the forest. I am a creature beyond Olaran now; an immortal essence.
For I am become Hate; a Hate that, until it is sated, can never die.
Our journey began in that first universe. We dwelled there for a hundred years, cruising from planet to planet, in search of the Death Ship.
And we did not find it. A futile fruitless search.
It is hard to convey how truly painful was that utter bathos. To go from a white heat of rage to-ordinariness. It was not tragic; it was merely banal.
However, while in this new universe Explorer and I studied planets, catalogued civilisations from afar, and we even made direct contact with one such species of sentients. For we encountered an exploratory space ship crewed with bipeds who found us altogether most exotic and strange; a man-machine with a scorched hull and a crazy passion to pursue an evil black-sailed ship!
I became fond of these bipeds; they were curious, witty, and intriguing. And, if I hadn’t been so very insane, I would love to have joined their fleet, to spend my days once more seeking out new civilisations. For though trading was once my passion, I had come to care more about discovery, and about life in all its many forms. Explorer had calculated for me the odds of us finding the Death Ship in one of these many (but we could not know how many, or indeed if there was any limit to them) universes; they were not good odds. Even if there were less than an infinite number of such universes-the chance of stumbling upon the one, the very same one, as the Death Ship occupied, were almost laughably small.
So Explorer asked me if wanted to give up our pursuit. I was, after all, still Master-of-the-Ship. I could, in theory, abort her programming. But I refused. We would not falter in our purpose, even though our failure seemed inevitable.
And so we travelled on; and the curious bipeds went about their business. They were of a species called Cruxes. I felt they had potential.
And then the stars in our universe began to go out.
Once we realised what was happening, ours was a desperate scramble to return to the area of space from which we had entered this reality. We rifted ceaselessly; hurtling through un-space with a reckless disregard for the agonies of improbability. As parts of us died and were mangled, Explorer replaced them with identical components. A human crew would have been killed outright.
By the time we had returned to our starting place, the Universe was nearly dead. And so we sought the same gap in space we had found before; and we rifted; we entered a new reality, with moments to spare.
Explorer had by then added twenty sentient species from this universe to our extensive Olaran archive of civilisations.
And, once we entered our new universe, bitterly lamenting the death of the reality we had just fled, Explorer created a new file category; the Log of Lost Civilisations. There were twenty-one of them so far, including our own.
We have been pursuing the Death Ship ever since.
BOOK 7
Sharrock
I stood in the grass amphitheatre surrounded by a baying, howling mob.
The arboreals led by Mangan were throwing rocks at me. Fray was roaring with rage, scratching the ground with her front hooves. The Quipus were assailing me with deadly five-fold sarcasm, screaming at the top of all their voices. And I was damp from the envenomed spittle spat by the serpentines, which made the bare flesh of my legs and arms and face sting.
Then I sensed someone arriving behind me; and from her stench, and the characteristic sound of her tentacle-loping gait, I realised it was Sai-ias. Back after all these many cycles.
But I did not turn around. Instead, I carried on with my angry tirade, carefully making eye contact with my adversaries, and ignoring the many intemperate and vicious heckles; even those relating to the sexual morality of my beloved wife.
“-this day is an opportunity for-” I tried to say.
“-fucking turd-brain arse-kisser-” raged Mangan.
“-a chance for us, to discuss-” I persevered.
“-no point, no fucking point, you fucking no-brained imbecile-” That was Quipu Five or Four, I could never tell them apart.
“-issues, scientific matters, or-”
My words were drowned out utterly by screams and shouts and words of abuse.
“What’s the father-fucking point! Djamrock had the right-”
“-philosophical concepts, stop it all of you, listen-” I persisted.
“The Rhythm of Days, I shit upon the Rhythm of Days!”
“-to me, I implore you to-”
“-masturbatory self-deluding biped fool-”
“-coward-”
“-time-waster-”
“-lick-cock! Lick-cock! Lick-cock! Lick-”
A stone hit me on the temple. I tottered at the blow, which fractured my skull and blinded me in one of my eyes. Then I ducked to the ground, and came up holding the stone. “This stone,” I said. “Look at it!”
Shit balls were hurled at me by the arboreals; some splashed messily upon my body, others, the tight- compacted balls, broke my bones agonisingly. But this time I didn’t even bother to dodge. I was drenched in brown excrement, my ribs had doubled in number, and blood was streaming down my face.
“Why bother, Sharrock?” said Fray, with just a hint of sympathy. “Even the old bitch herself doesn’t care! Look. She’s back now! But she fucked away just when we needed her! “
And now I turned, and looked at Sai-ias, and saw in her ghastly but (to my one eye) strangely beautiful features how distressed she was; and wondered what had caused her such pain. And then I turned my gaze back to Fray.
“Speak with respect of Sai-ias,” I said quietly; and Fray was silenced.
As a result of my rebuke to Fray, the clamour of the mob too was dimmed, so that I could at least hear my own voice and recognise it as mine.
“Sharrock, what are you doing here?” asked Sai-ias; and her voice was weary.
“I am merely,” I said, “asking a question.”
And I turned in a slow circle, making single-eye contact with as many of the malignly ignorant fucking aliens around me as I could. And then I attempted to give the finest and most rousing and most inspiring battle speech of all my life! Except that this speech was not about battle at all.
“This stone,” I said quietly, dropping it to the ground. “Let us ask ourselves; why does it fall?”
At that moment, a total silence descended; a silence born, I feared, of bafflement. For who in all fuckery cared about why stones fall?
“In my civilisation,” I persevered, “we have ‘downwardness,’ as the principle that explains why objects fall, and how planets remain in their orbits. Downwardness is the consequence of distortions in the cloth that comprises space and time. And so it must be on this ship! Our world is on the inside not the outside of the globe, but downwardness still pertains!”
The silence changed, if such a thing be possible, in timbre; it was an angry and resentful silence now.
But, as I had suspected, if you say something idiotically wrong in front of a bunch of incredibly brilliant scientific minds, there’ll always be someone to pipe up and contradict you. And thus it was that one of the Quipus spoke:
“That is nonsense! It’s a different phenomenon entirely!” said Quipu One, angrily. “We’re on the interior of a spaceship travelling through space; not on a planet orbiting a sun. This illusion of ‘downwardness’ as you call it
