Ours is, it cannot be denied, a small planet, easily traversed in a matter of hours if you can swim the seas, which I can. Or if you can plunge through the murky suppurating swamplands, which I can. Or if you are nimble enough to traverse the thick forestlands, which I am. The mountains are steep, and few land creatures can clamber up their sheer cliffs, but I am one such. And the valleys are dark and gloomy and raging torrents fill them, but I am easily able to ride the stormy waters and descend the waterfalls.
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.