short story

Untitled (Horphalmer) (2022)

A tiny silver dot on an immense sea of black nothingness was all that remained of the Libra-Doriann civilization.

To his own blessing, Horphalmer was not aware of this fact. He knew he was alone, but did not have the slightest glimmer of how alone he exactly was. He had long since stopped worrying about loneliness. How many years it had been? He did not know. How many minutes, he knew even less.

The faint sound of tinny jazz reverberated through and beyond the grand halls of the ship, through which an artificial canal serenely flowed. He had built it for them, powered from the absorption of solar rays that echoed through every corner of the wide, black immaterial ocean they had called Space. Immense marble pillars gave rise to an enormous glass ceiling through which the entire vast cosmos were visible in their shimmering glory. In particular, a paintstroke of orange and vivid stellar hues swathed the sky. It had been their glory, their guiding star.

Yet it was all so far away. And none of them were here to see it.

Sitting by the canal, Horphalmer watched small, shimmering carp come and go. Generations of them had come and gone by his hands. He remembered picking each tender corpse when they floated to the top of the water, their movement having long ceased. The other fish gathered around his hands, but they could not follow as their brethren was carried in a gentle procession towards the ship's atrium.

Of course, his favorite place - his atrium. The ship's atrium was his magnum opus. It was designed to carry their civilization across the stars without ever running out of food, while keeping the creatures safe and provided for outside of their habitats. The carp had made it, and a small, unspecific variety of bug, which he only knew because he saw their corpses from time to time in the incinerator room. Most of the other creatures had not. The albimures, rutts and dribs couldn't handle the conditions and died out a few generations in. He kept one of each of them preserved in a jar beside the coffins of his crewmates, each of which was filled to the brim with soil. He couldn’t remember having done that, but put it down to being one of those strange incongruencies of the grieving mind.

The first one he found was Nelldor. He was hunched over a ship’s toilet with his head in the bowl, water still flowing around his head. The most grim discovery he had made at that moment was that the captain had requested the engineering of a closet in which he had brought their ceremonial coffins, as if expecting that at least some of them would die before the ship made it. At the very least, it carried the implication that there would be others to eject his coffin out into space for its ritual gravitational burial into the sun. It was one of the only times in his life he had seen them, as they were generally for warriors that had died glorious deaths in planetary war. Ever since, he had wondered from time to time what the captain knew that drove him to bring coffins for a species that was known to be nigh immortal.

When the captain himself went, the rest of them were weary. Horphalmer was unanimously appointed new captain by the weary crewmates, and he tasked himself with learning all about the ship’s functions. He didn’t know where they were going exactly, or how to get there - that was the old captain’s job, and the others said that the ship just sort of knew where they were going. Birieus tried to sit him down and explain it to him once with his massive books of equations, charts and pens and their screens and tablets, but they both decided in the end it was best to leave it to the computer to manage. He missed Bireus a lot.

He took the dead carp to a pot of soil underneath a huge, jungle-esque centerpiece crowning the massive room. Like the rest of the ship, it had an open ceiling and glass walls with a magnificent view of space and an excellent surface area to capture the radiance of the sun. Massive green vines crawled up trellises on the walls, bearing fruits of the rainbow persuasion, circling around and coiling decisively across the clear boundaries. The soil shifted and melted around the carp’s body, digesting it in a way that was strangely beautiful in its efficiency. It was the way of things: more carp would be born, and he would nurture their eggs from the atrium’s tender care. He nodded to himself and switched the atrium radio from jazz to his favorite station, the one where he could hear the funny jingles and lovely noises of the humans.

He had been getting closer and closer to their planet for the past hundred years, but he had only been aware of this fascinating signal for the past twenty or thirty. He couldn’t really remember much about who he was anymore. What were his hobbies? Did he have children? What did he write on page twenty six of his copy of the Zallabar when he himself was a child? Why did they bring the carp on board again? He couldn’t remember a thing aside from the broadcast times for the jazz and the funny bibi-la-amalogama-abala noises with the zot-zing-ping noise that went every hour.

The next one to go had been Kal-Karemmis. The well-worker found him one day when he did not turn up for lunchtime entertainment, hunched over and lifeless in the middle of the act of stringing his pellsach. Dearest Kal-Karemmis; his music flowing through the corridors seemed to make life worth living! Horphalmer had tried learning the instrument on his own not long after, but he did not have the talent and quickly gave up. The music room now lay untouched, its beautiful, warm, concave wooden walls a home for all sorts of instruments and the small terrarium on one side of its room. It was for the best. If the pellsach broke, there would be nobody to restring it anyway.

It was from this room that he wheeled out a haphazardly built, miniature stage repurposed from a lunch trolley, replete with a set of small fuzzy puppets. The carp responded to the screeching noise of the wheels by coming nearer to Horphalmer, as close as they could get within their watery boundaries.

“Would you like some entertainment?” he shouted, ten of his own voice responding back. “I’m ready for some entertainment! That’s what I like to hear!”

He turned the radio to another channel, with endless, colourful noises and short balala-blab with coarse laughter. He could articulate the noises verbatim, yet with no conception of their meaning.

‘I’m getting a divorce!’ he mimed out, the red-dressed puppet said.

‘Of course you are, you nasty woman! I’ll kill you!’ the man mimed out, his fuzzy hair barely attached to his fuzzy face.

‘I don’t think so! You haven’t even paid off our credit cards and assets!’

‘And I never will! Don’t you know men are from Mars and Women are from Venus? There’s no way we can truly understand each other!’

‘That’s so last decade, Jenny! Now it’s all about thirty percent off a new television and having big eyebrows! Speaking of, why are your eyebrows so damn small?’

A fuzzy, brownpuppet came in and Horphalmer made those rough barking noises he had heard and hated since the broadcasts began.

‘Pee on my leg, junior!’ shouted the puppet Jenny. Junior lifted one brown, felt leg and made a curious staggered motion towards her.

He was certain the carp would clap if they could. What a talent, to be able to occupy the voice of the woman, the man, the puppet, and himself - yet none of them - all at the same time!

All of a sudden, the radio made a bang. Almost as soon as it was on, it was off. Horphalmer ran over to it, panicked, but nothing he did with the knobs made a difference.

He looked out the window and the lights on the planet had gone off. It was blue and deep and dark. Static came through the radio. Could they have been gone, just like that? Was this his fault? Perhaps they had seen him, somehow, and been so offended by his childish vision of their society he would be forever denied entry. Violent static became interspersed with the sounds of sharp, discordant instruments, a broadcast that sounded very serious, a rhythmic atonal beeping, a siren.

Horphalmer’s eyes filled with tears and his body heaved and shook as it all came down on him at once. He screamed, and screamed, against the tinny sound of the long, frightening alarm and sequences of indecipherable sounds being repeated at rhythmic intervals. He waited, and watched. The cacophony grew louder. The planet was still dark, and the broadcast was still screeching in his ears.

His breath increasing in rapidity, Horphalmer threw the puppets to the carp, who swam to avoid the impact, and turned to smash his head on a glossy pillar, and smashed it again, the impact reverberating the ship’s atrium as blood squirted and flickered over the floor. This continued until he lay, motionless, on the cold floor of the ship, blood trickling down into the carp pool.

“Oh dear,” said one of the carp in a deep voice after a moment of silence had passed. It rose to the surface of the water, a speck of red between its eyes. “I was hoping at least one of them would make it. I suppose that’s all life is, Horphalmer. A puppet show until we die.”

A sea of fins and scales crawled out to put yet another one of the Libra-Doriann crewmates into his earthen coffin. The atrium’s soil would be rich, full of growth and life yet. After all, this had been their peoples’ gift.

“It is best for him to sleep. We can wake him when it is time. He was kind to us,” one carp said in a low voice, its whiskers bobbing on the water. “Do you think the humans will be happy to see us?”

“I believe they already are,” said another.

The radio came back to life, broadcasting sounds the carp couldn’t understand, but it really did sound like the most beautiful thing they had heard in a thousand years. Outside the window of the atrium the blue planet was barely visible yet, but one by one the lights of their cities made a distinct pattern illuminated by the curves and heights of their continents. It said something, in the Universal Planetary Language, that the humans had taken a very long time to learn properly; it was heartening that they made the effort, thought one of the carp, even if their spelling is not perfect.

Weclome, it read in a neon script powerful enough to illuminate the cosmos, coming into view more clearly with every passing rotation of the sun.

It seemed so close. And by the time the ship arrived, the crew’s rest would not quite be complete, and they’d have missed the view.

Ah, but what could one do? At least the carp were here to see it.