“I am not,” I suggested, “so very bad.”
He stared at me, his angry features trembling. His skin was soft, reddish in hue, marked with diagonal ridges, and it undulated slightly when he spoke.
“You’re really not my gaoler?” he asked, eventually.
“No.” I replied.
“You were captured as I was?” he said.
“Indeed.”
He considered this. “If that is so, perhaps I have wronged you,” he conceded.
“It was an easy mistake to make; I just want you to know I am here to help you.”
“Then I thank you for that,” he said courteously.
“So, what is your name?” I asked him.
“They call me,” he said proudly, then paused and uttered, as if bestowing a precious gift, his name: “Sharrock.”
And he stared at me, clearly expecting a reaction.
“In my world,” he added proudly, “I am-” But then he broke off, and did not conclude his train of thought.
For there no longer was, of course, a “his world”; and no one would ever again sing songs about him and his heroic exploits, whatever they might have been.
“My name is Sai-ias,” I told him gravely.
“What language are we speaking?” he asked, quietly; his spirits clearly dashed.
“It is not a language. We are not speaking. Or rather, we speak, but the ship transforms the sounds, via invisible translators in the air, into patterns of meaning in our minds.”
“The air does that?”
“It does.”
“How is such a thing possible?”
“I do not know,” I admitted.
“And who is in charge? Who controls this ship? Who are our masters?”
“I do not know.”
“How can you not know?”
I sighed, through my tentacle tips, and patiently explained:
“I was captured, as you were, by a spaceship. I have never seen my captors. Other slaves explained to me what I had to do, and how.”
“So you don’t know who these creatures are? The ones who destroyed my planet?”
“My people called them Ka’un. In my language, that means ‘Feared Ones.’ ”
“What do they call themselves?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do they come from?”
“I don’t-”
“I get it. You don’t know. Have you asked? Did you try to find out? Do you know where on the ship they dwell? Do they look like you, or like me? What are their intentions? Do they have weaknesses? What is their purpose in attacking worlds like mine? Can we negotiate with them in any way?”
“They dwell in a Tower which no creature can approach. That’s all I know about the Ka’un,” I said.
Sharrock stared at me, intensity building in him like molten rock in a volcano approaching eruption.
“Then Sharrock,” he said, in the tones of a person making a vow that will change his life, “will find all the answers to all these questions, and more. And then he shall study the flaws and weaknesses of these accursed creatures. And then-”
“Then you shall wreak your wrathful vengeance upon the Ka’un?” I intercepted.
“Yes,” he admitted. And with some chagrin, he said: “You’ve heard that said before, I take it?”
I sighed, through my tentacle tips.
“Many times,” I told him.
A little while later Sharrock, with heart-broken eloquence, told me his tale. The dark and terrible story of the End Of All Days for his species.
He was a brave and proud warrior, he told me, and he came from a brave and proud and noble family. His people were exceptionally gifted at science and engineering, as well as being courageous fighters. He was, I learned, at some length, incredibly proud of his people and their status among the other tribes on his planet.
He also told me that on his planet there were two biped species living as one family unit: his kind, comprised of warriors of either gender and their spouses, guided by a Chieftain such as himself, but all equal in law and status; and the three-gendered Philosophers, who were small, tiny-tailed creatures of remarkable kindness.
The Maxolu warriors, he explained, were as clever as they were brave; and when they weren’t in combat, or stealing from other tribes, they were hunters, and farmers, and masters of mathematics and science.
The Philosophers, by contrast, knew little of science, and less still of war; but they had the gift of dreaming great things. And out of these dreams, Sharrock’s people had created skyships and spaceships and satellites and devices that make it possible to fly without experiencing the effects of acceleration.
I understood very little of all this but I knew it made Sharrock calmer to talk, so I let him talk.
Philosophers on his world, he continued, were treated like honoured guests, or small children; they weren’t expected to work, or to fend for themselves. All they had to do was dream; and those dreams were inspired, and had yielded an endless succession of extraordinary inventions and discoveries and concepts. In consequence, his own people were the masters of their solar system, and also of all the habitable planets within two hundred light-years of their sun.
I marvelled at the power of their Philosophers’ dreaming; and it gave me a strong sense of kinship with these now-extinct creatures. For my people too once knew how to dream.
Although their technology was advanced, he explained, Sharrock’s people were nomads. They lived in tents in the desert for large parts of the year, and loved to feel the desert sandstorms on their flesh. But even so, their cities were magnificent; and they could build machines of great complexity that could walk and talk and think, and kill at a distance; or could convey objects from here to there in less time than the blink of an eye. And they had become, through the manipulation of their own biology, extremely long lived.
Sharrock talked too about the historic rivalry between his people of the North, and the Southern Tribes who had occupied the equatorial zones and who, after a long battle the details of which held little interest to me, were banished into space, where they had created an empire of many planets. Shortly before the End of All Days, Sharrock had been on a mission in Sabol, the capital planet of this empire, a place steeped in luxury and decadence where (as he explained it) fat and effete Southerners lived inside machines, oblivious to the joys of the natural world.
He then explained to me how-after acquiring without purchasing some priceless artefact or other, which now of course was worthless-he had returned home to find his village laid waste, and his people dead.
He had then, he told me, taken to the sky in some kind of vessel and after various adventures had fought with a large alien female with red hair streaked with silver.
My heart sank when he told me this; I was confident I knew who it was he had fought, and I hoped I would be able to keep the two of them apart.
Sharrock had then been engulfed in lava as the planet began to fall apart; and had lost consciousness, only to wake up inside the bowels of the Hell Ship, his burned limbs and body miraculously healed.
He had subsequently witnessed his planet’s destruction through the glass walls of the prisoner-hold of the Hell Ship; a place I knew only too well. Trapped and alone, he had seen his sun flaring, like a wounded beast spitting bile and entrails from its shredded guts; he had seen comets and asteroids crashing into his planet’s atmosphere; he had seen earthquakes and volcanoes devastate his world with their hot burning horror; and then he had seen the planet itself break into a million parts like carved and coloured glass shattered by a blow.
The image haunted him, and I understood how he felt. For I, too had seen my world explode into many parts, and the memory of it has never left me.
“Let me tell my tale,” I said to Sharrock.
“My kind,” I told him, “are not warriors. We do not-or rather we did not-have weapons. And nor did we believe these creatures from space would hurt us. By the time we realised our error, our planet itself was in the process of being destroyed; racked with earthquakes and terrible storms.”