Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  I do this for eighteen hours. And slowly, hour by hour, I feel the stiffness leave my joints. I was built for this, bioengineered to run for twelve hours a day without any need for food and drink. My home planet of Pohl was an airless wilderness, but we man-beasts were modified so we could inhabit almost any of its terrains. We had cities in the valleys, we built temples in the mountains. We were a low-culture, high-technology mining planet, but as far as we Lopers were concerned, we were the lords of all we surveyed.

  I miss those days. I had lovers in plenty, I savoured the cold crisp airless Pohlian nights, the blistering heat of the summers, the icy cold of our winters. I worked all day, and slept all night. We weren’t trained to read, or watch tv or dv. We had no interests beyond being alive. Some called us slaves, but no slave has ever been so free.

  I run. I run. I run. I run. I run. I run.

  I runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun!

  And when I run I forget all my doubts and regrets. All my hesitations and pauses. All my uncertainties. All my fears. I run, I am the run, the run is me.

  I am complete.

  Lena

  “How was it?” Flanagan asks me, once we are back in the pirate ship.

  “You’re ingratiating yourself, please, it’s unseemly.”

  “I was in fact trying to be nice,” he says, frostily.

  “You are seduced, awestruck, pitiful,” I tell him, with relish. “I humour you but, in truth, I despise you.”

  “Look, just because you’re my prisoner and under threat of death, humiliation and torture, there’s no need for you to be uncivil.”

  “Cuntsucker.”

  “Ooh. I’d almost forgotten – you’re a poet.”

  “I am, yes, a poet.”

  “ Reminiscences of Exquisite Moments. A slim little volume, it sold in its several.”

  “It’s an acclaimed piece.”

  “It was excoriated.”

  “Those reviews were later rescinded, once I published under my… family name.”

  “Ah, so you do get good reviews, on pain of death? That’s a start.”

  “You are a philistine and an imbecile.”

  “I’ve had eleven symphonies and fourteen rock operas performed, I am considered to be one of the most accomplished popular composers of my era.”

  “And a braggart also.”

  “Wizened old shrew.”

  “I am, if you observe, far from wizened.”

  “I see your soul. Your soul is wizened.”

  “There is no such thing as a… wizened soul.”

  “Bleak. Barren. A desert. That’s your soul. I can feel it from here.”

  “Souls cannot be felt.”

  He smiles at that. It’s a charming smile. I hate him so. And yet… It’s true what he said about his music. He…

  “Shut up.”

  Chagrined, I realise I have spoken my inner thoughts aloud.

  “I wasn’t speaking!” Flanagan says, indignantly.

  I give him a forbidding look. I allow my charisma to wrap itself around him, like silken chains. Then I say, artfully: “It’s not too late, Captain, for you to achieve redemption and forgiveness. Hand me back, forget the ransom, commit ritual suicide, and you will die without a stain on your name.”

  “Or – not.”

  I glare. Flanagan sighs, ostentatiously. “Will you join me for dinner tonight?”

  “I will face that hardship with equanimity and fortitude, yes.”

  “We dine at eight. Will you need access to your wardrobe?”

  “My body armour will suffice.”

  “It looks a little… military.”

  I smile. I can drive him wild with desire. I may be his prisoner, but it is I who have power over him. I tap my armoured breast with a finger, and hear the hollow thud.

  “I like it that way,” I tell him.

  Lena

  “Camera, lights, action,” says Jamie. I am old enough to have some notion what he is on about.

  Harry, the freak, operates the vidcam. He has a wild look about him. Alliea is standing by too, frowning. Maybe she is jealous, because it’s clear to her the Captain is becoming infatuated with me?

  Flanagan has explained that they will transmit my message via video email to the Cheo. The date of the message will reassure him I am still alive. I have been given a script to read.

  “Okay?” says Flanagan. He continues to be nice to me. But that of course is because he needs me to cooperate. Which I will, but on my terms. I shoot him a fierce look, to boil his blood, and keep him hoping for the unattainable. That’s how I like my men: desperate.

  I glance at the message he has drafted: “I am being well cared for. But I am in fear of my life. Please help me. Give these people what they want. It is only money. My dearest son, I love you.” It is cringemaking stuff, without a scintilla of wit or rhetorical energy.

  I look into the vidcam. Jamie nods. “Let me die rather than deal with these terrorist scum,” I say calmly. “Do not pay their ransom, do not…”

  And Harry slashes with his claws. My face rips open, blood spurts from my eye socket, I fight back furiously, but he has the strength of ten. I lose myself in a maelstrom of hitting and biting and clawing. ..

  He’s eating me… the fucking monster is eating me alive…!

  Flanagan pulls the beast off. The vidcam is still rolling. I stare into the camera. I can feel that one of my eyes is out of its socket, it is oozy and cold upon my cheek. I am frozen with fear.

  “That went well,” says Flanagan.

  I am hysterical.

  Slowly I force myself to calm. My breaths become deep, composed. I figure out my error.

  My error is this: they don’t need my cooperation at all. They just need to show me humiliated, in pain. So as to force the Cheo to abandon his principles and pay the ransom. This was the message they had always planned. The script was a bluff. I fell for it.

  “Get me to the sick bay,” I say, clinging to a semblance of dignity.

  In the hold of their ship is my own space yacht. I am taken to the sick bay there, which is equipped with state-of-the-art organic repair technology. The skin cells on my face are boosted. My ripped eye is replaced with a clone from my eye bank. My scars are healed. I am given an injection to guard against the risk of fever from the man-beast’s savage bites.

  Within a month I will be as good as new. It’s a process I am familiar with.

  Flanagan comes to apologise. “I want us to be friends,” he says mildly.

  I fix him with my firmest one-eyed stare. And I say: “YOU FUCKING BASTARD!”

  Lena

  You should have warned me. I didn’t know.

  I thought he was my friend! No, no Lena. You never thought that. You were just biding your time, lulling him into a false sense of security. You were playing a game with him, guilefully attempting to. ..

  We went flying together! We flew! He thought he could win your trust and your confidence. He was wrong.

  I trusted him. You never trusted him.

  I… No… of course I didn’t. Never. Of course! Never. He’s just a betraying bastard.

  Yes he is! What a rank betraying bastard that betraying bastard is! Indeed.

  He pretends to be my friend. But he’s not! No, he’s not. He is merely a pathetic, evil, betraying bastard.

  And yet, he took me flying. And yet, he cooked for me. And yet, he looks at me, in that way, so kind, and… and… sweetly sometimes. And yet, he… desires me. I feel it. And yet… None of this matters, because he is a betraying bastard.

  Yes, you’re right. Of course. I know it. Of course he is! I mean, how could he treat me the way he did? Why did he let me be mauled and beaten? Well, since you pose the question: You did in fact pledge to read the ransom demand, without amendments. And instead, you…

  You dog, you cur, don’t defend that mf c! Indeed, no.

  He’s nothing but an mf cs f’ing c’ing piece of shit! And, also, let us not forget, a betraying bastard.

>   Yes!

  Flanagan

  It all goes according to plan. The Cheo sends his response; he will not pay the ransom. But he offers us a deal. Less money, fewer ships, no safe haven. It’s a good deal, we accept.

  Alliea and Alby become enmeshed in the technicalities of the drop-off. We will leave Lena in neutral space, on a space station owned by the flame beasts. We will wire her up to a remote-controlled bomb and hurry to a nearby system to retrieve the money and the ships. Once we are satisfied, we will neutralise the bomb.

  If the Cheo double-crosses us, we can kill Lena. If we double-cross the Cheo, the flame beasts are pledged to a blood feud against us. Since they can freely enter Debatable Space, we would therefore be doomed. The Cheo knows this. Legal agreements have also been drafted to secure the honour and integrity of the ransom deal. Everything is going according to plan.

  The first stage of our dangerous game is complete.

  Book 2

  Excerpts from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004

  I have had three best friends in the course of my whole life.

  I wish it had been more.

  My first best friend was Carla. When I was seven years old we played together every day. We made up worlds and stories. I was Ebony, an African princess. She was Melissa, the Queen of our Queendom, the fabulous country of Alchemy.

  Carla had beautiful blonde hair, a button nose, and a great stare. But I had all the ideas. I made up the stories, I made up the maps. I created costumes for us both. I painted my bedroom in black and gold to make it a suitable Queen’s Throne Room for Queen Melissa. And whatever I said or did, whatever brave or original idea I came up with, Carla always nodded, very seriously, and stared her formidable stare. So I would know that every idea I had was actually her idea, every thought was her thought. I was her willing slave.

  When we were ten, we decided to hold a joint birthday party together, even though my birthday was in February and hers was in October. We wrote all the invitations, we used our pocket money to buy balloons, we made each other presents out of papier mache and brightly coloured paper. We made fairy cakes with our mums and stole as many as we could. Then, on the day of our party, we both locked ourselves in my room and played with our imaginary guests and handed out imaginary party bags. We gorged ourselves on cake, and that night I was sick in bed. When Carla’s parents came to take her home, she had a wicked little smile on her face. They knew she’d been up to something, but they never knew that she’d just had her “official” birthday.

  We rarely quarrelled, and she only once really really lost her temper with me. It happened when I scored more baskets than her in basketball at playtime. I made two mistakes. First, I scored more baskets. And then I laughed, triumphantly. So Carla went very very quiet and didn’t speak to me for the whole rest of the week. We still met, and played together, but instead of speaking she would give messages to her blonde Bratz and ask the poor doll to pass them on. By the Friday of that week, I was devastated and I gave her all my pocket money to buy back her friendship.

  Carla never bullied me though. She never bossed me either. She just always got her way. It was easier, we both always knew what to do – namely, what she wanted. For otherwise, I feared, in my state of youthful existential panic, I might have had to make my own mind up about things…

  Then Carla’s parents decided to move abroad. Her dad had a job in Germany working on bridges or something. Her mum was part-German anyway. When Carla told me this news, I burst into tears. I begged her to stay, to join our family instead. Carla just stared at me, calmly, with that piecing stare. And she didn’t smile. Not once. Eventually, she calmly said, “Don’t make a fuss, Lena.” And I cried even more, for ages.

  I explained it all to my mother, how I wouldn’t be able to cope without Carla and how life was no longer worth living. But my mum just said, “Never mind, you’ll soon make new friends,” and I cried my eyes out again.

  I cried again on the day that Carla left. I was eleven by then. My mother was genuinely frightened at my behaviour. I was not just upset, I was hysterical.

  I met Carla years later at a friend’s dinner party, when we were both in our early thirties. She didn’t actually remember me. She was still very nice, but by that time the stare had worn off and she was a frazzled but cheerful mother of four. And she didn’t remember Princess Ebony, or the Queendom of Alchemy, or me.

  Some best friend.

  My second best friend was also a woman. She was called Helen Clarke, and we both studied History at university in Edinburgh. Neither of us was Scottish, neither of us was quite sure why we’d chosen a university so far away from our families and friends back home. But it was a magical time. The city was dominated by a castle on a massive rock, looming and glowering over the Georgian and Victorian buildings of the city. We studied the history of the town, we read all the books which were set there like Jekyll and Hyde and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the novels of Ian Rankin. And whenever I read a book, Helen read it next; our fingerprints jointly stained score upon score of battered paperback novels.

  I loved History. I read voraciously. I rarely forgot a fact. But Helen was the scholar. She came covered in clouds of glory – we all knew she had been offered a place at Oxford and had turned it down. Her mother was a Professor of History at Cambridge University, her father was a senior civil servant. I stayed with them once. All the curtains were chintz, there were knick-knacks in every room, not a trace of dust, and everyone spoke ironically and at length. I adored them. I compared them with my own suburban parents, with their boisterous enthusiasms and their silly holiday games. And I yearned for my own family to die painlessly and heroically in a freak asteroid strike. Then I could adopt Helen’s parents as my own de facto family.

  At Finals, Helen got a decent 2.1. I received a glittering First, and was marked down by my tutors for great things to come. Strangely, after that, I saw very little of Helen. She moved back home without saying goodbye, and never turned up for any of our college reunions. Ten years later I was still sending her long, detailed letters (yes, I wrote letters, not emails in those days!) every Christmas, describing lyrically and entertainingly my intellectual trials and tribulations, my boyfriend troubles, my thoughts on life and everything. Helen never wrote back, we never met. We spoke on the phone a few times, but somehow an actual meeting always proved problematic.

  Eventually I got the message. I stopped writing the letters, making the phone calls. Now, I can hardly remember Helen’s face. But I remember that sense of specialness. We were the terrible two. Yin and Yang, left and right, a bonded pair.

  And then – we weren’t. It was over, and we were strangers.

  I still get distressed over it, to be honest. Why wasn’t Helen more needy? How could she cut me out of her life so easily?

  Of course, I moved on. I made new friends. Except they weren’t really friends. Not real friends. That intensity was missing.

  It’s not that I was a social cripple. I was a reasonably good raconteuse. I could banter, amusingly. I was amiable, easygoing, sweetlooking. People took to me, by and large.

  But I always found it hard to make best friends. Something in me resists it. Perhaps it’s because I felt let down – first by Clara, then by Helen. Or perhaps I am too independent, I find it too hard to love.

  My third best friend was Tom, who was also my lover. Tom was different. He was special. He was the only friend who never, ever let me down.

  Although, I suppose, when I think about it – I’m the one who let him down.

  Freckles were my curse.

  As a child, the freckles made me cute. People always praised them. “Look at those lovely freckles.” “Isn’t she cute?” I took it as praise. And maybe it was meant as such. But in retrospect… I cringe. “ Cute? ”

  Freckles were my curse!

  Does that sound extreme? Maybe. And, okay, as a teenager, admittedly, the freckles were a neutral thing. I was more embarrassed by my thick square glasses, in
an age where contacts for teenagers were the norm. My eyes were particularly poor, combining astigmatism with myopia, and I was considered a bad candidate for lenses. So I had glasses, and freckles, and pale skin that never tanned but only ever burned.

  One summer when I was fourteen I played on the beach with my family and that night the skin peeled off my forehead and legs and face. My mother warned me to be more careful in the sun. So I wept, and the tears burned my raw peeling cheeks.

  When I was sixteen, I was so badly sunburned I had to spend two days in bed. My mother said, casually, “Well, I did warn you.”

  I read an article in a magazine. And I learned: people with freckles don’t tan properly. So that was why. The freckles were to blame.

  It’s not as if I was careless or stupid in my dealings with the sun. I didn’t seek out blazing sunshine with all its ensuing pain. I just found it hard to always wear a hat, sit in the shade, avoid hot days, never wear skirts in summer. I longed to be a vampire, because at least then my sun affliction would be a symptom of my dangerous and evil nature. Instead, I was merely pale. And, did I mention this? Freckled. Who ever heard of a vampire with freckles?

  A fact: a freckled person can never, ever, be cool.

  What’s worse, the freckles grew and multiplied in sunlight. Some summers, I was covered in blotches, like some alien in a Star Trek episode. And so as I hit twenty, the pale spectacled mutant-freckle look was becoming the bane of my life. It defined me, it limited me. And it controlled how others perceived me: I was never smart, tough-cookie, wisecracking brain-like-a-razorblade Lena. I was just poor old freckly Lena.

  I came to hate suntans. I hated the vulgar display of long-legged beauties with their bronzed skins, and men with six-pack torsos who wear no T-shirts in the blazing sun.

  Florence was my favourite city, I used to go there every year when I was in my twenties. But it was spoiled for me by all the bare skin on shameless display. The city was swarming with gorgeous, smiling, happy, slim, sexy, tanned young people, in their revealing shorts and skimpy T-shirts. They were everywhere, and I loathed them.