Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  Pinpricks of light in the distance betrayed the locations of fighter craft that had been hit and had expired in a burning maelstrom. Meanwhile, a new flotilla of space-fighting vessels had appeared and was spewing out debris which, I deduced was explosive.

  “It’s kind of beautiful,” said Phylas, soulfully.

  We were in invisible orbit in the planetary system of Xd4322, watching two tribes of the same species attempting to destroy each other in a series of colossal space battles.

  “The planet is a radioactive shell, the sentients now live on moons and satellites,” Morval explained.

  “What savages,” I murmured.

  “Perhaps; but do they have anything we’d like to buy?” asked Commander Galamea, with creditable hard-headedness.

  “Bombs?” I hazarded.

  “According to our intercepted transmissions,” Morval continued, “this war has lasted a thousand years. One group of sentients live in the inner solar system, the other group live in the outer solar system. They are fighting for dominance and the right to own the sun.”

  “What do they look like?” asked Galamea, and Albinia conveyed an image from Explorer’s space-cameras and projected it in the air.

  I studied the image with curiosity. These were diamond-headed creatures with no visible eyes or ears or limbs, whose squat bodies were supported on three powerful legs.

  “How do they play piano?” asked Phylas, mockingly.

  Albinia animated the image; tendrils emerged from the diamond torso and sweet music was heard.

  “They have no musical instruments,” explained Phylas, “but they sing their own internal organs.”

  “Could we trade with them?” Galamea persisted.

  Another missile struck the alien battleship and it split apart. And then, as sentients slowly spiralled out of the ship, the fighter craft dived in and obliterated the stranded sentients one by one.

  “I doubt it,” said Commander Galamea regretfully. “Seal off the system.”

  “When I was a boy,” said Morval, “the Olarans only had five planets. Olara, New Olara, Olara the Third, We Miss Olara, and Far From Olara.”

  “In those days,” observed Phylas, “the Olarans were a sad bunch.”

  “My father was on one of the first rift ships. He was a pioneer, one of the greatest of all explorers,” Morval bragged.

  “I’ve read about him,” I said.

  “Back then,” said Morval, “no one knew if the rifts were stable. Your ship rifted and it might, for all you knew, end up as random matter, or materialise in some other universe. So the courage of those early explorers was extraordinary.”

  “I’ve heard it said,” said Phylas, thoughtfully, “that most of them were volunteers. They went into space exploration for love, not as a result of, um, a court order.” He blushed, filled with shame at his own criminal past.

  “That’s true,” Morval acknowledged. “My father was an idealist. He believed the exploration of space was one of the greatest adventures of all time.”

  “As do I!” I said defensively.

  “You’re just here,” said Morval scornfully, “because some female broke your heart.”

  “Who told you that?” I said angrily.

  “It’s written,” said Morval, “all over your soul.”

  I seethed; but could not deny the truth of his words.

  “My father eventually settled,” Morval reminisced, “in a Trading Post in some far-flung galaxy, and never returned to his family. My mother didn’t care; she had married again of course, long before that. And she never spoke of him; all that I know about my father was gleaned from research.”

  “My father,” said Phylas, “was-” Then he ran out of words; clearly there was very little to say about his father.

  I sipped my rich-juice; thinking about my own father.

  I had not really known him all that well, in all honesty. My mother had been the main presence in our family, as was so often the case with Olarans. He had been an artifice monger; but I could recollect no tales he had ever told about his work. I decided I had nothing much to add to this particular conversation.

  “Have I ever told you,” I said, “about the time I tried to sell carpets to the Vengans and-”

  I drank too much that night and went to the Command Hub to look at the stars. On a Vassal Ship I could have used the Observation Deck and looked into space with my own eyes, but here I had to make do with camera images.

  Albinia was still wired to Explorer; eyes closed and effectively unconscious. I wondered when she slept, or if this for her was sleep.

  I conjured up the phantom control display and flicked through different star charts until I found the night sky of my own home world, Shangaria. It brought back fond memories; when I was ten years old I’d wanted to be an astronomer and spent every night looking at the stars. My mother used to name them for me; for she knew each star by heart.

  I wondered if my mother had ever loved my father. There was however no evidence for it. She was a wonderfully self-contained female, and intensely serious; my father had been a funny delightful man, but she’d never once laughed at his jokes. Perhaps that was because they were stupid jokes. I had found them incredibly funny; but then, I’d been just a child.

  After the divorce my father had visited us every weekend and he always had a smile for me. He told me that no Olaran marriage ever lasts more than twenty years; because females always grow impatient at the intellectual gap between them and their males. “Savour it while you can,” he’d told me, still with a smile.

  “You’ve been drinking,” said Albinia. Her voice startled me out of my reverie. I turned to her. Her eyes were open; she’d emerged from trance.

  “I am smashed,” I said, extravagantly, “sozzled, delirious, and delighted!”

  It was a stupid thing to say; and I said it in an extremely stupid fashion. And after I’d said it, Albinia stared at me for a long while, clearly baffled at my idiocy.

  Then she giggled.

  I offered to leave of course, after the giggle-moment, but Albinia insisted that I stay.

  And so I stayed, and we talked, surrounded by stars, as she plucked absent-mindedly at the cable that led out of her skull.

  We talked about aliens we’d encountered, and about missions, successful and unsuccessful, and about other members of the crew. Albinia knew the biographies of every crew member. I knew most of them by their first names from card games and drinking bouts, but she knew their full names including the matronymic and their professional and personal histories and she told me it all. I listened, an expression of rapt interest pinned to my face.

  “Are you bored?” she asked abruptly.

  “Not in the least,” I protested. “You say something.”

  “I would be delighted so to do.”

  “Go on then.”

  “Shall I tell you,” I said, expansively, “of the time when I was trapped in a cloud on the planet of-”

  “Unplug me,” she whispered, urgently, cutting off my words.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Please. I’d like to get up and stretch my legs.”

  I was startled at her request; but I reached over and gently eased the plug out of her skull; a curiously intimate act.

  “Thank you,” she said softly.

  “You can’t bear to do it yourself, can you?” I said, with dawning comprehension. “Disconnect yourself?”

  Albinia blinked, clearly disorientated at being fully in a human body. “I do find it-an effort of will,” she admitted. “Galamea makes me spend an hour in the gym, twice a day. But there are brain-plugs there too. It’s only at meal times that I am-naked.” She touched her skull holes self consciously.

  “Here, take a walk with me,” I said.

  I changed the settings on the panoramic wall screen; we were in a park now, the sun was shining, and there was a lake.

  Albinia got up from her chair, carefully stretching her limbs. Her bald head gleamed in the muted evening li
ghting.

  We promenaded around the Control Hub for several minutes; I held her arm in mine. She was, I noted, a little wobbly on her feet.

  “Look,” she whispered, confidingly.

  She showed me what was in her hand; it was her skull plate, that she used to cover the holes in her head on social occasions. “It holds a wirefree,” she admitted.

  “You wear this when you’re not connected to Explorer?”

  “When I wear this, I am connected to Explorer.”

  She smiled, like a child confessing a wicked secret; and she slipped the skull plate back into place, covering the holes. It was a silver oval, almost the same shape in miniature as her shapely head.

  Her eyes sparkled as the contact was made; Explorer was back in her brain.

  I found myself kissing her; I have no idea how that happened.

  We went back to my room, and fornicated for several hours.

  Albinia was a passionate lover, and it was a pleasure to bring her to climax. I felt curiously detached however; for I hardly knew this woman I was so skilfully orgasming. Because this wasn’t the Albinia I loved; it was the “in trance” Albinia who captivated me. This Albinia, the real one, was just a shy awkward creature, oddly young in her ways, and emotionally needy to a degree that terrified me.

  But I copulated her competently enough, then she fell asleep in my arms. And when she woke up she was crying and I had to ask her why; and then she told me what was wrong with her.

  “I fear that I’ve lost my olarinity,” said Albinia.

  I stroked her naked breast, and she shuddered. Her skin was warm, I could still taste the aroma of her soft flesh on my lips.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I can see,” she said, and held a hand out in front of her, “the galaxies unfolding. I can hear the beat of pulsing stars, I can touch the pull of gravity-well stars, I can count supernovae in a single glance and I can smell the carbon and the iron and the uranium in the clouds of matter circling each and every star in my sightline.”

  I touched her cheek with my fingers, and kissed her temples. “Feel that too?”

  “I feel that too.”

  “You’re Olaran.”

  “Some of the time.”

  I touched her skull plate, with its wirefree link to Explorer’s brain. I was somewhat shocked by it, in truth, for I’d never heard of such a thing.

  “Then cut the link. Turn off Explorer, exist in the here and now.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re supposed to. It’s not customary to be permanently connected. It’s surely in breach of safety protocols.”

  “I don’t care. I love it too much. I am the ship, the ship is me.”

  “I just fucked a ship?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That makes me feel,” I said, “odd.”

  And, to my delight, she giggled again.

  Here’s a truth I learned at an early age: females are not like males.

  When I was twelve years old my six-year-old sister explained to me the fundamental principles of Olaran science. I had no idea what she was talking about, despite my several years of school. But she had accessed a single memory file and had learned it all, instinctively. She could do mathematics the way I could throw a ball. But she could also throw a ball further and more accurately than I ever could.

  When I was sixteen years old I was given a degree in astrophysics with a distinction, and was considered to be one of the brightest students in my all-male class. But my sister, by this point, was building suns, with the help of a mind-machine link with the Olaran computer. Her intellect so far surpassed mine that I marvelled at our memories of being kids together, playing in a pool in the garden, creating imaginary friends.

  But Albinia was the first female who ever explained to me the negative side of having such effortless intellectual proficiency. Since she was ten years old she had been cyber-linked with a computer or robot for large parts of her waking day. And so she’d grown up awkward, clumsy, and not at ease in her own body. Males terrified her, and the fact that all the males she met treated her as a superior being terrified her even more.

  “All my life I’ve known I could have any male I wanted, with a click of my fingers,” said Albinia, trying but failing to click her fingers. “And a lot of my girlfriends did just that. They fucked their way through college and carried on screwing around in their twenties. What was there to lose? Pregnancy is volitional these days, males are getting more and more beautiful, and the sexual congress is officially an artform. But I hated it.”

  “Poor little powerful girl,” I said with-or so I realised in the retrospect of a moment later-a hint of bitterness.

  “Every male I’ve been with behaves like a servant. I never feel relaxed. I always feel in charge.”

  I remembered Galamea’s words on the dark world and, for the first time, I began to doubt my understanding of my own species.

  “Females are natural leaders,” I said tactfully.

  “Have you ever been treated as an equal? By a female?”

  “No,” I lied.

  We fucked again that night, and when I reached the moment of her orgasm she stopped and she looked into my eyes. And she cupped my head in her hands.

  And she transferred her consciousness into me, from her skull plate into my brain dot.

  And then we carried on fucking.

  And this time, I wasn’t me, servicing my goddess. I was her; I felt the heat of Jak’s skin, the hardness of his body, I felt his cocks inside me, and I saw it too, with my Explorer part; saw the two naked coupling bodies from the cameras in the wall, and then I was in the Command Hub watching the stars on the screen and I was also outside the ship, I was looking at Explorer/myself thorough space cameras, and I was travelling through space, and my telescopic and spectrographic and electromagnetic vision allowed me to zoom close to any sun I desired and feel the soft caress of its interstellar matter on my body.

  I was no longer myself; I was Albinia; I was Explorer; I was everywhere; and data swirled around me and I knew it without thinking. And when Albinia achieved her orgasm, I felt it too, and the ship shuddered, and the engines roared.

  Afterwards we lay silently and nakedly entwined.

  “How was that?” asked Albinia.

  “Let’s,” I said, “do it again.”

  “Commence to rift, please,” I said, and unreality descended upon us all in the Hub; on Morval, Galamea, Albinia, Phylas and myself.

  As the rifting process began, I kept my eyes carefully focused on the star screen, and on my work. I did not, thanks to my exceptional self-control, digress in my purpose by looking at Albinia: the cable trailing from her skull like a leash, her absorbed and haunted features, her distantly-staring eyes, her twitching lips. Though in truth I wanted to look at her so much; so extraordinarily much.

  And indeed, I did, just for a moment, sneak a peek!

  For I loved, I realised, both Albinias now. The real one that I had fornicated with so beautifully that night; and the other one, the trance-Albinia who I knew on the Hub; a beautiful child lost in dreams.

  “Improbability is-” Phylas started to say.

  But suddenly Albinia screamed. It was a scream of pure hysteria and it shocked us all. And the ship rocked and shook, as she broke her link with Explorer. We were flying through un-space without a Star-Seeker!

  “Operating manual controls,” said Morval swiftly, as he took control of the vessel from Albinia/Explorer. He eased us back into reality. The Command Hub flipped and flipped again, until the walls and ceiling were whirling around us in our fixed points, held by the stay-still.

  Then finally we were back in real space. I broke the stay-still with a murmur-link command, and hurried across the room to Albinia. Her face was twisted with pain. I reached for her cable.

  “That could be traumatic,” Morval warned.

  I touched Albinia’s face; she opened her eyes; sh
e saw me and smiled.

  I wrenched the cable out.

  She sighed with huge relief; and was herself again.

  “What is wrong Star-Seeker?” I asked, appalled at the look of emptiness in her eyes.

  “I saw,” she said, “another world come to a terrible end.”

  The genocided aliens in this case were the Maibos; a species of artificers, and we had done a great deal of business with them.

  The Maibos had built for us some of our most magnificent furnishings and tapestries. They were an entirely non-violent species; it was a miracle they had survived so long. The Maibos had constantly refused all offers from Olara to equip them with a space defence system. And they refused to heed our argument that this is, and always has been, a viciously violent universe.

  But the Maibos held to their faith, that violence begets violence; whereas a spirit of peace and love will spread and possess all those who encounter it. They called it the “contagion of joy.”

  And in this delightful faith they were proved entirely wrong. For these peace-loving creatures were invaded and exterminated like bugs. All of them died; all. Not one Maibos remained, except for the handful who dwelled at the embassy of the Olaran Home Court.

  And even their planet was destroyed; shattered and exploded into many parts, just as had happened to the planet of the FanTangs. And to salt and sting the wound, un-matter bombs were flown into their sun, sending it into a flaring frenzy; it was now poised to turn nova.

  We knew all this because, in the dying moments of their civilisation, the Maibos had found a way to transmit space camera images of their demise through rift space, on what they knew were Olaran frequencies.

  This is what Albinia had seen through her Explorer link. The end of a world; the planet of the Maibos sundering; billions of gracious, honourable creatures perishing even faster than their own ideals. It was an image of horror that had seared her mind.

  It was a shocking holocaust and all Olarans mourned for the lost Maibos.

  But the good news was that this time there had been a sighting. An Olaran scout vessel had viewed the foul slayer of the Maibos as it had fled the planetary system.

  And according to this reliable report, there was no fleet, no alien armada; just a single vessel, with black sails.