Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

How can I possibly stay sane, knowing a thing like that?

But, I suppose, the hardest thing to bear is when remarkable things don’t happen. If you are, for instance, a prehistoric human tending your field and you are never visited by beings from outer space, and never have a vision of a god, and are incapable of telepathy or telekinesis, and cannot see ghosts, and nothing ever changes for you, day after day after day… then that really would be strange. A life without magic; a life without wonder.

And, I must confess, a really odd thing has happened to me. I have become reconciled to my life of imprisonment. I have become used to being a bargaining chip. And I am confident that my beloved son Peter will pay the ransom and save his mother from this living Hell.

So life is good.

I sit down to dinner one night. As always, Alby sits with me, chatting, keeping me company. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t drink, but as a dinner companion, I’ve had much worse.

Then the door opens and a woman walks in. She glides calmly forward, sits down, picks up my glass of wine and drinks from it. Then she looks at me.

I reach out. And I touch her face. I touch her breasts. I put my fingers in her mouth. She accepts all this. She smiles. “Will I do?” she asks Alby. He flickers, and I can sense his admiration, his pride, at the sight of this strikingly beautiful woman. But I, I am lost for words.

For she is me. The woman is me.

I am training with Alliea and Brandon. I do a star jump, touch the ceiling, Alliea fires a stun gun which hits me in the chest, and I fall like a stone, but recover and land on my feet. And then I do another star jump.

One! Two! Three! Four! Five! star jumps, each one accompanied by a direct stun blast in the upper body. Five of these and I’m ready to die.

Alliea is a good forty years younger than me – she’s fifty-six. She’s kept herself in great shape and has had her face, hips, vagina, teeth and spinal column replaced. She’s like whipcord, and she never seems to get tired. I, by contrast, am starting to feel my age. I get aches and pains in my old bones, and I have trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. And my hair and beard are grey – I’ve never opted to have them re-vivified. As a result, I look and sound like a grizzled old-timer, and I like it that way. It gives me, I feel, a certain gravitas.

My legs, however, are brand-new, state-of-the-art, and genetically enhanced. Hence the star jumps. I have extraordinary power, when it comes to jumping high, and running away.

Brandon puts on his boxing gloves and we step in the ring. We trade a few punches then he comes at me fast and furious. My punches have power, but I can’t throw so many of them. He wears me down with sheer dogged persistence. Eventually I throw in the towel. Enough is enough.

Alliea steps in the ring, and she and Brandon box. Alliea, of course, trained with Rob. She’s a boxing artist. She wipes the floor with my hapless astrophysicist. At the end of the bout, Brandon’s jaw is hanging loose, and his nose is broken. He bears the pain with equanimity. But I know it will take him several days under the autodoc to heal these injuries.

I start lifting weights. It’s crude, but for sheer power nothing can replace free weights. But I vary the workout to prevent muscle-boundness. I lift two hundred kilos of weights on a barbell up on to my shoulders; then I shrug and throw the barbell in the air. Then I wait patiently, looking straight ahead, and catch it as it falls, hard, on my shoulders. It feels as if the roof has crashed in. Great training for storming a ship, or taking a blaster shot directly on the body armour.

Hup, throw, wait, CRASH. Hup, throw, wait, CRASH.

Alliea picks up a sword and tries to cut off Brandon’s head. His head bobs and weaves, he ducks and kinks, as he brilliantly eludes the sword’s sharp blade. It’s great speed training, but it’s dangerous. Once, in a training session, Brandon’s head was cut clean off. He claims you can still see the scar on his throat where the head was sewn back on… But of course, he’s just being fanciful. The stitches are micro-sewn, and quite invisible to the naked eye.

Then we shower together. We’re all too old, too seasoned, to have any shyness about communal bathing or showering. But there’s no sexual element to it. Brandon is predominantly homosexual, and finds his sexual pleasures on week long binges in the Free Ports. And Alliea is still in mourning for Rob; the possibility of me sexually desiring her or her sexually desiring me would be an affront to etiquette.

And as for me – well, I’m a gnarly old man with scars up and down my body and grey pubic hair. No one on the ship regards me as a sexual being any more. And, goddamn it, it’s been at least two years since I had a decent fuck. So maybe they’re right to write me out of the equation.

I find it comforting, to be naked with people I love. People I care for. People I would be happy to die for.

My people.

We arrive at the drop point a week early. It’s obvious that the Cheo will try and ambush us, so we make our preparations accordingly.

We hollow out an asteroid and fill it with explosives.

We place holographic projectors on floating satellites, too small to be visible to the enemy’s surveillance ’bots.

We charge our laser cannons. We sow space with nanobombs. We gird on our body armour. And we wait.

He doesn’t show.

We send another ransom email. The Cheo responds promptly, offering less money. He reminds us that if we ambush him, he will invoke the flame-beast blood-feud clause. It’s all standard stuff, powerplay gambits. Designed to test our nerve. We arrange another drop-off point. This time, Harry goes along, in a high-powered tugboat, intending to tow away the boat full of treasure and released prisoners which are the essence of our ransom demand.

Harry’s tugboat is ambushed, he is blown out of space. He escapes on a rocket-propelled backpack. Only a Loper could have survived a direct blast attack of this kind, but we kind of hoped he would.

We send a third ransom demand. This time the Cheo is getting cocky. He’s played his games, he’s tested our resolve to the utmost. Now he comes back with a final renegotiation. If we surrender, and submit ourselves to execution, then he will wipe the slate clean and exonerate our families. Otherwise, mass carnage will ensue of all our kindred and clan.

It’s a hollow threat. All of us, long ago, lost those who were close to us. We respond with our counter-offer. One more day in which to provide the ransom, or Lena will be killed.

A day passes.

We vidphone Alby and relay the news. We see him sitting with Lena. She is looking particularly beautiful. Alby turns to her and explains: the Cheo will not pay. He would rather, Alby tells her, see you die than pay a ransom.

Lena laughs. A gutsy laugh. “That’s my boy,” she says.

Alby swirls over her. It’s almost affectionate in its delicacy. Then he swirls away.

Lena is on fire. She screams and screams in agony. She falls to the floor and rolls around, trying to extinguish herself. Her bones char, her skin melts. She dies in utterest agony.

We relay the vidphone call to the Cheo. The kidnap is over. The hostage has been killed.

Lena, his beloved mother, is dead.

Excerpts from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004 It was a dream come true for me.

To be a concert pianist, and play at Carnegie Hall.

When the day arrived, I couldn’t believe it was really happening. Or that I deserved such an amazing honour. And admittedly, I did have to pay for the hall myself. But it was by no means a vanity concert. I was a brilliant pianist by this point, and I’d earned the right to be there, for my first major public recital.