“Then go, you ignorant stealer-of-space-that-might-be-occupied-by-my-shadow.”
“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 Djamrock 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.”