Debatable Space (39 page)

For much of this period, Peter gave me a blow-by-blow account of the dangers he faced. But after a few years, Peter vidphoned
home less often. We exchanged vid messages at Christmas; and I was vaguely aware that he was becoming quite a powerful figure
in his own right. But I was lost in my own concerns.

And then, seventy years later, my subjective time, we met again in space, during my flight from Earth. Peter had a great reputation
by then. He was known as an administrator, an innovator, and a democrat. He was leader of the anti-colonial movement which
challenged and defied everything I had ever done in the course of my career. But when we met, he was so charming. He flattered
me, and told me that I had achieved great work. He never once quizzed me on my bizarre aberration, my murder of a dying old
woman.

He could have psychoanalysed me. It was a tempting thing to do. Who was I really killing, when I killed that old bitch Cavendish?

I was pretty sure, by that time, that I was profoundly mentally ill. But I found that, with the use of medication, and the
copious use of deception when in the company of psychiatrists and therapists, I could keep it in check. I was content in my
lunacy; in retrospect, I think that period of insanity was a necessary phase. It was a bridging period that allowed me to
purge demons, and settle into the next century of my life with a new soul and renewed energy.

So much has happened to me in my long long life. The details are still clear, but the overall story seems vague. I did
this,
then that, then many other things – but why? What was my purpose? What was my journey? Do I have an arc? The truth is: I
simply do not know.

But I did love my son. I did. Grant me that. Despite all his sins.

I loved him.

Rebus was an archive planet, which specialised in the collation and dissemination of data on every conceivable subject. We
were encyclopaedists on a grand scale. We savoured every decade in human history. We created video time lines which allowed
one to sensually experience life in any given period of fully recorded history. You could sit in a virtual-reality helmet
and hear the sounds, smell the smell, see the sights of whatever date or place one chose. With a combination of cctv camera
footage, smell data banks, live music archives, police camera footage and the data from Mass Observation video diaries, we
could recreate the experience of being anywhere on the planet Earth in any day in any year for the past few centuries.

You could watch Death Star live in concert at the Hammersmith Dance Emporium, even though the band themselves died of electroshock
overdoses long ago. You could see Karel Mzniv conduct the New York Philharmonic in a concert performance of
La Bohème
, with Anne Mitchell making her first public performance. You could be one of the crowd in the Trafalgar Square riots of 2222,
fired upon by police, whilst also being pelted with acid bombs by anarchist infiltrators.

You could experience the Rage Riots of 2032, which tore apart the city of San Francisco; and you could watch the astonishing
end of Karl Mistry, the leader of the cult New Millennium group. You could watch as a mushroom cloud floated above the city
of San Francisco, and feel what it was like to fear that the world is about to end.

With our newer virtual chip technology, you could have sex with the most beautiful men or women in the world. You could fornicate
with whores from the planet Eros, five at a time; or build your own perfect lover from scratch.

We also had comprehensive pre-historical archives, with raw film and television footage from the twentieth century, and books,
magazines and archaeological records from all the preceding centuries. We had a DVD-Rom of life in Ancient Egypt which combined
archaeology with sensory reproduction and would allow you to feel what it was like to be a Pharaoh, or participate in every
gory stage of the process of mummification.

This was, indeed, Nerd Heaven.

Rebus was led by a collegium of professors with radical views about the power of information. And our wealth came from selling
our data and archive techniques. On a regular basis we were visited by merchant ships bearing untold glorious gifts of a kind
that we found it difficult to reproduce in our Space Factory – honey, perfumes, vintage wine, carpets, works of modern and
ancient art. And in payment for these, we sold facts.

I was welcomed into the community of scholars on Rebus, because of my academic background, and because of the iconic value
of my
You Are God
books. But I quickly learned that I had a clearly defined place and position in this hierarchy of scholars. It wasn’t an
especially low place and position but it
was
rigidly insisted upon. Decisions filtered down from above; bright, vivid, positively expressed suggestions were passed upwards
to the senior academics via the Bulletin Board. In fairness these suggestions were always carefully considered and often heeded.
But we were
ruled
, there was no doubt about that.

I found it soul-destroying. I was trapped into being one person, one role, one place in the hierarchy. And though the work
was challenging, I felt I was going back in time. I was becoming the person I used to be, the young Lena. Shy, bookish, intense,
solitary, lonely. All my colleagues had a dry, ironic sense of humour. None of them feared me. None of them adored me. None
of them, frankly, had much respect for my tenure as the most important politician in the Universe.

I did manage an intermittent love affair with the head of the archive, Professor McIvor. He had silky old skin, weary with
lines, and a bassoon voice that he could modulate at will. I flattered him artfully and invited him to share in my dreams
of greatness. I argued that we should, together, create a Universal Archive that offered a commentary on all human knowledge
from Plato to Schwegger. He humoured me for a while.

But nothing ever came of my plan. Because McIvor’s real passion was for the sorting of existing facts. He could arrange knowledge
alphabetically, thematically, and chronologically. But he had no new thoughts to offer on anything. His lovemaking too was
confident, and based on tried and trusted techniques for stimulation. But he never lost himself in the heat of passion. He
never just
was
.

I felt that every second I spent with McIvor sucked an ounce of passion out of my spirit. He was rarely boring, always courteous;
but somehow he managed to create an aura of order and calm that enveloped all those in his presence, like a pillow over one’s
mouth.

Most evenings when we were together we sat and read, or played computer games. The physical proximity satisfied a primal need
in my body to be near the sound of another person’s breath, to share in the beating of their heart. But to all intents and
purposes, we might as well have spent our evenings alone. We dined, and as we dined we discussed. We made love, and as we
did so, and after we had done so, we made pleasant and flattering comments to each other. Then we retreated into our own private
mental islands until it was time to sleep.

My dreams at that time were, by the way, extraordinary. I dreamed of worlds in which flesh was liquid and oozed and slithered
along earth that was ribbed and ridged and tore at one’s body delectably. I dreamed of having eyes like stalks that turned
and burrowed into my ear passages until they entered my brain and saw my thoughts unfolding like a movie. I dreamed of swimming
in my own womb, suckling at my own breast, I dreamed of shrinking and dissolving until I became a drop of spittle on my baby’s
mouth.

In one dream Tom was alive. We were having supper in a boozer on the Old Kent Road, he was wearing his leather bomber jacket,
and all around us were the hanged corpses of the villains we had put away. Occasionally, a waiter would come and serve us
a plate of still wriggling flesh from some blagger’s body. Professor McIvor was playing the piano, but he had no flesh on
his hands, so we could hear the clicking of his finger bones on the ivory keys.

Every dream ended with me sitting in a chair and being strapped in for my behaviour modification therapy – the brain-frying.
At this point, the dream would end, because I had schooled myself to stab my own leg with a pin strapped to my finger whenever
the horror of the brain-frying threatened to return. This, I suppose, is why my dreams were so vivid. Because every time I
started to re-enter the nightmare universe of the brain-frying, I stabbed myself, and woke, and remembered my dreams, then
fell asleep, and dreamed anew.

Each morning my sheet was dank with blood, and my legs were spotted and sore. But I kept the nightmares at bay.

Rebus was, frankly, a drab planet. The gravity was light, and the settlers had populated it with birds, but no land animals.
The skies were often thick with eagles and sparrows and vultures and parrots and genetically modified mock-orcs. But the land
was flat and featureless and uniformly planted with crops and medicine-synthesising oak and elm trees.

It did, have, however, an amazing air vortex: a permanent typhoon like Jupiter’s Red Spot which stalked the planet like a
serial killer. Underground shelters were placed in every populated area for humans to hide from these savage tornados. When
the vortex struck, all the birds in the sky hurtled downwards and huddled on the earth in terror and despair. The winds would
sweep across the land like scythes of air, ripping up trees and hills and occasionally even denting the supposedly invulnerable
human living quarters.

Then the winds would pass, and we would return to the surface. And for weeks afterwards, dust would fall as rain, until equilibrium
was once again reached.

But for the most part, the climate was temperate, and so were the inhabitants. And I spent almost all of my time in the library.
I found I was even cultivating a cool, measured, slow way of talking, my subliminal response to living on what was in effect
a planet-wide public library.

TV was my salvation. When McIvor wasn’t around, I voraciously devoured the Earth soaps and the new drama series from the Second
Wave colonies. I could easily watch six hours of television in a single sitting – movies, comedies, reality shows, art installations,
I watched or experienced them all, and loved them all equally, and undiscriminatingly.

I watched the news avidly too. I was aware of every detail of the war that had broken out between two non-human species in
the Ø Sector, the Heebie Jeebies and the Sparklers. The Heebie Jeebies are oxygen-breathing carrion-eating fast-moving little
skulky things. The Sparklers, by contrast, are carbon monoxide-breathing flying predators which have an electromagnetic inner
body that allows them to bioluminesce, and expel lightning bolts. Both species coexisted on different planets in the same
planetary system, but knew nothing of each other’s existence until a spacecraft full of Lopers attempted to colonise the system.
The sun, a Cepheid variable, proved to be too high in ultraviolet, and too unpredictable, so the Lopers relaunched and tried
elsewhere. But as a consequence of their contact with the two alien sentients, an idea-seed was planted which allowed both
species to independently develop space travel.

Earth was of course monitoring the possibility that either or both of these species could be a threat to human colonies. But
in the first instance, the Heebie Jeebies devoted all their energy to building a space cannon that could pot holes into the
Sparklers’ home planet (which the Lopers called, cringe-makingly, Tinkerbell). And the Sparklers, for their part, were honing
their bioengineering skills, with the aim of building a multi-organism Sparkler gestalt entity that could launch a massive
kamikaze assault on the Heebie Jeebies’ home world, HJ.

It was a preposterous quarrel to the death between a right hand and a left hand; and the news vids covered it exhaustively.
I even knew the names of the Heebie Jeebie leaders and generals; and could just about recognise the various members of the
Sparkler high command even though, frankly, Sparklers all look pretty much alike.

But soon after that, Earth was invaded; and my attention switched to
that
long-running reality show instead. (The Sparklers won, by the way, and are now a much-feared space-travelling species. And
the Heebie Jeebies de-evolved into non-sentience, a surprisingly common xenobiological event.)

But, reverting to the invasion of Earth: What a marvel it was! Rarely have I been so thrilled by a news event. So much carnage,
so much bloodshed. And to think, my own son did all that!

My colleagues were equally enraptured at the amazing events happening all those light years away, which we were able to watch
happening contemporaneously thanks to the Quantum Beacon signals
.
We even found a way to capitalise upon the invasion, by creating brilliantly edited DVD-Roms of the event which we disseminated
to every planet in human space (about two hundred of them at that time) via Quantum Beacon. And we marvelled at the ease with
which a single mercenary army could capture the home civilisation of the human race.

My son was like a shark in a swimming pool. His fleet was trained in space combat. And his soldiers were skilled and battle-hardened
after years of fighting dangerous aliens, and were armed with weapons which were custom-built to cause devastation and wreak
genocide.

A battle took place which dwarfed the greatest wars of history. Fleets of warships burned, asteroids were used as battering
rams, and laser beams sliced up space stations into glittering shards.

Then Peter’s ships rained fire on the planet Earth, from their position of space superiority. Napalm and acid derivatives
were housed in rocket shells which shattered in the upper atmosphere and left the skies denuded of birds for days. Forests
boiled and bubbled, and the oceans were coated with an eerie slime that was fatal to the touch.

Fusion bombs were exploded on the Moon, sending chunks of rock flying into space which were then steered back into the Earth’s
atmosphere. As a consequence, vast exploding chunks of Moon landed on North America and Australia. The damage was relatively
minor, but the psychological terror of it was intense.