“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,” he 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.