharrock’s words, and for the first time in many aeons, I did not know what to do.
Should I convey this information to the others? Or keep it as a secret?
Sharrock had, I knew, been foolish in telling me so much. For the air that translates and that brings the light can also hear our every word. The Ka’un are like gods; they know everything that happens, and everything that is said. Which means they already knew of Sharrock’s venture into the Tower; and they knew too what he had just told me. We were both in deadly peril. Sharrock was an idiot if he didn’t realise this!
And I thought about the prospect of death-in-Despair and I realised I feared it. My life was bleak enough; but the alternative was far worse. For if the Ka’un caught me, and declared me to be a rebel and a trouble-maker, then they would punish me in the most terrible of ways. Despair indeed might prove to be the best of my options.
“Do you see what this mean?” Sharrock said.
“Of course I do,” I said, calmly, hiding my terror.
“Then we must-”
“Wait.”
“We have to-”
“We have to wait. Let me think.”
He sneered. “I get it. You’re afraid. You-”
I expanded, five fold, in an instant, and fired my quills at the trees that lined our path, and they were impaled and screamed in agony, for they were sentient trees and I had not realised. And I howled, a low howl.
“Sai-ias…”
“I am afraid,” I conceded. If I were a biped, my face would have been moist. “I am afraid. Afraid. Afraid. Afraid.”
I had lived for so many centuries without rage, without a thirst for vengeance, and without any trace or remnant or shadow of hope.
And now I realised I was afraid of it; I was afraid of hope.
I made Sharrock pledge to keep silent. And I did not visit him for another twelve cycles, while I brooded about the problem: what to do about the Tower?
I walked up from the woods, past the seas of fire. Shoals of Bala Birds flew above me-a single gestalt mind in the bodies of a million tiny insects that flocked like shadows in the air. I saw the arboreals playing, flying from branch to branch with the aid of their prehensile tails, or in some cases prehensile teeth or noses.
I half-walked, half-slid on my carapace-segments past the shore of the lake where Sharrock and I had eaten false-fish, and I saw the charred remnants of a bonfire.
And then I saw Sharrock, squatted on a tree trunk, eating cooked meat. He sensed me before he saw me, and turned, and looked at me enquiringly.
“Sharrock,” I said to him, “Let us explore that fucking Tower.”
The sun was setting beautifully over the lake. The Tower was etched in silhouette against the richly red sky.
Then the lights went out.
Sharrock was tethered to my back, and I swam across to the waters of the lake. It was totally black now; not even a glimmer of light intruded, and there were no heat signatures to guide me. So I simply swam blind using my sense of motion to keep us on a dead straight line across the lake.
Sharrock murmured encouraging words to me, which gave me precious little encouragement; indeed, he was starting to make me feel like his beast of burden. The waters lapped around us. I found it disorientating to have no way of locating myself by my surroundings. I tried uttering a few shrill shrieks to see if I could echo-locate by them, but that wasn’t one of my best senses and sound, of course, doesn’t really travel so well at night in this place.
So we simply carried on until I crashed into an invisible barrier.
I crumpled, and rolled over in the waters, and splashed and spluttered myself into a floating position. Sharrock stayed balanced on my body, unperturbed and undampened.
“This is it,” said Sharrock, contributing nothing but the accentuation of the obvious.
I patted the barrier with two of my tentacles, and felt a sticky, soft surface. The force projection field.
“Proximity alarm has gone off,” said Sharrock; his hearing was most unnaturally acute, for I had heard nothing.
“I feel rain,” Sharrock added; I was too wet by then to tell. But I could hear the wind start to spring up.
Then Sharrock gripped me tight, holding me by my eye-fronds, the ends of which he had tied to his stomach like ropes; and I dived down. And down further, pawing the invisible wall with my claws-savouring the joy of water on my soft skin, an atavistic memory of life as a sea creature running through my veins-until suddenly the force wall was gone.
I was near the muddy bottom of the lake, and I ploughed a path through the mud and mess. Then my way was blocked by rock, as we struck the lake bed itself; but I tore at the rock with my claws, burrowing a way through, with Sharrock clinging on to me. After we had tunnelled for ten minutes or more through rock and mud, I aimed my body upwards; until we were in water once again.
We were, I was confident, now on the other side of the force shield barrier.
Swiftly, I kicked and splashed, using air from my gills to propel me through the water to the surface. And we broke the water’s soft barrier of tension and emerged into the air. Sharrock gasped for breath, but appeared unharmed by our long time underwater; and I marvelled at the remarkable capacity, for a land creature, of his lungs.
“Now,” I said, and Sharrock turned on the searchlight that Quipu had constructed, using parts of hull and metallic ore from the mountains. And the world was lit up: the Tower, looming above us, the purple grasses all around, and the brooding crag of the Tower’s rocky mount.
“I hear it,” said Sharrock. “The second alarm. Wait, it’s stopped. This happened last time too. Which means-”
“What?”
“Soon, the storms will really start to rage.”
We paddled to shore. The beach was lit by our searchlight. A gust of wind struck us, and I tucked Sharrock in a tentacle to keep him safe from the gale, and we looked around for the giant metal beast, but saw none such. As we had hoped, it was a creature that stalked the day, not the night.
Then we continued on.
We made our way up from the beach and Sharrock walked on my wind-sheltered side while I slithered towards the Tower, still following the light of Sharrock’s torch. The Tower was close. There were no more force barriers. We reached a gate, and I tried to crawl over it and failed, so I smashed it down. Then we reached the Tower, and entered through a stone gateway. We were inside the Tower now.
We were inside it.
The Tower at such close quarters had a delicate beauty that surprised me; it was made of silver brick that shone with newness, and the coloured-glass windows were decorated with scenes of biped heroism etched with stunning artistry. But the interior was barren-no rooms, no furniture, no people.
We explored the Tower, which was a vast complex of interlocking rooms the size of a city; but possessed of no furnishings, and no in
habitants. We trailed down empty corridors; stood within vast empty banqueting rooms; marvelled at the empty basements and the barren upstairs rooms which had no decor and had never been inhabited. This place was not and never had been lived in; it was certainly not the control centre from which the Ka’un steered and controlled the ship.
“I don’t understand,” I said at last.
Sharrock uttered a sharp sound; a laugh mixed with mockery.
“It’s a trick,” said Sharrock. “We use them in warfare all the time. Fake cities. Illusionary battalions. The Metal Giant too, that’s illusion. I saw it walk on to the beach the other day, over those purple grasses. But the grass there is intact and still high; no creature has walked here in many years. The Metal Giant is not real, it’s just a visual projection. More trickery.”
“But to what end?” I asked.
“Self preservation,” Sharrock explained. “You all believe the Ka’un live in this Tower. And if that were actually true, you might conceivably have found a way to beat their godsforsaken force field, and then swept through this place and destroyed them all.
“But these monsters are not stupid monsters. They’re not here, they’re elsewhere. Safe. Guarded.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Sharrock. “But do you see what this proves?”
I thought, long and hard and strategically. “No,” I admitted.
“They’re afraid,” said Sharrock.
“I do not comprehend.”
“Why hide, if they could so easily defeat you? They’re afraid. Of you. Their own slaves.
“And that means,” said Sharrock, “that if we ever can find the fucking corpse-sucking bastards, we stand a chance of defeating them.”
We left the Tower. The wind by now had risen to a frenzy, and rain was pouring in torrents from the clouds above. Though this rain did not actually land on us-it merely splattered on to the force projection field above us in the air.
But the winds were actually here, inside the dome-shaped field of force; and we knew that the Ka’un were using their air as a weapon against us.
“We should,” I suggested, “go.”
The journey back was harder. The storm was exceedingly powerful, and I had to fight every step of the way to return to the island’s pebbly beach. Sharrock was unable to stand against the gale, so I held him in my tentacle; but even I could barely propel myself against the walls of wind that enveloped me. And bizarrely the winds could change direction; no matter which way I turned, I was battling against the wind.
Eventually however we reached the beach and I dived back into the waters of the lake, which were wildly turbulent. And then dived to the bottom and returned along the crude tunnel I had ripped out of the lake bed, that took us under the force wall.
And once when we were back upon the lake itself, the tides were still against us, and were ferociously powerful; it took almost all my strength to swim against tide and wind in the direction of the land.
However a mere storm had no power to hurt me; and Sharrock was by now hugged tight against my chest, protected from it all.
As I swam, I thought about the Tower, and the pathetic deception the Ka’un had practised against us; and I began to see Sharrock’s point. Now, for the first time in all my years on this ship, the Ka’un did not seem to me to be all-powerful. Perhaps they really could be My thoughts were savagely interrupted, for the gales intensified and became a tornado; and spiralling currents of air caught us up and threw us into the air. And we were flying now, higher and faster and higher still; and then we crashed against the hard surface that I knew was the roof of our world. The impact shocked me, I began to fall, Sharrock by now was just clinging on numbly, unable to speak.
I tried again to right myself, and glide; but I was spun in a helical path by winds so powerful they threatened to rip the cape off my body.
So instead I flattened my cape against myself and made myself as streamlined as I could, as if I were swimming through the deep ocean. And I allowed the winds to lift me up, and dash me down, and crash me from all sides.
And so, all night long, we flew in the midst of a hurricane, deafened, unable to see, battered this way and that.
Then, when the sun arose, the storm started to abate. And I went into a free fall. At the last moment I managed to spread my cape and we glided safely down to the mainland.
Sharrock was unconscious, though alive; his clothes had been torn from his body and his skin had been ripped from his back. I could see the white bone of his spine. His supporting frond tether had broken; but even so, he had managed to cling on to me and never let go.
I carried him to the well of life and lay him down there and rolled him in. The blue waters turned red and Sharrock spluttered. But I made him lie in the healing waters until the skin on his back had grown back, and his broken bones were beginning to heal.
“So where are they?” I asked.
Sharrock smiled, as if he knew something that I didn’t.
“It’s a total mystery to me,” I confessed. “The Ka’un do not dwell in the Tower; they are not under the lake; they do not exist in the mountains or the Valley. I know every inch of this world! Where are they?”
And Sharrock pointed up, to the clear blue sky.
“Up there. Beyond the sky. That is their world,” said Sharrock.
“Beyond the sky is space,” I protested.
“A second hull. It’s the only explanation.” He drew the shape in the sand: a circle surrounded by a larger circle. “Picture this: we dwell in the interior world; but above and around us here is the exterior world, where the ship is controlled, and where the Ka’un make their home.”
I looked at the shape:
“We are a world within a world,” I said, marvelling.
“Yes,” said Sharrock. “And all we have to do is find a way through to the exterior world that exists between our sky and the ship’s hull, where dwell the Ka’un. And then we shall-”
“Slay the evil bastards?” I suggested.
“Slay,” agreed Sharrock, “those evil world-killing bastards.”
Jak/Explorer
You should stop now.
Stop reading Jak.
Read no more. It’s not helping you. You cannot I have to know.
No purpose is being served. You are merely I have to honour them. Every one. Every creature lost, I must at least know the name of its species, and one fact at least about it. Is that too much to ask? That one fact about an entire species will be remembered for all eternity.
That will drive you mad.
Again.
Jak?
Jak?
In this archive are riches from the multiverses; for ever gone.
EXPLORER 410: DATA ARCHIVE
LOG OF LOST CIVILISATIONS (EXTRACT)
Lost Civilisation: 12,443
SPECIES: The Dia
MORPHOLOGY: Unknown, but small in size … a formidable database listing every single species on every single planet explored by these remarkable sentients.
The full database is archived here; it goes into minute and sometimes pedantic detail (twelve million categories of dotted markings upon skin) and does not include any useful description of the Dia’s own form, shape, and nature.
Highlights from the database of species known to the Dia include:
Kaolka: small toad-like creatures that could leap up into the clouds and eat birds with a single gulp (on the planet D12132 if mapped according to Olaran model of stellography-Dia name not translatable).
Shoshau: creatures made of slime without internal organs or eyes or ears who moved by binary fission and competed for land with vast flocks of aerials whose urine was toxic to the slime-beasts (on the planet Ff991). The Shoshau had, apparently, a song that was astonishingly sweet.
Seaira: translucent land-animals whose internal organs were clearly visible and who could soar like bats, and could focus sunlight as a lens to use as a weapon against predators (on the planet D9980).
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Bararrrrs: Insect-like creatures that lived for centuries and grew to the size of small rodents, then grew to be vast amphibious creatures, then carried on growing and ossifying until they became mountains; these mountains then served as nests for new generations of insects (on the planet R88).
Though the morphology of the Dia themselves was never defined, several clues indicate they were small, and unaggressive. ^ 1
Lost Civilisation: 22,399
SPECIES: Unknown
MORPHOLOGY: Unknown
Language of message untranslatable, but coherence patterns indicate it originated as an electromagnetic signal. As with 67.2 per cent of all messages, the lack of a hermeneutic prime number/alphabetical symbol/significant images key page makes it impossible to read the message.
Lost Civilisation: 33,445
SPECIES: Kaaaala.
MORPHOLOGY: Not specified but aquatic origin implies limbs that are evolved from fins.
This species left many messages caught in the folds of space, but this lament is the most haunting: Our planet is dying. Our people are dying. We are the last of our kind, and we are truly cursed by our own foul nature. Yesterday I saw a mob erupt and kill a pregnant female and rip her embryo from her womb and trample it into the dust. Such a horror appalled me but I know it is typical of our times. Such outbursts of violence are hardly new. We’ve all read our history books, and we know about the city riots of the sixth century and the country riots of the twelfth century and the class riots of the thirteenth century. Our history books are little more than a litany of murders, wars and mass uprisings in which the death toll can often reach the millions. Why are we such a barbarous species? Are we unique, in all this universe, in being cursed to kill our own kind? Some commentators blame the corruption of technology and science for our woes. And it is true that the invention of the projectile bomb, the road-side bomb and the extendable dagger have wrought havoc among our youth and our elders. My own grandfather slew a hundred innocent children when he rampaged through his former school with a multi-projectile gun and body armour. His age-rage was typical; our kind seem to evolve out of riotous youth into a tranquil middle age, only to descend once more into vicious anarchy once we are past the age of sixty years. But the death rate was even higher back in the long gone Old Days, even though knives and swords and axes were used instead of rockets and mortars and projectile guns. The streets ran purple with blood on so many occasions; and traitors and innocents alike were punished by the law by the most cruel methods, including beheading, eviscerating and [NOT KNOWN]. The biological determinists believe that our cruel nature is the result of our distant origins as aquatic creatures of the great oceans. For we are used to spawning, and shoaling, and dying en masse in the teeth of vicious sea predators. A million of our eggs will yield ten million or more children as they hatch in the nursery muds and we are accustomed to allowing nature itself to determine which of those children shall have parents-in other words, we let them fight it out until only the strongest new-born embryos survive. Perhaps there are other species who do not practise such a barbaric form of early nurture, who place more value upon the lives of their children. We are born to bloodshed, eating alive our brothers and sisters in order to survive. Is it any wonder that blood-lust remains with us all our days? There are deists, however, who believe we are dying as a species because we have been cursed by an unknown, omniscient creator, who spawned all the eggs of life and is now waiting gleefully to see which intelligent species will live, and which will die. We are pawns of a playful god, in other words, waiting to see if we live or die and not caring either way. When I was a young one I dreamed of travelling into space and discovering alien forms of life and being an explorer. Now, it is unlikely I will live beyond my sixtieth birthday. For the mobs are using hydrogen-fission weapons to attack their enemies; the end is surely not far off. We will kill each other off with our new bombs; we will destroy ourselves as surely as we destroyed our enemies. And if the world does survive-what do we have to look forward to? A slow decline into vicious, violent, gangsterish brutality? Will I end up murdering my own children, as so many of my older friends have done? What savages we are! If there are other intelligent species out there, then I thank my blessings we never encountered them; for they would be ashamed of us. We are nature’s runt; the worst, most violent species ever spawned. We do not deserve to live.
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