Hell Ship

Sai-ias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharrock.

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

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

Another Ka’un apocalypse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What can be done?” asked Sharrock.

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

Sharrock paused, and swallowed.

“We cannot allow that,” he protested.

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing,” Sharrock admitted.

“Then nothing is what we can do.”

Sharrock thought about my words.

“So be it,” said Sharrock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then that familiar impatience settled upon him.

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

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

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

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

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

“That wouldn’t be sufficiently taunting.”

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

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

“A fine philosophy,” Sharrock conceded.

“But?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sharrock,” Lirilla said.

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

“How is he?” I asked.

“Dead,” Lirilla trilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll stay with him,” I said, calmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m here,” I said.

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

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

“I know.”

“I-” He coughed and spluttered.

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

He took deep breaths. Gathering his energies.

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

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

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

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

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

“The sun,” said Sharrock.

“Too bright?”

“Warm,” said Sharrock. “It’s good.”

Sharrock stood up totteringly, and eventually got his balance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharrock was disconcerted by the question.

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

“But was anything achieved?”

“Much glory was got,” he said feebly.

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

“Not so!” Sharrock retorted.

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

Sharrock’s face was bright scarlet now with emotion.

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

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

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

And as his strength grew, we talked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hear what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And once I had realised this, I dived down. And down, and down, clinging on to the soft force projection field with my finger tips until I touched air. And then I swam under, through the gap, and into the water on the other side of the invisible barrier, and on to the beach itself.

“And I reached the other side, Sai-ias. I was this close to the Tower!

“And then I heard a sound again. Another proximity detector; and that’s when the real storms began. A wind started up; a wind that whipped my face, and made me stagger as I walked.

“Then I saw a giant approach. Ten times my height and made of metal, stomping towards the beach. I had no chance of defeating him, so I dived down into the water again, and swam back under the force projection field.

“And then I was in the midst of the storm; and the winds broke my bones and the water drowned me. And when I woke, I saw your face glaring down at me. Never have I been so glad to see such a forsook-by-all-the-deities ugly fucking face as yours, Sai-ias.

“But there are tides, Sai-ias. And there is a way in. We can reach the Tower, Sai-ias. We can do it!”

I was stunned by Sharrock’s words, and for the first time in many aeons, I did not know what to do.

Should I convey this information to the others? Or keep it as a secret?

Sharrock had, I knew, been foolish in telling me so much. For the air that translates and that brings the light can also hear our every word. The Ka’un are like gods; they know everything that happens, and everything that is said. Which means they already knew of Sharrock’s venture into the Tower; and they knew too what he had just told me. We were both in deadly peril. Sharrock was an idiot if he didn’t realise this!

And I thought about the prospect of death-in-Despair and I realised I feared it. My life was bleak enough; but the alternative was far worse. For if the Ka’un caught me, and declared me to be a rebel and a trouble-maker, then they would punish me in the most terrible of ways. Despair indeed might prove to be the best of my options.

“Do you see what this mean?” Sharrock said.

“Of course I do,” I said, calmly, hiding my terror.

“Then we must-”

“Wait.”

“We have to-”

“We have to wait. Let me think.”

He sneered. “I get it. You’re afraid. You-”

I expanded, five fold, in an instant, and fired my quills at the trees that lined our path, and they were impaled and screamed in agony, for they were sentient trees and I had not realised. And I howled, a low howl.

“Sai-ias…”

“I am afraid,” I conceded. If I were a biped, my face would have been moist. “I am afraid. Afraid. Afraid. Afraid.”

I had lived for so many centuries without rage, without a thirst for vengeance, and without any trace or remnant or shadow of hope.

And now I realised I was afraid of it; I was afraid of hope.

I made Sharrock pledge to keep silent. And I did not visit him for another twelve cycles, while I brooded about the problem: what to do about the Tower?

I walked up from the woods, past the seas of fire. Shoals of Bala Birds flew above me-a single gestalt mind in the bodies of a million tiny insects that flocked like shadows in the air. I saw the arboreals playing, flying from branch to branch with the aid of their prehensile tails, or in some cases prehensile teeth or noses.

I half-walked, half-slid on my carapace-segments past the shore of the lake where Sharrock and I had eaten false-fish, and I saw the charred remnants of a bonfire.

And then I saw Sharrock, squatted on a tree trunk, eating cooked meat. He sensed me before he saw me, and turned, and looked at me enquiringly.

“Sharrock,” I said to him, “Let us explore that fucking Tower.”

The sun was setting beautifully over the lake. The Tower was etched in silhouette against the richly red sky.

Then the lights went out.

Sharrock was tethered to my back, and I swam across to the waters of the lake. It was totally black now; not even a glimmer of light intruded, and there were no heat signatures to guide me. So I simply swam blind using my sense of motion to keep us on a dead straight line across the lake.

Sharrock murmured encouraging words to me, which gave me precious little encouragement; indeed, he was starting to make me feel like his beast of burden. The waters lapped around us. I found it disorientating to have no way of locating myself by my surroundings. I tried uttering a few shrill shrieks to see if I could echo-locate by them, but that wasn’t one of my best senses and sound, of course, doesn’t really travel so well at night in this place.

So we simply carried on until I crashed into an invisible barrier.

I crumpled, and rolled over in the waters, and splashed and spluttered myself into a floating position. Sharrock stayed balanced on my body, unperturbed and undampened.

“This is it,” said Sharrock, contributing nothing but the accentuation of the obvious.

I patted the barrier with two of my tentacles, and felt a sticky, soft surface. The force projection field.

“Proximity alarm has gone off,” said Sharrock; his hearing was most unnaturally acute, for I had heard nothing.

“I feel rain,” Sharrock added; I was too wet by then to tell. But I could hear the wind start to spring up.

Then Sharrock gripped me tight, holding me by my eye-fronds, the ends of which he had tied to his stomach like ropes; and I dived down. And down further, pawing the invisible wall with my claws-savouring the joy of water on my soft skin, an atavistic memory of life as a sea creature running through my veins-until suddenly the force wall was gone.

I was near the muddy bottom of the lake, and I ploughed a path through the mud and mess. Then my way was blocked by rock, as we struck the lake bed itself; but I tore at the rock with my claws, burrowing a way through, with Sharrock clinging on to me. After we had tunnelled for ten minutes or more through rock and mud, I aimed my body upwards; until we were in water once again.

We were, I was confident, now on the other side of the force shield barrier.

Swiftly, I kicked and splashed, using air from my gills to propel me through the water to the surface. And we broke the water’s soft barrier of tension and emerged into the air. Sharrock gasped for breath, but appeared unharmed by our long time underwater; and I marvelled at the remarkable capacity, for a land creature, of his lungs.

“Now,” I said, and Sharrock turned on the searchlight that Quipu had constructed, using parts of hull and metallic ore from the mountains. And the world was lit up: the Tower, looming above us, the purple grasses all around, and the brooding crag of the Tower’s rocky mount.

“I hear it,” said Sharrock. “The second alarm. Wait, it’s stopped. This happened last time too. Which means-”

“What?”

“Soon, the storms will really start to rage.”

We paddled to shore. The beach was lit by our searchlight. A gust of wind struck us, and I tucked Sharrock in a tentacle to keep him safe from the gale, and we looked around for the giant metal beast, but saw none such. As we had hoped, it was a creature that stalked the day, not the night.

Then we continued on.

We made our way up from the beach and Sharrock walked on my wind-sheltered side while I slithered towards the Tower, still following the light of Sharrock’s torch. The Tower was close. There were no more force barriers. We reached a gate, and I tried to crawl over it and failed, so I smashed it down. Then we reached the Tower, and entered through a stone gateway. We were inside the Tower now.

We were inside it.

The Tower at such close quarters had a delicate beauty that surprised me; it was made of silver brick that shone with newness, and the coloured-glass windows were decorated with scenes of biped heroism etched with stunning artistry. But the interior was barren-no rooms, no furniture, no people.

We explored the Tower, which was a vast complex of interlocking rooms the size of a city; but possessed of no furnishings, and no inhabitants. We trailed down empty corridors; stood within vast empty banqueting rooms; marvelled at the empty basements and the barren upstairs rooms which had no decor and had never been inhabited. This place was not and never had been lived in; it was certainly not the control centre from which the Ka’un steered and controlled the ship.

“I don’t understand,” I said at last.

Sharrock uttered a sharp sound; a laugh mixed with mockery.

“It’s a trick,” said Sharrock. “We use them in warfare all the time. Fake cities. Illusionary battalions. The Metal Giant too, that’s illusion. I saw it walk on to the beach the other day, over those purple grasses. But the grass there is intact and still high; no creature has walked here in many years. The Metal Giant is not real, it’s just a visual projection. More trickery.”

“But to what end?” I asked.

“Self preservation,” Sharrock explained. “You all believe the Ka’un live in this Tower. And if that were actually true, you might conceivably have found a way to beat their godsforsaken force field, and then swept through this place and destroyed them all.

“But these monsters are not stupid monsters. They’re not here, they’re elsewhere. Safe. Guarded.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Sharrock. “But do you see what this proves?”

I thought, long and hard and strategically. “No,” I admitted.

“They’re afraid,” said Sharrock.

“I do not comprehend.”

“Why hide, if they could so easily defeat you? They’re afraid. Of you. Their own slaves.

“And that means,” said Sharrock, “that if we ever can find the fucking corpse-sucking bastards, we stand a chance of defeating them.”

We left the Tower. The wind by now had risen to a frenzy, and rain was pouring in torrents from the clouds above. Though this rain did not actually land on us-it merely splattered on to the force projection field above us in the air.

But the winds were actually here, inside the dome-shaped field of force; and we knew that the Ka’un were using their air as a weapon against us.

“We should,” I suggested, “go.”

The journey back was harder. The storm was exceedingly powerful, and I had to fight every step of the way to return to the island’s pebbly beach. Sharrock was unable to stand against the gale, so I held him in my tentacle; but even I could barely propel myself against the walls of wind that enveloped me. And bizarrely the winds could change direction; no matter which way I turned, I was battling against the wind.

Eventually however we reached the beach and I dived back into the waters of the lake, which were wildly turbulent. And then dived to the bottom and returned along the crude tunnel I had ripped out of the lake bed, that took us under the force wall.

And once when we were back upon the lake itself, the tides were still against us, and were ferociously powerful; it took almost all my strength to swim against tide and wind in the direction of the land.

However a mere storm had no power to hurt me; and Sharrock was by now hugged tight against my chest, protected from it all.

As I swam, I thought about the Tower, and the pathetic deception the Ka’un had practised against us; and I began to see Sharrock’s point. Now, for the first time in all my years on this ship, the Ka’un did not seem to me to be all-powerful. Perhaps they really could be My thoughts were savagely interrupted, for the gales intensified and became a tornado; and spiralling currents of air caught us up and threw us into the air. And we were flying now, higher and faster and higher still; and then we crashed against the hard surface that I knew was the roof of our world. The impact shocked me, I began to fall, Sharrock by now was just clinging on numbly, unable to speak.

I tried again to right myself, and glide; but I was spun in a helical path by winds so powerful they threatened to rip the cape off my body.

So instead I flattened my cape against myself and made myself as streamlined as I could, as if I were swimming through the deep ocean. And I allowed the winds to lift me up, and dash me down, and crash me from all sides.

And so, all night long, we flew in the midst of a hurricane, deafened, unable to see, battered this way and that.

Then, when the sun arose, the storm started to abate. And I went into a free fall. At the last moment I managed to spread my cape and we glided safely down to the mainland.

Sharrock was unconscious, though alive; his clothes had been torn from his body and his skin had been ripped from his back. I could see the white bone of his spine. His supporting frond tether had broken; but even so, he had managed to cling on to me and never let go.

I carried him to the well of life and lay him down there and rolled him in. The blue waters turned red and Sharrock spluttered. But I made him lie in the healing waters until the skin on his back had grown back, and his broken bones were beginning to heal.

“So where are they?” I asked.

Sharrock smiled, as if he knew something that I didn’t.

“It’s a total mystery to me,” I confessed. “The Ka’un do not dwell in the Tower; they are not under the lake; they do not exist in the mountains or the Valley. I know every inch of this world! Where are they?”

And Sharrock pointed up, to the clear blue sky.

“Up there. Beyond the sky. That is their world,” said Sharrock.

“Beyond the sky is space,” I protested.

“A second hull. It’s the only explanation.” He drew the shape in the sand: a circle surrounded by a larger circle. “Picture this: we dwell in the interior world; but above and around us here is the exterior world, where the ship is controlled, and where the Ka’un make their home.”

I looked at the shape:

“We are a world within a world,” I said, marvelling.

“Yes,” said Sharrock. “And all we have to do is find a way through to the exterior world that exists between our sky and the ship’s hull, where dwell the Ka’un. And then we shall-”

“Slay the evil bastards?” I suggested.

“Slay,” agreed Sharrock, “those evil world-killing bastards.”

Jak/Explorer

You should stop now.

Stop reading Jak.

Read no more. It’s not helping you. You cannot I have to know.

No purpose is being served. You are merely I have to honour them. Every one. Every creature lost, I must at least know the name of its species, and one fact at least about it. Is that too much to ask? That one fact about an entire species will be remembered for all eternity.

That will drive you mad.

Again.

Jak?

Jak?

In this archive are riches from the multiverses; for ever gone.

EXPLORER 410: DATA ARCHIVE

LOG OF LOST CIVILISATIONS (EXTRACT)

Lost Civilisation: 12,443

SPECIES: The Dia

MORPHOLOGY: Unknown, but small in size … a formidable database listing every single species on every single planet explored by these remarkable sentients.

The full database is archived here; it goes into minute and sometimes pedantic detail (twelve million categories of dotted markings upon skin) and does not include any useful description of the Dia’s own form, shape, and nature.

Highlights from the database of species known to the Dia include:

Kaolka: small toad-like creatures that could leap up into the clouds and eat birds with a single gulp (on the planet D12132 if mapped according to Olaran model of stellography-Dia name not translatable).

Shoshau: creatures made of slime without internal organs or eyes or ears who moved by binary fission and competed for land with vast flocks of aerials whose urine was toxic to the slime-beasts (on the planet Ff991). The Shoshau had, apparently, a song that was astonishingly sweet.

Seaira: translucent land-animals whose internal organs were clearly visible and who could soar like bats, and could focus sunlight as a lens to use as a weapon against predators (on the planet D9980).

Bararrrrs: Insect-like creatures that lived for centuries and grew to the size of small rodents, then grew to be vast amphibious creatures, then carried on growing and ossifying until they became mountains; these mountains then served as nests for new generations of insects (on the planet R88).

Though the morphology of the Dia themselves was never defined, several clues indicate they were small, and unaggressive. ^ 1

Lost Civilisation: 22,399

SPECIES: Unknown

MORPHOLOGY: Unknown

Language of message untranslatable, but coherence patterns indicate it originated as an electromagnetic signal. As with 67.2 per cent of all messages, the lack of a hermeneutic prime number/alphabetical symbol/significant images key page makes it impossible to read the message.

Lost Civilisation: 33,445

SPECIES: Kaaaala.

MORPHOLOGY: Not specified but aquatic origin implies limbs that are evolved from fins.

This species left many messages caught in the folds of space, but this lament is the most haunting: Our planet is dying. Our people are dying. We are the last of our kind, and we are truly cursed by our own foul nature. Yesterday I saw a mob erupt and kill a pregnant female and rip her embryo from her womb and trample it into the dust. Such a horror appalled me but I know it is typical of our times. Such outbursts of violence are hardly new. We’ve all read our history books, and we know about the city riots of the sixth century and the country riots of the twelfth century and the class riots of the thirteenth century. Our history books are little more than a litany of murders, wars and mass uprisings in which the death toll can often reach the millions. Why are we such a barbarous species? Are we unique, in all this universe, in being cursed to kill our own kind? Some commentators blame the corruption of technology and science for our woes. And it is true that the invention of the projectile bomb, the road-side bomb and the extendable dagger have wrought havoc among our youth and our elders. My own grandfather slew a hundred innocent children when he rampaged through his former school with a multi-projectile gun and body armour. His age-rage was typical; our kind seem to evolve out of riotous youth into a tranquil middle age, only to descend once more into vicious anarchy once we are past the age of sixty years. But the death rate was even higher back in the long gone Old Days, even though knives and swords and axes were used instead of rockets and mortars and projectile guns. The streets ran purple with blood on so many occasions; and traitors and innocents alike were punished by the law by the most cruel methods, including beheading, eviscerating and [NOT KNOWN]. The biological determinists believe that our cruel nature is the result of our distant origins as aquatic creatures of the great oceans. For we are used to spawning, and shoaling, and dying en masse in the teeth of vicious sea predators. A million of our eggs will yield ten million or more children as they hatch in the nursery muds and we are accustomed to allowing nature itself to determine which of those children shall have parents-in other words, we let them fight it out until only the strongest new-born embryos survive. Perhaps there are other species who do not practise such a barbaric form of early nurture, who place more value upon the lives of their children. We are born to bloodshed, eating alive our brothers and sisters in order to survive. Is it any wonder that blood-lust remains with us all our days? There are deists, however, who believe we are dying as a species because we have been cursed by an unknown, omniscient creator, who spawned all the eggs of life and is now waiting gleefully to see which intelligent species will live, and which will die. We are pawns of a playful god, in other words, waiting to see if we live or die and not caring either way. When I was a young one I dreamed of travelling into space and discovering alien forms of life and being an explorer. Now, it is unlikely I will live beyond my sixtieth birthday. For the mobs are using hydrogen-fission weapons to attack their enemies; the end is surely not far off. We will kill each other off with our new bombs; we will destroy ourselves as surely as we destroyed our enemies. And if the world does survive-what do we have to look forward to? A slow decline into vicious, violent, gangsterish brutality? Will I end up murdering my own children, as so many of my older friends have done? What savages we are! If there are other intelligent species out there, then I thank my blessings we never encountered them; for they would be ashamed of us. We are nature’s runt; the worst, most violent species ever spawned. We do not deserve to live.

One year after this message was broadcast to the stars, the Death Ship appeared in the skies above these people’s planet. The Dreaded were hailed as saviours, and a new spirit of cooperation spread through the lands of these once-aquatic peoples. Violence ceased. The elderly mellowed, and realised the folly of their brutal ways. The children learned to respect their elders, awed and shamed by the presence of alien sentient life.

The Dreaded were welcomed by these people with open arms, and according to several broadcasts transmitted to the stars, they were acclaimed almost as gods.

There is no record however of how this species and its planet were destroyed by the Dreaded; but destroyed they were, along with the rest of this universe. All that remains is a lament by a sentient being ashamed of his own people for all their flaws and frailties; and, as Star-Seeker Jak has ironically observed, unaware that that there are other creatures in existence who take evil to infinitely greater extremes.