Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

Occasionally, Peter was arrested and spent nights at a time in a prison cell. He never did serious jail time, but he was convicted of being drunk and disorderly, committing ABH, being racially and sexually abusive while under the influence of alcohol, and of running out of restaurants without paying. There were also two other rape investigations, neither of which led to a criminal prosecution. But the police, I could tell, had a file on Peter, and were just waiting for him to make one fatal slip.

I never reproached him. I’d gone past that point. My love was based on damage control. He was still my boy, no matter what.

Then, eventually, while I was President of Humanity a Metropolitan Police major incident team was given the task of investigating Peter. He was suspected of extortion, on-line banking fraud, and murder. The old rape allegation was also being reinvestigated. I used my police expertise to access the incident team files, to follow the course of the investigation on a daily basis. And when it was obvious Peter was in danger of being arrested on serious offences, I used a hacker to delete the investigation team’s files, and ordered the Home Secretary to disband the team and assign them to other duties.

Then I arranged for Peter to join a colony ship, even though there were many others ahead of him in the queue. He didn’t, of course, know how close he was to being arrested and sent to jail for decades. And so he begged me to beg him to stay, but I wouldn’t.

We dined in the restaurant on the Swiss Re tower, looking out over London. “I wish I had the courage to join you,” I told him.

“Maybe I…”

“You’re so brave,” I told him, wheedlingly. “And you’re so right to be doing this. It’s the only way humankind can reach the stars. If young men and women of your calibre gamble with their lives.”

“Yes, but I’m… having second thoughts,” he said to me, a fearful expression in his eyes.

“Which is only natural. But the joy of space… the exhilaration of the infinite!”

“But it might go wrong. We might not find a planet to terraform.”

“They are plentiful. And technology is improving all the time. It used to take a hundred years to make a planet habitable. Now, it can be done in twenty.”

His spirits visibly sank. He could tell I wanted shot of him. “You think I should go then, huh?”

I smiled, radiantly. “It’s hard for me to bear… but yes.”

And I felt a moment of pride about the fact that, for all his many character flaws, I still had and would always have ultimate power over my boy. He would do anything for me. He’d kill for me, if I asked him to. He’d even leave me, if that’s what I wanted, although it clearly broke his heart to go.

And so he left. I had saved him from arrest, and in the process saved my own reputation. I meticulously deleted all evidence of my lies and manipulation at the Home Office and elsewhere. I arranged for the investigating officers on the major incident team to have fat bribes paid into their bank account, from an unattributable source, so that they wouldn’t rock the boat. And, also, so that I would be able to blackmail them with accusations of corruption if they did ever speak out about Peter. (None of them, of course, declared these phantom receipts to their bosses or the taxman.) And then I breathed a sigh of relief.

Because I was glad – no, more than glad, utterly and profoundly relieved – to finally see the last of my child. My love for him felt like a shackle around my heart. I was afraid of him, and dreaded his company.

And, once the colony ship had departed from Earth system, I felt able to return to my normal life. I took lovers, who were always much younger than me. And I took great pleasure in looking at their young, taut, un-surgically enhanced naked bodies. I continued to build my empire of power. And I made the big change, from Lena to Xabar, that made me a legend and not just a functionary.

Twenty years later Peter landfell on a distant planet, and was able to contact me via the Quantum Beacon. It was strange to see him again, via the vidphone. There was a zest to him now, he talked excitedly of the challenges they faced on their chosen home, a double planet system around a yellow G1 star, 16 light-years from the Sol system. Nitrogen-dwelling life forms had been identified on the first planet, and the intention was to declare this a protected zone, and colonise the second planet.

Every week Peter would tell me of his adventures. The nitrogen-rich planet was christened Meconium, and the planet to be terraformed was called Chaos. But Peter always referred to them as Shit (the nitrogen planet) and Shittier (their own hydrogen/helium gaseous low-gravity planet).

This planetary system proved to be a cursed place for the human settlers. The nitrogen-dwelling life forms that had been identified on the uninhabited planet of “Shit” proved to be, in fact, the sentient excrement of much larger nitrogen-dwelling life forms, which were able to expel their wastes through space by means of natural rockets. The excrement was then caught in the gravitational pull of its twin planet (Chaos, aka Shittier) before entering its atmosphere. And this planet, of course, is where Peter and his companions were attempting to forge a new society…

These cosmic shit showers contained the embryos for third-phase life forms which were able to inhabit the helium/ hydrogen planet in gaseous form. In effect, this alien beast was a caterpillar, which turned into a pile of steaming turds, which turned into a gaseous butterfly.

Tens of thousands of humans died in those earlier years, fighting these alien beings, technically known as 421 S (N), which Peter referred to as “Shit Buckets”. Peter was appointed Commander of the colony, and he planned and authorised an operation to detonate fusion bombs all over the planet as part of a controlled terraforming operation that would lead, inevitably, to the genocide of the alien monsters.

I argued passionately with him that they should move on, find a fresh planet. Alien life was a precious thing, to be treasured and conserved. And as humans, we have a duty to think beyond our own selfish needs.

Peter wasn’t impressed. It would take another seventy years of travel to reach the nearest potentially terraformable planet. And besides, this was their home now.

Peter encountered fierce opposition from the leader of his new planet; and so he staged a coup, and after some appalling massacres, Peter was elected as new leader.

The aliens were annihilated. And two oxygen-atmosphere low-gravity Earth-habitable planets were created.

For much of this period, Peter gave me a blow-by-blow account of the dangers he faced. But after a few years, Peter vidphoned home less often. We exchanged vid messages at Christmas; and I was vaguely aware that he was becoming quite a powerful figure in his own right. But I was lost in my own concerns.

And then, seventy years later, my subjective time, we met again in space, during my flight from Earth. Peter had a great reputation by then. He was known as an administrator, an innovator, and a democrat. He was leader of the anti-colonial movement which challenged and defied everything I had ever done in the course of my career. But when we met, he was so charming. He flattered me, and told me that I had achieved great work. He never once quizzed me on my bizarre aberration, my murder of a dying old woman.

He could have psychoanalysed me. It was a tempting thing to do. Who was I really killing, when I killed that old bitch Cavendish?

I was pretty sure, by that time, that I was profoundly mentally ill. But I found that, with the use of medication, and the copious use of deception when in the company of psychiatrists and therapists, I could keep it in check. I was content in my lunacy; in retrospect, I think that period of insanity was a necessary phase. It was a bridging period that allowed me to purge demons, and settle into the next century of my life with a new soul and renewed energy.