Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  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 s
lave.

  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, undoubted
ly 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.”