Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

The stranger looked blank.

“You don’t know who John Thompson is?” asked Harry, very surprised. “You come from Brum and you don’t know about the chair of the Birmingham Men’s Committee? Good God man, they say he’s the most powerful man left in England!

“Oh yes… that John Thompson… he’s…”

“In a different mould entirely from our own dear Timothy Brown,” Harry said, winking at me to show no hard feelings.

“Oh but Timothy’s such a good man,” said Rod Stone again in a soft falsetto. And he didn’t bother to wink.

“He’s a pussy-licker,” said Peter Hemlock, avoiding my eye. He tipped back a glass of vodka. His eyes glazed over as the ethanol hit his bloodstream.

Rod Stone refilled his glass.

“Drink up,” Harry said to the stranger, “You look like you could use another. What on Earth were you hoping to find in that wood there anyway?”

“Jazamine. She said she’d…”

All three of them snorted with disapproval.

“A girl? What do you want a girl for?” Harry asked. “Listen mate, if it’s a little nooky you’re after, you be much better off with the likes of Lily here.”

Lily had come up behind us in an overpowering blast of sickly sweet scent.

“Hi there,” she purred.

“She’s got everything a woman has got,” said Harry with a wink at me. “I think we can all vouch for that, eh lads? But she’s got the brain of a man, and that means she knows what a man really wants.”

Lily fluttered her eyelashes at the stranger. Comprehension slowly dawned in his dazed blue eyes. Her female face was nothing more than a mask of paint and mascara. Through it looked out the solid heavy face of a man, burning with a bottomless rage.

So the stranger had come looking for Jazamine in the green wood – and he was offered this .

He reddened violently and turned away. The others laughed at him. He tried to shift the conversation onto other ground.

“What… what is TTX?” he blurted out. “I saw it written on a sign.”

The laughter died instantaneously. The four of them stared at him in shocked silence.

“You mean you don’t know ?” asked Harry quietly, all friendliness gone.

The stranger could see he had made some kind of blunder and tried to recover.

“No – I mean yes… I mean I just forgot for a moment…”

“Well, if you really know what it is sweetie,” said Lily in a hard male voice, “why don’t you tell us?”

The stranger looked at me desperately. I tried to mouth the word ‘plague’.

“It’s an… illness,” he said.

“Yes,” said Harry grimly, “an illness. So now tell us what it does to a man.”

“It’s… like flu to start with and then…”

“It makes your balls go purple and swell up like footballs,” snapped Rod Stone from behind the bar, “and then they burst and you die.”

“Everyone knows that, my friend,” said Harry reprovingly, “everyone knows that. ”

There was a moment of silence.

“You know what he is, don’t you?” said Rod. “He’s one of those shifters you hear about. He doesn’t belong here. He’s slipped in from another world.”

Harry whistled softly.

The stranger stood there like a prisoner in the dock.

Harry spoke very quietly “So you come from a place where TTX never happened, do you? The women never took over?”

“Maybe he’s got some of that stuff on him,” Rod said. “You know, that shifter drug they use, maybe he’s got some.”

“Well let’s see if he has,” said Peter Hemlock.

“You know what they say, don’t you?” said Lily. “If a shifter’s swallowed all his stuff, you can still get it out of him by drinking his blood!”

Her painted lips parted, revealing yellow fangs. The stranger gave a sort of low groan and started to back away.

“Not so fast,” Harry said, “we haven’t finished with you.”

He and Peter took hold of the stranger’s arms.

“Hey!” I yelled. “He hasn’t done you any harm. Leave him alone!”

“Or you’ll tell your mummy, eh?” snarled Peter.

But they loosed their grip all the same, for my mother had power. The stranger broke free and ran, out of the door at the back, off in the direction of the wood.

Harry and Peter settled back onto their bar-stools, both a little flushed and breathless. Lily gave a cold snort of contempt. None of them looked at me.

“Do you think he was really a shifter, or was he just off his head?” asked Rod, after a moment.

“Just some nutter more likely,” said Harry with a shrug. “I mean I’ve heard these rumours about shifters the same as you have, but I’ve never been able to see how a drug could make people cross to another world. Even if there are such things. I mean I know the slits have abolished science and we don’t know squat about anything anymore, but it just doesn’t sound plausible does it?”

“I suppose not,” said Peter, “but I wish we’d searched him all the same.”

“I wished we’d sucked him dry,” hissed Lily.

She glanced venomously in my direction. So did Peter.

“Pussy-licker!” he whispered.

I picked up my stick and hobbled away from them with as much dignity as I could manage, through the back door, following after the stranger.

There was no pool in the wood. He was standing by a small concrete reservoir with a locked metal lid. He jerked round in alarm as he heard me coming, preparing to run again.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not about to drink your blood.”

He nodded and turned away from me. “This is the place. The pool was here. Jazamine was here. But it was another world I suppose.”

Tears came to his eyes but I laughed harshly.

“Well, even if you could find her, so what? You don’t believe men and women can really get on together do you? You don’t really believe that? Harry and his crew – okay I don’t like them and they don’t like me – but they’re right really. So are the RadFems. We’re rivals. It all boils down to one thing: them or us.”

I lashed out at a nettle with my stick.

“The fools are the ones like my dad, the good men, the gentle men, the ones who try to smooth things over by denying their own nature…”

I grinned at him.

“What…” he began. “What are you…”

He voice tailed off. He stared at me with those dazed eyes of his and I felt ashamed of what I was doing but carried on anyway, determined to crush his dream, and even more determined to stamp out in myself the cruel impossible hope that opposites could be reconciled.

“Oh I know, I know. You and that girlfriend of yours made sweet music together. It happens even here sometimes. But all that’s based on a delusion, isn’t it? What you wanted and what she wanted weren’t really the same thing. Just for a moment they seemed to coincide, that’s all.”

Still he stared, wide-eyed. He was confused, a little frightened, but even more than that (I now realise in shame) he was just plain puzzled by my hostility.

Well, I was puzzled by it too, but my bile boiled up inside me anyway. I grinned mirthlessly in his face, I waved my stick at him. There in that little scrap of a wood with evening falling, I – who knew better than most what it was to be alone and to be picked on – ruthlessly attacked a young man who was completely alone in the world, and had done nothing to harm me at all:

“We think that if we long for something there must be a someone out there in the world that’s there to quench our longing. But why should that be?”

I laughed. “Do you know what a lamprey is? Do you know what it longs to do? A lamprey longs to fasten itself onto the skin of a fish and suck out its insides. That’s its heart’s desire! But do you think that the fishes it preys on are longing to be eaten alive? No, of course not. If the fishes had their way, the lamprey would go hungry. He could pine himself away with longing, for all they care. He could fucking starve.”