Hell Ship

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. “On 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.

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.”