Debatable Space (35 page)

Keep the hand on the plough

Hold on.

When I get to heaven gonna sing and shout

Be no body there gonna put me out.

Keep your hand on the plough

Hold on.

Oh Lord

Oh Lord

Oh yeah.

Keep your hand on the plough

Oh Lord

Oh yeah

Oh Lord

Oh yeah

Keep your hand on the plough

And hooooooooooooooooooooold on.”

“What’s wrong?” I ask him gently.

The wake is over. All are sober. I am in the bar with a deeply melancholic Captain Flanagan. My previous mood of perverse
elation has melted away. I am now bathed in Flanagan’s despair.

“So many have died,” he says softly.

“You knew that would happen.”

“For no reason.” He looks at me blankly. “We can’t succeed.”

“We’ve destroyed a Beacon before.”

“And now they know our methods. They’ll be prepared. It’s a suicide mission.”

“Then so be it.”

“You’re prepared to die?”

“Hell no. But I’m prepared to let
you
all die.”

“Thank you Lena.” He smiles a wry smile.

He cannot find a way around the time-lag factor.

“It’s the time-lag factor, isn’t it?” I say to him.

He is silent for a long long time.

“I knew you’d figure it out eventually,” he tells me.

I pour myself a drink. We sip. We bathe in our own misery.

Every time the pirates invent a new military strategy, it may be ten or twenty years in subjective time before they can travel
far enough to implement it again. But in Earth Time, those twenty years are in fact forty or even fifty years.

“Time dilation is against you. And the vast distances of space. By the time you fly from one star to another, they’ve had
half a century or more to plot and counteract your next move.”

“You got it.”

Every battle is recorded on every ship’s cctv and transmitted instantaneously back to Earth via the Beacons. Flanagan used
an antimatter bomb once; the second time, the Earth DRs had built a net to catch it. He used the child Jamie’s computer skills
to capture the Doppelganger minds on Cambria; but by now, every Doppelganger in the Universe will be Earth-Mind Read Only.

“You can’t use the Big Bang Bomb again,” I say. “They’ll have a way around it.”

“I wouldn’t risk it anyway. This is our Universe. What the hell are we doing with it?”

“Fair point. So, what’s your plan to destroy the Beacon on Kornbluth?”

Flanagan takes his glass and throws it at the wall. It doesn’t break, it bounces. The effect is laughable, rather than dramatic.
Flanagan looks duly chagrined.

“We try, we fail. That’s the plan,” he tells me.

“
That’s
a plan?”

“That’s Plan A,” Flanagan tells me. There’s a shade more confidence in his voice now. But I can tell he is still beset by
terrible doubts.

“So what’s Plan B?”

He stares at me.

The air in front of him seems to shimmer and flicker. For a moment, I assume I have a migraine of a kind I haven’t endured
for centuries. Then I wonder if Alby the flame beast is back inside the ship.

Then the air solidifies into a black floating particle. More particles swarm, to form a shape, a letter. The letter grows.
It is the shape and size of a standing human being without limbs. It is an
I
. A free-floating
I
which is almost as big as I am. Then the
I
flickers and changes, and I realise what is happening. The air is talking to me.
The air is talking to me.

And it says:

I stare at Flanagan.

“You’re insane,” I tell him.

“I have no choice,” he says flatly.

The letters shimmer a little more and turn into a humanoid shape. The humanoid black shape sits in an armchair, and crosses
one humanoid leg over another.

The humanoid shape is, I know, made of billions upon billions of microscopic entities, swarming under the control of a focused
group intelligence. It is an alien being that is alien beyond imagining.

Flanagan has forged a treaty with the Bugs.

I am in the same room as
Bugs.

Every pore and follicle on my body shivers in horror. I feel as if my skin is being ripped off. I cannot breathe.

The Bug entity shimmers and changes its shape again. It is, I realise, trying to find a succinct way of indicating friendly
and non-aggressive intentions towards me. But the shape it chooses is surreally inappropriate. It heightens my panic attack.
It makes me almost insane, torn between a desire to hoot with laughter and an overwhelming urge to defecate then die.

This is what the Bug becomes:

“Oh no,” I say. “Oh merciful heaven, no!”

EXCERPT FROM THE THOUGHT DIARY OF LENA SMITH, 2004–

I have been drunk, drugged, lazy, stupefied, and just plain idle. Like Samuel Beckett, I once spent a year in bed. Like Winnie
the Pooh, I have gorged myself until my stomach has bulged. I have also, aimlessly, foolishly, doodled away entire months
doing nothing apart from tidying and making a mess and tidying it up again, a little differently.

Most galling of all, I spent two hard desperate years writing a novel into which I poured my heart and life and soul and entire
family history, and which I showed to people whose opinion I respect. They all
hated it
. In fact, I lost some of my dearest friends because of what they considered to be the dreary drabness of my writing.

So I turned, again, to drink and drugs. I spent ten years as an addict and had to have a liver transplant. I snorted coke
and bought a new septum. I mainlined and OD’d and mixed crack with LSD and ecstasy and almost died, several times.

But I knew what I was doing. I was pacing myself. I knew I had a long life ahead of me. I wanted to be sure I left no experience
unexplored.

For in my time, I have sky-dived. I have scuba-dived. I have had gonorrhoea. I have been a high-class prostitute. I have been
a professional gambler. I have had sex with a movie star. I have read
A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
in the original French. I have listened to and appreciated every single symphony and major work by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach,
Chopin and Sidelman. I have spent a year in China. I have spent a year in India. I have spent numerous years in Italy. I have
been a step-mum to squawling babies and angry toddlers. I have been unfaithful. I have been faithful. I have committed murder.
I have been to jail. I have been brain-fried for my crimes, and I have survived with my rage intact. I have escaped from prison.
I have white-water-rafted and I have been a fashion model. I have been a good mother. I have been a bad mother. I have been
burgled. I have been flayed, twice. I have been a thief. I have written, as I said, a deeply underrated novel. I have composed
several symphonies. I have learned a dozen languages. I have been a concert pianist. I have written best-selling academic
books. I have had friends who are transsexuals and homosexuals and celibates. I have loved, and been loved, and I have had
my heart broken more times than I can count.

And for almost one hundred years, I was the leader of humankind.

That last part sounds unlikely, I know. Even now, it seems like a dream that such a thing could have happened. I have lost
touch with the person I was then: focused, political, manipulative. I networked ceaselessly, eighteen hours a day and more,
in person, on the phone, and by email. I wrote game plans of objectives to be achieved and day by day, month by month, I ticked
off my successes. And by this means – carefully, ruthlessly, cynically – I achieved ultimate power.

It came about, in the first instance, because of my experience with Future Dreams. After experiencing the very worst of human
corruption and injustice, I was left with a burning urge to change things in the world. Admittedly, it was decades before
I did anything about that urge, and I drank a lot of margaritas and screwed a lot of men in this delightful interim. But the
seed had been sowed. And it finally germinated.

I was unemployed, a recovering alcohol and drug addict, and I had just been betrayed by a philandering man. So I called up
all my contacts in the hope of getting academic work – and it was a complete washout. So instead, randomly, I applied for
a job with the UN. And I became a junior manager of a UN-funded project in Portugal. This was, of course, after the Worst
Hundred Years, when the collapse of the ecosystem had caused astonishing devastation and loss of life across the planet. For
much of the time when I had been drinking and taking drugs and having sex, Florida and Spain were flooded, Central America
was devastated by malarial infection, and much of Europe had turned to desert. However, huge progress had been made in restoring
the Earth’s damaged biosphere. And the UN was pioneering the recovery process.

So for sixteen years I laboured with the other UN workers to heal the land, cure the sick and reseed the empty oceans. It
was an extraordinary, exhilarating time; we all knew that we were doing something genuinely good. And in this period I had
a glorious sense of what it was to have the nationality Human. We were all bonded together, in a joint enterprise; and day
by painful day, our world was saved.

But once the principles of ecostability were more fully understood, the pace of progress increased. Vast floating carbon traps
cleared the air of man-made emissions. Plankton swarmed in the oceans. Cod replenished and filled the seas. Frozen helium
chilled the poles, and the ice froze again. The equilibrium was restored; the Earth started to heal itself.

And, as the years went by, I felt ambition crept up on me. Once the crisis was over, most of my work became repetitive and
clerical and mundane. I knew I had the experience to do more than I was doing – and I yearned to be the leader and not the
led.

So I applied myself to that task, with all the focus of a heat-seeking missile. For the first time in my life, I made it my
objective to climb the greasy pole. And I applied all my talent and knowledge to that single, soulless task.

I undermined my rivals with psychological gambits. I worked on my skills and my contacts and I ceaselessly, endlessly, flattered
those who might be of use to me. I worked long hours, I flirted with my Portuguese boss and even had sex with him a few times.
I became a socialite and a gossip. I was promoted from deputy manager to manager; I was transferred to a new project in France;
and from there I became a member of the UN hierarchy, on a roaming global brief.

And within seven years, I became Deputy Vice President of the UN during a time of great political upheaval.

In my first year in this new job, I wrote a definitive paper on the new world order, in which I tried to analyse with scientific
precision the problems facing mankind – and also the solutions. Energy, I concluded, was the answer to most of these problems.
Others agreed. And a year later, a superconductive energy pump was invented which, when placed in close orbit, could convert
heat from the sun’s rays into invisible beams of energy that provided near-limitless power to fuel our consumerist technological
society.

Four years later, I resigned from the UN and became a British Member of Parliament. I had a constituency in Greenock, and
I gave my maiden speech in the house on the subject of urban regeneration. I wrote a column for a newspaper, I campaigned
on behalf of consumers and factory workers. I appeared on comic quiz shows and became a cult figure.

And after thirteen years of this relentless hard work, I became Leader of the Opposition.

Five years after that I became Prime Minister. I had my photograph on the staircase next to Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown,
Matthews, Thomas, Jones, Durbridge, Smith, Andrews, and McQuist. I dined with the Queen, I opened factories, I traded insults
at Question Time, I feuded with my Chancellor, I put a brave face on economic adversity, I pandered to Middle Britain, I gave
approval for a vast underground motor and railway to join Glasgow, Cardiff and London. I did, well, really, all sorts of things.
I have a list somewhere. I should be prouder, I suppose, though after this long distance of time, all I can remember is that
most British MPs drink formidable quantities of Scotch whisky and pride themselves on being raconteurs, even when they aren’t.

And then, after four years in office, I shocked everyone by resigning in order to launch my campaign to be appointed Ambassador
for Humanity. This was a new job created as a token sop to liberals who urged an end to nationalism and factionalism. But
in my view, it was a post which offered wider horizons and greater challenges than being the cat’s-paw of the Liberal Democratic
Socialist Alliance Party.

I got the job as Ambassador. And I felt like a hawk with a healed wing. After all the petty backbiting of British politics,
finally it felt as if I had a
proper
job. I soared and pounced and soared some more. And after a while, I changed my job title to “President of Humanity”.

Once self-appointed in this way, I went on to run the Council for the Improvement of Humankind. And I became, through force
of personality, and sheer weight of groundbreaking ideas, the de facto leader of the human race.

Talk about goal-oriented! All it takes is drive, stamina, shamelessness, a shit-caked tongue, and a modicum of ability.

As the first-ever President of Humanity, I had a new office built for me in Brussels, with 3D wallpaper that could be transformed
at the clap of two hands into a map of the solar system. I explored the limits of my new expense account. I learned how to
power-dress.

And I studied the art of how to rule the human race. I read every book I could think of – from Machiavelli to Plato. And I
adapted the principles of political governance by referring it back to my People Matrix based on the emergence equations I’d
created so many years before. Using those equations instead of blind instinct, I forged a new way forward. I devised a computer
program that would allow me to map and extrapolate political changes before they happened. I was able, therefore, to foresee
and prevent revolutions in France and Louisiana. I forged a pact between China and Japan. I defanged the neo-cons of America,
already discredited after their failed policies of the early twenty-first century. And I created an elite corps of aides who
acted on my behalf with all the ruthlessness of Tom and Tosh and Michiyo and the others in the old days of the World Police.
I never killed my political enemies; I merely discredited, undermined and humiliated them.