Piranha - Chapter 12: Quest, Part 1

PIRANHA
Chapter 12:  Quest, Part 1

He was roaming through the ship, as he hadn’t done in many days; the old agony of restlessness was in him again.  He paced down the center of the corridors, subtly shying away from the metal walls, his posture erect, for there were crew about, but his eyes lowered, his face hidden under the big brim of his hat.

He’d let himself get pulled in, hadn’t he, let himself be touched by that poor girl and her struggles, by her – he pulled his hat down hard, angrily covering even more of his face – by her singing.  And then his smothered, stifled past, lurking in wait, had snatched the opportunity to ambush him.  Not just him – something of that vision seemed to have reached her, too.  It wasn’t fair, she didn’t deserve that kind of treatment, but inevitably he’d frightened her yet again.

For that matter, he had frightened himself at least as much.  It kept drifting back to him now, ghostily, vengefully –  that soft air, that sweet dark forest, those haunting sounds; halting his breath, crushing his chest, hurting his eyes.  There, darting behind the trunk of a tree, he caught a glimpse of the evil sprite that tormented his days, the elusive, the mocking, the heartless little Guardian.  

And those mercilessly clear blue eyes, caught in flight – halted, slowly turned, fixed on him.  Get out.  You don’t belong here.

The embracing trees melted away.  Piranha’s downcast eyes shuttered over.

“Ly,” he said involuntarily.  And recoiled, so hard that he startled a few passing pirates.  Oh, gods, no, don’t attract her attention!

He surged forward, abruptly he was fleeing down the corridor as if chased by a flock of demons.  With effort, he pulled himself back to a stiff walk.  Seeing him run would give the pirates the idea he was in trouble, which would spark life back into all his latent enemies on board, next thing they’d be after him, and he’d be in trouble for real.

But he was in trouble.  There couldn’t be any trouble worse than this.

He walked on, a little shaky.  It was hard to control his extremities; he had nervous thoughts of accidentally leaving behind a hand or foot without noticing, in the intensity of his preoccupation.

If only he could slip away into the forest, to calm down, collect his thoughts, regenerate himself.  

Into the forest.  He yanked his hat down again to conceal his prickling eyes, took a long, tremulous breath.  There weren’t going to be any more forests.  He was part of this ship now.  He was going to be here for a long, long time.  Any future dealings with forests would most likely have to do with burning them down.

As if stung, his body again leaped forward.  Savagely he jerked it back like a runaway horse.  Of all the painfully unnatural things he’d had to do since coming to the ship, this did him the most violence.  Concealing his reactions.  Putting up a false front.  Divorcing thought and emotion from action.  Lying.

He halted.  Like an actual poisonous fluid, a painful torrent of rage and hatred flooded through his body.  Anaconda.  His black-gloved fists clenched, his teeth set; involuntarily he turned to head in the direction of the Boss’s sanctuary.  Then, before taking a step, once again forcibly halted himself.   A thick surge of nausea went through him, as it always did when he fought back his strong natural instinct for immediate, decisive action.  But that was his life now – suppressing, crushing into submission every instinct that used to be right, that ought to have been right, that no longer was.  

Any thought of attacking Anaconda was a violation of his contract.  He would never violate his contract.  He was never going to give that bastard an excuse to go back to his planet, no matter what he had to do to himself to keep his word.  That meant that sooner or later, he would no longer be able to keep it...

He turned away.  Hardly able to see where he was going, he set off at random down a corridor, striding quickly.  But however much he hurried, he couldn’t leave behind the clamour of thoughts that pursued him like an angry mob.

***

Huge as the ship was, by now Piranha knew it almost as well as – as someone had once known every river, tree and path of the mountains and forests of his world.  It had always been his way to seek out every handsbreadth and foothold of his environment.

Now even more so.  Exploration kept him busy on sleepless nights, when he didn’t dare let down his guard for fear of those seeking eyes, the green almond-shaped eyes of his planet.  Or when the thought of sleep itself was unbearable, with its suffocating hallucinations that he had to struggle out from under like a pile of boulders – only to wake into the knowledge that the nightmare was real.

No, he didn’t sleep much.  As a result, there probably wasn’t another non-robot on the ship who knew the vessel so well.  The only parts he hadn’t ventured into were the hazardous maintenance tunnels surrounding the ship’s engines, with their proximity to gigantic, unshielded machine parts, and their enormous, erratic power surges.  That, and the front half of the tenth level, the most heavily guarded area on the ship, quite inaccessible.  Even air vents didn’t seem to lead into it.  Aside from those places, he could have drawn a three-dimensional blueprint of the ship’s visible and concealed structures, detailed enough to predict where most of Anaconda’s secret “technological” routes probably were – like the one the Boss had led him through to give him the blast gun, so long ago.  In fact, Piranha already had uncovered a few more.

A time-consuming and mostly pointless game, but it was better than lying awake night after night, hour after hour in the dark, listening to the sleeping breaths of the helpless kid who bore the brunt of his exhaustion and insanity.  Listening to the point of hallucination, until those soft breaths melded into the wide green eyes of the jewelled planet...

Ly.  As the two primary guardians of their planet, he and she had always had a deep and close connection.  Each had always sensed when the other was in trouble, they had always come to help each other.  She couldn’t help him now, nothing could.  But that faint, wispy link to her was still there, that alarm trigger – and it connected him, through her, to the life and breath of his world.  That painful, maddening connection that he clung to with all his strength.  It kept his mission before him, forced him to stay alive, set the boundaries that were probably the only thing preventing him from being sucked in, digested and absorbed by this vile place.  

And it terrified him.  He had to hold onto her, but she mustn’t know, she must never become aware of him, he couldn’t endure for her to see what he had become; he couldn’t bear for her even to know that he was alive.  Liar and deceiver and embodiment of falsehood that he had become, he had to lie even to Ly; Ly, who laughed and brushed lies aside like cobwebs.  It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do – keeping the connection alive, keeping a surreptitious finger on her, but if she ever sensed it and whirled around to look, he wouldn’t be there...

No, he’d be off shoving a dagger into some defenseless native.  

Not slowing his rapid pace down the hall, he shut his eyes, gasping.  How much longer could he keep his grip on the two scorching ropes pulling him apart?  Be the Guardian of the magic planet and the First Mate of the Insurrection both together?  To be that open, guileless creature, transparent as diamond, and a smoky entanglement of lies?  The Guardian who in spite of himself had betrayed his trust, and the First Mate who couldn’t help but be a double agent...


A loud thump recalled him to his surroundings, he paused and looked about him in surprise.  In his preoccupation he’d wandered across the ship and up several flights of stairs, he was on the eighth level.  The officers’ bar was just down the hall, he could hear the clanking cups, the rumbling voices, smell the drink and sweat.  Another long, heavy surge of hatred washed through him.  The enemy, no less an enemy because he was supposed to be part of it.  If Anaconda was the enemy’s face, this shipful of brutes was its body.  The sight of any crew or officer, human or robot, sent a hot glow into his eyes, a rush of violence into his fists, a mindless ferocity that was harder and harder to quell.

And day by day, remembering that to a large degree he served as this shambling monster’s brain –

Eyes shut, fists taut, he waited, breathing slowly; trying to still the rage and despair and sheer revulsion of that thought.  Trying to still the rage and despair and revulsion...

Someone opened a door, and a roar of heavy laughter emerged from the barroom down the hall, bowling over him like a series of falling rocks.

He opened his eyes.  That was it.  He needed a fight.

***

Sitting alone at one of the barroom tables, oil-smudged and with a couple of fresh rips in his jacket, Piranha contemplated the drink before him with cold distaste.

A fight.  Good luck.  As he came into the bar, there was the predictable reaction:   panicked stares, a frozen moment, stampede.  It would be comical if he had any sense of humour left.  The only way he could get an opponent was to block the door and fix on a victim with such an unmistakable glare that everybody else backed gratefully out of the way.

And after all his work to goad some reluctant robot into battle, what good did it do?  Once again, after pounding his chosen enemy into the floor, he turned away only more depressed.  That fiery moment of vengeful victory... it was no victory, and nothing was avenged.  Somehow, in starting the fight he was only defeating himself.  He hated the metallic louts as much as ever, but what kind of victory could he have?  They still owned the ship.  Anaconda still owned him.  Nothing changed.  

He’d never tried the ship’s “rum” before.  Its smell was stomach-turning, and when he swirled it in the cup it sloshed glutinously like machine oil.  Alcohol never had much effect on him, and he didn’t find it particularly pleasant.  But he was in such a state today that he’d decided to give the stuff a try, if only in the interest of research.  However, a single sip of the greasy concoction was enough to change his mind.  He pushed the glass away, grimacing.

And sat there feeling a little aggrieved.  Maybe getting drunk was the exact thing he needed.

Yes, to be a perfect pirate at last.  The last tap that would send him flying over the cliff edge.

The accelerating slide downwards.  Why was he resisting so hard?  Clawing and scrabbling and clinging with torn fingers as he slipped down a steep hill towards the abyss, did he really think he had a hope in hell of not falling?  Wouldn’t it at least make for better drama if he deliberately short-circuited his fate and jumped?  

He chuckled bitterly.  For a guy who had once been infamous for his practical jokes, it was fair enough that the best one was played against himself.  How much better could it get?  Living moment by moment in horror of one day becoming what he already was.

What was he trying to prove?  His position was impossible, flatly impossible.  He’d been rejected long ago by the power at the heart of his planet, if you wanted to put it that way – the first Guardian ever to have been defeated, to have brought calamity on his people.  Yet he was still trying to protect them, though they didn’t even know he was alive.  At the same time, he had to fulfil his promise to the Boss.

Anaconda had instantly seen, more clearly than he himself, what he would be doing to himself with their agreement.  He had set himself up as the pawn of both sides, in the silent, unstated, almost invisible battle still under way between Anaconda and the Guardian.  He must submit to every sadistic, degrading whim of the Boss, and at the same time he must be the ruthless commander of an unruly army of criminals, and – he had to do it all while squirming under the painful control of the Guardian, who thrust him mercilessly into piracy and yet dug talons into him at every pirate-like act he committed.

He couldn’t be that passive, it wasn’t in his nature – and it wasn’t possible in this situation.  If he must be a pirate, he must be a pirate, taking it on without reservation – a life of monumental greed, of craving only plunder and power, of feeling only scorn for the corpses he crushed in the process of acquiring them.  There was no other way to do it.

As Anaconda – that knowing bastard –  had once said, a pirate had to throw himself into the role full force.  It was true.  As his men were wrapping up the final days on this planet, topping off the last crates of booty, stuffing the last dozens of prisoners into the already overcrammed slave quarters, scouring the area for the last few fleeing natives who had managed to elude slaughter or capture up till now, it was clear to Piranha that unless you could approach taking a swig of rum or running a dagger through a heart with equal aplomb, being a pirate would either bring you to madness, or kill you.  Plenty of new recruits didn’t last long; the ones who survived were the ones who could stomach that kind of life.  

It hadn’t been so hard for him at first.  In the crisis he was faced with at the moment he took on Piranha, everything he had done had come quite naturally.  But as he became more powerful on the ship, as he moved on from securing his own survival to fulfilling his duties as Anaconda’s man, the things he had to do were less and less natural, they were acts that only a pirate could do, and they stirred responses in him that – that only a pirate could deal with.


In dragging himself back from his well-earned death to become Piranha, he hadn’t deluded himself that he was coming back to life.  Piranha, that dark mechanism, had been brought into existence for one purpose only.   He was supposed to be the Guardian’s faceless, voiceless, mechanical tool, whose emotions, if they existed, were of no importance.  

The problem was, death is a kind of perfection, and he wasn’t that perfect.  Things did reach him, did cause reactions.  Elly.  The people of this plundered planet.  The sight of his own hand on the hilt of a sword.  Memory.  Inside the Guardian’s machine there was something still moving, still responding, incapable of passive obedience.  Either to the whims of the Boss or to the fierce choke-hold control of the Guardian.  

There wasn’t any sane balance possible for him.  He was existing in a seething, tortured, impossible state of resisting every move he made in the process of making it.  There was no other way.  Unless he went on fighting himself with every breath – unless he hated Anaconda and this place and all these robots and men in it who lived only to destroy, abhorred them all as enemies, reviled himself as one of them – yet simultaneously fought the paralyzing control of the Guardian – unless he resisted every impulse in any direction, he would be absorbed by the pirates, he would become them, he would disappear into the ship.  Or he would die, drowned in contradictions.  The pillaging of planet after planet would go on as it always had, the burning eyes of the Guardian would be snuffed out, his own world would become an open target, and only the tall figure of Anaconda would remain, standing above the carnage, arms folded, yellow eyes glowing in his dark face, red cape sweeping around him; once again, as always, triumphant.

And that would be the end of the agonizing questions, the ones that attacked him every moment of his life:  Burning in this hell, what was he being punished for?  For having lost his world to the pirates?  For freeing it again by becoming a pirate himself?  Which was the worse evil?  Which was he atoning for?  Both?  What else should he have done?  What else could he have done?


The shadowy, green-scented forest flashed across his senses again, his fingers felt its rough bark and cool water, its soft colours shifted across his vision, he heard its private whisper; and the combined scents of the earth, of the leaves and shoots and flowers and mosses, pierced through him with physical pain.  He closed his eyes.  Such an anguish of longing, stirring up the hatred and despair that hadn’t hit so hard in weeks, not since he had been training Elly.  

With his eyes closed, he could feel the presence of every living being in the room – those who hadn’t fled when he came in – each one localized in the dark like an x-ray image, a glowing center of toxic radiation.  But the vileness that emanated from himself overwhelmed them all.

[End of Part I]