Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

We arrive in the massive central hall of the Dolph vessel, flooded with Earth-quality salt water, and home to fishes and barnacles. Three Dolphs swim towards us. They are beautiful and eerie, with their sleek streamlined bodies and lack of exterior genitalia. The woman have broad nipples but their flesh is a sheeny silver. Their hair flows as they swim, but each strand is a living thing, the Dolph’s hair is a sensory organ sensitive to vibration and able to detect movement from almost a mile away.

I’ve seen plenty of films about Dolphs, but nothing prepares you for their beauty and perfection. They are very unlike Lopers, who are entirely utilitarian, bioengineered for strength and power and the ability to withstand extreme environments. Dolphs, by contrast, are crafted with love. They are human evolution perfected, with all the rough edges shaved off. Streamlined, swift, gifted, poetic, sublime.

And while Lopers are still a minority species within the galaxy, Dolphs are staggeringly prolific. There are, it is calculated, nearly three times as many Aqueous Worlds in the inhabited Universe as there are Dry Land worlds. And the Dolphs have therefore become the second-most-prolific human species – after, of course, Original Humankind.

Dolph pirates are rare. As a species, they have an ability to absorb tyranny, to treat it as a matter of course. Like all the other human civilisations, they are dominated and ruled by Doppelganger Robots. But Dolphs never seem to care. They have no “resent” gene.

We are greeted by the three Dolphs over our helmet radio. “This is Lena,” I tell them, “she’s a friend.” Lena seems more relaxed now, and she’s openly fascinated by the Dolphs’ sleek forms.

“I am Carl,” the first Dolph says. For reasons I’ve never fathomed, Dolphs use the menage a trois as the basis of their civilisation. Sometimes it’s two females and one male; on this occasion it’s two males and one female.

“We’ve come to trade,” I say, and the work begins. These Dolph pirates rarely steal their own booty. They prefer to cruise the galaxy dealing and trading with marauders such as ourselves. We are offering the cargo from the last merchant ship we pillaged. In return, they can give us computer wealth – energy capsules and computer programs that will allow us to generate food, wine, TV shows, and interactive sex and tourist games. We are always hungry for something new, different sensations, fresh ways to occupy our rest time. So we are addicts for virtual tours, which allow us to mind-explore all the sights and pleasures of the vast galaxy, through a headset and a virtual enabler.

“Let’s swim,” says Lena. And the Dolphs swell with pride and anticipation. They shoot off like rockets through gaseous atmosphere. We follow, slowly and awkwardly, kicking with our flippers to build up speed.

A huge white shark drifts past us. There are coral reefs, I see barnacles. A strange shimmery shape before me turns out to be a jellyfish. We swim through, marvelling at the fanatical dedication that causes the Dolphs to stock their spaceship with exotic flora and fauna. It’s the equivalent of us creating tropical jungles in our own ships, then populating them with snakes, elephants, dogs and birds.

But at this moment it’s easy to see why. The Dolphs are supremely content in their habitat, but without the sharks, the fish, the fronds, the coral reefs, without that rich diversity, they would be merely sailing through space in a tank of tepid water. This way, their world travels with them, everywhere.

Boy, Lena is fast. She has mastered the knack of swimming with flippers, and she’s now racing face to snout with one of the male Dolphs. Then he ducks down and rises up between her legs. She grabs hold of his shoulders and he’s swimming with her now, spiralling and corkscrewing through the water like a bucking horse, with Lena holding on. She loses her grip for a moment, and instead seizes him by his thick long black hair. Carl almost shudders with pleasure at that, since his hair of course is a sense organ. She might as well, I mused bitterly, be holding him by the cock.

I feel detached, almost resentful. I wish Rob were here.

Flanagan swims up behind me. He watches Lena swim, her exhilaration visible even through her transparent face glass. I realise: this is why we liaised with the Dolph ship. We’re heading for a Border planet, we can do our trading there, at better rates, and get less wet. But Flanagan wanted Lena to have this experience. Swimming with a Dolph. She’s like a child, running in a park on a sunny day, face smeared with ice cream. Pure joy.

Lena

I can read Flanagan like a book. I know he’s manipulating me, I know he’s playing his psych games on me. I know all that!

But the trouble is, that mf cs bastard, he can read me like a book too.

That night, I dream of sex with the Dolph. I see his penis flick out of his streamlined body, like a knife blade. I dream of water orgasm. I wake feeling soiled at my own banality.

And I am covered in sweat, a soft silvery sheen of sweat that coats my entire body. Like a film of water. Like ocean on my pores.

Campbell World. Notorious as the most free-living Border Planet in the human galaxy. Prostitutes, drugs, murder games, suicide sects. This is the place to go if you want to go to extremes.

It’s also an unterraformable planet cursed with high winds, summer storms, and hailstones that can kill a soldier in full body armour. Campbell World is famous for its night life. But in daytime it is bleak, hot, stormy, dangerous, and terrifying.

The atmosphere is of course unbreathable, but the core is molten, and an energy pump enables the inhabitants to easily service and fuel a vast planetwide conservatory that houses an entire civilisation. Hard glass domes look upwards to Campbell World’s stunning double star system. But underfloor heating and triply backed up oxygenated air make the interior world habitable and comfortable.

The bars are underground, artificially lit, artificially stimulated, and loud. Campbell World has walls that throb with bass rhythms. Its inhabitants regard strobe lighting as normal, and comforting. Hallucinogenic drugs are regularly fed into the air conditioning, to lighten the ennui and despair of the long-term resident. And drunkenness is seen as a virtue.

We land in the secure landing bays used by galactic outlaws as a matter of course. We are guaranteed a departure slot, and immunity from prosecution with respect to any illegal cargos.

And then we hit the saloon.

Lena has to be coaxed of course. She’s playing hard to get, but she loves the fact that I’m chasing her. It’s a combination of seduction and hunt. She is my prey, and my Desired. I need her support to be unequivocal, passionate, wholehearted. And I know I can’t appeal to her idealism, her sense of duty, or her conscience. At Lena’s age, such abstract notions hold little appeal. No, I’m appealing to Lena’s boredom. At the time we captured her she had spent a hundred years in free space without seeing another living soul. I want to give her a mission, a sense of purpose, a way to fill her days.

Waging war against her only son fits, in my own humble opinion, that bill perfectly.

“We don’t serve dogs,” the barman sneers at us.

“I’m a Loper,” Harry says stiffly. “I’m as human as you are, just hairier. Tequila, make it a large one.”

“Beer with a vodka chaser,” I say.

“Large vodka with a tequila chaser,” says Alliea.

“Just put lots of alcohol in one big glass and I’d like a bucket for the puke please,” says Jamie. I give him a hostile glare. He drinks like a ten-year-old eating sweets. Because, I guess, he is a ten-year-old.

The bar is based on a design by Escher. It curves round in a Moebius strip with an antigrav field so you can drift up or drift down at will. The tables themselves are secured to bulkheads or hung from wires, but the overall effect is like being trapped in a cave of bats most of which are hooting and howling and swapping obscenity-laden anecdotes.