Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“So it’s a planet with no sun,” I said.

“Yes,” Dixon told me excitedly. “A planet all on its own. It’s been assumed for a long time that they existed, but we’ve never found one before.”

“Well so what?” I said. “What use is it to us? Even Pluto would be hospitable by comparison with a planet that has no sun at all and Pluto is so cold it’s covered with solid methane. We’re trying to survive, remember? What use is a dismal place like that?”

“But the thing is, Angela,” Mehmet said excitedly, “the thing is that this planet isn’t cold!”

“And it’s not completely dark either!” said Tommy.

They were all over one another in their haste to show me the evidence. Somehow, even without a sun, this strange object had a surface as warm as Earth’s. Seen in infrared it glowed. In fact, even in the visible spectrum it glowed, though very softly, so softly that against the blazing mass of stars it still seemed dark.

And when Dixon did the spectrometry on the starlight passing round the planet’s edge, he made the most sensational discovery yet. This was a planet with breathable air.

Tommy:

Mehmet, Dixon and I had made a whole career of looking for habitable planets. And now, with very little chance of ever being able to bring the news back to Earth, it looked like we’d finally succeeded, by accident and in the least likely place imaginable.

Of course we had to go and look at it. The thing was only few days away across Euclidean space and a short delay wouldn’t make our next leap any more or less likely to succeed. The only difficulty was Angela and Mike, but she shrugged and said okay, if she was going to die, she might as well see this first – and he was strapped to a bunk and peacefully off with the fairies.

Angela:

When we’d got the Defiant in orbit, we climbed into the ship’s landing capsule and sank down towards a surface that we could now clearly see to be gently glowing over much of its area, as if the planet was covered by a huge candle-lit city. But it wasn’t a city. It was a forest. It was a shining forest of glowing trees and luminous streams and pools, that filled up all but the highest ground.

The trees were like gnarled oaks, leafless but with shining flowers along their branches. Their trunks were warm to the touch and they constantly pulsed. You could feel it if you touched them. You could even hear it. Hmmmmph – hmmmmph – hmmmmph , they went, and the sound of all of them together combined into a constant hum that pervaded the whole forest. The ground under the trees grew strange leafless flowers that shone like stars. Under the surface of pools and streams waving waterweed carried more shining flowers that made the water luminous, like a swimming pool lit up by underwater lights. And the whole forest was mild and scented like a summer evening on Earth.

“Look at that!” cried Mehmet as something bird-like with neon blue wings swept by overhead.

“Hey, come and see this!” called Dixon, squatting down to look at a clump of small shining flowers like miniature sodium streetlights.

Tommy wandered off in one direction, Mehmet in another. Neither of them said where they were going, and no one asked. Dixon settled down under a tree with his back to its warm trunk. I settled down on the mossy banks of a nearby stream. Strange melodious cries came to us from other parts of the forest. All around us the trees throbbed and hummed and shone under the great wheel of the Milky Way galaxy that filled up most of the sky. Fluttering creatures resembling fluorescent butterflies fed on the shining flowers and in the warm air vents that many of the trees had on their trunks. Bird- and batlike creatures swooped and dived among them.

I was lying by the stream watching little shining fish-things darting around in the water when I remembered that Mike was still inside the capsule.

“Dixon,” I said, “would you mind giving me a hand?”

My voice sounded very strange and looming, like when someone suddenly speaks after a long silence during a night journey in a car. It was as if this planet wasn’t used to human voices.

Tommy:

Angela and Dixon fetched Mike down from the capsule and settled him on the ground, still fast asleep. He came round a few hours later. There was no screaming and yelling this time. He just wandered through the trees like the rest of us and found a place to sit down and stare and try and take it all in. It turned out that he was some kind of amateur naturalist back home – he went on bird-watching holidays and stuff like that with his wife and kids – and now he had a whole new set of plants and animals to explore. It was him that came up with the theory that the trees worked like radiators, pumping water through hot rocks underground, circulating it through their branches, and warming the surrounding air. They got their energy from the planet’s core, he reckoned, instead of from a sun.

Eventually everyone got hungry and we reconvened round the capsule for a share of the rations we’d brought down with us. We supplemented this cautiously with fruit we’d found on the trees. Most of it turned out to be good to eat.

“Isn’t this great?” exclaimed Dixon, munching contentedly, his back against a warm tree-trunk. “This is what it must have been like in Eden before the Fall.”

And Eden is what we decided to call the place.

Angela:

Mehmet was the one I got on best with. He was friendly and interested and fun to be with. Dixon was okay I suppose but I was really angry with him for selfishly doing the leap when Mike and I were so close. I’m not a person that likes to hold grudges but I really did need to get some of that anger off my chest before I could get along with him – and he simply wouldn’t let me . Whenever I tried to challenge him, he just said that God had told him to make the leap: the fact that we’d found Eden was proof of it.

‘I’m sorry I dragged you away from your family and your friends Angela,’ would have been nice, or even: ‘I quite understand why you’re so angry.’

But I wasn’t going to get any of that. Instead it was: ‘Angela, you need to try and accept the will of God.’

The will of God! The arrogant prig! It seems wrong to talk about him like that now, after what’s happened since to the poor bloke, but that’s how I felt at the time.

Mike, on the hand, was really sweet in this context. Free of the role of RAF officer and free of the fear of space, he became a sort of gentle, dreamy, solitary child. He’d spend his time making lists of all the animals and plants he could find, and giving them names.

But Tommy, he really got on my nerves. He tried to be charming and helpful but he was this world-famous lady-killer and he couldn’t forget it. In one way I felt that he just took it for granted that I’d want to fall at his feet, yet in another way he was quite afraid of me and needed to keep testing me out all the time to see if he could get a reaction and work out where he stood with me. So he was complacent and insecure, both at the same time, a weird and seriously irritating combination.

Annoyingly, though, he was just as handsome as he’d always looked on TV, so you couldn’t help looking at him, whether you wanted to or not.

Tommy:

Angela was graceful, funny, natural. I thought she was wonderful. Stranded a million light-years away from home and very probably in the final days of her life, she was dignified and undefeated and unbowed.

I’ve been with all kinds of women in my life – models, film stars, university professors, athletes and, yes, I admit it, even whores – and I guess what everyone says about me is true in a way. Women are not just people to me: they are also a kind of addictive drug. But, and I guess this is the part that many people don’t understand, I really do like women. I mean I just like being with them, I like them as human beings – and I always have. I remember when I was five years old my teacher asked the whole class one day to pair up for a walk in the local park – and all the boys looked for other boys and all the girls looked for other girls, but I risked the ridicule of everyone to ask a girl called Susan if I could hold her hand. I remember another time I was chasing round the school yard with a bunch of boys, yelling and hollering and waving sticks around, when I noticed a bunch of girls quietly playing in a tree. And suddenly I wanted to be in their game with them, their quiet game, and not with the boys at all. That’s how I felt about Angela. I just wanted her to let me join in her game.