I was piqued at that.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want to be,” she pointed out, with anger modulating her normally calm tones, “just an animal. Unable to control my brute lust. Nor frankly do I savour your selfless pathetic obedience. We need to be more than prisoners of our own biology, Jak! We have-don’t we see-the potential to be so much more!”
“Whatever you say, Commander,” I said, my casual tone belying the fact I was affronted at her words.
Pathetic? Obedient? Was that really how she saw me?
“Do you have the faintest idea what I’m saying?” she asked me, sadly.
“Not really,” I admitted
“Then forget we had this conversation.”
“It’s forgotten.”
The shadows lifted from the trees and hovered above us. A slow hissing sound surrounded us.
“Can you translate?” Galamea asked Albinia.
“ Not yet. ”
We waited patiently for Explorer to decode the linguistic patterns in these creature’s malign hissing.
“Are these shadowy bastards a hive intelligence?” I asked.
“ I have no data on that,” said Albinia/Explorer.
The shadows hovered high, and when I looked up at them, at the black clouds that blocked the sun, I realised that the clouds were moving.
“These creatures block their own sun,” I told Albinia/Explorer.
We stood in that field for fourteen hours, but Explorer never managed to decode the aliens’ strange hissing language.
And so the system was abandoned, but not quarantined. The mission was a failure.
But Galamea’s words stayed with me.
And many years later, after she was dead, it occurred to me what she had really been saying that day in the field of trees and shadows.
She had been asking me to change. To stop serving her blindly; to cease treating her with craven adoration; to treat her, in short, as an equal. All this, I eventually realised.
Too late.
BOOK 4
Sai-ias
“Where are you talking me?”
“Not far. My cabin is here. Down the corridor,” I said.
Sharrock stepped anxiously along the circular corridor, struggling to keep his balance because of the steepness of the slope. The corridor was large enough to accommodate my bulk and that of Cuzco and the other “giant” sentients, as we are called. Sharrock was dwarfed by it, like an insect clambering across the hide of a huge and grossly fat land animal; or, indeed, like Lirilla dancing upon the backside of Fray.
He slipped, and fell, and scrambled back to his feet.
“Take care,” I advised him.
“I tripped,” he said angrily, “on that fucking slime trail you leave wherever you’ve fucking been.”
“It is an outpouring of my essence, not a ‘fucking slime trail,’ ” I told him stiffly.
“You fucking corpse-fucking slime-leaving freak,” Sharrock sneered.
I slithered on.
The circular tunnel expanded into a large circular atrium, and I spoke the code and a door opened in the wall. I slid inside and Sharrock scrambled behind me, and we arrived in my cabin, the largest on the ship, which also was a perfect sphere.
Sharrock stood and looked around and his breathing became irregular, and I guessed this was a visceral response to what he saw before him.
“These are my cabin friends,” I explained.
His face was calm, his demeanour relaxed, as befits a warrior; but I could tell that, beneath the mask, Sharrock was filled with fear.
“Hello there,” said Cuzco.
“Hi,” added Fray.
“You look like shit,” said one of Quipu’s heads-the leftmost one, Quipu One-unhelpfully.
“Welcome,” said Doro.
“Hello,” said Lirilla.
“I am privileged,” said Sharrock, with nary a tremor in his voice, “to encounter such noble creatures.”
Cuzco snorted with contempt; and Sharrock flinched, as smoke seared the air and Cuzco’s eyes radiated hate.
“In my world,” Cuzco said softly, “you would be carrion.”
Sharrock stared up at Cuzco, fearlessly. “You really are one ugly son-of-an-arsehole fuck, aren’t you,” he said marvelling. And Cuzco’s eyes blazed scarlet with rage and his back-body thrashed and his body-horns grew into long spikes, and his scales rattled, and all at once the huge circular room seemed too small to contain us all.
Sharrock continued to stare, with no trace of fear; ready to fight or to die; his body a veritable masterpiece of composure.
And finally, Cuzco gave ground: his body shrank, his back-body stilled, his scales became silent, his horns sank back beneath his armour, his eyes turned green again. And his tongue lapped the air, and we could see the jagged tongue-spikes which Cuzco, in the old days, would have used to suck the blood and the life out of any errant or impertinent biped.
But those days, as even Cuzco now acknowledged, were gone.
“Sit,” I said to Sharrock, gently.
That night, Fray told us a tale we had not heard from her before.
“This is the story,” she told us, in her booming low voice that always for me evoked the thudding of hooves on a lonely savannah, “of how my world was born. It is a story told to me by my mother, and her mother before her. It is our origin story.”
I curled myself up comfortably, and breathed air scorched by Cuzco’s breath, and kept an eye on Sharrock, who, I noted, was rapt and exhilarated as Fray eloquently spoke.
“We were born of the wind, so my mother said,” Fray told us. “The wind that blew from the north and crashed in great tumult against the mountains of the south. And then the wind’s angry tongue licked the rock, and the rock roared with pleasure, and split, and a grey wet mess of flesh was birthed. And that was us. The Frayskind.
“We were born of the union of the wind and the mountains; and our father the wind is still our friend. That is how we learned to hunt. We were slow and heavy and all the other creatures could hear us thundering after them, for we were never the fastest of beasts. But we begged the wind to howl and roar, and the grasses were whipped wildly by its gusts. And the animals we stalked could not smell us, for the wind conveyed our stench swiftly away, and they could not hear us, because the sounds caused by the wind were so deafening. So we thundered towards them and caught them unawares and ate them in our great jaws, and when we had digested them we farted loudly and long, to return the favour to the wind.
“And the mountains are our mother, and when the great Majai hunted us and killed us by the thousands, we took refuge in the womb of the mountains. Rents appeared in sheer cliff faces and we clambered inside the caves and we made our homes there for many hundreds of years. And while we were gone our father the wind roared and ripped the planet apart and all the land animals died, including the Majai, and when we returned we were the only large land animals left alive and we were able to eat the thick grasses and the rich vines without any competition or threat from other predators. Thus were we saved by our mother the mountain.
“And to this day, I worship the wind, and revere the mountains. And I fart loudly, and long, when I eat. This is our origin myth. And,” Fray continued, crisply, “it is based to some degree on historical truth. For the archaeological records show that in the ancient eras our planet was racked with terrible storms that destroyed all the major life forms apart from us, the largest land animal, and the clumsiest. But we survived because we cowered in caves and scrambled among rocks and when we emerged the wind was stilled and the land was fertile again.
“I am an atheist; I do not believe in the god of wind, and the goddess of mountain. But I love this story. It has poetry and beauty.”
“It’s a fine story,” agreed Cuzco.
“Aside,” said Quipu One, “from the farting.”
The sun rose; I watched with delight. And I felt a surge of anticipation. For today was Day the First; the day on which I explore the rich and varied habitats of our world.