Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  I left Earth that night on a colony ship. Twenty years later, subjective time, I was reunited with my son, who was on a ship heading for Earth.

  He led a conquering army. I greeted him like a matriarch applauding her Emperor son. He was completely under my spell. I had no friends by then, I could not afford to make one more enemy.

  I was amazed at how confident Peter seemed. He had a swagger, coupled with an easy charm. He had been fantastically successful as a colonist; he had become the leader of his people, he had destroyed an alien species, and he had helped to terraform one of the bleakest planets ever settled by humans. And now Peter was eager for fresh challenges. He was a general returning home, with the intention of declaring himself Emperor.

  I was still somewhat crazed when we met. Everything he said seemed normal. But in retrospect, everything he said was utterly monstrous. Peter had become addicted to war; and he made it his life’s work to seek out the cruellest and the hardest way.

  I gave him long long lectures on how to rule Earth according to liberal principles, and he paid me not a blind bit of notice. Eventually, feeling myself to be old and tiresome, I bade him farewell. He went his way, I went mine.

  I travelled through space a few decades more, and eventually made myself a home on Rebus, the fourth planet of the star Moriarty. Whilst there, I watched the TV footage of Peter’s Earth invasion. I watched as my son installed himself as leader of mankind.

  I watched and I understood nothing. By this point, I did not even understand myself. I wrote this, in my mental diary: I do not know who I am, or why I did what I did. I am merely a forward arrow through time. I wonder if I am truly human any more.

  Kids! They break your heart.

  When he was nine years old I realised I was afraid of Peter. He had tantrums, terrible screaming fits that left me shaking and shuddering for hours afterwards. But there was always that sense that he never really lost control. There was always that still, eerie eye at the centre of the storm.

  He didn’t like green vegetables but we had a nanny who insisted that he ate them. He thought this was awful, so he begged and begged me to sack her, but of course I refused. Then he started to wet the bed. I was so ashamed. I had a cleaner of course, but I couldn’t bear for her to see the sheets, so I’d be up in the early hours washing and ironing sheets and replacing them on the bed before dawn. Then he started to wet himself in school. Every night, before going to bed, he would drink a gallon and a half of water with the sole intention of urinating it back up again over his plastic sheets or his schoolbooks. Eventually, I sacked the nanny, and the bed-wetting stopped. Peter had got his way.

  To my astonishment, other children always did what he told them to do. It was a knack he had. If he asked a child to jump out of a first-floor window, the child would do so. Numerous broken limbs resulted. If he wanted extra sweets, he would demand that other children give their allowances to him. And no one dared argue with him.

  And so the parents of the other children refused to have him in the house. He became a pariah, the child no one wants their child to be with. He once put a dead bird in the drainpipe of the house of one of his little friends. It stank the house out, and the parents had to call the Council round to fumigate. And another time, he superglued two little girls together by their hands. They were too embarrassed to tell anyone for two days. So they just walked side by side together even when they went to the toilet. When the parents found out, they were devastated – at the injury committed, and at their own neglect of their daughters.

  Peter was an ugly teenager. His face was pockmarked and scarred with acne. I had to pay for skin rejuvenation therapy to start him off at the age of fifteen with a clean slate, and a face girls could bear to kiss. But at some level, he never lost that ugly face. He always had that cautious look of someone who expects the first reaction of others to be recoil.

  He masturbated incessantly. Don’t all boys do that? I suppose they do. But I found it shocking, I was tired of finding damp tissues chucked down the toilet bowl, and sheets that were stiff with the previous night’s emission.

  He used to steal hard-core magazines. I was searching his things regularly by then, and I was horrified at the material he read. Coprophilia, necrophilia, other perversions that even now I can’t bear to think about. I took him to a therapist and Peter made false allegations of incest against me just as a joke.

  How could a child grow up so bad?

  But then, perhaps there are in fact reasons and excuses for his behaviour. And perhaps, after all, I was to blame. Because, even in the period after my encounter with Future Dreams, and the flaying, even when I was well and skinned again, I was never there for him. I had my other concerns. I was preoccupied with work, I rarely came home before midnight. And, of course, I was constantly afraid that Future Dreams would wreak a terrible revenge for what I had done to them. They might send mercenaries to kill me or my child or fit us up for crimes or even, conceivably, murder or rape me in my bed. I was very paranoid during that period. I was also drinking heavily. I was also abusing pharmaceutical drugs and overdosing on rejuves. I was a total screw-up, with a small child. What was I thinking of?

  It was all my fault!

  But Peter did change. By the age of seventeen, his face was smooth, and he had a ready smile. He was smart and charismatic, and he had learned how to flatter me. He was mummy’s little boy. I basked in his approval.

  He took a ferocious interest in the work I was doing He travelled with me round Europe, and Egypt, and Africa. We walked around the Parthenon together, arms linked like husband and wife. But in fact, he was my son. My handsome, funny, clever son.

  For a time I forgot, to be honest, about his dark-child years. I smothered him, I pampered him. I never challenged his opinions, though he was inclined to wild supernatural speculations. He never wanted for anything. I catered to his every whim and desire. And I was so proud of him when he said he wanted to be a doctor, and got a place at an Oxford college to study medicine. Then, after he was thrown out of Oxford for assaulting a fellow student, I was so proud he quickly managed to get a place on a BA course in ecology at London Met. Then, when he was sent down from London Met for abusing the Vice Chancellor at a freshers’ networking event, I was so proud of the way he managed to get himself a job in the City of London.

  Then, when he was sacked from his job in the City for misappropriating clients’ funds, I was so proud of him when he shrugged off the disgrace and came to live with me, and stayed in bed all day, and drank a lot, and screwed a different woman every night. As long as he was happy, that’s all that mattered.

  Then, after about a year of unemployment, he was arrested for raping a girl who worked in Tesco’s. He’d met her, apparently, at an all-night rave. They’d both been taking drugs. She claimed rape, he argued consensual sex. There was some bruising on the girl and the police were keen to prosecute. But I pulled some strings, and paid some money to the girl’s family to encourage her to revise her testimony. Because I believed, of course, that Peter was innocent. I knew he’d been rough with her – but with that much crack in his system, what could you expect?

  But a year after the cover-up, Peter calmly explained that he hadn’t, in fact, been on drugs that night. The girl was coked to the eyeballs; but he’d been sober and in control. He’d targeted her, basically, because he knew she wouldn’t fight back. He took her to his room, tied her to the bed, and raped her. And he’d filmed the rape too, as an aid to future masturbation. He even, the bastard, offered to show me the tape.

  Peter’s theory of women, which he explained at some length, was that they needed to be melded to the spirit of a superior male. Rape, he argued, was nature’s way of doing just that.

  Of course, after hearing all this, I recognised all the telltale signs of egomaniacal psychopathy. But he refused to go to therapy, and he wouldn’t let me contact the police. He made me feel complicit in his guilt. Even now, part of me feels that I am a rapist. By loving my son, I feel a par
t of every evil thing he has ever done.

  But I did love my son. And so I had to embrace and forgive his evil. So I continued to cover up the rape, and continued to persuade myself that there was some good to be found in Peter. He was, after all, delightfully entertaining company.

  Peter joined a neo-Nazi party for a while, and campaigned in favour of a Mass Exodus proposal which mean compelling Muslims to leave Earth en masse. His friends were all con artists and burglars and diagnosed psychopaths and fellow neo-Nazis. He had a harem of beautiful girlfriends, who were always going off with other men, and I strongly suspected Peter was pimping them.

  We stayed good friends, even when he left my house and took a flat of his own (paid for by me) and amassed debts of tens of thousands of pounds. Once, I had to pay for him to have plastic surgery after his face was burned with acid by a fifteen-year-old girl who, he claimed, had an irrational grudge against him. The girl was later murdered. I have no reason to suppose Peter was responsible for her death. But I never enquired, just in case.

  Occasionally, Peter was arrested and spent nights at a time in a prison cell. He never did serious jail time, but he was convicted of being drunk and disorderly, committing ABH, being racially and sexually abusive while under the influence of alcohol, and of running out of restaurants without paying. There were also two other rape investigations, neither of which led to a criminal prosecution. But the police, I could tell, had a file on Peter, and were just waiting for him to make one fatal slip.

  I never reproached him. I’d gone past that point. My love was based on damage control. He was still my boy, no matter what.

  Then, eventually, while I was President of Humanity a Metropolitan Police major incident team was given the task of investigating Peter. He was suspected of extortion, on-line banking fraud, and murder. The old rape allegation was also being reinvestigated. I used my police expertise to access the incident team files, to follow the course of the investigation on a daily basis. And when it was obvious Peter was in danger of being arrested on serious offences, I used a hacker to delete the investigation team’s files, and ordered the Home Secretary to disband the team and assign them to other duties.

  Then I arranged for Peter to join a colony ship, even though there were many others ahead of him in the queue. He didn’t, of course, know how close he was to being arrested and sent to jail for decades. And so he begged me to beg him to stay, but I wouldn’t.

  We dined in the restaurant on the Swiss Re tower, looking out over London. “I wish I had the courage to join you,” I told him.

  “Maybe I…”

  “You’re so brave,” I told him, wheedlingly. “And you’re so right to be doing this. It’s the only way humankind can reach the stars. If young men and women of your calibre gamble with their lives.”

  “Yes, but I’m… having second thoughts,” he said to me, a fearful expression in his eyes.

  “Which is only natural. But the joy of space… the exhilaration of the infinite!”

  “But it might go wrong. We might not find a planet to terraform.”

  “They are plentiful. And technology is improving all the time. It used to take a hundred years to make a planet habitable. Now, it can be done in twenty.”

  His spirits visibly sank. He could tell I wanted shot of him. “You think I should go then, huh?”

  I smiled, radiantly. “It’s hard for me to bear… but yes.”

  And I felt a moment of pride about the fact that, for all his many character flaws, I still had and would always have ultimate power over my boy. He would do anything for me. He’d kill for me, if I asked him to. He’d even leave me, if that’s what I wanted, although it clearly broke his heart to go.

  And so he left. I had saved him from arrest, and in the process saved my own reputation. I meticulously deleted all evidence of my lies and manipulation at the Home Office and elsewhere. I arranged for the investigating officers on the major incident team to have fat bribes paid into their bank account, from an unattributable source, so that they wouldn’t rock the boat. And, also, so that I would be able to blackmail them with accusations of corruption if they did ever speak out about Peter. (None of them, of course, declared these phantom receipts to their bosses or the taxman.) And then I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Because I was glad – no, more than glad, utterly and profoundly relieved – to finally see the last of my child. My love for him felt like a shackle around my heart. I was afraid of him, and dreaded his company.

  And, once the colony ship had departed from Earth system, I felt able to return to my normal life. I took lovers, who were always much younger than me. And I took great pleasure in looking at their young, taut, un-surgically enhanced naked bodies. I continued to build my empire of power. And I made the big change, from Lena to Xabar, that made me a legend and not just a functionary.

  Twenty years later Peter landfell on a distant planet, and was able to contact me via the Quantum Beacon. It was strange to see him again, via the vidphone. There was a zest to him now, he talked excitedly of the challenges they faced on their chosen home, a double planet system around a yellow G1 star, 16 light-years from the Sol system. Nitrogen-dwelling life forms had been identified on the first planet, and the intention was to declare this a protected zone, and colonise the second planet.

  Every week Peter would tell me of his adventures. The nitrogen-rich planet was christened Meconium, and the planet to be terraformed was called Chaos. But Peter always referred to them as Shit (the nitrogen planet) and Shittier (their own hydrogen/helium gaseous low-gravity planet).

  This planetary system proved to be a cursed place for the human settlers. The nitrogen-dwelling life forms that had been identified on the uninhabited planet of “Shit” proved to be, in fact, the sentient excrement of much larger nitrogen-dwelling life forms, which were able to expel their wastes through space by means of natural rockets. The excrement was then caught in the gravitational pull of its twin planet (Chaos, aka Shittier) before entering its atmosphere. And this planet, of course, is where Peter and his companions were attempting to forge a new society…

  These cosmic shit showers contained the embryos for third-phase life forms which were able to inhabit the helium/ hydrogen planet in gaseous form. In effect, this alien beast was a caterpillar, which turned into a pile of steaming turds, which turned into a gaseous butterfly.

  Tens of thousands of humans died in those earlier years, fighting these alien beings, technically known as 421 S (N), which Peter referred to as “Shit Buckets”. Peter was appointed Commander of the colony, and he planned and authorised an operation to detonate fusion bombs all over the planet as part of a controlled terraforming operation that would lead, inevitably, to the genocide of the alien monsters.

  I argued passionately with him that they should move on, find a fresh planet. Alien life was a precious thing, to be treasured and conserved. And as humans, we have a duty to think beyond our own selfish needs.

  Peter wasn’t impressed. It would take another seventy years of travel to reach the nearest potentially terraformable planet. And besides, this was their home now.

  Peter encountered fierce opposition from the leader of his new planet; and so he staged a coup, and after some appalling massacres, Peter was elected as new leader.

  The aliens were annihilated. And two oxygen-atmosphere low-gravity Earth-habitable planets were created.

  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.

  I was lonely on Rebus.

  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 Boheme, 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.