“Self preservation,” Sharrock explained. “You all believe the Ka’un live in this Tower. And if that were actually true, you might conceivably have found a way to beat their godsforsaken force field, and then swept through this place and destroyed them all.
“But these monsters are not stupid monsters. They’re not here, they’re elsewhere. Safe. Guarded.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Sharrock. “But do you see what this proves?”
I thought, long and hard and strategically. “No,” I admitted.
“They’re afraid,” said Sharrock.
“I do not comprehend.”
“Why hide, if they could so easily defeat you? They’re afraid. Of you. Their own slaves.
“And that means,” said Sharrock, “that if we ever can find the fucking corpse-sucking bastards, we stand a chance of defeating them.”
We left the Tower. The wind by now had risen to a frenzy, and rain was pouring in torrents from the clouds above. Though this rain did not actually land on us-it merely splattered on to the force projection field above us in the air.
But the winds were actually here, inside the dome-shaped field of force; and we knew that the Ka’un were using their air as a weapon against us.
“We should,” I suggested, “go.”
The journey back was harder. The storm was exceedingly powerful, and I had to fight every step of the way to return to the island’s pebbly beach. Sharrock was unable to stand against the gale, so I held him in my tentacle; but even I could barely propel myself against the walls of wind that enveloped me. And bizarrely the winds could change direction; no matter which way I turned, I was battling against the wind.
Eventually however we reached the beach and I dived back into the waters of the lake, which were wildly turbulent. And then dived to the bottom and returned along the crude tunnel I had ripped out of the lake bed, that took us under the force wall.
And once when we were back upon the lake itself, the tides were still against us, and were ferociously powerful; it took almost all my strength to swim against tide and wind in the direction of the land.
However a mere storm had no power to hurt me; and Sharrock was by now hugged tight against my chest, protected from it all.
As I swam, I thought about the Tower, and the pathetic deception the Ka’un had practised against us; and I began to see Sharrock’s point. Now, for the first time in all my years on this ship, the Ka’un did not seem to me to be all-powerful. Perhaps they really could be My thoughts were savagely interrupted, for the gales intensified and became a tornado; and spiralling currents of air caught us up and threw us into the air. And we were flying now, higher and faster and higher still; and then we crashed against the hard surface that I knew was the roof of our world. The impact shocked me, I began to fall, Sharrock by now was just clinging on numbly, unable to speak.
I tried again to right myself, and glide; but I was spun in a helical path by winds so powerful they threatened to rip the cape off my body.
So instead I flattened my cape against myself and made myself as streamlined as I could, as if I were swimming through the deep ocean. And I allowed the winds to lift me up, and dash me down, and crash me from all sides.
And so, all night long, we flew in the midst of a hurricane, deafened, unable to see, battered this way and that.
Then, when the sun arose, the storm started to abate. And I went into a free fall. At the last moment I managed to spread my cape and we glided safely down to the mainland.
Sharrock was unconscious, though alive; his clothes had been torn from his body and his skin had been ripped from his back. I could see the white bone of his spine. His supporting frond tether had broken; but even so, he had managed to cling on to me and never let go.
I carried him to the well of life and lay him down there and rolled him in. The blue waters turned red and Sharrock spluttered. But I made him lie in the healing waters until the skin on his back had grown back, and his broken bones were beginning to heal.
“So where are they?” I asked.
Sharrock smiled, as if he knew something that I didn’t.
“It’s a total mystery to me,” I confessed. “The Ka’un do not dwell in the Tower; they are not under the lake; they do not exist in the mountains or the Valley. I know every inch of this world! Where are they?”
And Sharrock pointed up, to the clear blue sky.
“Up there. Beyond the sky. That is their world,” said Sharrock.
“Beyond the sky is space,” I protested.
“A second hull. It’s the only explanation.” He drew the shape in the sand: a circle surrounded by a larger circle. “Picture this: we dwell in the interior world; but above and around us here is the exterior world, where the ship is controlled, and where the Ka’un make their home.”
I looked at the shape:
“We are a world within a world,” I said, marvelling.
“Yes,” said Sharrock. “And all we have to do is find a way through to the exterior world that exists between our sky and the ship’s hull, where dwell the Ka’un. And then we shall-”
“Slay the evil bastards?” I suggested.
“Slay,” agreed Sharrock, “those evil world-killing bastards.”
Jak/Explorer
You should stop now.
Stop reading Jak.
Read no more. It’s not helping you. You cannot I have to know.
No purpose is being served. You are merely I have to honour them. Every one. Every creature lost, I must at least know the name of its species, and one fact at least about it. Is that too much to ask? That one fact about an entire species will be remembered for all eternity.
That will drive you mad.
Again.
Jak?
Jak?
In this archive are riches from the multiverses; for ever gone.
EXPLORER 410: DATA ARCHIVE
LOG OF LOST CIVILISATIONS (EXTRACT)
Lost Civilisation: 12,443
SPECIES: The Dia
MORPHOLOGY: Unknown, but small in size … a formidable database listing every single species on every single planet explored by these remarkable sentients.
The full database is archived here; it goes into minute and sometimes pedantic detail (twelve million categories of dotted markings upon skin) and does not include any useful description of the Dia’s own form, shape, and nature.
Highlights from the database of species known to the Dia include:
Kaolka: small toad-like creatures that could leap up into the clouds and eat birds with a single gulp (on the planet D12132 if mapped according to Olaran model of stellography-Dia name not translatable).
Shoshau: creatures made of slime without internal organs or eyes or ears who moved by binary fission and competed for land with vast flocks of aerials whose urine was toxic to the slime-beasts (on the planet Ff991). The Shoshau had, apparently, a song that was astonishingly sweet.
Seaira: translucent land-animals whose internal organs were clearly visible and who could soar like bats, and could focus sunlight as a lens to use as a weapon against predators (on the planet D9980).
Bararrrrs: Insect-like creatures that lived for centuries and grew to the size of small rodents, then grew to be vast amphibious creatures, then carried on growing and ossifying until they became mountains; these mountains then served as nests for new generations of insects (on the planet R88).
Though the morphology of the Dia themselves was never defined, several clues indicate they were small, and
