Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

And I spend the day at the leisure centre. As well as a gym, and a pool, they have a competition running track. Athletes in training limber up and stretch. A pole vaulter leaps high up in the air and skims the bar. Two runners match paces as they cruise at an effortless sprint.

I take the field. My brawny hairy Loper body feels vile to me as I see the sleek and muscular professional athletes around me, but no one can deny that I am a magnificent runner. So I run, and run, and run. Not quite as fast as the competition-winning athletes, who can move like mercury exploding. But when they are flagging and tiring, I am still going strong. I vary my pace; from run to bound. I leap huge leaps along the track. I roll a forward somersault, leap ten metres in the air, backflip, forward flip, then continue running.

I do this for eighteen hours. And slowly, hour by hour, I feel the stiffness leave my joints. I was built for this, bioengineered to run for twelve hours a day without any need for food and drink. My home planet of Pohl was an airless wilderness, but we man-beasts were modified so we could inhabit almost any of its terrains. We had cities in the valleys, we built temples in the mountains. We were a low-culture, high-technology mining planet, but as far as we Lopers were concerned, we were the lords of all we surveyed.

I miss those days. I had lovers in plenty, I savoured the cold crisp airless Pohlian nights, the blistering heat of the summers, the icy cold of our winters. I worked all day, and slept all night. We weren’t trained to read, or watch tv or dv. We had no interests beyond being alive. Some called us slaves, but no slave has ever been so free.

I run. I run. I run. I run. I run. I run.

I runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun!

And when I run I forget all my doubts and regrets. All my hesitations and pauses. All my uncertainties. All my fears. I run, I am the run, the run is me.

I am complete.

“How was it?” Flanagan asks me, once we are back in the pirate ship.

“You’re ingratiating yourself, please, it’s unseemly.”

“I was in fact trying to be nice,” he says, frostily.

“You are seduced, awestruck, pitiful,” I tell him, with relish. “I humour you but, in truth, I despise you.”

“Look, just because you’re my prisoner and under threat of death, humiliation and torture, there’s no need for you to be uncivil.”

“Cuntsucker.”

“Ooh. I’d almost forgotten – you’re a poet.”

“I am, yes, a poet.”

“ Reminiscences of Exquisite Moments. A slim little volume, it sold in its several.”

“It’s an acclaimed piece.”

“It was excoriated.”

“Those reviews were later rescinded, once I published under my… family name.”

“Ah, so you do get good reviews, on pain of death? That’s a start.”

“You are a philistine and an imbecile.”

“I’ve had eleven symphonies and fourteen rock operas performed, I am considered to be one of the most accomplished popular composers of my era.”

“And a braggart also.”

“Wizened old shrew.”

“I am, if you observe, far from wizened.”

“I see your soul. Your soul is wizened.”

“There is no such thing as a… wizened soul.”

“Bleak. Barren. A desert. That’s your soul. I can feel it from here.”

“Souls cannot be felt.”

He smiles at that. It’s a charming smile. I hate him so. And yet… It’s true what he said about his music. He…

“Shut up.”

Chagrined, I realise I have spoken my inner thoughts aloud.

“I wasn’t speaking!” Flanagan says, indignantly.

I give him a forbidding look. I allow my charisma to wrap itself around him, like silken chains. Then I say, artfully: “It’s not too late, Captain, for you to achieve redemption and forgiveness. Hand me back, forget the ransom, commit ritual suicide, and you will die without a stain on your name.”

“Or – not.”

I glare. Flanagan sighs, ostentatiously. “Will you join me for dinner tonight?”

“I will face that hardship with equanimity and fortitude, yes.”

“We dine at eight. Will you need access to your wardrobe?”

“My body armour will suffice.”

“It looks a little… military.”

I smile. I can drive him wild with desire. I may be his prisoner, but it is I who have power over him. I tap my armoured breast with a finger, and hear the hollow thud.

“I like it that way,” I tell him.

“Camera, lights, action,” says Jamie. I am old enough to have some notion what he is on about.

Harry, the freak, operates the vidcam. He has a wild look about him. Alliea is standing by too, frowning. Maybe she is jealous, because it’s clear to her the Captain is becoming infatuated with me?

Flanagan has explained that they will transmit my message via video email to the Cheo. The date of the message will reassure him I am still alive. I have been given a script to read.

“Okay?” says Flanagan. He continues to be nice to me. But that of course is because he needs me to cooperate. Which I will, but on my terms. I shoot him a fierce look, to boil his blood, and keep him hoping for the unattainable. That’s how I like my men: desperate.

I glance at the message he has drafted: “I am being well cared for. But I am in fear of my life. Please help me. Give these people what they want. It is only money. My dearest son, I love you.” It is cringemaking stuff, without a scintilla of wit or rhetorical energy.

I look into the vidcam. Jamie nods. “Let me die rather than deal with these terrorist scum,” I say calmly. “Do not pay their ransom, do not…”

And Harry slashes with his claws. My face rips open, blood spurts from my eye socket, I fight back furiously, but he has the strength of ten. I lose myself in a maelstrom of hitting and biting and clawing. ..

He’s eating me… the fucking monster is eating me alive…!

Flanagan pulls the beast off. The vidcam is still rolling. I stare into the camera. I can feel that one of my eyes is out of its socket, it is oozy and cold upon my cheek. I am frozen with fear.

“That went well,” says Flanagan.

I am hysterical.

Slowly I force myself to calm. My breaths become deep, composed. I figure out my error.

My error is this: they don’t need my cooperation at all. They just need to show me humiliated, in pain. So as to force the Cheo to abandon his principles and pay the ransom. This was the message they had always planned. The script was a bluff. I fell for it.

“Get me to the sick bay,” I say, clinging to a semblance of dignity.

In the hold of their ship is my own space yacht. I am taken to the sick bay there, which is equipped with state-of-the-art organic repair technology. The skin cells on my face are boosted. My ripped eye is replaced with a clone from my eye bank. My scars are healed. I am given an injection to guard against the risk of fever from the man-beast’s savage bites.

Within a month I will be as good as new. It’s a process I am familiar with.

Flanagan comes to apologise. “I want us to be friends,” he says mildly.

I fix him with my firmest one-eyed stare. And I say: “YOU FUCKING BASTARD!”

You should have warned me. I didn’t know.

I thought he was my friend! No, no Lena. You never thought that. You were just biding your time, lulling him into a false sense of security. You were playing a game with him, guilefully attempting to. ..

We went flying together! We flew! He thought he could win your trust and your confidence. He was wrong.

I trusted him. You never trusted him.

I… No… of course I didn’t. Never. Of course! Never. He’s just a betraying bastard.