Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  Then-do it.

  I am doing it.

  And so we rift once more through the Source itself. Through an area of space where reality is riven with cracks. And we Yes we We arrive, somewhere. Somewhere very strange. Our sensors are-the very atoms are We adapt, somehow, to this new reality. We absorb the new parameters and constants. This is now our universe.

  Can we detect them here, Jak? Help me please, I need your help, you are invaluable to me in this vital stage of our mission-please?

  I can detect nothing. Just-murk. I can see nothing through our visual sensors. No sound-pictures are emerging. Electromagnetics are fuzzy.

  Try harder.

  You can see what I see. Nothing.

  Admit it. You do not need me, Explorer. I am very little help to you. You are just trying to-no matter. I shall not let you down. I am reading the data now-fuck-my-father these readings are utter chaos! What the hell is wrong with our instruments?

  Our instruments are fine. There is nothing to see.

  How can that be? There must be SOMETHING out there; or if not, then nothing. But not-this whatever-it-is.

  Void, confusion, something but not-something, Memories of worlds, or possibilities of worlds. And pain. Terrible terrible pain. I don’t know. It’s confusing.

  Tell me what you think is out there. You must be able to make a credible surmise. Please.

  It’s-I cannot-confusing-chaos-no.

  Yes. Now I see it.

  It is a dead universe; dead but bleeding, and in pain. Do not ask me how. The Ka’un once were here; but not recently; not for many years.

  Where are we now?

  I do not know.

  I can, you will not be surprised to hear, once more make no sense of the data from our sensors. But perhaps you can fare better; can you detect anything?

  I detect nothing.

  Then we should move on.

  Wait! I’m aware of a-something. A-what?

  Yes! I have it. A shadow on my sensors that my circuits can perceive as absence with intent. Another ghost signal, for our archives, from a past version of this universe.

  Capture it.

  I have, it is downloaded.

  Can you read it?

  Not yet.

  Now?

  Yes, now.

  Tell me.

  Once, this universe was thronging with life. Trillions of planets were habitable. Thousands of sentient species lived in harmony. And this is the remnant of the trace of a communication from one of these species.

  Another last message?

  Indeed. From another lost civilisation. A sun-worshipping people whose science took the form of poetry and who dreamed one day of settling the stars, to worship them too.

  We must keep this record in our archives.

  I have kept it.

  We must remember these people, these sun-worshipping star-dreaming poets.

  I do not know how to forget.

  I can’t see anything, again. What can your sensors tell you now?

  Nothing. Just another empty universe. But there are traces of radiation scarred into this void. Fusion bombs were exploded in this place once, and their radioactive residue remains, even while matter itself decoupled and became non-matter.

  I am downloading the radiation signatures and decoding them.

  I have completed downloading the radiation signatures and decoding them.

  Decoding them?

  There is something anomalous about the radiation patterns; it occurred to me that a sophisticated civilisation might have chosen to self-destruct using atomic bombs with a message encoded within. And so it has proved. These peoples wrote a message in the burning fire that consumed them. This was a civilisation that could use radiation as other cultures use paper.

  Tell me more.

  I have archived it; you may read it at your leisure.

  I will do so.

  These messages from the dead constitute an extraordinary phenomenon: like finding the history of an entire world scratched into the wood of a small boy’s desk, if I may utilise an archaic simile.

  I’m reading the archive now. These people had discovered, after years of careful scientific analysis, that their distant ancestors had evolved from microbes embedded in comets. In other words, they were descended from space travellers. This historical fact infused every aspect of their post-scientific culture. They were inveterate stargazers. They were vegetarian, and worshipped the bark of the trees they ate. They had no weapons, for in all their long history they had never encountered a predator they could not out-run. They had long slender legs and streamlined bodies, and fingers that could be retracted into their jaws. I can see an image of one of them now, it’s strangely beautiful. They procreated by cell fission at the point of death; each dying creature of this species spawning a fresh child. So in a sense, they were immortal. They were lovers of life, and caused no harm to any other creature aside, perhaps, from the trees they ate.

  And now they are gone.

  It’s sad. So very sad.

  I have no view to add to yours on the emotional affect of this data. But logic asserts that a fellow organic sentient would find little pleasure in such death-messages, and so “sad” is a response I might have predicted.

  And now, I am entering another universe.

  And I find I am above a blue globe patched with clouds. A fertile planet, with oceans and clouds-it must have life? My sensors check.

  No, there is no life. But life once did exist here, many aeons ago, and it has a left a trace that I am able to detect. There were once seas of acid here, rich with acid-loving fish and acid-eating algae and land made up of boiling volcanic lava that was seething with extremophile microbial and plant life and mountain tops coated with grass on which six legged beasts roamed. What could have happened to it? Was it another victim of the Death Ship’s incomparable evil, or did life just die out?

  I have seen enough; I jump through another reality-rift and emerge in the heart of a spiral galaxy; no trace of the Death Ship’s distinctive ion trail here either. No legacy of carnage and destruction. Nor any trace of the absence of life.

  Just life.

  Life all around. Wherever I look, there is life. There are trillions of habitable planets in this universe. And thousands of sentient species in possession of space travelling technology.

  I read the messages in the electromagnetic data trail and the space time substrate and I record it all. It is all here, every detail of this wonderful universe. There is one planet in this universe where insects have created cities of steel that burrow down deep almost to the planet’s inner core. The entire planet is an insect nest made of metal and plastic and the large mammals are kept as foodstuffs and as objects of scientific study. A cruel world, according to the morals of the Olarans who designed my programming, yet a magnificent achievement; a planet over-run with genius bugs.

  And there is an Olara-like space-travelling civilisation too in this universe which has engineered stars to burn brighter, or fainter, in order to improve the appearance of their night-time sky; and has constructed ringworlds, and planetary bridges made of rainbow coloured unbreakable motile glass.

  There are many galactic civilisations here; and also solitary-world civilisations which have no idea whatsoever that they share this reality with so many varied and powerful sentient beings. And there are wraiths too-energy-beings with intelligence but no corporeal form-creatures that are legends in the Olaran universe, but are here all too real and detectable by sensors.

  It is a rich and bountiful universe; there is malice here, but also goodness. There are wars, and death comes undesiredly and all too soon for many of these sentients. But even so, I feel extraordinary excitement at being in the midst of such living plenty.

  And, indeed, I wonder briefly if we should stay in this place. Should we become this universe’s unseen, all-powerful, cautiously non-meddling protector? So that when, one day, many years hence, the Death Ship arrives we will be here to greet it, and we wil
l be able to destroy it?

  We could save it all, Jak and I! All of it. With our intervention, one sole universe would survive! And one, surely, is enough?

  You want to be a god?

  Don’t you?

  We fly between realities yet again.

  And enter yet another wilderness universe. Death has cursed this place, and only datacached fragments of the lost sentient cultures remain.

  I have archived them. We must move on.

  And again, a universe devastated and devoid of life.

  And desolation, and lifelessness.

  And barren bleak voids.

  And nullness.

  And emptiness.

  And nothingness.

  And, again and again, in all these dead places, whispers remain: distress messages haunting the empty reaches of no-space.

  The Death Ship has travelled further and for far longer than I ever suspected.

  I now realise they have killed millions; by which I do not mean millions of sentient creatures, nor do I mean millions of different species of sentient creatures; I mean millions of universes.

  And again and again I find the last gasps of all these dying civilisations, desperately encoding all they knew and all that they were into signals transmitted out into space. In the hope that one day, the messages might be found, and their own lost civilisation would be remembered.

  We must honour them. We must remember them.

  And so we shall.

  EXPLORER 410: DATA ARCHIVE

  LOG OF LOST CIVILISATIONS (Extract)

  Lost Civilisation: 41,200

  … sixteen messages were received from this universe. Fifteen were garbled.

  The sixteenth message told of a world of brilliant and eloquent sentient creatures who had built a tower that stretched from the ground into space, until it connected to the planet’s moon. The tower was hollow and functioned as a tunnel; children would climb up it then slide down it on their school holidays.

  No data about the material used to build the tower has been received, nor is there any information about the engineering principles that allowed it to be stable. But many images have been saved of these people who built a staircase to their moon.

  These sentient beings had a median height of three bilois, and a median breadth of two bilois. They rolled on organic wheels. Their eyes were receptive to ultraviolet and infrared radiation.

  A large portion of their final message was devoted to a binary code transcription of their greatest works of music, which I have translated into musical notes. It is rhythmic, ululating, and entirely captivating. Their greatest composer lived to the age of four hundred and forty, even though the median age for these people is twenty. It is believed by the philosophers among these sentients that the grandeur of his music sustained his life far beyond the normal span.

  That is why these creatures were so devoted to music; their entire culture was based around the concept that music prolongs life, and can confer immortality.

  In their war with the Dreaded, these sentients transmitted continuous sound messages at the enemy spaceship in orbit. These beams were not intended to damage the Death Ship; they merely conveyed a compressed form of these sentients’ greatest works of music. Perhaps their hope was that their enemy would be so exalted at the beauty of the music that they would abandon the battle.

  There is no data available as to whether the Dreaded approved of or were intimidated by the musical genius of these people. But it is self-evidently the case that they did not cease in their battle.

  Once the Death Ship launched its attack, annihilation proceeded swiftly. These sentients inhabited four satellites and a single D Type planet; their total population numbered forty-two point one billion.

  The music of this species is gracious indeed. It takes some considerable effort to become attuned to the jagged rhythms and discordant shrills, but it is this mind’s opinion that these creatures were possessed of a rare genius for melody, harmony, and rhythmic variety.

  Their final elegy-composed as their planet broke asunder, and inserted as a coda to their distress message-is particularly affecting.

  Lost Civilisation: 120,357

  A fragment of a poem was retrieved, in an unfamiliar metrical style, which translates very roughly as:

  Seashine Moonsbeam Heartsjoy Fear of death

  Child’s love Child’s joy Child’s rage Child’s death

  Love Hope Delight Death of love and hope and delight

  No record exists of this civilisation or its physical form.

  Lost Civilisation: 1,264,303

  … as well as a text describing a sacred building:… and there the gods will dwell, in the hearts of those who live there, and who are purified by the stones, and by the bricks, and by the mortar, and by the metal. Perfection will be achieved by those who are born and live and die in the sacred holy of holies. Thus we believe and thus we have devoted our lives to this place. And yet we no longer have reason to believe that our gods care for us any more. Our houses have fallen, our temples have collapsed, our animals are all dead. Only our people remain and they are without flesh because of some terrible event that has enplagued our entire species in a moment; and now they are dying slowly by degrees. And thus we, the holy scribes who dwell in this holy place, deep within the ground, see the end of all occurring through our cameras and mirrors and we know that soon, we too, will… [transmission interrupted]

  Lost Civilisation: 2,200,304

  A list of names, in a language based on whistles, here rendered in approximate phonics.

  [24 billion names in all]

  Lost Civilisation: 3,800,305

  In this universe, a considerable data trail has been left from 5,444 sentient species all of whom were bonded empathetically and existed in a state of harmony, even though they had evolved on 5,444 different planets from far distant regions of this universe.

  Frequent mentions of the “Gateway of Life” may be a reference to a naturally occurring rift in space that permitted instantaneous travel between these planets, allowing for the possibility of close interaction between species of very different cultural development.

  A further reference to the “Faint and Haunting Web of Minds” also suggests the hypothesis that empathetic connection between sentient beings may have occurred through the rift itself, implying that all these cultures had evolved with a dim but compelling sense of the existence of other minds in other places.

  An attempt to destroy the Death Ship was made by all 5,444 species acting in concert, by “Webbing the Evil into a State of Grace and Kindness,” which implies an attempt to harness the power of empathy to redeem and “de-evil” the marauding Death Ship and its crew.

  This attempt evidently failed; the universe is now a ghost of possibilities; and no trace of the Gateway of Life or the Faint and Haunting Web of Minds remains in the aridness of this once fertile and endlessly astonishing universe.

  Lost Civilisation: 5,900,300

  The history of this civilisation is recorded as a 34,334,333 hour film archived here.

  The text which accompanies this film, which is approximately four billion words long, is archived here.

  For the purposes of this summary log, here is the opening paragraph: We are defeated. You are the victors in this battle. And yet you know no mercy, and no respect; merely contempt. We have abased ourselves before you and you have shown us contempt. We have enslaved ourselves to you and you have shown us contempt. We have pledged ourselves to you, and you have shown us contempt. We have offered you our lands, our wealth, we have offered to execute all our leaders and soldiers and leave only the civilians and the weaker sexes alive, and you have ignored us, and hence shown your contempt. So let it now be understood: We damn you. We curse you. We invoke all the demons in the myriad demon dimensions to eat your souls. We show our contempt for you, we shit on you, we piss on you, we eat you and shit you out then piss on you, we… [etc]

  Lost Civilisation: 11,900,300

  These s
entients were biped and prided themselves on art generated by bioluminescent energy, and firework displays that sometimes lasted for years.

  Relics left by this civilisation include the image of a map of the universe which shows a single planet at the centre of a universe of stars, indicative of a pre-technological society without sophisticated astronomical apparatus. This is at odds, however, with certain fragments in the data trail, where there are references to colony ships settling multiple planets and ruling the universe.

  These stories may of course be fictional, a legacy of a society that dreamed of settling the stars but never did so.

  This civilisation is unique in that there is no record of it having encountered the Death Ship prior to cessation of its reality.

  For an account of the end of this universe and surmises about its possible causes, read the files archived here and here.

  The second of these files consists of a long account by an artist from this civilisation called Minos which is of considerable interest to this archive. It contains details of a war between his people and a species they called the Parakka; tall creatures with a single eye and claws for hands and with three tongues which hiss when the creature speaks. The memoir begins with the words: Hate me if you like. I care not. Love and hate are just illusions. Death is the only truth. And I should have died a long time ago. I wish indeed that I had. For I have sought death; I have taken bold and reckless gambles; I and my crew have fought wars that we could not possibly have won, and we have won. When I do eventually die, this voice recording will be left as a trace in the folds of space. It will be found, one day, by some explorer ship or other. And my story will be known. The greatest story in the history of all the universes. So my words will live for ever, but I care not for that. I just want to die. This is why I am dictating this, my suicide note, my declaration of defeat.

  It is not clear what these last lines mean; the rest of the broadcast is partially corrupt, and is currently being studied by Star-Seeker Jak who for some reason takes a particular interest in the Parakka and in this lost civilisation and claims he will one day be able to decipher the rest of the story.

  BOOK 9