Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

The sad thing was, she didn’t like me at all. Every time I tried to talk to her, she ended the conversation as quickly as she could. Whatever tack I tried with her, I could see she saw it all as some kind of trick. Yet she would sit for hours with that goddamned Turk, talking and laughing away like they’d known each other forever.

Angela:

When we’d been there the equivalent of two or three Earth days we started to ask each other the question ‘What happens next?’

I wanted to know what the chances were of getting successfully back to Earth. Dixon immediately said that he had no doubt at all that God would see us safely home to bear witness to the new Eden. But Mehmet and Tommy thought that it would take at least three leaps to get back to Earth and that each leap would have no more than a 25% chance of success. A quarter of a quarter of a quarter: that was a one in sixty-four chance of getting back alive. A fourth leap, which we’d quite likely need, would knock those odds down to one in two hundred and fifty-six. A fifth leap was apparently out of the question. We just didn’t have the power.

“There is an alternative, though,” I said. “We could stay here.”

“That’s true,” said Tommy. “Or some of us could stay here while the others tried to get back. If they succeeded, they could send out another crew in the Reckless or the Maverick, to fetch back the ones who’d stayed.”

“But if they failed, the ones who’d stayed would have to grow old and die alone,” said Mehmet with a shudder. “Okay I know it’s pretty here, but to live a whole lifetime here and die here and …”

He broke off, and no one spoke for a little bit.

“Not necessarily grow old and die alone,” I eventually said. “Not if I was one of the ones who stayed and one of you stayed with me. We could have babies, and then we wouldn’t be alone. We could start a whole new race.”

Men are funny prudish creatures in some ways. They all visibly squirmed – and then they all laughed loudly to cover up their unease.

I told them I wasn’t kidding. I’d stay here with any one of them, or more than one if they liked, and if the Defiant didn’t make it back and the Reckless and the Maverick never came, I would make babies with whoever was with me.

Tommy:

I wanted to shout, ‘Me! I’ll stay!’, but I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was included in the invitation. Dixon put on his religious voice and said he was married. Mike and Mehmet both said they had to at least try to get back to their kids.

“How about you, then Tommy?” Angela asked.

I was amazed.

Angela:

Tommy and I gave them two months, two Earth months. If no one had come back for us by then, it would mean the Defiant had definitely failed to get through.

Two Earth months was April 8th. The date didn’t mean anything, of course, in constant Eden, which has no days or nights or sun or moon and (as it turns out) doesn’t even change its own position relative to the distant galaxy, or not so you’d notice. But we still followed Earth time on our watches, and hung onto some kind of notion of months and days. And both of us started keeping a diary record on pocket recorders.

On April the 1 stthere was a small earth tremor and mountains appeared in the distance that we’d never seen before, illuminated by the lava streaming down the side of a volcano in their midst: big mountains covered in snow, that up to now had been in permanent darkness. For a while a hot sulphurous wind blew and the galaxy was hidden behind black dust. Tommy and I spent a few hours laying out a circle on the ground, using big round stones from the bottom of one of the streams, to mark the site of our original landing. It was my idea. It struck me that whether we stayed or whether we returned to Earth, this was a fairly important historic site for the human race. It was a good spot to be in. There were large pools around it, and streams, with fish in them that were good to eat if you could catch them.

April 3 rdit rained. We sheltered in a small cave in one of the rocky outcrops around the pools. The cave was even more full of life than the forest outside. When we finally lay down and tried to sleep – Tommy at one end, me at the other, listening to the rain outside – Tommy said that life on Eden must have begun deep down in underground caves when the surface was still covered in deep ice. You get little pockets of geothermal life even on Earth, he pointed out, in deep caves and on the bottom of the sea beyond the reach of the sun. There was even life in Lake Vostok two miles down under the Antarctic ice. Life here could have begun like that and then spread upwards when it discovered how to heat its own environment. Any life form that could reach the surface and melt the ice would get an advantage because it would be able to spread more quickly than was possible in underground caves.

Tommy was trying really hard to be nice to me and not to slip into his smooth lady-killer routine which he knew I hated. In fact we were weirdly formal with each other. It was such a strange position to be in. I was quite clear in my mind that if we got back to Earth I most probably wouldn’t want to have anything more to do with him. His celebrity as such didn’t impress me and as a person he really wasn’t the type I chose to spend my time with.

But if no one came for us? Well then he would be my life’s companion and this really would be a marriage which nothing could end but death, a marriage more total than almost any other that has ever existed.

Tommy:

April 4 thwe saw a new animal a bit like a cat, only it had luminous spots and its eyes were round and flat, not spherical. The weird thing was that when it moved its spots could ripple backwards along its sides at exactly the same speed as its forward motion, so as to create the illusion that its skin was standing still. It also had six limbs, like other Eden creatures. The bird-like and bat-like animals, for example, had hands as well as feet and wings. The little bats stood upright on their hind feet on branches and looked down at us curiously, stroking their wrinkled little noseless but oddly human faces with their oddly human hands while they fanned their membranous wings.

April 5 th, I shot a pig-like six-legged animal and we skinned it and cooked it over a fire. It was the first thing we had killed, but we knew we couldn’t live on fruit and space-food for much longer. It tasted a bit like mutton, but kind of sweet and fatty.

We didn’t talk much, but I guess we both did a lot of thinking. I’ve never noticed myself as much as I did then. I’d often been told I was selfish, self-centered and self-absorbed – by Yvette among others, though I’m not sure she was really in a position to talk – and I guess I was, yet I’d never reflected much before on me, on this strange being that happens to be myself. I’d always just been this person, blundering and trampling around like some kind of wounded beast, without ever thinking about who he was or why.

Angela:

April 6 thI woke up loathing the perpetual night of Eden. It’s not cold, it’s not pitch dark, it looks pretty enough with its lantern-flowers – quite lovely in fact, like a garden forever decked out with Chinese lanterns for a midsummer night’s party. But to think that there would never be a sunrise here, never a blue sky, never a clear sunny day when you could see for miles. Never. Never. Never. For a while I felt so claustrophobic it was all I could do not to scream.

Tommy and I hardly said a word. We’d said we’d wait to April 8 thso we did, but really we knew already that no one was going to come back to us, and that Mehmet and Mike and Dixon had not got through. We just weren’t going to allow ourselves to say it yet.