“Many times,” I told him.
A little while later Sharrock, with heart-broken eloquence, told me his tale. The dark and terrible story of the End Of All Days for his species.
He was a brave and proud warrior, he told me, and he came from a brave and proud and noble family. His people were exceptionally gifted at science and engineering, as well as being courageous fighters. He was, I learned, at some length, incredibly proud of his people and their status among the other tribes on his planet.
He also told me that on his planet there were two biped species living as one family unit: his kind, comprised of warriors of either gender and their spouses, guided by a Chieftain such as himself, but all equal in law and status; and the three-gendered Philosophers, who were small, tiny-tailed creatures of remarkable kindness.
The Maxolu warriors, he explained, were as clever as they were brave; and when they weren’t in combat, or stealing from other tribes, they were hunters, and farmers, and masters of mathematics and science.
The Philosophers, by contrast, knew little of science, and less still of war; but they had the gift of dreaming great things. And out of these dreams, Sharrock’s people had created skyships and spaceships and satellites and devices that make it possible to fly without experiencing the effects of acceleration.
I understood very little of all this but I knew it made Sharrock calmer to talk, so I let him talk.
Philosophers on his world, he continued, were treated like honoured guests, or small children; they weren’t expected to work, or to fend for themselves. All they had to do was dream; and those dreams were inspired, and had yielded an endless succession of extraordinary inventions and discoveries and concepts. In consequence, his own people were the masters of their solar system, and also of all the habitable planets within two hundred light- years of their sun.
I marvelled at the power of their Philosophers’ dreaming; and it gave me a strong sense of kinship with these now-extinct creatures. For my people too once knew how to dream.
Although their technology was advanced, he explained, Sharrock’s people were nomads. They lived in tents in the desert for large parts of the year, and loved to feel the desert sandstorms on their flesh. But even so, their cities were magnificent; and they could build machines of great complexity that could walk and talk and think, and kill at a distance; or could convey objects from here to there in less time than the blink of an eye. And they had become, through the manipulation of their own biology, extremely long lived.
Sharrock talked too about the historic rivalry between his people of the North, and the Southern Tribes who had occupied the equatorial zones and who, after a long battle the details of which held little interest to me, were banished into space, where they had created an empire of many planets. Shortly before the End of All Days, Sharrock had been on a mission in Sabol, the capital planet of this empire, a place steeped in luxury and decadence where (as he explained it) fat and effete Southerners lived inside machines, oblivious to the joys of the natural world.
He then explained to me how-after acquiring without purchasing some priceless artefact or other, which now of course was worthless-he had returned home to find his village laid waste, and his people dead.
He had then, he told me, taken to the sky in some kind of vessel and after various adventures had fought with a large alien female with red hair streaked with silver.
My heart sank when he told me this; I was confident I knew who it was he had fought, and I hoped I would be able to keep the two of them apart.
Sharrock had then been engulfed in lava as the planet began to fall apart; and had lost consciousness, only to wake up inside the bowels of the Hell Ship, his burned limbs and body miraculously healed.
He had subsequently witnessed his planet’s destruction through the glass walls of the prisoner-hold of the Hell Ship; a place I knew only too well. Trapped and alone, he had seen his sun flaring, like a wounded beast spitting bile and entrails from its shredded guts; he had seen comets and asteroids crashing into his planet’s atmosphere; he had seen earthquakes and volcanoes devastate his world with their hot burning horror; and then he had seen the planet itself break into a million parts like carved and coloured glass shattered by a blow.
The image haunted him, and I understood how he felt. For I, too had seen my world explode into many parts, and the memory of it has never left me.
“Let me tell my tale,” I said to Sharrock.
“My kind,” I told him, “are not warriors. We do not-or rather we did not-have weapons. And nor did we believe these creatures from space would hurt us. By the time we realised our error, our planet itself was in the process of being destroyed; racked with earthquakes and terrible storms.”
He listened carefully, but with a certain detachment. It was clear that in his mind what happened to me could not in any way compare to what had happened to him.
“And I was captured, and held in a spaceship, just as you were, and saw my planet fall into pieces, just as you did.”
“How do they do that?” Sharrock asked. “The earthquakes? To do that requires a radical sundering of the planet’s structural integrity.” His features were alert; he was thinking hard now, and it made him look like a hunter eyeing his about-to-be-captured prey. “Bombs fired into the planet’s core? Missiles made of un-matter?”
“I do not know.”
He nodded, absorbing the sheer depths of my ignorance. “I think so,” he said. “Un-matter would do it. You know what un-matter is?”
“No.”
“The opposite of matter; when the two collide, Poof!” He clapped his hands, to demonstrate the explosion resulting from the happening of whatever he was talking about. “Or maybe a collapsor sun. You know what that is? A sun so massive it collapses in on itself?”
“We have no such concept; I have heard talk of such things though, from my friends on this ship,” I said.
“The physics is formidable,” said Sharrock, grinning with relish, “but the engineering is simple. Put your un- matter or your mini-collapsor in a big missile, fire it into the planet’s crust; set it to detonate when it reaches the liquid outer core. Bang!” He clapped his hands; so skilful was his storytelling that I could see the very same image that he was seeing. “The planet is gone. Brutal. Our Philosophers have dreamed of such a weapon; but even the Southern Tribes would not be so entirely fucking evil as to do that.”
“The Ka’un,” I said, “are undeniably that entirely fucking evil.”
He nodded. “Continue,” he said, as if I were his servant, and he my king; and I did.
“My planet was lost to me,” I told him, “and no more can be said of that. And then I came to the Ka’un ship, and I was shocked at what I encountered.”
I had his attention fully grasped by now; and I needed him to heed these words. For those who do not comprehend how it was then, cannot exist now.
“It was,” I said, “back then, so many years ago, a bleak and barren world. The lake was stagnant, the grasses were knotted with weeds that stank like corpses. My fellow captives slept outdoors, and every night when the sun was switched off, the blacker-than-black night was filled with screaming.”
For a brief moment, I allowed myself to touch the memory of those days; and it seared my soul.
“And so I learned,” I said, “in those early years, the way to survive. And this I must now teach you.”
“You may,” said Sharrock, “endeavour so to do.”
“The way to survive is this: do not fight. Do not rage. Do not yearn for vengeance.”
Sharrock smiled; and I recoiled at the power of his hate.
“How can you say that?” Sharrock said scornfully, his skin glowing scarlet, his eyes glittering, his muscles bunched. “You slack-cunted bitch! You coward-who-would-comfort-his-mother’s-rapist! Vengeance is all there fucking is!”
“No! You must surrender your hate,” I said, and my normally gentle tones were strident now. “Thoughts of revenge will gain you nothing; they will merely poison your soul.” I knew this well; so very many of my friends had been consumed by hate and implacable rage.
Sharrock thought about what I had said, sifting it like evidence in a murder trial. “How can I give up my dreams of revenge?” he said, more baffled than angry now.
“You have to.”
“No!” he roared.
“Remember this,” I said, “life is worth-”
“I don’t want to hear your fucking platitudes, you black-hided monster!”
