“Then I shall cut to the gist of it. To live here,” I explained firmly, “there are several simple rules that you must follow.”
“Whose rules?”
“Rules we live by.”
“No one tells me,” said Sharrock, “how to fucking live!”
“Rules you have to live by,” I insisted. “For know this: you must from this moment on abandon all abstract ideals like ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ and ‘happiness.’ These concepts belong to the past; our only future is one of shared regret. “And embrace, too,” I said, with a wisdom acquired over aeons, “ joy: joy in our world; joy at being alive, and at being together. Each day is precious, to me, and to all of us, for the moments of joy that it harbours.”
And I paused, anxious to hear if my logic had prevailed with this arrogant, war-mongering fool.
And, for a moment, Sharrock did in fact look pensive; he nodded slowly, as if considering my words, and met my gaze calmly.
But then Sharrock spoke:
“You,” said Sharrock, in rage-filled tones, “are nothing but a fucked-up-the-arsehole drinking-piss-and- thinking-it-tastes-like-wine conniving-with-the-enemy and sucking-the-cock-of-the-creature-who-kill ed-your- mother-and-your-father piece of shit!”
And I sighed, once more, from my tentacle tips, regretfully.
Clearly, my work with Sharrock was far from over.
Jak
And so, as I have already narrated to you, I left Mohun. And soon afterwards my ship the Explorer 410 slowly accelerated past the planet of Varth, leaving behind Kawak and his herd of savage predators.
I was Master-of-the-Ship, serving under Commander Galamea, and the ship’s officers included the two Space Explorers I had met at the banquet, Morval and Phylas.
The ship was a small, squat working vessel with a hull streaked with stripes and pock-marked with small asteroid scars. The quarters were basic; I had a cabin smaller than my wardrobe on the Vassal Ship. There was no banqueting dome; we ate in the canteen, with food malignly designed by the ship’s computer brain to be nutritious, but not appealing. It was, all in all, a place of horror.
It took a week for Explorer to reach the outer limits of the solar system. Averil would soon depart with the main Trading Fleet, with her new lover Master Trader Mohun.
I thought of her often.
In fact, incessantly.
Indeed, for every moment of every day, I was haunted with memories of her achingly intellectual features, her lusciously perceptive smiles, and her casually neglectful glances when I performed for her some great service or other.
But I had made my choice: I would lose himself in my work. And I was no more a Trader. My job now was to lead the Explorer craft into the depths of uncharted space; where, in time-hallowed fashion, we would search out new and alien civilisations, in order to get the better of them in sly negotiations.
“Welcome to my ship,” I said to Morval.
His old, withered, bald head scrunched up in a scowl more ugly than-well, I had never seen anything more ugly.
“I have been on this vessel,” he pointed out, “for two hundred years.”
“It’s my vessel now,” I reminded him, courteously.
“I’m aware of that.” The scowl became a sneer; hardly an improvement.
“We should be friends,” I told the old Trader generously.
“I have, as a point of policy,” said Morval, “no friends. My friends all abandoned me when I was banished by the Chief Artificer.”
“I always admire an Olaran,” I said, “who can harbour a grudge the way a father raises a child; with love, care, and the passage of decades.”
“Ah, Master-of-the-Ship your wit is so… entirely adequate,” said Morval, bitterly.
“Let me make a wild surmise; you were passed over for promotion?”
“I was.”
“Because of your sullen attitude and melancholic disposition,” I suggested.
“And my abundant lack of youth and beauty.”
“Then clearly,” I suggested, “I am better qualified; for young I am, barely forty years, and many consider me beautiful. But you shouldn’t in any way feel-”
“This is a godsforsaken Explorer ship! We don’t need a pretty boy Master! We need someone who knows what in fuck’s name he’s doing!”
“And you would be that someone, I take it?”
“I would be, and I am.” And Morval stared at me with his dark haunting deep-set eyes. “The previous Master-of-the-Ship,” he pointed out, “died of shock when his simulacrum was eaten alive by sentient slugs, after he and I had spent two years trapped in an alien forest.”
“I’m used to danger.”
“You have no idea,” Morval told me, with evident glee, “what danger really is.”
I stood in the bleak, spartan Command Hub of my new ship, with grey walls all around, no porthole, and four brushed-Kar-goat-leather (I mean the common variety of Kar goat, not the rare beasts with skin like a baby’s arse) seats for the ship’s officers and our Commander. One of these seats was currently occupied by Star-Seeker Albinia, who was linked by a cable which stretched from her shaved head to the ship’s brain; and hence existed dreamily in a world of her own.
“You’re used to better,” sneered Morval.
“My Vassal Ship,” I said politely, “had wooden furniture, shaped and whittled intricately by a Master Carver, and a ship’s wheel made of gold and titanium.”
“Frippery!” said Morval. “Explorer steers the ship, Albinia sees through its eyes; what’s a ship’s wheel supposed to do?”
“It made me feel,” I pointed out, “important.”
Phylas grinned at me as if I’d made a great joke; he was, I realised, a shameless ingrate.
“Any chance of a view?” I asked, and Morval grunted again, with even greater disapproval. But I glared: Pardon me, direct order? And he yielded.
“Albinia,” Morval said, “give us your eyes.” Albinia responded without speaking, and the blank grey wall ahead of me became a panoramic view of the space outside our ship.
“Background music?”
A dark dense thrilling chord pitched at almost subliminally low levels filled the small cabin; that, and the stars, gave the spiritless space at least some sense of atmosphere.
Morval grunted and scowled, clearly caught up in a crescendo of disapproval, but I ignored him.
“My bunk,” I said to Phylas, who stood shyly beside me, “is it considered acceptable on such vessels?”
“It is the largest bunk on the ship.”
“Except for the female quarters.”
Phylas snorted with amusement. “Except, obviously, for the female quarters.”
“What is the Commander like?” I said. “Give me fair warning. Is she firm? Fair? Disciplined?”
“She is fierce.”
“Ah. Fierce.”
“She is a former Admiral in the Olaran Navy; she was discharged for excessive, um, brutality.”
“Against who?”
“Against the Stuxi.”
“The Stuxi,” I pointed out, “tried to destroy our home world; they were flesh-eating savages who murdered millions before we forced them into a truce.”
“Even so, a military tribunal found her too brutal.”
“Ah.”
“I believe also that she considers me an idiot,” Phylas admitted.
