Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  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 O 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 ca
nnon 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.

  And one missile was fired into the Atlantic ocean, ripping through the water and detonating on the muddy bottom, causing a huge vortex to be created that nearly touched the sky. The resulting tornados and tsunamis wrecked and flooded homes and lands on every Atlantic coast.

  Peter stopped short of dispatching plagues of frogs and locusts and holograms of the Four Horsemen of the Armageddon, but in every other respect he constructed an invasion that was deliberately intended to evoke and echo Armageddon. There was mass panic, and mass suicide – and entire armies threw down their weapons.

  Faced with this overwhelming firepower, and unbelievable psych warfare acuity, the Earth President, a toad of a man called Chapel, capitulated. My son came to power. And thus he became the first person in all of history to conquer the entire planet Earth.

  His first act was to abolish the World Council and the office of President of Humanity. Instead, in a glorious public relations coup, he declared that all the “satellite” planets of Earth were, from this moment forward, to be independent and self-governing. Unity would be achieved through trade, as Asimov had prophesied; and the days of imperial rule were over.

  He also, in passing, established a Universal Trading Corporation of which he was sole shareholder and Chief Executive Officer. The Corporation’s first act was to charge all planets for information sent or received on the Quantum Beacons. It was, in effect, a massive and lucrative tax on all colonies, but no one realised that. The euphoria on all the inhabited planets of the Universe was intense and palpable. Freedom from Earth’s tyranny!

  Sadly, it didn’t turn out that way. The Corporation was not a government; but it had absolute power. And, through the technology of the Doppelganger Robots, my son the Chief Executive Officer (Cheo) became de facto Emperor of the Human Universe.

  Years later, he invited me to visit him, on Earth. Naturally I accepted.

  As I explained, I was lonely.

  I never thought that I would see

  Such beauty and such tragedy

  And foolish fucked up blazin’ wasted lives

  And un’xpected sublimity

  I never thought that I would see

  So much of life, and of the genius of our universe

  Before visiting my son, I got myself a new liver and a skin rejuve. I burned all my clothes and chose a whole new wardrobe from our designer collection. I went for a shiny ochre look with my clothing, and my hair was raven-black. I glowed, I was sublime. And I looked as if I was going to see my lover.

  I chose cryosleep for the journey. It doesn’t save you anything – your body still ages the same number of subjective years. But it avoids the tedium of years in transit, playing auto-chess and rereading so-called literary classics.

  I was woken when we reached Pluto. In Earth Time I had been away for 130 years or so. And in that time, the grand project of transforming the Sol system had advanced hugely.

  Jupiter had rings now. A vast space factory made up of hundreds of separate but interconnected units hung in permanent orbit around the huge gas giant, powered by energy pumps in the heart of the planet’s boiling atmosphere. The man-made ring blended with and accentuated Jupiter’s own natural but fairly anonymous ring system (which of course is invisible to most low-grade telescopes from Earth itself).

  Jupiter’s moon Europa is now a gleaming blue and green jewel, after the melting of its icefields turned it into the second of the Aqueous Planets (after Earth itself). Vast green islands have been floated over this planetary ocean, and each year, I’m told, the islands become bigger and bigger.

  As my spaceship moved closer and closer into the Sol system, the breathtaking genius of human engineering became ever more manifest. After the glory of Jupiter’s ring comes the magnificence of the Dyson Jewels. These orbiting diamond-shaped space stations are each the size of the planet Mars. And thousands upon thousands of them are caught in orbit between Jupiter and Mars. This is the region of space known as the Beltway, in honour of the Asteroid Belt which used to exist there (before it was pillaged and annihilated for its raw materials).

  The orbits of each Jewel are finely calculated and are set at a multiplicity of angles. To visualise this, imagine a sphere with balls circling around it. One ball will circle the equator of the sphere; another will be set at an angle of 5° to that; the next will be tilted at an angle of another 5°; and so on until the final sphere orbits the poles in a straight up and down line. All the balls circle simultaneously, but their orbits only intersect at two points and so with a degree of careful calculation, the balls will never collide.

  And so, in this way, the maximum amount of space can be filled by a series of huge orbiting balls, which form a kind of imaginary sphere. And this of course is an extension of the principle of the Dyson Sphere – a theoretical construct of a man-made planet which is mathematically calculated to occupy the greatest possible amount of space. Instead of a planet as a tiny ball orbiting a huge sun – imagine that planet as a vast sphere encircling the sun. Such a place would be vast beyond our wildest imaginings! However, in reality the Dyson Sphere would be inconceivably expensive to build and maintain, and would probably be irredeemably unstable. Niven’s proposed Ringworld is more tenable, but also tricky.

  But the Dyson Jewels offer a third and more pragmatic option. Each mini-world is self-contained; but the maximum amount of space around the sun is
utilised by their carefully calibrated orbits. They swarm around the sun, magically never colliding, stealing every iota of its warmth and energy. And the Dyson Jewels collectively offer land almost without limit. There is more room for humans to live and roam on in the Dyson Jewels than in all the planets of human-occupied space put together.

  Inside each Dyson Jewel is a planet with green fields and blue skies and clouds, and horizons that curve up. And, for those with a head for heights, there are vast viewing areas where the people can look out, into space.

  But for the most part, the citizens of the Jewels look in. The Jewels’ rotation creates an illusory gravity; but for the rest, their world is as real as any world. Real grass, real trees, real animals, rivers, lakes and oceans.

  And cities that are as organic as a Bavarian wood. In the Jewels, houses grow and deform over the years; streets digress and meander, and sometimes spontaneously give birth to new houses thanks to stylishly mischievous computerised subprograms. Solar power alone is, because of the huge planet-sized solar panels on the hull, enough to give each sphere near-limitless energy. And so each Dyson Jewel has all the resources it needs. Each is a self-contained paradise, which exists in a state of total freedom.

  Except, that is, for the contractual requirement to pay weekly licensing fees to the Corporation, which owns the sun’s radiation, and has copyrighted all the energy pumps, and leases all the computer software which makes human civilisation possible.

  And, as if the Dyson Jewels weren’t marvellous enough, there is the Angel. An ever-changing man-made Aurora Borealis generated by a micro-star that orbits high above the planetary ecliptic, at roughly the same distance as Uranus from the sun. The Angel sends a radiance over the entire Sol system, illuminating the deepest recesses of space so that the whole system is, in effect, lit by suns at each end.