Her species, I knew, had no concept of maternal love. One time Fray had told us, with relish, a story about how Frayskind mothers loved to eat their young; and she’d gone into considerable detail about how enjoyable it was to crunch upon the bones of newborn Frayspawn, and to munch the skulls of toddlers who had, in some unspecified way, been errant. Our response to her tale had been unamused, and indeed hostile.
Fray had, I recalled, been extremely offended at our narrow-mindedness and lack of empathy for her culture’s moral values.
I watched the dawn. The sun was a rich and glorious ball of fire, as it always was. And its red rays lit the waters of the lake and made them ripple like flames furiously flickering, as they always did.
I looked at the Tower, standing bleak and eerie on its craggy summit that loomed upon the island at the centre of our world’s only lake. And I felt a breeze on my face as the wind was turned on, and the fields of purple grass began to sway.
I drank from the well of life, and it was rich and refreshing, and cold. I tipped the dregs from my cup over my face and felt my black hide moisten.
“You must eat,” I told the prisoner softly, for the hundredth time. It is one of the most important things the new ones have to learn; the necessity of eating both regularly and well.
“Eat,” I said, but he ignored me.
“Please, I beg you, eat,” I implored, but his eyes were blank and he did not move.
Then he turned to me, and his face became a sneer, and once again he spat at me (clearly a gesture of disdain in his culture), and he screamed, with spectacular fury: “Fuck your puckered-arsehole, you soul-stealing fucking bitch!”
And I could tell he yearned to be able to attack me, and mutilate my body, and perhaps even kill me; but he dared not, for my every tentacle was larger than his single torso.
He was, to my eyes, a quaint and tiny creature; very prone to rages, and gifted with an extraordinary breadth of eloquent invective. Most of his insults cast aspersions on aspects of my femininity-for my voice to his ears was unmistakably female-or my inability to practise monogamy, or the size and condition of my sexual organs. Often, he ascribed to me a fondness for eating my own excreta, which in fact I do, so I wasn’t too offended by that one. And, on other occasions, he indulged himself in vivid fantasies about my demise.
One of his favoured insults, as I recall, was: “May your small-brained children eat your mouldering-fucking- flesh so they can shit it out and feed it to the fucking Baagaa [rodent-like creatures who were indigenous to his planet]!”
Another classic taunt was: “You’re just an ugly mother-raper-whose -children-ought-to-turn-into-mutant- freaks-so-they-can-fuck-your-arsethen-eat-you-alive!” Or rather, this is how it came out in translation; in his language, he later told me, all this could be expressed by a single one-syllable word; a miracle of linguistic economy, in my opinion.
He also, and often, encouraged me to “swallow the cock of a Sjaja [a large furry animal indigenous to his planet] and choke to death on it.”
His language was, all in all, deplorable, even after being toned down by the translating-air. But I had no linguistic taboos, so his words did not hurt me.
“If you don’t eat,” I explained to him eventually, “you will be in pain. You will suffer intestinal disorders. Your body will start to consume its own fat reserves. You will not die, but you will wither away.” At this point he began screaming and weeping, but I continued:
“Your skin will be like parchment,” I told him. “Your heart will be hard as a stone. Your blood vessels will scar your body like blue streams in a rocky desert. And this process cannot be reversed. Eat, or the flesh will fall off you and it will never grow back.”
“I don’t plan to live that fucking long!” he said savagely.
“Show me your arms.”
“Fuck away, you bitch-with-a-withered-arsehole-that-stinks-of-death!” he sneered.
“Show me.”
He hugged his arms tightly to his body. I gently but firmly pulled one arm away and looked at the wrist. It was gouged and ugly and full of pus. The teeth marks were still visible. But the artery had resealed and there was no trace of infection in the wound.
“You must understand,” I pointed out to him, “that you cannot die.”
“What have you turd-fucking monsters-from-Hell done to me?” he asked, with desperation in his tone.
I had, I must confess, become fond of the poor wretched creature by this point. Though his ranting did annoy me somewhat; and I found him, to be candid, rather ugly, although these things are of course highly subjective.
He was a thin biped-a morphology I used to loathe, though I was becoming used to it-with two eyes in the front and one mouth; and, at this very moment, his face was wet, which I knew from considerable experience of this species-type indicated a show of emotion.
Then, as his face dampened still further, he lay down and curled his body up in an unnatural posture which I presumed to be defensive and defeated. So I waved my arms and blew soft air on him through my tentacle-tips, and was appalled when he began to scream.
I withdrew a few paces and, still in my gentlest tones, explained the truth about our lives, the thing that we all of us have to face.
“Your body has been improved,” I said. “Your rejuvenation powers have been enhanced. A bullet cannot kill you. A knife cannot kill you. A broken neck cannot kill you. Age cannot kill you. Disease cannot kill you. But if you do not eat, you will become a living skeleton and the pain will drive you to the brink of insanity.”
“This is evil beyond evil, you creature-who-should-never-have-been-born!” he roared.
Then he began to writhe and spasm, and he howled in horror, fists tight-clenched, tortured by the fact that his formidable (by small biped standards) physical strength could not be used against an enemy such as this: his own body.
“You must,” I told him sternly, “eat, or you will regret it, bitterly and self-reproachfully, for all eternity.”
That night, Quipu recited to us a poem; it took six hours to perform, using a complex system of calls and responses between his five garrulous heads. His poem was extremely good but a little repetitive. It was the story of a god who played tricks with all his creatures by disguising himself as various exotic animals indigenous to Quipu’s home planet. The final trick was when the god arrived on Quipu’s world disguised as an alien invader.
We all roared with laughter at that.
I watched the dawn. It seemed to me that the dawn was a slightly different colour every day, though Quipu told me I was deluded.
I felt a breeze on my cheek.
“Enjoy your day,” I said to Lirilla, as she hovered next to my head, also savouring the dawn, and cooling me with the rapid beating of her multi-coloured wings.
“I shall,” Lirilla replied, in a voice so soft it was like a memory distantly recalled.
After five hours of cutting and biting with my claws and teeth, I fabricated a perfect stone, and then I carried it on my back from the quarry to the Temple.
The path was long, and winding; I passed herds of grazing creatures dawdling in the fields, savouring the sun on their variously coloured hides; I skirted the swamplands, where drowsy mud-beasts were wallowing, occasionally splashing each other with shit and mud; and finally I reached the Great Plain, where stood the Temple of the Interior World.
It reached, by now, almost to the clouds; a double-cylinder 8 shape with oval windows built, brick by brick, out of carved rock, modelled on a constellation visible from the night skies of my own home planet. The rays of the sun shone down upon the polished surfaces of the stone; it gleamed white in the soft light, a squat beast with its head striving to angrily butt the sky.
I placed my perfectly-shaped stone down on the grass for just one moment, and admired the beauty of the magnificent edifice we had conceived and built: a doubly circular obelisk set amidst rich grassland, with the snow- capped mountains in the distance peering down at the child of their rocky loins.
And I felt proud; just for a moment; the very briefest of moments.
And then I clambered up the side of the Temple until I reached the top and levered the stone into position. And I spat the fast-mortar I had been carrying in my mouth into the thick join between stone and stone, to secure
