Debatable Space (14 page)

This is why hate defines me.

This is why I am what I am. Michael Flanagan, citizen of Cambria, pirate chief.

I am surrounded by flame. It’s really quite eerie.

Alby tries to be charming, and courteously insists on treating me as a guest rather than as a hostage. In reality, of course,
I am not free to leave, and I live in constant fear. And he is, actually, let’s face it, remarkably dull. And pedantic. And
over-knowledgeable. And pompous. And excessively flickery. And over-inclined to disagree with my opinions, even when I’m totally
right.

And yet, to be fair to this poor, socially dysfunctional, personality-challenged, abhorrently weird and alien flame monster,
he does laugh at all my jokes. And there is also, I have to admit, though I hate to do so, something beguiling about this
time we spend together. We dine, we converse, we reminisce, we have fierce debates about politics and art and television drama.
We are like some old married couple settled in domesticity, while living in a space station that orbits a sun that is infested
by sentient flames.

My grandfather once showed me his first typewriter. It was an Olivetti, and you had to really bang the keys to get the little
metal arms to fly up and hit the paper and leave a mark. The ribbon was blue on top and red on the bottom; if you were technologically
competent enough, you could swap from blue ribbon to red ribbon and have a multi-coloured text. Lord only knows why. Oh, and
yes, I remember the way you corrected mistakes! If you wanted to delete something you literally painted the page with white
goo, then let it dry, then typed over it. Or you stuck a little piece of white paper over the typing paper and tapped the
same key as the letter you wanted to delete, so that the letter was replaced by a white replica which was the same colour
as the typing paper, and hence, invisible. [God, that’s a bit hard to follow. And I worry my style is too informal – can you
amend that last paragraph, deleting all the “yous” and substituting “ones”?]

[No, on second thoughts, don’t bother, it looks more spontaneous if I leave in the occasional grammatical solecism, don’t
you think?]

I think that you…

Hush, you mar my flow; as I was saying: That machine, my grandfather’s manual typewriter with its blue and red ribbon, is
a vivid memory from my childhood that is seared into my brain. It was cutting-edge technology
then
. Now, I have a computer chip in my brain, and I am talking to a fire.

And the mystery is, why it doesn’t all feel stranger? How do we come to take these things for granted? For tens of thousands
of years human beings whittled tools and farmed soil and ate animals. And now there are people who have themselves bioengineered
so that their excrement emerges from their anus ready-wrapped in polythene. Such people have achieved the ultimate in human
evolution; their shit does not stink.

How can I possibly stay sane, knowing a thing like that?

But, I suppose, the hardest thing to bear is when remarkable things
don’t
happen. If you are, for instance, a prehistoric human tending your field and you are never visited by beings from outer space,
and never have a vision of a god, and are incapable of telepathy or telekinesis, and cannot see ghosts, and nothing ever changes
for you, day after day after day… then that really would be strange. A life without magic; a life without wonder.

And, I must confess, a really odd thing has happened to me. I have become reconciled to my life of imprisonment. I have become
used to being a bargaining chip. And I am confident that my beloved son Peter will pay the ransom and save his mother from
this living Hell.

So life is good.

I sit down to dinner one night. As always, Alby sits with me, chatting, keeping me company. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t drink,
but as a dinner companion, I’ve had much worse.

Then the door opens and a woman walks in. She glides calmly forward, sits down, picks up
my
glass of wine and drinks from it. Then she looks at me.

I reach out. And I touch her face. I touch her breasts. I put my fingers in her mouth. She accepts all this. She smiles. “Will
I do?” she asks Alby. He flickers, and I can sense his admiration, his pride, at the sight of this strikingly beautiful woman.
But I, I am lost for words.

For she is me. The woman is me.

I am training with Alliea and Brandon. I do a star jump, touch the ceiling, Alliea fires a stun gun which hits me in the chest,
and I fall like a stone, but recover and land on my feet. And then I do another star jump.

One! Two! Three! Four! Five! star jumps, each one accompanied by a direct stun blast in the upper body. Five of these and
I’m ready to die.

Alliea is a good forty years younger than me – she’s fifty-six. She’s kept herself in great shape and has had her face, hips,
vagina, teeth and spinal column replaced. She’s like whipcord, and she never seems to get tired. I, by contrast, am starting
to feel my age. I get aches and pains in my old bones, and I have trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. And my hair
and beard are grey – I’ve never opted to have them re-vivified. As a result, I look and sound like a grizzled old-timer, and
I like it that way. It gives me, I feel, a certain gravitas.

My legs, however, are brand-new, state-of-the-art, and genetically enhanced. Hence the star jumps. I have extraordinary power,
when it comes to jumping high, and running away.

Brandon puts on his boxing gloves and we step in the ring. We trade a few punches then he comes at me fast and furious. My
punches have power, but I can’t throw so many of them. He wears me down with sheer dogged persistence. Eventually I throw
in the towel. Enough is enough.

Alliea steps in the ring, and she and Brandon box. Alliea, of course, trained with Rob. She’s a boxing artist. She wipes the
floor with my hapless astrophysicist. At the end of the bout, Brandon’s jaw is hanging loose, and his nose is broken. He bears
the pain with equanimity. But I know it will take him several days under the autodoc to heal these injuries.

I start lifting weights. It’s crude, but for sheer power nothing can replace free weights. But I vary the workout to prevent
muscle-boundness. I lift two hundred kilos of weights on a barbell up on to my shoulders; then I shrug and throw the barbell
in the air. Then I wait patiently, looking straight ahead, and catch it as it falls,
hard,
on my shoulders. It feels as if the roof has crashed in. Great training for storming a ship, or taking a blaster shot directly
on the body armour.

Hup, throw, wait, CRASH. Hup, throw, wait, CRASH.

Alliea picks up a sword and tries to cut off Brandon’s head. His head bobs and weaves, he ducks and kinks, as he brilliantly
eludes the sword’s sharp blade. It’s great speed training, but it’s dangerous. Once, in a training session, Brandon’s head
was cut clean off. He claims you can still see the scar on his throat where the head was sewn back on… But of course,
he’s just being fanciful. The stitches are micro-sewn, and quite invisible to the naked eye.

Then we shower together. We’re all too old, too seasoned, to have any shyness about communal bathing or showering. But there’s
no sexual element to it. Brandon is predominantly homosexual, and finds his sexual pleasures on week long binges in the Free
Ports. And Alliea is still in mourning for Rob; the possibility of me sexually desiring her or her sexually desiring me would
be an affront to etiquette.

And as for me – well, I’m a gnarly old man with scars up and down my body and grey pubic hair. No one on the ship regards
me as a sexual being any more. And, goddamn it, it’s been at least two years since I had a decent fuck. So maybe they’re right
to write me out of the equation.

I find it comforting, to be naked with people I love. People I care for. People I would be happy to die for.

My people.

We arrive at the drop point a week early. It’s obvious that the Cheo will try and ambush us, so we make our preparations accordingly.

We hollow out an asteroid and fill it with explosives.

We place holographic projectors on floating satellites, too small to be visible to the enemy’s surveillance ’bots.

We charge our laser cannons. We sow space with nanobombs. We gird on our body armour. And we wait.

He doesn’t show.

We send another ransom email. The Cheo responds promptly, offering less money. He reminds us that if we ambush him, he will
invoke the flame-beast blood-feud clause. It’s all standard stuff, powerplay gambits. Designed to test our nerve. We arrange
another drop-off point. This time, Harry goes along, in a high-powered tugboat, intending to tow away the boat full of treasure
and released prisoners which are the essence of our ransom demand.

Harry’s tugboat is ambushed, he is blown out of space. He escapes on a rocket-propelled backpack. Only a Loper could have
survived a direct blast attack of this kind, but we kind of hoped he would.

We send a third ransom demand. This time the Cheo is getting cocky. He’s played his games, he’s tested our resolve to the
utmost. Now he comes back with a final renegotiation. If we surrender, and submit ourselves to execution, then he will wipe
the slate clean and exonerate our families. Otherwise, mass carnage will ensue of all our kindred and clan.

It’s a hollow threat. All of us, long ago, lost those who were close to us. We respond with our counter-offer. One more day
in which to provide the ransom, or Lena will be killed.

A day passes.

We vidphone Alby and relay the news. We see him sitting with Lena. She is looking particularly beautiful. Alby turns to her
and explains: the Cheo will not pay. He would rather, Alby tells her, see you die than pay a ransom.

Lena laughs. A gutsy laugh. “That’s my boy,” she says.

Alby swirls over her. It’s almost affectionate in its delicacy. Then he swirls away.

Lena is on fire. She screams and screams in agony. She falls to the floor and rolls around, trying to extinguish herself.
Her bones char, her skin melts. She dies in utterest agony.

We relay the vidphone call to the Cheo. The kidnap is over. The hostage has been killed.

Lena, his beloved mother, is dead.

EXCERPTS FROM THE THOUGHT DIARY OF LENA SMITH, 2004–

To be a concert pianist, and play at Carnegie Hall.

When the day arrived, I couldn’t believe it was really happening. Or that I deserved such an amazing honour. And admittedly,
I did have to pay for the hall myself. But it was by no means a vanity concert. I was a brilliant pianist by this point, and
I’d earned the right to be there, for my first major public recital.

I didn’t sleep at all the night before. I woke early, hungry but unable to eat. I slept in the afternoon, showered, changed,
arrived two hours early at the Hall. It was a Friday. I wore black. No, blue. A figure-hugging outfit. Arms bare. No jewellery.
My hair was – up? Down? Must have been up. It was hot. I sweated under my armpits, I had to rinse myself with cotton pads
in the loo. And I – no, no, that wasn’t then. That was another time. No matter. It was a cold night, in fact. I wore a dress
with sleeves. But it was blue. Definitely. Blue.

The press clamoured to interview me beforehand, but I refused all offers. I stayed in my dressing room and focused my
chi
. I watched an episode of an American comedy on my PDV. Then when I felt ready, I began the long walk from dressing room to
stage. Then across the stage to the grand piano. To the piano stool. Then I sat. Then a casual glance at the audience – which
almost unnerved me. But I kept my composure. The crowd was hushed. The lights burned my skin. I looked at the keys. Blanked
my mind. A cough shattered the calm. I ignored it. Composed myself. Then I began to play . . .

And in the millimillimillisecond between my hands getting the signal from my brain and the first note of music, I thought
to myself: Not bad, Lena. Not at all bad. For someone who had always been tone-deaf, and hopeless at music.

It used to piss me off, to be honest,. At school, I could get As in all my subjects, my creative writing was fine, I was shit
at gym but that didn’t matter. But I always loved the idea of being a great musician, and yet it never happened for me. I
failed Grade 1 clarinet, and then failed Grade 1 flute, and finally failed Grade 1 cello, having failed to master how to pick
up a bow. I was clumsy, that was the problem, and uncoordinated, and I couldn’t remember melodies, and I had difficulty telling
one note from another. At a school concert I was in the chorus of our production of
Les Misérables
, and was told to mime because my singing was sapping the resolve and eroding the pitch of the angry mob.

But years later, after the success of my second book, I was looking for new challenges. So I decided that for my third book,
The Many Talents of You, God
, I would explore the whole area of teaching and instinct. And so as my research project I applied myself to the mastery of
a whole series of athletic activities like tennis, tae kwon do, and sharp-shooting. And, for good measure, I decided to be
a concert pianist too.

The research period took far longer than I expected – nearly four decades in fact – but I was rich by then and I was mainly
doing this for my own satisfaction. And, through the application of science, and a steadily growing insight into the power
of relaxation techniques, I managed to train my body to be “instinctive’. I learned how to move without thinking about it;
learned to step outside of my body and let the body itself control me. And, because my fitness level never declined, I was
able to make slow, steady progress towards excellence in all those related spheres. By the time I was sixty, I was a black
belt fourth dan in tae kwon do and judo. By the time I was seventy, I was as good a tennis player as a gifted individual would
be at the age of fifteen. Almost, but not quite, good enough to play at Wimbledon.