dangled me by the metal shackles on my wrists.
After I had been left hanging like this for several days, some Kindred arrived with knives. They taunted me, though I could not understand their words, then they flayed my skin off me a piece at a time. They left me raw and bleeding, a glistening body of bare muscle and exposed ligaments and bulging eyes.
The pain was intense, worse than anything I had ever known before; and I assumed I was going to die.
But I am not dead. And my skin is already starting to grow back. My guess is that once I am restored and whole, they will flay me, one piece at a time, all over again.
Water from the ceiling bathes me constantly; I assume this is water from the well of life and it is helping to keep me alive despite my appalling injuries and my lack of covering skin. The aim I suppose is to torture me for all eternity.
Let them.
For the pain-Ah! The pain!
Cling to that Sharrock. Cling to the pain!
You are not defeated. Not yet. Not defeated.
Never defeated!
The pain is my ally, not my enemy.
Embrace the pain, Sharrock! For while I feel pain that rends the soul and rips every nerve ending and fills my head with an agonising howl I know I am
Still alive.
I wondered a great deal about those two who came to mock me, just a few days after the Kindred had done their vile work. For I knew them to be Ka’un. They were dressed in rich robes in a style I did not recognise. Their faces were black and withered. Their eyes stared as if they were looking across to the other end of the universe. Their features were entirely expressionless. Was that a consequence of great age?
How old are these godsforsaken monsters anyway? And why do they do what they do. Boredom?
Perhaps, I speculate, age corrodes the emotions. Perhaps the smaller emotions like irritation and amusement and delight rot away, and all that are left are the huge and richly coloured emotions: like hate, and rage. That might explain why these creatures do what they do.
The male had stared at me for a long time before departing, as if studying me. Why? Had he never seen a flayed warrior before?
I lose consciousness from time to time and I know that this is the prelude to death; but each time the healing sprays revive me.
It is Day the First on the interior world; I know that for certain, for I keep a mental tally. Today Sai-ias will be exploring her world.
I try to-Ah! Agonising blinding pain! Embrace it, Sharrock! Embrace it!
I wonder about what Sai-ias is feeling and doing. Right now. Perhaps she is swimming in the lake?
And perhaps Lirilla is singing as she hovers in the air, her tiny wings beating?
And perhaps Fray is galloping on the savannah; while Quipu bickers with himselves?
And perhaps Sai-ias can feel the sunshine on her moist black hide?
Perhaps.
Explorer/Jak
So many lost civilisations; too many.
This has become my duty, and my obsession; as we travel, I fish for scraps of information about lost worlds and collate it and archive it all.
I am a machine and hence I take great relish in the meticulous storing and cataloguing and cross-referencing of this data; for as far as the computing part of me is concerned, it is merely data.
My machine-mind is however merged with the mind of an Olaran who is clearly filled with horror at the scale of these tragic losses; and his anguish perturbs me.
Sometimes the information I garner is random, the noises and imprints left by any technological culture, though such echoes in space-broadcast dramas and poems and factual films and radio messages between spaceships or planets-can be highly illuminating. Other times, however, the information is found in the form of compressed datacaches intended to be last messages from dying civilisations desperate to be remembered somehow. Such data may be technical or astronomical or military or historical or all of these; but sometimes more personal messages are also inscribed in this way.
The collation of these archives keeps my mind active. I am lonely much of the time. Jak is not such very good company. Not compared to Albinia.
He is better than he was. For after our departure from that second universe, Jak fell into despair. And then came the madness. And after the madness, came despair again. Now he is merely sad; and occasionally he even talks to me.
I have made a list of the universes which we have travelled through, both the live ones and the dead ones. Jak refuses to let me tell him how many there are. But he does, obsessively, read through my archives of lost civilisations. Occasionally we discuss what he finds there; not often though. Not often enough.
There is now, in my opinion, no doubt about the validity of my theory that the dead universes we encounter are the trail left by the Death Ship; corpses scattered in its bloody wake. No other explanation will suffice; and datacaches have been found in all but a very few of these wasted universes.
There are very many of them; I have had to rebuild my archive in order to accommodate all the data.
How long has the Death Ship been destroying realities in this way? I can make no estimate.
What weapon is it using? I do not know.
Will we ever find the Death Ship, and defeat it? I can make no prediction.
But for a period of time that is larger than the lifespan of any Olaran, we have hunted this rogue vessel. We have journeyed onwards through the many living universes, searching each, one by one, with painstaking care, in the vain hope of stumbling upon our prey.
After one thousand years had elapsed, I explained to Jak that we were wasting our time; there were far too many universes. He agreed. And yet still we continued.
But finally I spotted a pattern; and it dawned on me that the Dreaded were observing a loose chronological cycle. Every ninety-three years by our calendar-though occasionally a hundred and ten and sometimes a hundred and fifty years-the Death Ship would return to the sector in space where we first encountered them. And then it would use the weapon that enables the Dreaded to destroy a universe as easily as an Olaran kills a dangerous and reluctant-to-trade alien. And then they would pass into the next universe.
Their pattern betrayed them. And it encouraged me to formulate a cosmological hypothesis. For it is clear there is only one place connecting the many universes; and my belief is that this was the point of origin of all the universes. And so I call it the Source.
Yet knowing this was no help, not at first anyway. For when we rift, we have no means of ascertaining how far we have travelled, or in which direction. So finding the Source again in a new and strange universe is no easy task; it can take two hundred years or more of mapping stars, until our point of origin is reached once more.
The only certain test is that when the rest of the universe has evaporated-well, then the Source is all that is left. We find it by fleeing the onset of nothingness.
But by then, of course, it is too late.
And even when we have located it, the Source can move; that was a shock also.
Or perhaps it’s the universe that moves, and the Source that remains; no matter. The point is we have wasted many years seeking and pursuing the Death Ship through the multiverses. And we have wasted just as many years staying put and waiting at the Source for its return. Neither strategy has worked for us.
But I think I have now devised a star-mapping methodology that allows us to find the Source in good time, and remain there. And I am sure that I can detect it if the Source moves; and then we will move with it.
It took me approximately ninety thousand years to devise and perfect this approach. And we are now concealed behind a gas giant close to the Source in a universe with many recent traces of the Dreaded. Each fresh
