Hell Ship

BOOK 4
Sai-ias

“Where are you talking me?”

“Not far. My cabin is here. Down the corridor,” I said.

Sharrock stepped anxiously along the circular corridor, struggling to keep his balance because of the steepness of the slope. The corridor was large enough to accommodate my bulk and that of Cuzco and the other “giant” sentients, as we are called. Sharrock was dwarfed by it, like an insect clambering across the hide of a huge and grossly fat land animal; or, indeed, like Lirilla dancing upon the backside of Fray.

He slipped, and fell, and scrambled back to his feet.

“Take care,” I advised him.

“I tripped,” he said angrily, “on that fucking slime trail you leave wherever you’ve fucking been.”

“It is an outpouring of my essence, not a ‘fucking slime trail,’ ” I told him stiffly.

“You fucking corpse-fucking slime-leaving freak,” Sharrock sneered.

I slithered on.

The circular tunnel expanded into a large circular atrium, and I spoke the code and a door opened in the wall. I slid inside and Sharrock scrambled behind me, and we arrived in my cabin, the largest on the ship, which also was a perfect sphere.

Sharrock stood and looked around and his breathing became irregular, and I guessed this was a visceral response to what he saw before him.

“These are my cabin friends,” I explained.

His face was calm, his demeanour relaxed, as befits a warrior; but I could tell that, beneath the mask, Sharrock was filled with fear.

“Hello there,” said Cuzco.

“Hi,” added Fray.

“You look like shit,” said one of Quipu’s heads-the leftmost one, Quipu One-unhelpfully.

“Welcome,” said Doro.

“Hello,” said Lirilla.

“I am privileged,” said Sharrock, with nary a tremor in his voice, “to encounter such noble creatures.”

Cuzco snorted with contempt; and Sharrock flinched, as smoke seared the air and Cuzco’s eyes radiated hate.

“In my world,” Cuzco said softly, “you would be carrion.”

Sharrock stared up at Cuzco, fearlessly. “You really are one ugly son-of-an-arsehole fuck, aren’t you,” he said marvelling. And Cuzco’s eyes blazed scarlet with rage and his back-body thrashed and his body-horns grew into long spikes, and his scales rattled, and all at once the huge circular room seemed too small to contain us all.

Sharrock continued to stare, with no trace of fear; ready to fight or to die; his body a veritable masterpiece of composure.

And finally, Cuzco gave ground: his body shrank, his back-body stilled, his scales became silent, his horns sank back beneath his armour, his eyes turned green again. And his tongue lapped the air, and we could see the jagged tongue-spikes which Cuzco, in the old days, would have used to suck the blood and the life out of any errant or impertinent biped.

But those days, as even Cuzco now acknowledged, were gone.

“Sit,” I said to Sharrock, gently.

That night, Fray told us a tale we had not heard from her before.

“This is the story,” she told us, in her booming low voice that always for me evoked the thudding of hooves on a lonely savannah, “of how my world was born. It is a story told to me by my mother, and her mother before her. It is our origin story.”

I curled myself up comfortably, and breathed air scorched by Cuzco’s breath, and kept an eye on Sharrock, who, I noted, was rapt and exhilarated as Fray eloquently spoke.

“We were born of the wind, so my mother said,” Fray told us. “The wind that blew from the north and crashed in great tumult against the mountains of the south. And then the wind’s angry tongue licked the rock, and the rock roared with pleasure, and split, and a grey wet mess of flesh was birthed. And that was us. The Frayskind.

“We were born of the union of the wind and the mountains; and our father the wind is still our friend. That is how we learned to hunt. We were slow and heavy and all the other creatures could hear us thundering after them, for we were never the fastest of beasts. But we begged the wind to howl and roar, and the grasses were whipped wildly by its gusts. And the animals we stalked could not smell us, for the wind conveyed our stench swiftly away, and they could not hear us, because the sounds caused by the wind were so deafening. So we thundered towards them and caught them unawares and ate them in our great jaws, and when we had digested them we farted loudly and long, to return the favour to the wind.

“And the mountains are our mother, and when the great Majai hunted us and killed us by the thousands, we took refuge in the womb of the mountains. Rents appeared in sheer cliff faces and we clambered inside the caves and we made our homes there for many hundreds of years. And while we were gone our father the wind roared and ripped the planet apart and all the land animals died, including the Majai, and when we returned we were the only large land animals left alive and we were able to eat the thick grasses and the rich vines without any competition or threat from other predators. Thus were we saved by our mother the mountain.

“And to this day, I worship the wind, and revere the mountains. And I fart loudly, and long, when I eat. This is our origin myth. And,” Fray continued, crisply, “it is based to some degree on historical truth. For the archaeological records show that in the ancient eras our planet was racked with terrible storms that destroyed all the major life forms apart from us, the largest land animal, and the clumsiest. But we survived because we cowered in caves and scrambled among rocks and when we emerged the wind was stilled and the land was fertile again.

“I am an atheist; I do not believe in the god of wind, and the goddess of mountain. But I love this story. It has poetry and beauty.”

“It’s a fine story,” agreed Cuzco.

“Aside,” said Quipu One, “from the farting.”

The sun rose; I watched with delight. And I felt a surge of anticipation. For today was Day the First; the day on which I explore the rich and varied habitats of our world.

Ours is, it cannot be denied, a small planet, easily traversed in a matter of hours if you can swim the seas, which I can. Or if you can plunge through the murky suppurating swamplands, which I can. Or if you are nimble enough to traverse the thick forestlands, which I am. The mountains are steep, and few land creatures can clamber up their sheer cliffs, but I am one such. And the valleys are dark and gloomy and raging torrents fill them, but I am easily able to ride the stormy waters and descend the waterfalls.

Day the First has always been my favourite day; I simply travel, from one end of my world to the other. And I am always tired by the time I retire to my cabin, where every night I desperately strive, but fail, to sleep.

That night, I brought Sharrock once more with me to my cabin. And he listened, with intense attentiveness, as Doro told his tale.

Doro talked, with quicksilver speed, of the joys of metamorphosis.

“I am this, or Icanbethat,” Doro said.

“Stone rock sand sea plant animal twig bug bird metal or anything at all ifithasthesamebodymassasIdo. You all know this,” Doro added, still speaking so fast that I was never truly sure if I had heard him speak at all.

“Look, look at me, look at me as I change,” he said, and Doro became a shimmering ball of light; it took a real effort to realise he still existed in solid form beneath the glittering rays.

“And look, looklooklook again.” And Doro became a crack in the floor, a complex pattern that was like bared raw mortar and that would be overlooked by any except the most attentive or paranoid seeker-of-life.

“And again.” And Doro became a shadow; the shadow of one of Quipu’s heads.

“And again.” And Doro became a sound in the night, and for some reason we could not see him, we could just hear his Click Click Click as he echoed past us.

“I have no stories to tell,” Doro said. Rock, shadow, noise in the night.

“For I am the stories that I tell.” Crack in the floor, flash of faint colour.

“I am any thing and I am allthings.” A twig; a cloud in the sky.

“Am I real?” Doro was no longer there.

“Or am I not?” And Doro was there again, a small shiny rock once more.

“Is this in your mind?” A miniature lake, set amidst mountains.

“Or do I, yes do I, no askyourselfthis, can I, really transform myself so?” A diamond, glittering.

“Or perhaps it is both: I am inyourmind, and reallytrue, both at the same time?”

Doro shapeshifted; and spoke, and teased; and delighted; he was a magician. In truth, we knew nothing of him: he seemed to have no inner life, no philosophy, no ideas, no curiosity. But he was articulate, and certainly intelligent in his own peculiar way, and in the service of his own peculiar purposes; and the marvel is that no creature could ever hunt or kill a creature like Doro. He was unfindable, elusive, unkillable.

Only the Ka’un could ever hurt one such as Doro.

“Is this Doro?” A rock. “Or this?” A plant. “Or this?” And Doro became a small, angry lizard-like creature with a forked tongue and staring eyes.

“Or this? Is this Doro?”

As I led Sharrock back to his cell that night, he quizzed me on my friends, and their worlds, and their powers. He was animated; full of joy.

But it was, I feared, the wrong kind of joy.

“With the strength of Cuzco, the power and speed of Fray, the shapeshifting magic of Doro, there is nothing we could not achieve!” he ranted.

“You want to declare war on the Ka’un?”

“Of course. Would you expect anything else-of Sharrock?”

“It cannot be done,” I explained.

“Of course not,” he said soothingly, his eyes ablaze. “I would not dream of challenging the authority of our gaolers. I am happy indeed to be a slave.” I recognise the deceit in his words; he was humouring me.

“I had hoped,” I said sadly, “that meeting my cabin-friends would have taught you to be like us.”

He smiled. “I yearn to be like you Sai-ias. Your humility inspires me.”

His tone was warm, his words were gracious; yet I knew contempt for me was in his soul. I found myself resenting this puny creature’s arrogant sense of moral superiority. I was old, and wise; Sharrock was by comparison just a child.

“I have much more to teach you,” I told him.

“I look forward to it with ‘joy’ in my heart,” said Sharrock, smiling even more broadly, whilst tauntingly throwing my own word back at me.

I ushered him to his confining cell. Sharrock lay down upon his bunk and I stared at him a moment: his disproportionately large arms; his torso deeply striated with muscle patterns; his long black hair; his piercingly blue eyes. Sharrock had a way of being still in a fashion that conveyed boundless inner energy; he reminded me of the many four-legged predators that stalked through the forests, who lived only to hunt.

I sighed, from my tentacle tips, sadly but philosophically; then I closed and locked the door.

Day the Second dawned.

For me, this Day is always an arduous delight. The Temple reaches nearly to the clouds now, it is a magnificent achievement and a beautiful one, and it will soon be finished. The final curved stones will be placed at the summit; and the rooms within will be decorated with the names and images of those beloved and mourned by our most gifted artisans.

But every ten years, to my infinite regret, it is decreed that the Temple is imperfect and must be demolished, brick by brick. And so we demolish it, brick by carefully hewn brick, until the ground is bare and the rocks have been returned to the quarries and smashed into fragments; then we begin again. A new Temple, identical to the first, is build with new bricks, and fresh labour; until magnificent imperfection is once more achieved; and then the Temple is once more destroyed.

This has happened, by my reckoning, at least twice ten thousand times.

I watched the sun rise over the Tower.

The Tower was a soaring magnificence of brooding tallness; its walls were made of grey brick mortared with gold; and it shimmered in the sun like the light in a lover’s eyes, or so I am told.

It was, without doubt, a creation of great beauty. And yet, forgiving though I am by nature, I hated the Tower with all my soul. For it was the fortress of the Ka’un, where our oppressors dwelled. The sight of it was a daily reproach to all of us; a reminder of their power, and our utter helplessness.

No one could ever reach the Tower. Many had tried, and failed. I knew all their names; they numbered scores of thousands; all doomed by the Tower’s wrath.

The Tower was there to mock us; it was a clear token that the Ka’un could never be defeated.

Nor, as I knew well, was there any way to escape from the Ka’un and the planet-sized spaceship they used as our prison. Many had tried that too; including myself.

For when I had first arrived on the Hell Ship I was full of a child’s blind rage at the killing of my parents and my people. And when I was told that my enemies dwelled in the huge Tower on the lake, I swam out to it in fury, determined to confront them; and was caught up in a huge storm. And, battered and appalled, I found myself entirely unable to reach the island’s shore, because of an invisible force barrier of some kind which surrounded the Tower.

So I returned to land and brooded; and then was told there was a way off the ship: through the hull-hatch in the vessel’s glass belly. Here it was possible to throw waste objects off the ship-such as bodies-and I excitedly made one of my fellow captives explain the mechanism of the hatch, and its inner cavity that was used to prevent air from the ship from billowing out into space.

And so one day I crept to the glass belly and entered the hatch; and secured myself in the inner cavity; then opened the outer door and toppled out of the ship into deep space.

This of course would have meant certain death for most species; but not for my kind. For we were once creatures of the sea who then journeyed to the land; and then over many years we made a second journey into space, in which bleak environment we can comfortably survive. So my plan was simple; soar off into the vastness of the universe and travel until I found another planet inhabited by my own kind. It was an idiotic plan-I was but a child after all!-for as I now know huge distances separate each star; and in any case, I had no notion around which suns the remainder of my people dwelled, or how to reach there.

But I didn’t care. I would rather, I recall angrily thinking to myself, die free than live a slave.

But the Ka’un were far smarter than I; and I soon discovered that their entire spaceship was surrounded by an invisible force barrier, of the same kind that encircled the Tower. Thus, after two cold and futile days trapped in space, I was forced to come clambering back on board and never spoke of it to anyone.

We could not fight; we could not flee, so I was sure that the only way was my way: Live each day, and enjoy it as best you can.

And to encourage my new ones into that contented and calmly resigned state of mind, I treated them gently at times, but at other times with implacable cruelty. For only in this manner were they able to learn the hard lessons that they needed to learn.

Kindness alone does not work; I have tried it and it has always failed.

Thus Sharrock, a nomad, had been deliberately kept by me trapped in a small confining cabin for many cycles. It was making him claustrophobic and desperate; he was by now talking to himself, and occasionally (as I could glimpse through his door) he became engaged in imaginary conversations with his lost loved ones. And so revenge was daily becoming less important to him than having at least some measure of freedom. It was all proceeding according to plan. And when I was with him, Sharrock’s rages were fewer; his language was becoming less coarse and offensive; the spittle associated with his ranting tirades was far less often spat in my direction. And so I decided he was now ready to venture out into our world, where he would discover what his life really had to offer.

I opened my eyes, after several hours of not sleeping, and I sighed.

Around me were the bodies of Fray and Quipu and Cuzco and Lirilla, all like me savouring the pleasure of pretending to sleep, in the dimly lit spherical cabin that was our home and womb.

There was no trace of Doro; then I noticed that Quipu had six heads. I was amused; Quipu hated that particular jest.

I left my cabin and made my way through circular corridors until I reached the confining cells. I could look through the metal of the door-though prisoners could not look out-and thus I could see that Sharrock was practising his combat moves, in the slowest of motion.

I spoke the codes that Gilgara had taught me so long ago, and the door slid open. Sharrock waited inside patiently, motionless now, poised for action.

“What do you want?” he said, puzzled, for I never came to him at this hour.

“Come with me,” I said.

I led Sharrock down another long corridor, past the numerous unoccupied cabins. Once, or so Quipu believed, the ship was equipped to carry colonists by the million, and these cabins were the lonely remnant of that time.

Finally, the white corridor walls came to an end and a single black wall was before us, blocking the way. “I am Sai-ias, four five six oh two one seven, let me through,” I told the wall, and it became a door, and opened.

I stepped through, and Sharrock followed. Then he blinked, and looked around.

The sun was rising over the empty lake; the clouds were stripes of scarlet-and-orange splendour; the silhouette of the Tower on its rocky summit loomed blackly against the dappled-redness of the sky. And I wondered once again if the colours of the dawn today were slightly different to the colours of yesterday, and the day before.

I noticed that a flock of aerials were hovering, warming themselves in the sun’s beams. And I glanced at Sharrock, and I decided that, despite his air of unimpressable contempt, he was awed at the sight.

“Is it an illusion?” Sharrock asked, with open astonishment.

“It’s a construction,” I qualified.

“The sight of it could, in some creatures, lead to a sensation of dizziness,” Sharrock conceded.

Then Sharrock stepped forward, still blinking in the glaring light, staring up at the empyrean. And that clever-thinking look came upon him again, as he analysed what he saw and tried to make sense of it.

“Artificial downwardness,” he speculated. “Whirling-force creates a…”

“I know nothing of such matters,” I explained warily.

“Downwardness is the compression of space,” Sharrock explained, getting into his stride. “It’s what keeps us on the surface of a planet. It’s why fruit falls. Whirling-force is-”

“I know nothing, and care nothing, of such matters,” I informed him, courteously.

“It’s a fuck-my-grandmother-if-you-have-a-cock-of-steel hell of a trick,” Sharrock said, admiringly. “How big is it?”

“In the units of measurement used on my planet,” I said, “It is a breath, or a tenth of a hope. According to the measures more commonly used on board the ship, it is one hundredth of one millionth the size of a yellow dwarf sun. Approximately the size of a typically-sized sea on what I am told is a ‘median sized’ planet. It’s possible to circumnavigate our world in five hours,” I added, “if you are a flying creature. Nine, if you ride the rails; and Fray can run it in less than two days, though that is exceptional.”

“A planet the size of a small ocean, but the people live on the inside,” Sharrock said. There was respect in his tone; and I knew he was consciously learning all he could about his captors and their technology. My eyes absorbed the view, for I took great joy in the image of my interior world. It was hard not to believe that the sky was about to fall down upon us; hard, too, not to marvel at the genius of a species that could build an entire planet to contain their slaves on the inside of a spherical spaceship.

“What’s that? The blurring?” asked Sharrock.

“Storms,” I explained. “Vast typhoons that prowl the northernmost reaches of the interior planet. Sometimes, the storms escape and entire mountain ranges are ripped to pieces, and the lake is sucked dry of water.”

“Why? Why build an artificial planet that has such terrible storms?” Sharrock asked.

“It may be, I am told, a design flaw,” I lied. The Ka’un loved to see things being destroyed: how could he not guess that?

“And how many different species exist here?”

“Many,” I said evasively; some find a tally of the number of defeated civilisations demoralising.

“And none of them are from my planet.”

“None.”

“Everyone died?”

“Everyone,” I explained, “except for you.”

Sharrock’s face was pale, almost pink. It became moist again.

“Let us explore,” I said, brightly.

We walked down to the lake and I dived into the waters and returned with a mouthful of wriggling fish that I spat out and gutted with my claws and offered to the startled Sharrock.

Sharrock stared at the eviscerated fish anxiously. “Are these not intelligent creatures, like you and I?” he said, warily.

“No, of course not,” I said. “I know all the sentients by name. But many of the fish in the lake, and the aerials in the skies, and a few of the grazing species, are just dumb beasts; and they multiply without restraint. We have to keep their numbers down. We sentients, however, cannot breed. Although the Kindred keep trying.”

“The Kindred?”

“The giant bipeds. There are a thousand or more of them, all the same species. Twice the size of you, with claws on their fingers and with one more eye than you have. They do not mix.”

“And how many other ‘bipeds’ are there?”

“Three hundred and four, of the hairless and tailless varieties such as yourself. You will be able to get to know them soon,” I said; though that was a lie.

“Good,” Sharrock conceded grandly, as though I were his subject; this was I realised an annoying habit of his.

Above us, dumb birds and smart aerials flew. The trees nearest us were purple sentients and were admired by all of us for their extraordinary intellect and wisdom. I warned Sharrock not to eat the berries, for that was tantamount to eating the gonads of a great philosopher. Arboreals of all sizes and colours perched in branches and swung from branches and seized every opportunity to stare curiously at the newcomer. Sharrock looked around at it all, appraising, memorising, undoubtedly awestruck.

“I’d like a swim,” said Doro, and Sharrock looked around, baffled.

I slithered across to the rocks, and picked up Doro-who was, as always, perfectly camouflaged. And I held him in the tips of two tentacles.

“How is he doing?” Doro asked.

“A talking rock?” Sharrock said sceptically.

“You’ve met Doro once before,” I explained. “The night I took you to my cabin.”

Comprehension dawned in his eyes. “The shapeshifter. I encountered another species like that once, while on a mission in the Lexoid Galaxy.”

“That is a tale I would love to hear.”

“And so you shall,” said Sharrock, with charm.

I hurled Doro into the waters of the lake, where he became waves.

Sharrock smiled. He was, I could tell, starting to enjoy himself.

My strategy was working.

“This tastes good,” Sharrock said, a little while later, chewing on the fish I had caught for him.

“It has no nutritional value,” I admitted. “The Ka’un alter the cells of these fish to be non-poisonous to all species, but our physiologies are so different we can’t hope to digest the flesh. It is the gloop we eat daily and the water from the well of life that truly feeds us.”

“The water?”

“It contains foodstuffs and minerals and hormones in solution form, and is able to alter its molecular structure to suit the needs of each of us.”

“Water can do all that?”

“The water and the air are what keep us alive.”

“How so?”

“They just-do,” I explained.

Sharrock laughed; and crinkled his eyes. He was, I realised, using his charm on me again.

“Perhaps, dear Sai-ias, you could explain in just a little more detail?” he said, and there was a courtesy to his tone I had not heard before.

I remembered all I had been told, by the technological sentients like Quipu. “The air,” I told Sharrock, “doesn’t just translate our words, it transforms itself so that we can breathe. It transmutes itself to give oxygen to one species, methane to another, and so forth. Somehow, the air knows how to be the right air for each of us, no matter how different our worlds.”

“The air- knows this?” said Sharrock.

“Yes.”

“That’s-” said Sharrock, and could not find a word for it.

“And it also, so I’m told,” I continued, “carries with it light. The sun is not the sun, it is merely air shaped in a ball. And when the air of the sun grows tired, the light gets redder and we call that sunset.”

“Air can do all that?”

“In this world, yes it can,” I explained.

“Such marvels are-beyond belief,” said Sharrock, and I could tell he was plotting and scheming again. “But this air-the Ka’un created it right? It has, perhaps, micro-particles that carry information? So each molecule of air functions like a miniature artificial mind? Like a… a… data engine, but at a sub-atomic level?”

“Perhaps,” I said, cautiously.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” said Sharrock.

“No I do not.”

“Amazing.”

“Why is it amazing?”

Sharrock’s mouth made a shape, common to many bipeds; a smile.

“I’m not considered to be a great scientist among my kind. I’m certainly not a Philosopher,” Sharrock explained. “But these are basic concepts, that every sentient creature must be aware of. Surely?”

“Not me,” I admitted.

He was silent for a while. I could tell his spirits were high; he was convinced he had discovered some secret that could be used to destroy the Ka’un. The usual delusion.

And so, as we sat there, I realised that it was time for me to proceed to the next stage of my strategy; to save this poor wretched creature before hope wholly destroyed him.

Thus, once we had eaten and digested, I began to speak to him softly, whilst bathing him in a persuasive spray from my tentacles that would, I knew, render him more pliable and less aggressive.

“This is what will happen,” I explained. “In a while we will walk down to the forest. You will find there a place to live. And there also will be creatures for you to live with. They will teach you the ways of this world; and they will be harsh ways. I will visit you when I can. But I can help you no more; this must be your home now.”

“You’re leaving me?” Sharrock said, drowsily, with only a trace of fear in his voice.

“I will see you as often as I can,” I said. “But though you and I can be friends, we can’t be-close friends. Our bodies are too different.”

“And what do I do, when I’m given this new home?”

“You must learn,” I told him, “to love the little pleasures. You can fish, and forage, and hunt; and bask in the sun; and savour the Rhythm of Days.”

“That is no kind of life,” Sharrock said, through his sleepy haze, “for a warrior!”

“Ah, you warriors, you are so brave,” I said, flatteringly.

“I am,” he said, drugged yet proud, “among the greatest of warriors!”

“You must forget all that,” I said soothingly. “Forget your old ways. Live for the moment.”

“The greatest,” he murmured, “of warriors.”

And I sighed, from each of my tentacle tips, sorrowfully.

I dared not tell Sharrock the truth, not just yet; that there is indeed a place for warriors on the Ka’un’s ship.

For some nights, the night does not end. And a deep dreamless sleep descends upon us.

And when we wake, we find that some of our most fearsome fighters have disappeared. They have been conveyed, in a fashion we do not comprehend, away from their cabins while the rest of us slept. And of these, the Vanished Ones, some never return. And others, like Cuzco on so many occasions, do return after a passage of months or years, but horrendously scarred and battered, or with limbs that are weak and recently regrown.

And these Vanished Warriors have no recollection of what has occurred to them, and no inkling as to how they sustained their injuries.

At first, many of us assumed that the Ka’un were “experimenting” on the Vanished Ones, to advance their knowledge of alien biology; such ruthless behaviour is, I have learned, common among many technological species. Others believed that the Vanished Ones were being tortured for information; though since all of us had lost our worlds, it was hard to say what information the Ka’un might need from us.

But as time went by the truth forced itself upon us all. The Vanished Ones always had one thing in common; they were strong, or armoured, or fierce, or terrifyingly large, or from species which made a religion of the art of war.

Or to put it in bolder terms: those who go missing are the warriors supreme of the Ka’un’s Hell Ship. And it became obvious to all of us what they do.

They fight, and vanquish, and destroy, and capture fresh slaves.

Thus, these warriors unwillingly serve the evil that is the Ka’un. They conquer alien worlds; their memories are swept clean; and they are returned to us.

This, I knew, would be Sharrock’s fate; his warrior skills would make him irresistibly attractive to the Ka’un. I did not warn him, however, of what was in prospect for him; for who could bear to know they were cursed with such a terrible fate?

Lies, sometimes, can be kinder than truth.

“This will be your home now,” I told Sharrock, as we stood in the shadow of the scarlet carola trees that marked the boundary of the forest region.

He stared at me accusingly. “Did you drug me?” he asked.

“I calmed you.”

“My rage,” said Sharrock, incredulously, “has gone. I feel content.”

“That is good.”

“My rage has gone. I feel content!” He sounded like a child who has had a toy stolen by a sibling.

“You will be happy here.” A silver-furred arboreal dropped from the tree-top and joined us, scamperingly.

“This is Mangan,” I said. “He will be your companion and your mentor now.”

Mangan danced, and snarled; and his eyes flickered hatred.

“Why,” said Mangan, “do we have to put up with this hairless fucking freak?”

“He is my friend,” I said soothingly. “Protect him.”

Mangan cackled, and scratched his balls, and spat green phlegm, and began to-I need describe no more. Mangan truly was the foulest of beasts.

Sharrock looked at the silver arboreal warily, and with an expression of considerable distaste. “ These are the creatures I must live with?”

“Treat him well,” I said to Mangan, who merely cackled, and stared with hate at the fresh meat I had so generously provided him with.

I unfurled my cape, and I seized the ground with my tentacle tips and hurled myself into the air away from them. Sharrock called after me; but I continued to seize and fly, seize and fly, and I did not look back.

Sharrock

I felt an overwhelming sense of relief when the monster departed.

This black-hided brute has pretended to be my friend; but I know that she is no more than the hapless pawn of my gaolers. Her soft words-for her voice is melodious and beautiful without doubt-have been used to lull me and deceive me. She has preached acceptance and forgiveness; but as a warrior, I could never accept, or forgive, those who have wronged me so utterly.

And so to be free of her gave me a great sense of liberation.

I looked about me, and became attuned to the sounds and the sweet smells of the forest. I could hear screeches and howls and clicks and roars and bellows and grating noises. There were very many creatures here, and none of them were familiar to me. The trees also were strange-some with bark as hard as marble, some soft to the touch. The plants which covered the forest ground were equally diverse and bizarre and their leaves and flowers spanned the rainbow of colours, with some shades of green and purple I had never seen before. There were no insects; that was strange. The air was mild, quite warm; the sun cast a steady heat but never moved.

Once Sai-ias had left, Mangan had fled too. As I had suspected, this was a creature who knew nothing about honouring one’s word. But this too filled me with relief; I had no intention of being trapped in a forest, and certainly not in a small cabin, with a bunch of monkeys.

Instead, I resolved I would live alone, in this forest; I was a creature of the desert, but I was sure I could easily adapt. And I found that I liked the colours, and the scents, and the cacophony of sounds of this alien landscape.

For months I had lived in a cage of metal, occasionally released from captivity only to spend hours in the company of garrulous monsters of astonishingly vile aspects.

But now, after all those months of close captivity, I could smell flowers in the air, I could hear creatures crying and howling and singing, my senses were exhilaratedly alive. And I felt-no this could not be!-yet it was-I felt content. Fulfilled.

I could of course never be truly happy on this world. But I did at least relish being alive, in the forest, with all my senses engaged to the full.

And so I walked carefully through the avenues and alleys of trees, treading a path through wild shrubs and knotted ground vines, over mossy carpets of green and scarlet, and past plants with barks that resembled obsidian and others that seemed to be clad in soft velvet, and others stranger still.

And then my instincts flared and I rolled to the ground and turned around, to see that a serpentine creature had dropped from the branches behind me. It was clearly enraged that it had failed to land upon my head; it snarled viciously; its fangs were large and it spat venom that I dodged swiftly. And then it lunged at me. I had no weapon, but I stood my ground, and caught the creature in my hands, and strangled it to death.

Then I ripped the creature to pieces with my teeth and made a weapon out of its hide and fangs.

I moved onwards. It occurred to me I was still wearing the clothes I had on when my planet was attacked-leather tunic, leather trousers, a gold-mail vest, and silver bracelets around my wrists; and I now wondered how that was possible. The lava would have burned all these things off my body, as well as destroying my flesh and organs. So how was I alive? And how could my clothing still be wearable? And what had happened to the space armour I had put on? Why in other words were some of my clothes intact, but not all?

I decided these could not be my actual clothes. They must have stripped the clothing off the corpse of another warrior of similar bulk, cleaned it of blood, and dressed me in his garb. My body was then, or so I speculated, rejuvenated by means unknown to me; but that was hardly difficult to achieve. My own kind have rejuvenation therapies that allow us to restore a broken warrior to full health within months; it was no wonder these technologically advanced aliens could do better.

I sniffed my clothes and my theory was confirmed; these were not Sharrock’s. The leather of the tunic smelled of leather; not of me. I had worn my own garments on a myriad adventures; they were steeped in my stench.

And now a new adventure had begun. My planet was gone; my people were gone; I was alone on a hostile planet, which is actually a ship, surrounded by aliens who are monstrous beyond belief, ruled by unseen devils who all fear but none dare defy.

It was, I resolved, time for Sharrock to show what he could really do!

For I remembered the time A figure dropped to the ground behind me; I interrupted my reverie, and turned in a single easy gesture. It was the silver-skinned monkey, Mangan, glaring at me with his evil eyes.

“Greetings,” I said.

“You are to be our cabin friend, I gather,” said Mangan.

“That was the stated intention of the monster Sai-ias,” I said. “But I am happy to live alone.”

“That is not an option, cock-brain,” said Mangan, cackling.

“I will live alone,” I said calmly.

“You will do as Sai-ias requires,” Mangan insisted.

“I think not,” I said smiling.

Mangan cackled again. He was a vile creature. And then, to my shock and dismay, he hunched down and he shat, like the most vulgar of beasts. Then he captured his column of shit in one hand, and squeezed it into a tight compact ball.

And then he threw it at me. It was so fast I did not have time to dodge; and the shit-ball was remarkably hard, harder than any stone. I felt the dampness of my own blood trickle down my cheek.

But I ignored the provocation.

“My people were killed, I will take revenge somehow, I will live alone,” I explained patiently.

Three other monkeys dropped to the ground beside Mangan. One of them had a sharpened stick, and I relaxed, hefting the home-made fang-weapon in my hand.

I sensed another home-made missile about to hit me from behind, and this time I was ready; I rolled easily to the ground; the shit-ball flew past me, but a second ball of excrement from an assailant I hadn’t spotted hit me on the side of the head.

I cursed; the months of captivity had sapped my warrior reflexes.

Fortunately, however, this particular ball had been inadequately compacted; it was soft, not hard; thus, I had sustained no damage. My head however, felt damp and sticky and I touched it with a finger. The smell overwhelmed me.

However, I laughed uproariously, to show I could take a joke.

“Do you have a hole where you ought to have a cock?” asked Mangan, provocatively.

“Not so,” I said cheerfully.

Mangan cackled, then he turned his back to me, and then he At this moment, I am bound to relate, I foolishly lost my temper.

Jak

Albinia closed her eyes. I watched as she sank into a trance.

Her worry lines faded, her angry look disappeared. She was, once more, radiant.

I could see on my phantom control display the images she beheld via Explorer’s riftscope. Glimpses of planets and suns and black wildernesses of space and U shaped galaxies and oval galaxies and spilled-milk galaxies and fast-whirling galaxies and exploding stars.

“Three civilisations in subsector 412, planet O431,” said Albinia, through her trance.

We saw, on our display screens: stars, then planets, then seas, then fields, and plains, and savannahs, forests, mountains, cities, walkways, flying vehicles, temples, houses, shops and, finally, images of three kinds of sentients.

Furred bipeds with three arms, living in the cities.

Scaled polypods with tusks, dwelling in the savannahs.

And feathered aerials nesting in clouds made of excreted webbing, above the forests.

“Three Grade 2 civilisations on one planet?” I asked.

“It looks that way.” Albinia murmured.

“Any of them aggressive?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can’t tell.”

“Any artefacts? Jewellery? Artworks?”

“Too soon to say.”

“Do they have shifting-sands technology?”

“Yes. Maybe. No. I don’t know.”

Albinia’s head twitched. She was seeing the not-real as well as the real; visualising shards of possibilities that existed on the other side of the rift, of worlds and civilisations that might in fact not exist.

“Set the coordinates,” I said.

“We have an incoming message,” said Phylas.

“Take the message, then get ready for rift flight,” I said.

A face appeared on the screen; I recognised it as a FanTang.

(This memory comes to me now laden with such terrible ironical agony; for those loathsome murderous creatures did perhaps deserve to die. But not us; we did not deserve it! Not all of us.)

“We wish you wealth and health, and success in all your dealings,” I said formally to the FanTang.

“You betrayed us!” roared the FanTang, with the hysterical rage so typical of his species.

“We may,” I admitted, “have out-negotiated you. It’s a cultural thing: we see no harm in it, you see.”

“You brought death and destruction to our planet!” roared the FanTang.

I hesitated.

And then continued to hesitate.

“What are you talking about?” I eventually asked, baffled.

“Earthquakes have ravaged our land! Fires from the sky have-”

The transmission was interrupted.

I blinked, totally at a loss. “What was that about?”

“I have no idea,” said Morval.

“A hoax?” suggested Phylas.

“A trap?” suggested Galamea.

“No,” said Albinia. Her eyes opened. “Explorer has accessed other such messages, sent to other Olaran vessels. We have also made contact with the Fleet. There is a story is emerging about what has befallen the planet of the FanTang.”

“And what is that?” I asked, impatiently.

“Apocalypse.”

The sun of the FanTangs had exploded. Or rather, to be more precise, it had flared to an exceptional degree; coronal mass was billowing forth, and a vast proton swarm had radiated into the stellar system, where it was wreaking terrible havoc on the various planets and asteroids and space towns where the FanTang dwelt. Our sensors told us that there were now no traces of organic life in the entire stellar system.

And the home world of the FanTang was a fireball. As we flew our cameras closer, we could see that the forests were ablaze. Volcanoes were spewing their hot lava into the atmosphere. Even the seas burned. The seas?

“How can that be?” I asked. “The oceans on fire?”

I and the rest of the ship’s officers were watching camera images transmitted from Explorer via Albinia’s mind; images that were being filmed by robot scouts that flew through the cloud and into the depths of the inferno.

“It’s possible,” said Phylas, “but only if-”

“Do we have the technology to do such a thing?” I snapped.

“No,” Phylas conceded.

The robot scouts flew down closer. We could see lava spurting out of cracks in the planet’s crust. The cities were wrecked, and entire mountain ranges had been demolished after devastating crust-plate shifts ripped the planet apart. FanTang military aeroplanes had fallen from the sky like snowflakes ablaze, and the remnants of futile missiles were scattered on fields and plains wherever we looked. Mushroom clouds from nuclear explosions billowed and their clouds merged to form an ugly grey shell in the sky.

And the streets of the cities and smaller settlements were covered in corpses, and already-whitening skeletons. All the dead were FanTang or Jaimal, and many wore heavy body armour or exo-skeletons.

The people of this planet were warriors and they had marched into battle against some implacable foe. Billions if not trillions had died; yet our cameras did not see the corpse of a single enemy combatant.

It was carnage; token of a defeat so absolute it beggared belief.

“That’s a Trader craft,” said Morval, and the scout ship flew lower and we saw the wreckage of a Trader vessel on the ground, its complex bottle-curves shattered by some hammer blow. There were corpses lying near the wreckage. They were clearly Olaran.

“Retrieve the bodies,” I said, and the scout ship levitated the corpses and swallowed them in its hull.

“Who did this?” asked Galamea.

The image on the screen began to flicker.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

Albinia screamed, and screamed, and her eyes snapped out of trance, cutting her link with the metal minds.

“The planet,” she murmured.

Phylas changed the sky-eye image, and now we saw hovering in mid-air a more distant view of the blackened smoking globe of the planet of the FanTang.

“The planet’s going to blow,” said Phylas, taking the readings.

Pillars of flame started to burst upwards from the planet’s surface. Black clouds gathered and dispersed, then re-gathered. The blue of the seas and the red of the fields slowly vanished; until nothing could be seen except a black haze of smoke that mingled with the mushroom clouds.

“The sun!” screamed Phylas, and an image of the sun appeared before us.

The sun was changing colour, and its corona was flaring even more wildly, expelling gobbets of plasma like the vomit of a dying Olaran. I looked at my instruments and saw that we were being drenched in solar radiation.

“Supernova?” I said.

“I believe so,” said Phylas.

Now, the process seems wearily familiar; then, it was a horror like nothing we had ever seen.

After hours of devastating volcanic activity and earthquakes that ripped the land to shreds, the planet itself shattered -it broke into a million parts, as if struck a terrible blow, and the fragments drifted in space.

And then, in a ghastly slow ballet, the moons too detonated, one by one; like spools of cable unwinding, leaving sad haloes of light behind where once life had dwelled.

And finally, the sun of the FanTang turned supernova; an eruption of light like a universe birthing; a vision of nature’s fury such as I had never seen before.

Ten years previously I had travelled to this stellar system and raged at the ignorance and brutal violence of that wretched species, the FanTang. Now they were a memory; their bodies interstellar debris; and I was chilled at the breathtaking malice of such an act of planetary genocide.

“The FanTang,” Albinia announced, “left a dying message; they blame us for their downfall.”

“No one will believe that,” said Albinia.

“Some may,” conceded Morval.

“They accused us of betraying them; ambushing them; and destroying their planet,” said Albinia.

“They were,” I said excusingly, “wild with grief.”

“The Trader Post was also destroyed; five hundred Olarans dead,” Albinia added.

Morval made a strange exclamation; more howl than word.

“How is that possible?” Morval said. “Our space defences are-”

“The Olaran Court believes there is a aggressive species currently active with technology comparable to our own,” Albinia concluded.

“That conclusion is inescapable,” said Galamea coldly. She had fought in the war against the Stuxi; she more than anyone knew what was at stake here.

For our entire culture, our entire civilisation, is founded on one thing: undefeatable military might, based on science far beyond the imaginings of most sentient species. The Stuxi came close; but even they were, ultimately, easily defeated by our astonishingly powerful weapons of destruction.

It was our military power than ensured that no species could invade us, or defeat us, or threaten our trading links. But now, at a stroke, that had changed. And we were vulnerable.

I felt dizzy; as though standing on a high cliff top, staring down into an abyss.

“Whoever did this,” I said, calmly, but with utter conviction-for I knew the ability of our kind to birth a grudge, and to nurture it, and then to wreak the most terrible vengeance-“they shall pay.”

Sa-ias

I was travelling fast across the plain, throwing myself upwards and forwards with my tentacles, like a bullet with arms, when I heard a roaring sound above me. I tried to swerve away, but I was too slow and a great weight came crashing into me.

Cuzco!

His claws lashed at me, his great jagged tongue jabbed me, his six wings enveloped me and prevented me from propelling myself forward.

“You fucking cunt-eating cowardly fucking seamonster!” he screamed at me, and his foul words flew on the wind as our bodies encoiled and rolled.

I screamed at him to stop but he wouldn’t heed me and we continued to tumble along the ground.

At the last moment Cuzco broke free but I carried on hurtling onwards and gouged a huge trench out of the grey earth with my arse and back segments.

Cuzco’s assault had knocked the breath out of my lungs. I was dazed. I clambered myself upright on to my twelve feet and I glared at Cuzco.

“Was that your idea,” I asked, “of a joke?”

“Oh,” said Cuzco, “yes.”

And Cuzco bared his face at me; and mocking laughter consumed his features.

I sighed, from my tentacle tips; I loved Cuzco, but even so, I had to concede that he could be an annoying bully sometimes.

“That stupid fucking biped of yours,” he said tauntingly, “will never last. He’ll be in Despair and out of the hatch in less than a year.”

“We’ll see.”

Cuzco’s features were consumed with hilarity. “He doesn’t stand a swamp-fucking chance!” he crowed, and I raged at his cruel mockery.

And yet I feared his words were true.

The Rhythm of Days consumed me, as it always did.

And then, on a Day the Ninth, just three cycles after leaving Sharrock with the arboreals, I travelled to see him, once again using my tentacles to fling me fast through the air.

I saw that the camp I had helped him to make in the forest was deserted. I stood by the trees and called his name and saw no trace of him.

And so I called up to the aerials flying above and they descended, and I asked them courteously for a favour.

And then I spread my cape and they gripped my carapace in their claws and lifted me up into the air. Up I rose, their sharp talons gripping my soft skin, their wings beating; a hundred aerial creatures with scales and feathers and furs upon their wings, some with double heads, some with none, some as large as clouds, some as tiny as a biped’s skull; and they flew me up, above the tree line; then higher still; and patiently waited until the winds were strong enough to support me.

Then I thanked them again, and the aerials released me, and flew off, no doubt relieved to be no longer lifting my considerable bulk. I was now gliding on updrafts of air, undulating my cape and extended body to remain stable.

And from my aerial viewpoint, I peered down at the forest canopy, looking for the haloes of the arboreals who were supposed to be Sharrock’s cabin friends.

It took me a while to remember the knack of ignoring visual input so that I could focus on the mesh of body heat and personality that defined each sentient’s halo. The four I was looking for had strongly defined haloes-they were angry, spiteful creatures, and that made them easier to find. They were: Mangan, who I had introduced to Sharrock, Tara, Shiiaa, and Daran.

But there were hundreds of arboreals down there, and it was hard to focus on haloes as my body bucked and kinked in the wind. But I persevered: and so slowly and carefully, as the black shadow of my body fell upon the green and yellow forest canopy below, my eyes analysed the blurry patterns of hundreds of bodies in motion.

Eventually I was confident I had found my four. They were travelling fast, running up and down trees and swinging from branch to branch. They were chasing something; and then I saw a fifth halo and recognised it as Sharrock. They were playing with him.

This was exactly what I’d feared; the foul-mouthed, arrogant, always-angry Sharrock had riled the vicious little bastards.

I began to glide downwards towards the canopy. I furled my cape to make my body smaller then released my hood so it dangled above and behind me, slowing my fall, allowing me to control my descent.

Then I tightened into a hard ball and crashed through the canopy, breaking branches and shattering tree trunks until I landed safely on the ground.

I was now back to my usual size, a moist-skinned jet-black sea creature in a forest; feeling out of place and claustrophobic. But I owed it to Sharrock to rescue him.

I called out Sharrock’s name; no response.

I called Sharrock’s name again, but still he did not show himself. So I peered through the trees, looking for his halo, and saw that he was near. He was running along the ground, frenziedly and fast; clearly he was not agile enough to swing from branch to branch.

He had been doing this, I guessed, for about thirty-four days; and yet his pace was unfaltering and fast.

I charged forward and crashed a path through the thick forest, towards Sharrock’s fleeing body. I could hear screaming and cackling near him. On I thundered; I was too large to weave between trees so I simply ran at them and pushed the trees over, leaving a trail of destruction behind me.

And as I ran, I called Sharrock’s name, and his halo moved closer and closer, and I could tell that he was tracking me, trying to reach me. And finally, I emerged into a clearing, and he broke from cover and ran towards me.

As he ran, projectiles rained down from the trees and crashed into his body, exploding like bombs and coating him from head to toe in a slimy brown slurry. The blows were powerful and I could hear bones breaking, but Sharrock’s run did not falter. He ran towards me, and rolled, and stood up behind me, using me as his shield.

The projectiles, I realised, were balls of shit; Sharrock was stained with the juice of them, and I was glad I had no olfactory sense.

“You evil fucking bitch!” Sharrock shouted at me. He was out of breath. His arm was crooked and he favoured one leg; I guessed he had been beaten badly, perhaps several times. One of the arboreals had eaten his nose, and the bloody mess on the front of his face was still damp and unhealed.

“Oh Sharrock,” I said, “I’m so very sorry.”

“You fucking should be!” he roared. “These bastards have been chasing me for an entire fucking [unit of measurement on his world]. You treacherous cock-with-contagious-boils! This is all your fucking fault! Get me out of here!”

I sighed sorrowfully through my tentacle tips; for there was really no cause for such extreme language. I considered myself to be unoffendable, but even I was starting to get annoyed.

Meanwhile, the arboreals leaped down from the trees and hopped around, elated at the success of their great joke.

“I cannot,” I said.

“They tried to fucking kill me!”

“You must have provoked them,” I said sternly.

He looked at me, with horror and rage. “No I did not!”

“Did you tell them,” I asked, “that they are inferior to you, mere ignorant simians without any culture or grasp of sophisticated concepts?”

He hesitated; no doubt startled that I knew him so well. “Well perhaps,” he said. “But not in those exact words.”

“What were in fact your exact words?”

“I told Mangan,” said Sharrock recalling the moment with evident relish, “that he was nothing but a tree-fucking ape, and that on my planet we cook the brains of such ignorant branch-swinging hairy-arsed shit-hurling ignorant fucking savages!”

I sighed again, and in fairness he had the grace to look abashed at his own misguided eloquence.

“You insulted them,” I said. “And this is their way of asserting dominance over you.”

“Over me!?!” roared Sharrock. “On my planet, we feed hairy-cocked beasts like this to our fucking pets! You evil fucking whore-shit! You led me into a trap. You knew what would happen to me!”

“I knew it was possible. But you should not have not been so discourteously provocative,” I advised him.

“You should have warned me how vicious these evil fuckers are!”

“I sedated you,” I pointed out, “prior to leaving you in the forest. Surely that was warning enough?”

At that moment, Mangan strode towards us, his three legs moving in an odd rhythm, his silver fur matted, his big staring eyes blinking. Mangan’s four arms were huge, and he carried spiked clubs made out of tree branches in each hand.

“You fled, you hairless foul-tongued coward,” he sneered at Sharrock.

“I am no coward! However, I would like to try,” said Sharrock, in an unexpected attempt at diplomacy, “to be your friend.”

Daran threw another shit ball, rather sneakily; and I batted it away with one tentacle.

“This is wrong,” I told the arboreals. And they cackled and danced on the balls of their feet, entirely unrepentant.

“I regret my words,” said Sharrock. “I have insulted you, and for this I deserve all you have done to me. For Sharrock is,” and at this moment he literally hung his head in shame, “humbled, and defeated.”

The arboreals cackled again. Mangan was starting to look mollified. For one exhilarating moment, I began to think that Sharrock was capable of behaving like a sane and civilised sentient.

And then Sharrock screamed: “Ha! I jest! Sharrock? Defeated? Never!! ” And he pounced.

And then I realised that for all this time he’d been trying to get the four arboreals to descend to ground level. In the trees, they had the advantage; down here, he had a fighting chance.

And so he dived forward and rolled, like a bird in flight, and unbalanced Mangan with a foot swipe, and as he did so his elbow connected with the huge arboreal’s ribs. He broke two of Mangan’s arms in moments and then he had one of the clubs in his hand, and as the other three arboreals leaped at him he lashed out and in a series of swings so fast they defied the ability of eyes to see, he smashed their heads into pulp.

Mangan was back on his feet, and locked one hand around Sharrock’s neck but Sharrock had a knife made of serpent’s fangs concealed and he hacked Mangan’s arm off then buried the knife in his brain.

Shiiaa recovered from her battering, and got up, and lunged; her skull was caved in but her three knife arms were swinging. However, Sharrock leaped above Shiiaa’s head and landed behind her, then delivered two savage kicks to the arboreal’s twin spines, shattering both, and then broke her neck with a single savage twist.

But then Tara’s tail whipped up and caught Sharrock by the neck and lifted him in the air.

“Stop,” I said, but Tara ignored me so I spat at her; the spit congealed and wrapped her body in a tight web. Tara choked and fell to the ground, unable to move, snarled in white congealed spit that was stronger than metal. And Sharrock broke free of the tail and fell to the ground.

“Nice one, bitch,” he said, when he’d got his breath back.

“Climb on my back,” I told him.

I ran out of the forest with Sharrock clinging on to me, ramming through undergrowth and trees, hoping that I was not hurting any sentient plantlife in my clumsy progress. And then we emerged into the light, and I crashed down upon my lower segment on the purple grass of the savannah.

“I was defending myself,” Sharrock said, angrily.

“You picked a fight,” I informed him, accusingly.

“They were treating me like a slave.”

“You are a slave, and you should learn to be more polite.”

“You fucking betrayed me!” he roared, spittle rolling down his jaw again. “You put me with a bunch of fucking apes. Why didn’t you let me go and live with creatures who actually look like Maxoluns? The hairless bipeds. I know they exist. I saw them, the tree-huggers saw them too. They are creatures much like me!”

“The hairless bipeds,” I said, calmly, “have swords of metal. You would have fared far worse.”

Sharrock was silenced by my words.

“You mean, you knew,” he said, in calmer tones, “that I was going to get the fuckhood beaten out of me by those fucking apes?”

“Yes.”

“And you still let me go there?”

“For your own sake,” I explained to him, “For you have to learn to hold your tongue, and be more respectful of your fellow captives.”

“No fucking way, not ever! I’m a warrior!” he ranted.

“You’ve made four bitter enemies now. They will hate you for all eternity.”

“I killed at least two of them,” he bragged.

By this point I was tempted to give way to anger at his naivety. But I restrained myself. Sharrock was so new; he had so much to learn.

“No you didn’t,” I explained in my calmest tones.

“Don’t utter such fuckery! No one could-” he began to say, but I interrupted:

“Their injuries are survivable. Mangan will grow his arm back, and his brain cells will very likely heal after such a minor fang-stabbing, as will Shiiaa’s broken neck and snapped spines. And when they are all recovered, they will seek you out and batter you to a bloody pulp. But unless they entirely pulverise your brain, you too will heal, after months of agony. And then, consumed with rage, you will take your revenge upon them, and they will be beaten and bloody and in pain. Then they will heal, and-”

“I’m guessing you don’t approve of all this wretched backing-and-forthing,” he said quietly.

I sighed, from my tentacle tips, and noted with approval that Sharrock did finally seem a little embarrassed.

“These creatures are not your enemies,” I said. “We are all of us in this together.”

Sharrock made a sharp exclamation-it was his version of a laugh, I realised. But there was no humour in his tone.

“Fuck your anus!” Sharrock said viciously. “Those tree-fuckers bit my nose off! They broke my arm, my legs, then they tried to take my intestines out with a sharpened branch. Those shit-eaters deserve to die by choking on the barbed cock of a [untranslatable]!” Sharrock concluded, spitting with rage again by now.

“Make peace with them,” I said.

“Never!”

“You can’t,” I told him, “go on like this.”

He glared at me.

“Sai-ias, you mean well,” Sharrock said, icily, with what I felt was odious condescension. “You have a good soul. But the truth is,” and now Sharrock’s contempt for me shone through in every syllable, “you are nothing but a fucking coward.”

Sharrock’s scorn was hard to bear; but bear it I will and must.

For I have learned, over many aeons, to ignore the disdain of others, as warriors shrug off ghastly wounds without showing even a flicker of pain.

This is my tale; the tale how I shaped my world.

I was but a child when the Ka’un invaded my home world; just fifteen years old, two or three years away from my metamorphosis.

And I remembered how we young ones were amused when the alien spaceships first appeared in the sky. We made a game of swiftly dodging their bombs as they crashed to the ground, scattering earth and terrifying the land animals. And then we ran home and told our parents.

My parents comforted me, and told me we would be safe. But they did not fight, they fled, using flying ships to convey us at speeds faster than sound, as far away as we could get from the alien ship. And when the bombs continued to fall from the sky, we and millions of our kind took refuge deep in the earth’s crust. We would, my mother said, wait it out. When the enemy tired of destroying our cities and houses, such as they were, we would emerge and rebuild our planet. Or we would find another planet. It would be easy enough.

But when the earthquakes began my father was crushed by a wall of rock that collapsed on to him. He cut himself free, knowing he could, eventually, regrow his lost limbs. But he was worried now.

Then poison gas came through the rock and my brothers and sisters died in agony. My mother nursed them all, stroking them with her tentacle tips and mouth and thus absorbing the poison into her own body. And then she too died, while holding me in her tentacles, exhaling deadly air upon me, killing me with foolish love, for by then she had lost her senses with grief.

My father found me in time and sucked out the poisoned air out of my lungs and into his own body, dooming himself but saving me. Then he wrapped me in protective shielding, and placed me in a space capsule. And he fired the capsule into orbit, with a course set for another of the worlds occupied by our kind, so that one of us at least should live.

When he said goodbye, my father vowed that I would live a happy life, and that these invaders would not find it so easy to invade our other planets. For mind-messages had been sent with instantaneous effect to all my people-to those living on alien soil and also those who lived on artificial orbiting cities and those who chose to slowly drift in space, living on the energy from distant suns-to warn them that the ways of peace must come to an end. We must, as a species, resort to war, using all of our formidable powers.

All this he told me; and I marvelled at the rage in his voice, and the anger-fuelled expansion of his normally compact body. And I sorrowed for him, and for my dead mother; they were kind and full of joy and I loved them, and they will live for ever in my memories and in the depth of my soul.

Then, as I grieved, a child forced to confront evil for the first time, my father sealed the capsule and I was shot out into space in a cylinder of metal that was, my father hoped, to be my home for the next one thousand years.

However, his plans failed; and I was captured by the alien invaders as my craft made its way out the atmosphere. I lay in semi-sleep and woke abruptly when I felt my capsule lose all its momentum in a moment.

And later the capsule was broken open and I was confronted by an ugly tiny creature with two legs and fur, which I later learned was clothing. This was a Kindred; but at the time I thought it was a Ka’un.

I clambered out of my capsule to confront the creature, and lashed at him with my tentacles; and found he was made of air. A projection.

I realised I was alone inside a huge room shaped like a globe, made of some kind of glass; and beneath me and all around was the blackness of space, and the stars. And shining in the midst of the emptiness of space was a planet, my own planet; which our people had called Tendala. I knew this view of Tendala well; for I had flown in orbit around her many times; and as I looked now at the planet in space, I saw the oceans that I had swum in, and the mountains I had climbed.

I was confused, and frightened, and baffled. My confining shell was large and had no features and no visible doors; and because the floor too was made of glass it felt as if I were floating in space.

And, there, from my vantage point inside the glass belly of the Ka’un spaceship, I saw my planet start to break into pieces.

It was an impossible yet haunting image. I saw none of the terror and destruction that must have existed on the ground-the cities and forests burning, the seas racked with storms, the volcanoes erupting. All I saw was a beautiful blue globe breaking apart like smashed glass, and fragments the size of entire countries tumbling into space.

And my soul was rent with pain.

I knew I would never seen my loved ones again; never again would I feel the winds of Tendala, or swim in the Parago Seas, or watch the beauteous birds of Tharbois in colourful flight. Child though I was, I knew by now that these monsters took joy in the extermination of other sentient beings. And I knew them to be, by our own moral code, “evil.”

But though I was full of rage back then, my anger eventually, over the ensuing months, dimmed into a calm acceptance.

I was, I admit, grievously disappointed that others of my kind did not come to rescue me; but I did not resent them for this failure. Perhaps, I mused, they had decided to forgive the alien invaders? For forgiveness is the way of my species. We will, if absolutely necessary, fight; but continuing hatred is not in our nature, and indeed runs counter to our philosophy of life.

So I did not, as many Kau’un captives do, wallow in thoughts of vengeance. Nor did my captivity terrify me; and the prospect of spending eternity as a slave caused me little grief. For my kind are long-lived, and patient, and we endure.

And yet!

Even now the memories of the horrors that I saw in those early years on the Hell Ship cause me pain. The savagery! The cruelty! I arrived, a fresh slave, and was greeted by a slavering mob of creatures of all shapes and sizes, with claws and beaks and horns and soft pulsing flesh and hard scales and thick hides, creatures who flew and creatures who crawled and creatures who walked on a hundred legs and others who were nightmares made manifest. And all these monsters taunted and mocked me. And then they advanced upon me in a ruthless mass and savaged me, and tried to rip the outer shell off my three segments with their teeth and claws and horns and feelers and feet. One of the creatures spat acid upon my skin. Another wrapped its coils around me and tried to crush my body into a state of suffocation. And then one of them, a giant flying biped, picked me up in its claws and carried me up to the summit of the mountain range, over bleak and terrible terrain, and there he dropped me from a great height upon the sharpest crag. And I tried to fly away to safety, but my cape was shattered and I could not see because my eyes had been pecked out, and I could not hear because small worms were crawling in my brain and affecting my ability to sense my surroundings or to think.

When I hit the rocky crag the wind was driven out of my body and my carapace was cracked and my heart ruptured and my back spine was shattered.

And I was in agony for many months until I managed to drag myself down from the mountain. And then I hauled myself across the grasslands in the baking heat, until I found a well full of soothing water and dived in. And this, I later learned, was the well of the water of life; and these waters healed me.

Within months, I was restored to health; my spine was restored; my eyes grew back; my wounds healed; though my fear of my fellow captives was undimmed.

Carulha was the dominant warrior on the Hell Ship back then. A giant red polypod with spear-like protrusions on his flesh and a hundred bony arms that could cut and sever flesh and a thousand snake-tails that could spit venom and lash like whips. Carulha had led the mob that tortured and taunted me. And when I was healed, it was Carulha who sought me out and told me the laws of my new world. I must obey him, and him alone; for I was his slave, just as he was the slave of the Masters of the Ship. And I must, he told me, at all times use my strength to intimidate and humiliate the smaller bipeds (though not the Kindred) and the arboreals and the sentient aerials and the multi-legs and the swamp-dwellers, for that was the way of things on this ship.

I refused.

So Carulha went away and when he returned he once more led a mob of huge and deadly creatures. I can remember them now: Sairyrd, the hairy three-legged grey-skinned breaker of bones. Marosh, a serpentine with wings and teeth that could rip and tear in all the many mouths that ran the length of her slithering body. And Tarang, a creature with no fixed form, who oozed and shapeshifted and had the power to hurt by absorbing the bodies of her prey into her own soft sucking loathsome body. And more, many more. The bipeds fought too, for they served Carulha then, not the Kindred as they do now; and though they were small, they were armed with bows and spears and knives and wooden machines that could hurl rocks and balls of fire. The arboreals also joined this army; they were agile and guileful, and used their teeth and tails to maim and hurt at Carulha’s behest. And the aerials flocked at his command, and could peck out the eyes of a helpless new slave in a matter of seconds.

This was the mob that for the second time faced me. But this time, I was no longer a child; for I had been prematurely metamorphosed into my adult self through pain and grief. Thus, my strength and powers were enhanced a thousandfold, as is the way of our kind.

And so, sorrow in my heart, adulthood forced upon me, I defended myself.

After six hours of combat, I left behind me a trail of broken bodies and screaming, agonised monsters, and slept that night by the shores of the lake, watching the sun go down above the Tower. The wind was cold.

I missed my world.

Naturally, once I had proved my superior strength, Carulha and the others left me undisturbed. And that made me glad; and yet also broke my soul. For it is not in my nature to be alone, and unloved.

And even though I now enjoyed a protected existence, Carulha and his gang continued to hound and humiliate all the other slaves; and everything I saw brought me fresh torment.

For in those days, the lives of the slaves on the Hell Ship were truly dark and desperate. We were our own worst enemies, there was no comfort to be got, and no comradeship, and no kindness or compassion, and, most appallingly of all, no routine.

And those facts made me, deeply and wretchedly, sad.

And indeed it makes me sad even now, looking back, to remember how when I was a new slave, no one helped me; no one trained me. And there were no cabins either, not back then. No sanctuary, no friendship, just savagery.

Thus, in my first few years on the Ship, I lived in a state of perpetual disgust with the ways of my world. For all was hate! In the days, the slaves would fight and rip each other limb from limb, with pointless brutality. And at night their bodies would lie still and bleeding before they, slowly and painfully, began to heal.

And also, every night, after all the bickering and warring, we Ka’un slaves would lie on the grass while the sun set; and we would be filled with terror as the sheer blackness descended. A night so dark that nocturnal animals were blinded; a night where nothing moved, and no sound carried, and creatures possessed of echo-location were as helpless as those with eyes. A night of total and terrifying silence.

Then, after a few hours, screams would rend the night. As the absence of all light sent creature after creature to the brink of madness, or into the arms of cold Despair.

Then, eventually, the sun would rise, and cold light would leach across the land. And we would see before us the forests of the Despairing: dead and petrified figures that stretched as far as the eye could see, their warm bodies turned to icy stone, their screams of agony preserved for all eternity in rock. Such are the consequences of the bodily apocalypse we call Despair.

I was shocked the first time I saw this happen; and awed that the Ka’un were able to punish the weariest spirits by changing the very physical constitution of their bodies. No one could understand how they did it.

But I came to understand the reason for it: since the existence of Despair forces us all to be not just obedient, but also hopeful slaves. Knowing as we do that Despair will be our lot if we ever lose our precious will to live.

And the cruellest thing is that those who die of Despair never truly die; their minds are trapped alert yet helpless for all eternity in bodies of stone.

That is what makes the punishment so terrible. There is blind and remorseless cruelty; and there is what the Ka’un do to us, with their curse of Despair. It is, in my view, as different as day is to night.

Our days back then were largely spent disposing of stone corpses through the hull-hatch in the ship’s glass belly. I had no friends. We all lived separate lives, mistrustful of each other, cruelly hating.

Then one day we woke, and a hundred of us were missing.

Some returned, many cycles later, with limbs that had been regrown, or new heads, and with no memory of what had happened to them. And some never returned again.

And this is when I first realised what we slaves were for. Some of us were merely scorned chattels, but many served as the warrior army of the Ka’un. Furthermore, every time we woke from our dreamless sleep, new ones had appeared in our world. Single or several samples of newly captured sentient species. And they arrived full of terror and pain; and were immediately plunged into a world of even greater terror and pain. Carulha used to brag that every new slave needed to be made to feel as he had felt, after the death of his world. The agony of others, he would argue, in his few coherent moments, was the only way to honour the lost dead of his magnificent, arrogant species.

But I believed Carulha to be a brute, as terrible in his way as the Ka’un. His wretched kind, I mused, deserved their fate; it was the rest of we slaves who should be pitied.

And so I resolved to change my world. Instead of fighting, I would make peace. Instead of hating, I tried to spread love.

And this I did. For many long frustrating months.

And I was mocked for it; and despised for my innocence and my foolishness. For I spoke to all I met about the need for love and a new world order. I begged them all to share tales of their past, and to find a commonality in our sentience. I explained that hate and anger will simply feed more hate and anger. And I told them that we needed to accept the frailty and folly of our captors. Not to condone their crimes, but rather so we could forgive them, and thus exalt our own souls.

I spoke to each creature on the ship in such manner, over the space of hundreds of cycles. I told stories of my own people’s history to illustrate my point that violence is an evolutionary dead end. And I conjured up a vision of a world in which all of us would exist in amity and harmony.

For a long while I was ignored; but eventually my words began to take hold. I acquired a following; several of the more vicious predators broke with Carulha and began living their lives according to my principles: routine, comradeship, storytelling, love.

And Carulha was enraged by this. He regarded it as treachery, a threat to his authority.

And so once more his army of bullying cruel monsters gathered to destroy me. To rip me, as they bragged, “limb from fucking limb,” and then to hurl me from the hull-hatch.

They met me on the Great Plain. And there I stood-all alone, for my allies had abandoned me as Carulha approached. I was faced with an encircling army of nearly six hundred giant sentients, two hundred or more hairless bipeds, six thousand many-limbed predators, and all the arboreals. Only the Kindred did not deign to fight me, for they refused to have any part in the workings of our world.

I will admit that I was afraid; for I did not want to hurt anyone, and yet I knew that I would have to.

“No fucking speeches,” yelled Carulha, “die, you fucking cunt!” and the battle began.

And thus for the second time in my entire life, I fought.

And I slew them by the score, and ripped them limb, as Carulha had put it, from “fucking” limb. I smashed the aerials out of the sky with my tentacles and I ripped open the bodies of the giant sentients and tore the arboreals and bipeds and the many-limbed predators into pieces with my tentacle-claws that moved so fast that none could see their motion-thus my foes would abruptly and inexplicably split into many parts, gushing scarlet blood.

All this I did and more. And when it was all over, I threw Carulha’s dismembered body out of the hull-hatch, and the bodies of Marosh, Tarang, and nearly three hundred others. They would not die-I knew this for a fact, as I had known and understood so much from my very first moments on the Hell Ship. The same way that I had known that the waters of the well of life would heal me faster and more fully than allowing nature take its course.

No, they would not die; but their souls would live for eternity in the ripped remnants of their bodies, drifting through the emptiness of space.

And when the surviving slaves saw how I had vanquished Carulha, they swore their loyalty to me. They told me that I would be their new master!

But I refused their plea. For I would not be worshipped. I would not be obeyed.

I would, however, I insisted, be listened to.

And so they listened. And I used my newly acquired power to change our world. And this I have done; all the good that exists on my world, the clear blue waters of the lake, the comradeship, the use of cabins, the division of labours, the fertile plains, the Rhythm of Life itself-all this I caused to be.

Sharrock had no knowledge of all this; he arrogantly assumed I was merely a gullible and docile pawn of the Ka’un.

But in fact, I had defied the Ka’un, without them ever realising. I had turned their nightmare slave ship into a place where sentients of many species could live, and love, and share the joy of friendship.

So I have done; of this I am proud.

I found Cuzco on a crag, on Day the First, looking down at our world.

“The views,” he told me, “are wonderful up here.”

I looked at the views. They were indeed wonderful.

“Are you brooding?” I asked him.

“Fuck away,” Cuzco advised me.

“You are.”

“I am, indeed, you ignorant ugly monster, brooding,” he conceded.

I sat with him, in silence, for an hour.

“I’m still worried,” I said eventually, “about Sharrock.”

Cuzco snorted. “No need; he’s doomed. Forget the little cock-faced biped, for he’ll be marble soon enough. You worry too much, Sai-ias.”

“But I care about him. And it was a hard time for all of us, remember? The first few years. You must have-”

“You are so fucking pathetic!” Cuzco raged at me, cutting off my words. “You’re like a fucking mother to the new ones! You’d feed them the food from your mouth if you could. You sad ingratiating suck-arse! You can’t coddle creatures like this. Fly or die, that’s the way of the world.”

“I helped you. ”

“No one helped me.”

A lie, of course. Cuzco had also been an angry, bitter new one; I had spent many hours trying to teach him how to bank down his rage, and to find the moments of joy concealed in the bleakness of his life. Now, of course, he denied that he had ever needed me, or received any help from me; such was his pride.

“He reminds me a little of you, in fact,” I ventured.

“Go fuck a cloud!” said Cuzco. “He’s a biped. I’m a-a-” And he used a word that the air could not translate, but I knew it meant he had status. He was a giant among beasts, even on our interior world.

And, indeed, I often felt that Cuzco was a truly magnificent creature. He was a land giant with the power of flight; his armoured wings made him somehow lighter than air, and so he was able to effortlessly dance among the clouds, though he weighed more than Fray and myself put together. And his body was beautiful, in its own eerie fashion: he had two torsos, linked by bands of armoured flesh, and orange scales that glittered in the light. And claws on his haunches and torsos that could, when he so chose, be as delicate as hands. And no head; his face was on the breast of his left body, and he had features that were expressive and flexible and eyes that seemed to me to twinkle with delight when his mood was cheerful; though that was, in all honesty, not often.

“I fear Sharrock is harbouring a secret plan,” I admitted “He thinks he knows a way to defeat the Ka’un.”

“Perhaps he does.”

“You know he doesn’t. It’s folly.”

“I once,” said Cuzco, “had ideas like that.”

In his first year on the ship, Cuzco had, like me, attempted to attack the Tower. And to do so he had gathered a formidable army of aerials who had joined Cuzco in his attempt to breach the Tower’s invisible barrier from above. But storms had battered them and Cuzco’s six wings had been ripped off him so that he crashed like a rock in the lake, and the savage gusts of air had ripped the entire flock of aerials into shreds. Blood had rained upon us all that day; blood and beaks and feathers and scales and fragments of unrecognisable internal organs that pelted downwards and left our bodies soaked and stenched. Many of Cuzco’s followers were still mutilated after their mauling by the storm; and none of the aerials ever spoke to him now.

“Perhaps you could talk to him,” I said. “Counsel him to be-”

Cuzco stood up and his hackles rose, and terrifying spikes emerged from his body.

“I will tell him nothing of the sort! What do you take me for, you cowardly colon-full-of-shit? You do not comprehend,” said Cuzco, “what it is to be a warrior!”

“I comprehend it totally.”

“My kind were masters of all creation! We vanquished all the lesser breeds in our galaxy, and we were proud of it!”

“Your words bring you shame. You are nothing but a monster, Cuzco,” I told him, wearily.

Cuzco snarled; and then he stood; and leaped off the cliff top; and with grace and majesty he flew above the clouds, a patch of orange blurring the blue sky.

“Monster,” I said sadly, knowing it was true. If I’d met Cuzco in any other setting, he would have been my enemy, not my friend.