Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

Tommy:

April 7 thI tried to fill up the time by following starbirds through the forest. Starbirds was the name Mike gave to those peacock-like creatures with luminous stars on their tails. I liked the creatures, even though they were basically carrion eaters. I liked the way they crashed noisily through the trees. I liked the way that pairs of them would move through the forest some way apart, but in parallel, calling out to each other in loud voices that carried over the humming of the trees, and over the cries of all the other creatures.

“ Hoom – hoom – hoom ,” goes one.

Then the other, maybe a mile away, goes “ Aaaah! – Aaaah! – Aaaah !”

I liked the way that that was all they’d got to say but they were happy anyway to say it for hours and hours, back and forth across the forest.

Starbirds don’t know they’re in Eden, I said to myself several times, as if it was something I couldn’t quite get through my head. They don’t know Eden is in intergalactic space. They don’t know that this ground isn’t the base of the universe itself. To them this is just how the world is.

Angela:

And then it was April 8 th. We were both awake watching the GMT click over from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00.

“They didn’t make it,” we admitted to one another at 00:05:00. “They didn’t get through.”

I wondered how it had ended for Dixon and Mehmet and Mike. It was possible that in mid-leap they had been swallowed up inside one of those weird mirror-lined bubbles of sub-E, which are really tiny little temporary universes which shrink back to nothing when the engine stops pulling them into being. But I think it was more likely that the engine died on them after a leap or two and left them stranded: stranded in that smelly little box in the middle of the void, while the food and water ran out, the ship gradually grew cold and Mike’s last sedative shot was finally used up. Poor gentle Mike with nothing between him and his worst fear. Poor friendly, positive Mehmet. Poor Dixon, having to come to terms in the end with the fact that God had let him down. He had found proof that there was life beyond Earth, proof that would undoubtedly have ensured that the Galactic Project would continue and that the gospel could be carried out across the stars, but God had not let him take that news home.

But there was no point in going on and on thinking these thoughts, was there? There was simply no point.

I took Tommy by the hand and we went to a pool we knew and which, without actually speaking of it, we’d somehow both set aside for this moment. It was surrounded by pulsing trees. A soft cool moss grew on its banks, small bats swooped over the water and there always seemed to be starbirds in the vicinity, calling to each other across the forest. It sounds romantic but really for me it was a case of Plan A has failed so let’s move quickly on to Plan B – to Plan Baby. This just seemed the best place to put it into effect.

But then again I really did feel a sort of closeness to Tommy because of the weird experience that just the two of us had shared, and because there were so many strong emotions going around in my head, and because there was never going to be anyone else to turn to but Tommy – and whoever else he and I managed to summon up between us inside my body.

After we’d done, we looked around and I noticed that there was a tree by the pool with ripe fruits high up in its branches. I’ve always been good at climbing trees and so I separated myself from Tommy and scrambled up to get something to eat for us. Tommy stood up and waited for me below. I could just make him out in the soft glow of the tree’s white lanterns, smiling up at me. Like a little boy, I thought, and then I suddenly felt incredibly angry with him. He was nothing but a silly over-indulged little boy, I thought, who does silly selfish thoughtless things and expects to be instantly forgiven.

I got the fruit and clambered back down, pausing before the last bit to toss it to Tommy so I could use both hands. As I dropped to the ground beside him, Tommy, without any warning, kissed me profusely and then burst out that he loved me and that he’d loved me from the day he saw me. In fact he’d never loved anyone as he loved me, he told me. He hadn’t known until now what love was really like.

Jesus!

Well, of course I told him not to talk crap. I mean I didn’t ask to come here, did I? I didn’t ask to be stuck with bloody love-rat Schneider. I would have much preferred Mehmet. Yes and I didn’t ask never to see my mum and my dad and my sister Kayley again. I didn’t ask to be cut off forever from my friends, and the sun, and green leaves, and the friendly streets of London. And if it wasn’t for Tommy Schneider here and his selfish friends I would still have had all of those things. Most likely I would have had them for years and years to come.

So I was angry. I ignored what he had said completely. I started instead to tell him all the grimmest things I could think of about what lay ahead of us.

If we got sick here there would be no one to cure us, I told him. I told him we’d go blind one day in this dim light. I told him I could easily die in childbirth, die in agony and leave him alone here with nothing for company but mine and the baby’s corpses. Yes, and I told him – I pointed out to him – that if we did have children that lived, they would have to turn to each other for sex partners – unless of course they turned to us – because there would be no one else there for them.

And I told him that after a couple of generations of inbreeding our descendants would have to cope with all the hereditary diseases and deformities that were now hidden away harmlessly in his and my genes. There’s sickle cell in my family, I told him, and diabetes too, and my grandmother on my mum’s side and two of my aunties were born with a cleft palate. (Did Tommy Schneider know what a cleft palate looked like, or how to surgically correct it, of course without the use of anaesthetics?) Many of these things would become rife in a few generations, when inbreeding brought recessive genes together again and again, along with whatever little genetic contributions Tommy’s family might have to make. That was assuming of course that there actually were future generations at all and that the line didn’t simply die out, as was quite likely, leaving some poor devil at the end of it all to face the experience of being completely alone in this ghostly forest where day would never come, and no other human being would ever come again.

“This isn’t some kind of happy ever after story, Tommy,” I told him. “This is very very far from happy ever after. The best you can say for it is that it’s the only way we’ve got of going on living and finding out what happens next.”

(And, though I didn’t speak about it to him, I thought, as I sometimes do, about my ancestors, my great-great-great-great-grandparents, taken from Africa in chains to the Caribbean to cut cane under a slave driver’s lash. Horrific as it must have been they went on living, they kept going. If they hadn’t, I would never have been born.)

Tommy nodded. He seemed quite calm about everything I’d said, which was disappointing because I wanted to upset him. I wanted to trample over his lovey-dovey daydream so as to pay him back for what he and his friends had done to me. Those three men had stolen my life from me, stolen my home, stolen everyone I really loved.

“So it was all a cold calculation?” he asked, quite calmly. “You staying with me. You making out with me here beside the pool. There wasn’t any feeling involved, just a clinical assessment of the situation. Is that right? Is that what you are trying to tell me?”