Debatable Space (27 page)

And at the precise moment in which spatial teleportation occurs, space itself is rent in a multiplicity of twains.

Just for an instant.

In fact, less than an instant, a tiny portion of an instant, one times ten to the power of millions. But for that brief period,
space does what space shouldn’t do. It
isn’t there
.

The consequences of the rift in space are cataclysmic. To us, from our vantage point speeding niftily away, it’s as if a giant
god with an invisible hand has squeezed the Universe. The Corporation warships are crushed instantaneously, and a huge tidal
wave of pressure rushes through space. Our ship is tossed and hurled around, suns flare, planets are caught in vast whirlpools
hurling round at light speed and further distorting dimensional reality as relativistic effects kick in.

We are swatted away from this vast dimensional hurricane like a fly, and we hurtle through space. Our engines explode. Our
hull melts and reforms. Then the Beacon ship itself falls to pieces around us.

We are left floating free in space, secure in our spacesuits. Alby throws his lattice net around us again, and tows us through
deep space. I am weeping tears of amazement.

What a fucking mess I just caused! What a total gross-out fucking up of reality!

I ripped a piece of space. No man or child has ever done so much.

I’m the king of the castle!

We float through spaccccee for nearly two years. I find it relaxing. I accept that the ressst of them are sssuffering badly.
But they do have food and fluid in their suits, enough to keep them alive for five yearsssss in all.

At lassst, we are picked up by a merchant ship. I flicker away on the outssside of the ship, doing my imperssssonation of
a waning comet. The others recccceive their creature comfortsss and a lift to the nearessst habitable planet.

Another ten yearsss passss.

I’m conscious there is something of an atmosphere. I am not as popular as I would like.

This I find peculiar. After all, since I am technically still their hostage, I could have betrayed them all to the Captain
of the merchant vessel which picked us up. I could have denounced them as pirates. But then, I suppose, if I had done that,
they would simply have killed the Captain and stolen the ship.

Instead – they took the Captain prisoner, and stole his ship. After great debate, it was decided to put the Captain into cryo-sleep.
This was a one-man merchant vessel, mainly run by autopilot. The Captain had taken his cargo through 200 light-years of space,
most of it spent in coma. Strictly speaking the ship could run without him; but he was the human failsafe. He was, like all
such merchant Captains, a sour, embittered, supremely well read intellectual. In other periods, he would have been a professor
in a university. These days, such people are sent on long lonely space journeys with computer access to every academic book
and journal ever published. When he reaches his destination, this Captain will publish an academic treatise based on nearly
forty years of intensive study. Occasionally, during that period, he would have had to veer around an asteroid swarm. But
generally, it’s an easy life.

This particular Captain is, as it happens, clinically insane. I read his treatise and it was utter gibberish. But still, the
ship sailed on. Rather than bicker about who should have the one cryo-berth, we stuck the mad fucker in it and aged ten years.

I decided to use this period to be sociable, and to make myself the undisputed social and emotional heart of the group. I
was motherly yet sexual to little Jamie. I spoke to Harry about the bleak loneliness of my life, and my awe at the beauty
of the universe. I asked Alliea gently about love, and encouraged her to tell me stories of her exploits with her lover Rob
during his long and ill-advised boxing career.

I wrangled with Brandon about the design of spaceships, and impressed him with my first-hand knowledge of the great ship designers
– Bartleby, Smith, Malone and Davis. And I exuded all my available pheromones with Kalen, sensing her peculiar half-cat sexual
energy that drew her to me as a fellow predator and sexually rapacious female. We did not physically consummate our love;
but each day, I perfumed her erotically. I know, by now, how to control my own scent emissions; I can drive any man or woman
insane with desire with the rank smell of my own heat. But with Kalen I am more subtle; I toy with her, I seduce her, I enthral
her.

And yet, the fact of the matter is, they all hate me. Kalen in particular treats me with an angry scorn. Why? Because of my
one error during the battle of Cambria? The fact that instead of joining my companions in battle, I went off and, as it were,
using the common but inelegant idiom, fucked myself?

We won, didn’t we! What’s the problem with these people!

And as for Jamie – what a selfish spoiled child! I’ve spent hours bonding with him, listening to his favourite nu-heavymetalthrashpunk
music bands, talking about quantum theory, showing him my favourite cartoons. And he calls me “oppressive” and “mommyish”.
“Mommyish!” Me! I’m the most toxic femme fatale in outer space!

Alliea, of course, is an emotional cripple. I’ve tried explaining to her how she was locked in a symbiotic-dependency relationship
with Rob, unable to have an opinion unless he shared it, unable to enjoy an experience unless he was enjoying it too. I outlined
for her the basic principles of Inner Self Management as expounded in the New Guru books of the twenty-second century. I tried
to teach her forgetting-remembering mantras, which allow us to control and corral potent memories so that they are no longer
present in the subconscious mind, but can be easily recalled with a simple verbal trigger. For Alliea’s mind is a blur and
jumble of memories of happy and tragic times with this, frankly, brute of a man. She needs to lock them away, and keep the
key safe; that way she can get on and advance herself emotionally.

She listens to me patiently; they all listen to me patiently. But there is that strained look in her eyes. It’s the look I
myself assume when someone I can’t risk offending is telling me in detail the plot of a long and boring film. Honestly, what’s
wrong with these people! Don’t they realise how much they can learn from me?

Brandon’s okay, I guess. He’s so laidback. If I were a widget, he might marry me. As things stand, I am just a useful wall
to bounce his facts against. I persevere wildly with Brandon, but he bores me rigid. I once slept for two and a half minutes
during one of his sentences, though of course, I masked it well and he never knew.

Harry just smiles at me and says nothing. He has his own pheromones; and I sense, very vividly, that he is aroused at the
thought of eating me alive. He knows that I know this; he enjoys watching me squirm as he slavers. I wake up some days with
pains in my leg and stomach, which feel scarily like bite marks. They are psychosomatic; the bastard is mentally eating me
alive.

I should thrust a metal rod up his arse and roast him on a spit. But though I can conjure that image up mentally, I cannot
project images into his mind, as he does to me. He has a rarer skill than I. I really think he is more beast than man.

And Kalen – Kalen doesn’t love me after all. I dream of her soft downy skin with its faint tint of orange. I dream of her
body hairs, her sharp cutting teeth, her flickering tongue. But she is immune to my charms. My pheromones do not work on her.
Instead, I have intoxicated and aroused myself. I have made myself obsessively in love with a fucking
cat
. How stupid is that?

Very.

Shut up.

Sorry.

And then there’s Flanagan.

Oh Flanagan.

When we reach Illyria we float the merchant Captain off in a lifepod. It seems a harmless enough act of charity. Then we carry
on, for three more subjective years, until we reach Debatable Space. Our sanctuary.

No Corporation warships ever penetrate in here. They are too afraid, their spirit is sapped by the myth of the Bugs.

Lena is visibly nervous.

“You’re superstitious, aren’t you?” I say mockingly to her.

“I’m not.”

“Black cats. What do they symbolise to you?”

“Evil.”

“Would you stroke one?”

“Never.”

“Double stars. Would you live on a planet that circles a double star?”

“There are radiation issues.”

“Would you?”

“Double stars can split a personality. They can sunder your id from your ego, your psyche from your soul. No human born under
a double star can ever be sexually faithful.”

“Rubbish.”

“It’s true.”

“Are you sexually faithful?”

“I was, once. But I’ve never lived under a double star.”

“You’re a baby. You’re spooked by Debatable Space. You don’t trust your son’s own scientists.”

“You fucking infant. You weren’t even alive when we found the Bugs.”

“They’re trapped. They’re encased in walls surrounded by walls surrounded by walls. But you’re scared, in case the bogeyman
might creep out.”

“Walls can have holes. Some Bugs might escape.”

“Then they would escape all the way through Inhabited Space. You believe in auras, don’t you? You’re afraid the Bug Aura can
reach out and touch your mind?”

“I do, in fact, believe in auras.”

“Tosh. There are no auras. Auras are bogus science, pure superstition. “

“If I am within ten feet of a person, that person’s soul can touch mine. It’s a documented fact.”

“It’s a discredited documented fact.”

“It’s a fact I believed in before it was discredited. Old opinions die hard!”

“You’re a victim of your stupid, ingrained, indelible fucking prejudices, aren’t you?”

“This place spooks me.”

“It’s where we live.”

I was in retirement on Earth, living in my son’s palace, and basking in my sixth century of life, when we first found the
Bugs. I passed my days reading Dickens and Hammerfast and the collected works of Bjorn Ishil. Then a new Quantum Beacon was
installed in the region of Epsilon Omega 5, and we were able to witness at first hand the experience of the colonists when
Human first met Bug.

At first, we all thought it was a plague. All two thousand settlers developed fevers. Then they stopped speaking English.
Then they cut holes in their spacecraft and floated through space stark naked, with no visible side effects.

By this time we were running the colony ship with the ten Doppelganger Robots we had in storage. Peter asked me to advise
the Major Incident Team on how to manage the plague crisis. I watched as DRs attempted to subdue and incarcerate one of the
human beings. The human waved a hand and the DR fell into two pieces.

Then the human looked at the vid camera. We watched on our screens as his eyes bulged. His cheeks inflated. Then he exploded.
Every part of him shattered into the tiniest pieces. Until nothing was left. He was possessed by invisibility, and destroyed
by nothing at all.

Soon after the ship melted. Every particle of it was transmuted into raw energy. Our nanoprobes were able to follow some of
what happened next. The DRs now floated in space with the humans, as part of one vast colony. Out of seemingly nothing they
constructed a vast net in space. And there, like spiders in a web, the humans and the DRs coexisted.

Then a new spaceship appeared out of nowhere. It was similar to the one that had melted, but bigger, and sleeker.

We had three more colony ships in the area. We gave them their instructions. They formed a triangular pattern around the galactic
core. They activated their Quantum Beacons.

And we sealed off the whole region. A Quantumarity was created, a quantum-effect singularity which has no substance or energy
but which allows nothing to penetrate its boundary. And thus, we contained the plague. And then we watched as the crew of
the two colony ships – who were, of course, trapped
inside
the Quantumarity – died appalling deaths.

The second death we witnessed on camera was even more shocking. It was the ship’s doctor, a blonde woman, whose fevered eyes
suddenly clouded black. A million tiny insects crawled out of her eyes her nose her eardrums her nostrils and every pore and
bodily orifice. They swirled around her like flies. Then the insects ate her alive, until all that was left was a pillar of
floating insect that formed the shadowy shimmering shape of a human being.

Which then moved.

The insects swirled and vanished then reappeared. This time the human-shaped swarm was more fully developed. It had a nose,
breasts, fully shaped limbs. The skin was still black and suppurating but this impersonation of a human being was uncannily
accurate.

Then the insects swarmed again. And a letter appeared in the air. Followed by another, and another. And we read the chilling
words, written by a swirling swarm and suspended in air:

By now, our scientists had fathomed that these insects could not be insects. They were much much smaller, the size of a microbe,
or conceivably smaller still. But they were microbes that could swarm and form insect shapes that acted with a collective
intelligence and purpose. And the insect shapes could swarm and form larger shapes. And could communicate with us by forming
letters in the air . . .

It was, after all, a plague. A plague of intelligent Bugs that could possess and annihilate a human being in instants. These
were Bugs that could learn the English language in a matter of days. They could eat a spaceship. They could build a new spaceship
out of particles so small the human eye could not perceive them. They were tiny, they were evil, and we were their prey.

Someone leaked the story. And the world erupted into panic.

That panic has never subsided. All human history was changed irrevocably by the discovery of the Bugs. All the work I had
done to create a better and a fairer and a well regulated Universe was abandoned. The military–industrial complex took control.
A thousand warships were outfitted on a yearly basis, each equipped with a Quantum Beacon. It took the first of them ninety
years to reach the Epsilon Omega region. And once there, they used their Quantum Beacons to create a second impenetrable shell
around the first impenetrable shell. The warships, of course, were by now trapped in place, on the wrong side of the impermeable
wall. And so the trapped soldiers bred and raised children to be soldiers in turn.