Debatable Space (28 page)

These became our Sentinels; human beings whose only function and reason for being was to guard against the possibility of
a Bug invasion. If that event ever happened, of course, the soldiers would die instantly, since there was and is no defence
whatsoever against attack by sub-microscopic Bugs. They can go anywhere, penetrate any hull, crawl into any weapon.

But since they were trapped anyway, the Sentinels were led to believe they fulfilled a vital function. They lived, and still
live, a life of pointless folly; sustained only by purpose-built religions which allow them to exist in a state of Messianic
zeal. Their futility is known to everyone, but not to them . . .

A thousand impenetrable shells have now been constructed around the Bugs’ planetary system. All of mankind’s resources have
been poured into making humankind safe from Bug. But to generate that wealth, and sustain that endless war drive, other considerations
have slipped down the order of priorities. Democracy was lost centuries ago. Liberalism is a distant dream. Humankind exists
on a permanent war economy, and government by diktat is now the only way.

The region outside the thousandth shell has come to be known as Debatable Space. In Debatable Space, half the sky is warped
and twisted, because of the bizarre effects of the Quantumarity. And all humans who live there exist in a state of foreboding
and dread because of the twisted sky above them, which serves as visible token of the Bug Threat at the heart of the Thousand
Shells.

There is no law in Debatable Space. It is a wild place. It is the place of final escape for pirates and outlaws.

And I loathe the place, beyond all measure.

I am with Alliea. The mood is informal. I have showered, and trimmed and combed my grey beard, and carefully brushed my hair.
We are having drinks in the ship’s bar. I look, I know, like a wolf who is being compelled to use a knife and fork.

“Don’t let her get to you,” I say, comfortingly.

“I don’t.”

“She doesn’t mean to be patronising.”

“She’s so fucking patronising!”

“She has a right to our respect. She’s lived, after all, an amazing life.”

“She slept her way to the top. That’s what I heard.”

“Not true.”

“She was a dictator. She destroyed democracy.”

“Not true either.”

“She committed murder.”

“And confessed her crime, and took her punishment. Besides, we murder people all the time.”

“We’re soldiers.”

“We’re killers.”

“It’s war.”

We pause.

“Can I say something?” I ask.

“What?”

“It’s hard.”

“Say it. You look strange.”

“I want to touch you.”

“No!”

“I know you loved him but…”

“There’s no ‘but’.”

“We could be something together.”

“Why not pair off with Kalen? She’ll do it with anyone, she doesn’t mind.”

“I have done.”

“Good?”

“Oh yes. I made her purr.”

Alliea laughs.

“This is not,” I tell her, “about sex. It’s about love. I’ve always loved you. I was jealous as hell of Rob, even though he
was my friend. Now he’s dead. Please tell me I have a chance.”

“I find this really creepy.”

“I wake up every morning afraid. I want someone to share my bed. Be with me. Share my fears, and my joys.”

“I’ve sworn a vow. I’ll never take another partner. Even if I live to be a thousand.”

“What a stupid fucking vow.”

“It keeps me sane.”

“I’m desperate for you.”

“Try a handjob.”

“I don’t expect you to love me,” I say desperately. “I’d be happy with… less. Just friendship. With sex. Sex without
love. You could go through the motions, but not feel anything in your heart for me.”

“Wow, what an offer.”

“I feel a black, black despair. I’ve lived too long.”

“I get that too.”

“The ten years on that merchant ship were a crucifixion of my soul.”

“It was ten subjective years. In Earth Time, it was twenty years.”

“I’m another half-century older.”

“We both are.”

“Kiss me Alliea.”

“No.”

“Then let me see you naked.”

“No’.

“Then at least, let me think about you sexually.”

She pauses, for a long long time.

“Okay,” she says, eventually. “Just this once.”

I ravish her with my eyes. I glory in the softness of her skin, the bulge of her breasts, her moist slightly parted lips,
her dark hair framing the perfect oval of her face.

“Enough.”

I stop.

“Never again,” she tells me, and I nod.

I look at her now with cool, professional, dispassionate eyes. I am her Captain, she is my crew member. I have been indulged,
my lust has been sated, now I have to forget I ever loved her. A promise is a promise.

So I cut my passion for Alliea out of my heart. It’s a tricky psychological manipulation, but I manage it. I now no longer
love her.

“Done?”

“Done.”

There is a trickle of moisture in the inner corners of her eyes. I pretend not to notice.

I love my watch. It’s the best gadget I’ve ever had.

When I was a boy, I had a mobile phone that was also my personal computer and my imaginary friend. I programmed the computer
to speak to me, to conduct entire conversations. “Brandon,” my phone would say, “let’s mitch off school today!”

I would tell stories about far-off lands to my phone and in return, my phone would tell me facts about the Universe. People
at school saw me talking into my phone – and they thought I had friends! Far from it. I was talking to my phone.

Well? What’s wrong with that?

I was brilliant at school, because I never forgot a fact. But during exams, I used to have spasms of rage because I wasn’t
allowed to have my mobile phone with me. I understand that they had to guard against cheating – but this wasn’t just my phone/camera/computer/TV/IPod
music player! This was my
best friend
!

My phone was called Xil. That’s pronounced, Kzil. And I imagined that Xil was only
disguised
as a phone and that Xil was, in reality, an alien, born on a planet at the far end of the Universe.

Xil (the alien) can of course travel through time and space. And he has been visiting the Earth system since it was a molten
ball of rock orbiting a newborn sun. Xil (or so I then believed, but I still
do
believe it) has witnessed at first hand most of the great events of Earth history. When Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes conquered
Europe, Xil was there, perched on the Khan’s shoulder. When Byzantium fell, Xil was there. When Hitler killed the Jews, Xil
floated above the death camps and watched. He was powerless to alter human history, and condemned to witness the very worst
of human nature. But he also saw the best. Xil has smeared his name in the wet paint of the Sistine Chapel ceiling; if you
examine the Adam and God fresco with a fine microscope, you will see the word “Xil” in tiny tiny letters above the touching
fingers.

Xil watched the first performance of
Hamlet
, floating in the wings as Will Shakespeare read the prompts to his largely drunken cast. Xil sat with Mozart as he died his
lonely death. Xil is a being of such incredible magic, and yet he still has the joy and zest of a child.

Xil was my dearest friend for three years, until I was thirteen, and then my parents found out and impounded my mobile phone.
For six months I was bereft, without computer, without phone, without
my best friend
. My parents put me through an intensive course of psychotherapy. Eventually, realising I was liable to be trapped for two
hours a week with this pompous imbecile for the rest of my childhood, I managed to persuade the psychiatrist that Xil was
just a harmless delusional fantasy. All went back to normal. I was introverted, withdrawn, bookish, but at least I didn’t
talk to my phone any more.

Then, when I was fifteen, my father bought me this watch. It is as accurate as an atomic clock. And it also functions as an
alarm, a stopwatch, a calculator, and can even be used as a DVD player if you unfold the perspex screen. But since I’ve had
my brain chip and phone and retinal implants, I no longer use the watch for computing and movies. I can just blink, and see
a movie projected on my retina; I can just tense my throat, and receive a mobile phone call from anywhere in the Universe
with access to a Quantum Beacon.

The value of my watch is its other great feature:
It keeps a record of the time and date on every inhabited planet in the Universe
.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Hope, for instance, one of the oldest colonies, is populated by colonists who travelled
for 100 subjective years, which is equivalent to 400 Earth-elapsed years, thanks to Einsteinian time-dilation effects. (Time,
of course, passes slower, the faster you move.) In the Hope Calendar, on the basis of actual elapsed time, it is now AD 3320.
In the Earth Calendar, it is AD 3380. (And, by the by, on Hope at the moment it is 22.22 hours, on Earth it is 07.20 hours,
and on board ship it is 11.15. But that has nothing to do with my main point, which is to do with years, not hours, so ignore
this digression.)

Most people don’t care about variations in time between planets (though I do!). This is because all colony planets use Earth
Time, regardless of what time distortions have occurred during the voyage. The minute the Quantum Beacon is turned on, the
colonists abandon their subjective calendar and revert to Earth Time, which therefore has the status of “Real Time”.

My magic watch, however, is programmed to tell me what time it is
subjectively
on every occupied planet. It is also programmed to give subjective ages. For me, it is the year 3090, and I am eighty-five
years old. But to the Earth Observer, it is AD 3380 and I am 200 years old. This is my official age.

But it is not my real age! It’s just not. I’ve never had those 200 years.

I’ve also devised a remote-control access technique that allows me to download information about other people’s elapsed ages.
I’ve done this for Lena, the Captain, all the other crew members of course, and I do it for everyone I ever encounter. So
I know their real ages, and their Earth Time ages.

I can play endlessly with this watch of mine, for it tells me the truth about time.
Everyone’s
time. I know what year it really is on Cambria, on Illyria, on every occupied planet. And I know how many years have elapsed
for every person I have ever met.

All this, and more, my watch can do. And I waste, I must admit, a huge amount of time playing around with these facts about
subjective and Earth-elapsed time. I don’t know why. It serves no useful function, except that it underlines to me how readily
human beings have swallowed the Earth’s intellectual dictatorship. We live by
their
time; we age ourselves by
their
years. But every planet has its own elapsed time. And any one who has ever travelled at near-light speed through space has
his or her own elapsed time. It makes us unique. We are fellow travellers in the space–time continuum; but nevertheless, we
each inhabit different times.

We are islands of time in a shifting-sands Universe.

How philosophical is
that
!

I miss Xil. He was my only real friend.

I know Xil’s time too. I programmed it into my watch a long time ago. And I factored in the fact that he makes frequent faster-than-light-speed
journeys to every part of the Universe. I know Xil’s age down to the nearest hour. I will never see him or speak to him again,
but I know his age. He is my imaginary friend. I have him in my watch.

People, by the way, tell me I’m weird.

I guess I am.

We are in orbit around a barren rock close to the system sun Kappa o332 b. It’s Fireworks Night.

We roll back the canopy of the bridge and sit in our suits surrounded by stars. A pair of Outlaw Traders have commandeered
two Corporation warships, and we watch in awe as they slowly glide past us towards the yellow Cepheid star. This star is a
pulsating variable, and the planet beneath us bears the scorch marks from the last time the star expanded to its fullest girth
and blazed down on the arid rocks. Now the Cepheid is in its waning cycle, slowly diminishing by about 10 per cent of its
previous diameter. This winking star hasn’t spawned any organic life forms on its orbiting planets. Nor are there any other
kinds of complex self-organising entities in this system. But the fourth planet from the star has a rich atmosphere of ammonia
and liquid hydrogen and a stable orbit. And it is blessed, too, with lakes of frozen oxygen. It is a perfect candidate for
terraforming, and it is the commencement of this process that we are about to watch.

I remember, fondly, the terraforming of Hope. We created legions of oxygenating robots to stamp across the surface of the
planet, swallowing carbon monoxide and spewing out rich clean air. We turned a frozen Hell into a tropical Paradise. It took
sixty years, in all, before settlers could walk the surface with an oxygen mask and a pressure suit.

The technology is, these days, much smarter. A micro-thin heat-absorbing lattice has been draped over the surface of the planet.
Nanobots have burrowed into the oxygen lakes. Every tiny element is network-connected so that each part functions as a thinking
cog in a machine of stunning complexity. And each is connected as part of an energy grid, powered by an energy transmitter
in orbit above the planet. This transmitter, in turn, will be powered by energy milked from the sun itself.

The warships sail closer and closer to the sun. At this distance, we cannot see the hull, even with our visors on full magnification.
But I imagine a sizzling and a burning as the metal Icaruses soar closer to the sun’s yellow-fresh burning rays.

Yellow-fresh makes no sense.

I imagine a sizzling and a burning as the metal Icaruses soar closer to the sun’s flickering incandescent rays.