The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  The sad thing was, she didn’t like me at all. Every time I tried to talk to her, she ended the conversation as quickly as she could. Whatever tack I tried with her, I could see she saw it all as some kind of trick. Yet she would sit for hours with that goddamned Turk, talking and laughing away like they’d known each other forever.

  Angela:

  When we’d been there the equivalent of two or three Earth days we started to ask each other the question ‘What happens next?’

  I wanted to know what the chances were of getting successfully back to Earth. Dixon immediately said that he had no doubt at all that God would see us safely home to bear witness to the new Eden. But Mehmet and Tommy thought that it would take at least three leaps to get back to Earth and that each leap would have no more than a 25% chance of success. A quarter of a quarter of a quarter: that was a one in sixty-four chance of getting back alive. A fourth leap, which we’d quite likely need, would knock those odds down to one in two hundred and fifty-six. A fifth leap was apparently out of the question. We just didn’t have the power.

  “There is an alternative, though,” I said. “We could stay here.”

  “That’s true,” said Tommy. “Or some of us could stay here while the others tried to get back. If they succeeded, they could send out another crew in the Reckless or the Maverick, to fetch back the ones who’d stayed.”

  “But if they failed, the ones who’d stayed would have to grow old and die alone,” said Mehmet with a shudder. “Okay I know it’s pretty here, but to live a whole lifetime here and die here and …”

  He broke off, and no one spoke for a little bit.

  “Not necessarily grow old and die alone,” I eventually said. “Not if I was one of the ones who stayed and one of you stayed with me. We could have babies, and then we wouldn’t be alone. We could start a whole new race.”

  Men are funny prudish creatures in some ways. They all visibly squirmed – and then they all laughed loudly to cover up their unease.

  I told them I wasn’t kidding. I’d stay here with any one of them, or more than one if they liked, and if the Defiant didn’t make it back and the Reckless and the Maverick never came, I would make babies with whoever was with me.

  Tommy:

  I wanted to shout, ‘Me! I’ll stay!’, but I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was included in the invitation. Dixon put on his religious voice and said he was married. Mike and Mehmet both said they had to at least try to get back to their kids.

  “How about you, then Tommy?” Angela asked.

  I was amazed.

  Angela:

  Tommy and I gave them two months, two Earth months. If no one had come back for us by then, it would mean the Defiant had definitely failed to get through.

  Two Earth months was April 8th. The date didn’t mean anything, of course, in constant Eden, which has no days or nights or sun or moon and (as it turns out) doesn’t even change its own position relative to the distant galaxy, or not so you’d notice. But we still followed Earth time on our watches, and hung onto some kind of notion of months and days. And both of us started keeping a diary record on pocket recorders.

  On April the 1st there was a small earth tremor and mountains appeared in the distance that we’d never seen before, illuminated by the lava streaming down the side of a volcano in their midst: big mountains covered in snow, that up to now had been in permanent darkness. For a while a hot sulphurous wind blew and the galaxy was hidden behind black dust. Tommy and I spent a few hours laying out a circle on the ground, using big round stones from the bottom of one of the streams, to mark the site of our original landing. It was my idea. It struck me that whether we stayed or whether we returned to Earth, this was a fairly important historic site for the human race. It was a good spot to be in. There were large pools around it, and streams, with fish in them that were good to eat if you could catch them.

  April 3rd it rained. We sheltered in a small cave in one of the rocky outcrops around the pools. The cave was even more full of life than the forest outside. When we finally lay down and tried to sleep – Tommy at one end, me at the other, listening to the rain outside – Tommy said that life on Eden must have begun deep down in underground caves when the surface was still covered in deep ice. You get little pockets of geothermal life even on Earth, he pointed out, in deep caves and on the bottom of the sea beyond the reach of the sun. There was even life in Lake Vostok two miles down under the Antarctic ice. Life here could have begun like that and then spread upwards when it discovered how to heat its own environment. Any life form that could reach the surface and melt the ice would get an advantage because it would be able to spread more quickly than was possible in underground caves.

  Tommy was trying really hard to be nice to me and not to slip into his smooth lady-killer routine which he knew I hated. In fact we were weirdly formal with each other. It was such a strange position to be in. I was quite clear in my mind that if we got back to Earth I most probably wouldn’t want to have anything more to do with him. His celebrity as such didn’t impress me and as a person he really wasn’t the type I chose to spend my time with.

  But if no one came for us? Well then he would be my life’s companion and this really would be a marriage which nothing could end but death, a marriage more total than almost any other that has ever existed.

  Tommy:

  April 4th we saw a new animal a bit like a cat, only it had luminous spots and its eyes were round and flat, not spherical. The weird thing was that when it moved its spots could ripple backwards along its sides at exactly the same speed as its forward motion, so as to create the illusion that its skin was standing still. It also had six limbs, like other Eden creatures. The bird-like and bat-like animals, for example, had hands as well as feet and wings. The little bats stood upright on their hind feet on branches and looked down at us curiously, stroking their wrinkled little noseless but oddly human faces with their oddly human hands while they fanned their membranous wings.

  April 5th, I shot a pig-like six-legged animal and we skinned it and cooked it over a fire. It was the first thing we had killed, but we knew we couldn’t live on fruit and space-food for much longer. It tasted a bit like mutton, but kind of sweet and fatty.

  We didn’t talk much, but I guess we both did a lot of thinking. I’ve never noticed myself as much as I did then. I’d often been told I was selfish, self-centered and self-absorbed – by Yvette among others, though I’m not sure she was really in a position to talk – and I guess I was, yet I’d never reflected much before on me, on this strange being that happens to be myself. I’d always just been this person, blundering and trampling around like some kind of wounded beast, without ever thinking about who he was or why.

  Angela:

  April 6th I woke up loathing the perpetual night of Eden. It’s not cold, it’s not pitch dark, it looks pretty enough with its lantern-flowers – quite lovely in fact, like a garden forever decked out with Chinese lanterns for a midsummer night’s party. But to think that there would never be a sunrise here, never a blue sky, never a clear sunny day when you could see for miles. Never. Never. Never. For a while I felt so claustrophobic it was all I could do not to scream.

  Tommy and I hardly said a word. We’d said we’d wait to April 8th so we did, but really we knew already that no one was going to come back to us, and that Mehmet and Mike and Dixon had not got through. We just weren’t going to allow ourselves to say it yet.

  Tommy:

  April 7th I tried to fill up the time by following starbirds through the forest. Starbirds was the name Mike gave to those peacock-like creatures with luminous stars on their tails. I liked the creatures, even though they were basically carrion eaters. I liked the way they crashed noisily through the trees. I liked the way that pairs of them would move through the forest some way apart, but in parallel, calling out to each other in loud voices that carried over the humming of the trees, and over the cries of all the other creatures.

  “Hoom – hoom – hoom,”
goes one.

  Then the other, maybe a mile away, goes “Aaaah! – Aaaah! – Aaaah!”

  I liked the way that that was all they’d got to say but they were happy anyway to say it for hours and hours, back and forth across the forest.

  Starbirds don’t know they’re in Eden, I said to myself several times, as if it was something I couldn’t quite get through my head. They don’t know Eden is in intergalactic space. They don’t know that this ground isn’t the base of the universe itself. To them this is just how the world is.

  Angela:

  And then it was April 8th. We were both awake watching the GMT click over from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00.

  “They didn’t make it,” we admitted to one another at 00:05:00. “They didn’t get through.”

  I wondered how it had ended for Dixon and Mehmet and Mike. It was possible that in mid-leap they had been swallowed up inside one of those weird mirror-lined bubbles of sub-E, which are really tiny little temporary universes which shrink back to nothing when the engine stops pulling them into being. But I think it was more likely that the engine died on them after a leap or two and left them stranded: stranded in that smelly little box in the middle of the void, while the food and water ran out, the ship gradually grew cold and Mike’s last sedative shot was finally used up. Poor gentle Mike with nothing between him and his worst fear. Poor friendly, positive Mehmet. Poor Dixon, having to come to terms in the end with the fact that God had let him down. He had found proof that there was life beyond Earth, proof that would undoubtedly have ensured that the Galactic Project would continue and that the gospel could be carried out across the stars, but God had not let him take that news home.

  But there was no point in going on and on thinking these thoughts, was there? There was simply no point.

  I took Tommy by the hand and we went to a pool we knew and which, without actually speaking of it, we’d somehow both set aside for this moment. It was surrounded by pulsing trees. A soft cool moss grew on its banks, small bats swooped over the water and there always seemed to be starbirds in the vicinity, calling to each other across the forest. It sounds romantic but really for me it was a case of Plan A has failed so let’s move quickly on to Plan B – to Plan Baby. This just seemed the best place to put it into effect.

  But then again I really did feel a sort of closeness to Tommy because of the weird experience that just the two of us had shared, and because there were so many strong emotions going around in my head, and because there was never going to be anyone else to turn to but Tommy – and whoever else he and I managed to summon up between us inside my body.

  After we’d done, we looked around and I noticed that there was a tree by the pool with ripe fruits high up in its branches. I’ve always been good at climbing trees and so I separated myself from Tommy and scrambled up to get something to eat for us. Tommy stood up and waited for me below. I could just make him out in the soft glow of the tree’s white lanterns, smiling up at me. Like a little boy, I thought, and then I suddenly felt incredibly angry with him. He was nothing but a silly over-indulged little boy, I thought, who does silly selfish thoughtless things and expects to be instantly forgiven.

  I got the fruit and clambered back down, pausing before the last bit to toss it to Tommy so I could use both hands. As I dropped to the ground beside him, Tommy, without any warning, kissed me profusely and then burst out that he loved me and that he’d loved me from the day he saw me. In fact he’d never loved anyone as he loved me, he told me. He hadn’t known until now what love was really like.

  Jesus!

  Well, of course I told him not to talk crap. I mean I didn’t ask to come here, did I? I didn’t ask to be stuck with bloody love-rat Schneider. I would have much preferred Mehmet. Yes and I didn’t ask never to see my mum and my dad and my sister Kayley again. I didn’t ask to be cut off forever from my friends, and the sun, and green leaves, and the friendly streets of London. And if it wasn’t for Tommy Schneider here and his selfish friends I would still have had all of those things. Most likely I would have had them for years and years to come.

  So I was angry. I ignored what he had said completely. I started instead to tell him all the grimmest things I could think of about what lay ahead of us.

  If we got sick here there would be no one to cure us, I told him. I told him we’d go blind one day in this dim light. I told him I could easily die in childbirth, die in agony and leave him alone here with nothing for company but mine and the baby’s corpses. Yes, and I told him – I pointed out to him – that if we did have children that lived, they would have to turn to each other for sex partners – unless of course they turned to us – because there would be no one else there for them.

  And I told him that after a couple of generations of inbreeding our descendants would have to cope with all the hereditary diseases and deformities that were now hidden away harmlessly in his and my genes. There’s sickle cell in my family, I told him, and diabetes too, and my grandmother on my mum’s side and two of my aunties were born with a cleft palate. (Did Tommy Schneider know what a cleft palate looked like, or how to surgically correct it, of course without the use of anaesthetics?) Many of these things would become rife in a few generations, when inbreeding brought recessive genes together again and again, along with whatever little genetic contributions Tommy’s family might have to make. That was assuming of course that there actually were future generations at all and that the line didn’t simply die out, as was quite likely, leaving some poor devil at the end of it all to face the experience of being completely alone in this ghostly forest where day would never come, and no other human being would ever come again.

  “This isn’t some kind of happy ever after story, Tommy,” I told him. “This is very very far from happy ever after. The best you can say for it is that it’s the only way we’ve got of going on living and finding out what happens next.”

  (And, though I didn’t speak about it to him, I thought, as I sometimes do, about my ancestors, my great-great-great-great-grandparents, taken from Africa in chains to the Caribbean to cut cane under a slave driver’s lash. Horrific as it must have been they went on living, they kept going. If they hadn’t, I would never have been born.)

  Tommy nodded. He seemed quite calm about everything I’d said, which was disappointing because I wanted to upset him. I wanted to trample over his lovey-dovey daydream so as to pay him back for what he and his friends had done to me. Those three men had stolen my life from me, stolen my home, stolen everyone I really loved.

  “So it was all a cold calculation?” he asked, quite calmly. “You staying with me. You making out with me here beside the pool. There wasn’t any feeling involved, just a clinical assessment of the situation. Is that right? Is that what you are trying to tell me?”

  I’d thought a lot about this. I’d been thinking hard about it for days. Of course I didn’t love the man. He didn’t love me either, whatever he’d decided to tell himself. (What did he know of me, after all, except that I’m pretty and that I have a brave face I’ve learnt to put on when I’m scared?) But there was a bond between us now, I’d decided, which in a way was much stronger than love. And love could grow from that bond, is what I’d thought, maybe not constantly like the lantern flowers of Eden, but perhaps, if we were very lucky, on a recurring basis like the flowers back on Earth.

  That is what I’d decided in those strange quiet days of waiting. If we stayed on Eden there would be a bond between us of necessity, stronger in a way than ever existed in almost any marriage on Earth. Necessity was as deep as love and maybe deeper; that was what I had told myself, and perhaps love could grow from it. That was what I’d made up my mind to believe.

  But right now I still wanted to hurt him.

  “A calculation?” I sneered. “Yes, that’s about right, mate, a calculation. If Mehmet had stayed, it would have been him who had laid down here with me just now. If…”

  But he didn’t let me finish.

  Tommy:

  It was
bad enough to look at her up in the tree, just like I watched those girls in the tree all those years ago when I was a kid at school, asking for them to accept me into their game. It was worse when I tried to tell her how I felt and she trampled on that (just like those little girls did when they all laughed at me and told me to leave them alone). But it was when she mentioned Mehmet that I got really mad.

  “You goddam women are all the same!” I found myself yelling at her. “You fool us, you lie to us, you twist us round your fingers. You offer us something sweet, something so sweet that we’d give up everything we have just to possess it – everything! – and then you take it away again and trample on it, and tell us it doesn’t mean anything to you at all!”

  I’ve been told I’m ugly when I get like that. My eyes bulge and spit comes flying out of my mouth. She looked at me with disgust.

  “I suppose this is what happened with all your other women,” she said, speaking very quietly and coldly. “As soon as they try to inject a tiny note of reality, as soon as they admit that Tommy Schneider isn’t the one thing they’ve been pining for since the day they were born, then Tommy Schneider flies into a rage and runs off to find some other woman who doesn’t know him yet, so that she can dry his tears and take him to bed and tell him he’s perfect and wonderful. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what always happens, yes? Well, you’ve got no one else to run to now!”