Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  “Perhaps I shall.”

  “Did you really think I would be glad to see you?”

  “Are you?”

  “You’re a grotesque viler-than-turds-in-my-eyeballs monstrosity.”

  “But are you? Glad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did not think you would be glad. After all-”

  “You fought a noble fight, and bested me.”

  “No fight is noble,” I said derisively.

  “I thought you were a coward.”

  “I aspire to be so.”

  “You’re not a coward.”

  I sighed, from my tentacle tips. I rehearsed my speech about pacifism, and why it is preferable to blood-lust, but decided not to waste my breath.

  “You fight like a grazing animal whose grotesque teats are the size of a baby Chall’s head,” I informed him.

  He snorted; the air burned; acid dripped from his eyes; laughing again.

  “Why did you come?” Cuzco asked.

  “I was worried about you.”

  “You beat me into bloodiness and had me dumped on a high cold mountain top; and you were worried?”

  “I thought you might be lonely.”

  Cuzco looked out at the view: the world was far below; we were atop a remote icy crag surrounded by sheer cliffs.

  “Fair guess,” he conceded.

  “Are you lonely?”

  “No.”

  “Good, I’m glad,” I said.

  “And yet,” Cuzco acknowledged grudgingly, “yes.”

  “As I suspected.”

  “Admit it,” said Cuzco, “The only reason you’re here is-you can’t live without me, can you, you ingratiating slime-fucker?”

  I waved my tentacles scornfully, disparaging such a ridiculous idea.

  “It’s true!” snorted Cuzco, scalding my cheeks with plumes of hot air from his skull. “You care about me, you actually have feelings for me, don’t you? In that sad pathetic cock-sucking arsehole-kissing clingy way of yours. Admit it, you soft-as-shit-expelled-from-my-bowels worm!”

  I was convulsed by a sudden unexpected paroxysm; my body was attacked from within by an unfamiliar choking feeling; my emotions clashed and collided; and I exhaled stale air from my rectum, violently and loudly.

  “What happened then?” said Cuzco, alarmed.

  “It is the way my species,” I said, amused, “expresses affection and abiding love.”

  Cuzco glared at me, and acid dripped out of his eyes again: “And you’re not extinct?”

  I knew all Cuzco’s stories, his tales of valour and loves lost and battles fought and great deeds performed in faster-than-light space ships that carried his kind amongst the stars.

  But over the next few weeks, he told me all the stories again, and I listened rapt and fascinated, and then I told mine.

  I talked of how my people first learned to fly through space; and how we danced and mated among the stars; and how we gave birth in caves and cherished our young. And I talked too of the day my father took me to the moon of Shallomar, perched on his back as he flew through vacuum.

  “Did you love your father?” Cuzco asked.

  “Of course I did.” I replied.

  Cuzco sighed; I suspected he felt a pang of jealousy.

  “And you? Did you love your father?” I asked, intrigued. “Or, rather, do your species leave their aged parents out in the desert to die the moment they begin to forget occasional facts? As the Frayskind, so lamentably, do.”

  “We do not do such a thing.”

  “But love? Did you love him?”

  “No, I did not love him,” Cuzco said, soberly. “He was a cruel tyrant; such as fathers are meant to be. My mother too was brutal to me; she taught me through pain, and taught me well, the evil bitch.”

  “I find that sad.”

  “Do not pity me!” said Cuzco angrily. “Our people do have love. We love many things.”

  “Name one thing that you love, that doesn’t involve ripping the throat out of a vulnerable fellow creature?”

  Cuzco thought hard, clearly angry at my words.

  “We love our comrades in arms,” he said proudly, “and would happily die for them, and they for us! And we love our sexual partners too. Yes, we do! With a rare and overwhelming passion! Or rather, we love them until we tire of them, and find their breath stale and loathsome, and then we feel compelled to batter them and seek fresh fucks. But for a while at least, then-yes, romantic love-I do know the meaning of that joy!!”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “But as for children,” continued Cuzco, “well, that’s a different thing entirely. For I did not know a parent could love a child, and a child a parent, until I came to this place.”

  “That’s sad,” I concluded, having won my case, I felt, beyond all doubt.

  “No it’s not. It’s normal,” Cuzco said, stubbornly. “For my kind.”

  “I had always believed,” I admitted, “it was a universal thing. That all species know the joy of love, even the violent ones.”

  “Not Doro’s kind.”

  “Fair point. His species are single-sex.”

  “Perhaps he loves himself?” Cuzco suggested.

  “That is not true love, it is just vanity.”

  “And Frayskind? Do they know love?”

  “Who could love a Frayskind! The great lumbering oaf!” I suggested.

  “Yet magnificent too,” Cuzco argued.

  “In her way, perhaps. Certainly loyal; and a good friend; unless you are a mischievous Frayskind teen, then Fray would eat you alive.”

  “Give us credit; my kind are not great parents, but we do not eat our young.”

  “You swallow sentient bipeds,” I said accusingly.

  Cuzco chuckled; an eerie sound. “Only when they are young and fresh; the older kind are chewy.”

  “You immoral beast!”

  “You should try it. Biped haunch. It has a tang.”

  And so it went on; we threw out ideas, exchanged memories, mused on the peculiarities of the strange other species with whom we inhabited this ship, told jokes, teased each other, and talked endless nonsense that amused us both.

  Cuzco and I were far from kindred spirits. His kind were fierce, wrathful, brutal, murderous, and cared for nothing more than honour, which they defined as the ability to kill or to die with skill and grace. While my kind were timid, pacifist, cowardly in his eyes; but full of an unquenchable love for others and for life itself.

  But we had one thing in common: our need for each other. For I needed him, desperately and limitlessly. And he needed me too, with the same crazy intensity. And the bond it created dwarfed any love I had ever known.

  Cuzco-I would fight and die in war for you!

  That’s how much I love you.

  “Why did you do it? The fight with Djamrock?”

  “He begged me to.”

  “You thought you’d win?”

  Cuzco sighed wearily. “Yes that was my plan.”

  “Could you have endured it? An eternity without body?”

  “An eternity of joy. Knowing I had died with honour.”

  “You would have abandoned me?”

  “We are all alone,” said Cuzco. “Love is an illusion.”

  He was right. Love is an illusion. And so is hope.

  But are illusions really so very bad?

  “Where did you learn to fight like that?” Cuzco asked one night, after we had spent a day flying on the updrafts above the highest summits.

  “I never learned,” I admitted. “I had never fought a battle until I arrived on the Hell Ship. But in the early days, there were two huge combats, which I won. That is why the world is as it is. Because I fought, and won, and claimed obedience.”

  “Before my time?” asked Cuzco.

  “Before your time.”

  “I thought Djamrock was the leader of the world. Or Miaris. They were the dominant predators. When they spoke, all listened.”

  “They listened; but Djamr
ock and Miaris never said anything that wasn’t nonsense. My words mattered.”

  “Yes but-”

  “What?”

  “You spoke to us all, true, and often we heeded you; but no one feared you.”

  “I did not want anyone to fear me.”

  Cuzco thought about that.

  “Explain how you can fight,” he said, “if your kind are not predators.”

  “Once,” I said, telling the tale of my people:

  “Once, the oceans of our world were ruled by a magnificent and beautiful sentient species called Tula. Tula means ‘all’ in my language; the Tula were our all. We were their symbiotes, their slaves. They were born as soft sea creatures, and developed a calcareous exoskeleton to become underwater reefs as they aged. The ocean bed was ruled by them; the ocean bed was them.

  “And they fed us and taught us, and in return we protected them.

  “These are not legends; this is the archaeological biology of my kind. We were giant plant-eating sea creatures with tentacles and a cape and the ability to expand our bodies to appear more threatening than we were. Then we formed a symbiosis with the Tula and we used our fearsome aspect to discourage predators who liked to eat the soft Tula flesh inside their bony frame. Browsing sea creatures like the Uoolsa and the Jaybkok could eat an entire Tula reef in a single sitting; but they were wary of us.

  “But as time went by the predators grew more bold and they began to eat my kind, before consuming our Tula hosts. So we learned to fight, using our tentacles as weapons to choke and our quills-our sexual organs, for males and females alike-as weapons.

  “And the Tula, who were sentient, saw what we were doing and they cleverly decided to ‘breed’ us. They paired us in combinations that amplified certain traits: size, strength, toughness of carapace, deadliness of our quills and so on.

  “All this took place over many tens of thousands of years; but selective breeding can be a remarkably effective process. We became fighting monsters, strong and remorseless. And so the Tula were safe, for we guarded them; and were bred to do so with terrifying effect.

  “Then the oceans started to die and we fled to the land. And there, with our bodies equipped for war, we struggled to survive. We became sentient. And when we became sentient, we became pacifist. That is when my species was truly born; when we began to think.

  “The Tula were no more; we were alone on hostile land. And our minds developed; but our bodies did not. Our fighting weapons did not de-evolve. We retained the atavistic ability to wage total war, though we chose never to do so.

  “It is a freak of nature, no more, Cuzco. I take no pride in it. I am proud of my intellect, my compassion, my empathy. But the fact I have a body that can kill with effortless skill means nothing to me. It is just a freak of nature.”

  “It means you are a warrior!” Cuzco said.

  “Oh you forsaken-by-the-gods eater-of-hot-smelly-shit-from-the-arse-of-a-Frayskind idiot, do you not hear anything I say?” I said to Cuzco, using one of his favourite insults; and he laughed.

  Night fell and we were enveloped in total blackness.

  We talked some more. I told him of my many friends in the days of my pre-metamorphosis “childhood,” and of my brothers and sisters who I had loved. He talked of his home planet and his “wife” (his third, whom at that point he still found sweet and had not yet rejected or battered) who he had tried and failed to protect from the Dreaded.

  “We were masters of our world,” he said. “And then the skies turned red. We are creatures of fire and they used fire against us. It rained flame, day after day after day. The forests were consumed. The seas boiled dry. Mountain tops were seared. But we hid in caves and underground tunnels and we launched our space fleets against the invaders.

  “My father was one hundred of our years old and he was Admiral of the fleet. He and his warriors perished. Then the fires on the surface of our planet died out. The smoke settled. We emerged from our caves to face our invaders. But they never came. They defeated us, but they never faced us. It was the greatest of dishonours.

  “I was sent to investigate the fleet’s emergency base, on the largest of our two moons. We had cable links with both the moons, we could fly back and forth on strings as thin as an ankle, as strong as the armour of a god. It was, indeed, a strange, unsettled time. Our space ships had been incinerated, our satellite stations had been exploded, but the planet itself remained un-invaded. Some of us speculated this was not an alien attack at all, just a series of natural catastrophes. And that the presence of an alien space ship in our stellar system was simply a massive coincidence.

  “But then I arrived on the moon, which we had engineered to give it a breathable atmosphere, and found scenes of carnage. This had been an old-style battle to the death. Tens of thousands of my people were scattered on the ground, dead and ripped to shreds by claws and talons and teeth. Blood lay in vast pools and insects drank it. I realised our invaders were motivated by a love of battle. They had incinerated our fleets to remove the threat to their spaceship, and they had bathed our planet in fire to prevent us from reinforcing the forces on the moon.

  “But the war on our moon was the purpose of their invasion. It had been a battle to dwarf all battles; no weapons were used; no burn marks or bullet holes could be found upon the corpses. It was all done with swords and daggers and claws and teeth and hooves, in bitter unarmed combat; the Dreaded were, I realised, just like us. They loved to fight, and they loved to kill. “And I was so ashamed Sai-ias. For I realised at that moment, as I walked among the corpses of the dead, that we had been exterminated by our own twin. I could only think of one other species who could have acted so cruelly, so bloodthirstily, so savagely; and that was my own. And I wondered at that moment if we had been subjected to this doom by a just god who was mocking us for our own sins.

  “And, thus humbled, I stood among the bloodied corpses of the last survivors of the Battle of the Moon of Karboam and I howled to the stars, in grief, and sorrow.

  “And then I woke and I was on the Hell Ship. I never saw the creature who captured me, and who rendered me unconscious. I went from hell to Hell Ship. That is my story, and I have told it often.”

  “And I have heard it often.”

  “And I have never admitted before how I felt shame.”

  “I knew,” I said, “I knew.” I realised that my body was trembling; and Cuzco was uttering strange tiny grunts; sad and pathetic and involuntary. The tokens of his deep inner grief.

  “Your father,” I asked. “What was he like?”

  “Magnificent. His wing span dwarfed mine. He sired twenty children, and I was the youngest and the least despised. He was an explorer and a scientist, and discovered many species of sentient life in the depths of space, and catalogued them all with care. But first and foremost he was a warrior, and a bloodthirsty butcher, and so was I. But does that make us unfit to live? Did we truly deserve to be exterminated, the way we were?”

  “I cannot answer,” I said, remembering all Cuzco’s tales; and the stories of the four species of sentient bipeds his people had tormented, and slaughtered, and eventually eradicated.

  “Perhaps we did,” Cuzco continued. “Perhaps the god of our universe judged us; and perhaps his judgement was fair.”

  “Not so,” I murmured, “not so.”

  I did not believe in a god of the universe; an arbiter of justice. I did however believe that Cuzco’s kind were murderous monsters who deserved most of what they got. For evil will always breed evil.

  However, I said none of this to Cuzco; he had suffered enough.

  And so we lay there in the dark, hearing each other’s breaths, bathed in each other’s sorrow. And I stroked Cuzco’s body with my tentacles and I felt a strange desire come upon me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Can’t you guess?” I asked, lightly.

  He was silent for a little while.

  And then for a longer while.

  “Ah,” h
e said, eventually.

  “Would you like to?” I asked.

  “Is it possible? For us?” Cuzco said.

  “Others have managed.”

  “Perhaps we could try,” Cuzco conceded. “Touch me some more.”

  I touched him some more.

  “I am becoming aroused,” Cuzco admitted, and shifted his body.

  I touched him some more.

  He sighed with pleasure.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No,” I said gently.

  “But I have to be able to satisfy you! Bring you to-what is for you a climax?”

  “This is all the climax I need. For my kind can eat the joy of others,” I explained.

  And at that moment, he howled to the black skies; and I howled too.

  “We could stay here for ever,” I told him, many glorious hours later. “Up in the mountains. The Ka’un don’t care.”

  “I feel happy,” said Cuzco, and he purred.

  “I feel happy too.”

  We lay together in the pitch black, all night long; and I listened to the sound of his breathing.

  And I thought about the first time I met Cuzco. He had been dumped by the Ka’un on the savannah and he had reacted to his plight with rage and violence. He attacked all who came near him; and his behaviour was so aggressive that eventually all the giant sentients steered clear of him. He burned a forest down out of malice and pique; he tried to fly off the planet and crashed agonisingly into the false sky; and he refused to speak to any of us for months.

  Even so, I tried, every day, to build a relationship with him, though he treated me always with a vitriolic rudeness that made Sharrock seem gallant by comparison. When I tried to comfort him he swore at me. He called me a coward and a bitch and a whore and an ugly abomination-and worse, far worse. But beneath the rage I sensed there was real anguish. And so I persevered.

  And then one day, as I was about to depart from his tirade of abuse, Cuzco had ceased raging and, in some embarrassment, asked me to stay.

  And I did. And then he shared with me some of his stories of loss and grief. And from that day on we were friends, of sorts.

  Despite our friendship however, he continued to be brutal and scatologically insulting towards me; for that was Cuzco’s way of showing affection. It lacked nuance in my view; and yet deep down I knew, or rather I suspected, or to be candid I hoped, that he did care. And there had certainly been, for all this time, something between us. And that “something” had sustained me over these many years. Until His breathing stopped.