Debatable Space Read online

  One! Two! Three! Four! Five! star jumps, each one accompanied by a direct stun blast in the upper body. Five of these and I’m ready to die.

  Alliea is a good forty years younger than me – she’s fifty-six. She’s kept herself in great shape and has had her face, hips, vagina, teeth and spinal column replaced. She’s like whipcord, and she never seems to get tired. I, by contrast, am starting to feel my age. I get aches and pains in my old bones, and I have trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. And my hair and beard are grey – I’ve never opted to have them re-vivified. As a result, I look and sound like a grizzled old-timer, and I like it that way. It gives me, I feel, a certain gravitas.

  My legs, however, are brand-new, state-of-the-art, and genetically enhanced. Hence the star jumps. I have extraordinary power, when it comes to jumping high, and running away.

  Brandon puts on his boxing gloves and we step in the ring. We trade a few punches then he comes at me fast and furious. My punches have power, but I can’t throw so many of them. He wears me down with sheer dogged persistence. Eventually I throw in the towel. Enough is enough.

  Alliea steps in the ring, and she and Brandon box. Alliea, of course, trained with Rob. She’s a boxing artist. She wipes the floor with my hapless astrophysicist. At the end of the bout, Brandon’s jaw is hanging loose, and his nose is broken. He bears the pain with equanimity. But I know it will take him several days under the autodoc to heal these injuries.

  I start lifting weights. It’s crude, but for sheer power nothing can replace free weights. But I vary the workout to prevent muscle-boundness. I lift two hundred kilos of weights on a barbell up on to my shoulders; then I shrug and throw the barbell in the air. Then I wait patiently, looking straight ahead, and catch it as it falls, hard, on my shoulders. It feels as if the roof has crashed in. Great training for storming a ship, or taking a blaster shot directly on the body armour.

  Hup, throw, wait, CRASH. Hup, throw, wait, CRASH.

  Alliea picks up a sword and tries to cut off Brandon’s head. His head bobs and weaves, he ducks and kinks, as he brilliantly eludes the sword’s sharp blade. It’s great speed training, but it’s dangerous. Once, in a training session, Brandon’s head was cut clean off. He claims you can still see the scar on his throat where the head was sewn back on… But of course, he’s just being fanciful. The stitches are micro-sewn, and quite invisible to the naked eye.

  Then we shower together. We’re all too old, too seasoned, to have any shyness about communal bathing or showering. But there’s no sexual element to it. Brandon is predominantly homosexual, and finds his sexual pleasures on week long binges in the Free Ports. And Alliea is still in mourning for Rob; the possibility of me sexually desiring her or her sexually desiring me would be an affront to etiquette.

  And as for me – well, I’m a gnarly old man with scars up and down my body and grey pubic hair. No one on the ship regards me as a sexual being any more. And, goddamn it, it’s been at least two years since I had a decent fuck. So maybe they’re right to write me out of the equation.

  I find it comforting, to be naked with people I love. People I care for. People I would be happy to die for.

  My people.

  Flanagan

  We arrive at the drop point a week early. It’s obvious that the Cheo will try and ambush us, so we make our preparations accordingly.

  We hollow out an asteroid and fill it with explosives.

  We place holographic projectors on floating satellites, too small to be visible to the enemy’s surveillance ’bots.

  We charge our laser cannons. We sow space with nanobombs. We gird on our body armour. And we wait.

  He doesn’t show.

  Flanagan

  We send another ransom email. The Cheo responds promptly, offering less money. He reminds us that if we ambush him, he will invoke the flame-beast blood-feud clause. It’s all standard stuff, powerplay gambits. Designed to test our nerve. We arrange another drop-off point. This time, Harry goes along, in a high-powered tugboat, intending to tow away the boat full of treasure and released prisoners which are the essence of our ransom demand.

  Harry’s tugboat is ambushed, he is blown out of space. He escapes on a rocket-propelled backpack. Only a Loper could have survived a direct blast attack of this kind, but we kind of hoped he would.

  We send a third ransom demand. This time the Cheo is getting cocky. He’s played his games, he’s tested our resolve to the utmost. Now he comes back with a final renegotiation. If we surrender, and submit ourselves to execution, then he will wipe the slate clean and exonerate our families. Otherwise, mass carnage will ensue of all our kindred and clan.

  It’s a hollow threat. All of us, long ago, lost those who were close to us. We respond with our counter-offer. One more day in which to provide the ransom, or Lena will be killed.

  A day passes.

  We vidphone Alby and relay the news. We see him sitting with Lena. She is looking particularly beautiful. Alby turns to her and explains: the Cheo will not pay. He would rather, Alby tells her, see you die than pay a ransom.

  Lena laughs. A gutsy laugh. “That’s my boy,” she says.

  Alby swirls over her. It’s almost affectionate in its delicacy. Then he swirls away.

  Lena is on fire. She screams and screams in agony. She falls to the floor and rolls around, trying to extinguish herself. Her bones char, her skin melts. She dies in utterest agony.

  We relay the vidphone call to the Cheo. The kidnap is over. The hostage has been killed.

  Lena, his beloved mother, is dead.

  Book 4

  Excerpts from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004 It was a dream come true for me.

  To be a concert pianist, and play at Carnegie Hall.

  When the day arrived, I couldn’t believe it was really happening. Or that I deserved such an amazing honour. And admittedly, I did have to pay for the hall myself. But it was by no means a vanity concert. I was a brilliant pianist by this point, and I’d earned the right to be there, for my first major public recital.

  I didn’t sleep at all the night before. I woke early, hungry but unable to eat. I slept in the afternoon, showered, changed, arrived two hours early at the Hall. It was a Friday. I wore black. No, blue. A figure-hugging outfit. Arms bare. No jewellery. My hair was – up? Down? Must have been up. It was hot. I sweated under my armpits, I had to rinse myself with cotton pads in the loo. And I – no, no, that wasn’t then. That was another time. No matter. It was a cold night, in fact. I wore a dress with sleeves. But it was blue. Definitely. Blue.

  The press clamoured to interview me beforehand, but I refused all offers. I stayed in my dressing room and focused my chi. I watched an episode of an American comedy on my PDV. Then when I felt ready, I began the long walk from dressing room to stage. Then across the stage to the grand piano. To the piano stool. Then I sat. Then a casual glance at the audience – which almost unnerved me. But I kept my composure. The crowd was hushed. The lights burned my skin. I looked at the keys. Blanked my mind. A cough shattered the calm. I ignored it. Composed myself. Then I began to play…

  And in the millimillimillisecond between my hands getting the signal from my brain and the first note of music, I thought to myself: Not bad, Lena. Not at all bad. For someone who had always been tone-deaf, and hopeless at music.

  It used to piss me off, to be honest,. At school, I could get As in all my subjects, my creative writing was fine, I was shit at gym but that didn’t matter. But I always loved the idea of being a great musician, and yet it never happened for me. I failed Grade 1 clarinet, and then failed Grade 1 flute, and finally failed Grade 1 cello, having failed to master how to pick up a bow. I was clumsy, that was the problem, and uncoordinated, and I couldn’t remember melodies, and I had difficulty telling one note from another. At a school concert I was in the chorus of our production of Les Miserables, and was told to mime because my singing was sapping the resolve and eroding the pitch of the angry mob.

  But years late
r, after the success of my second book, I was looking for new challenges. So I decided that for my third book, The Many Talents of You, God, I would explore the whole area of teaching and instinct. And so as my research project I applied myself to the mastery of a whole series of athletic activities like tennis, tae kwon do, and sharp-shooting. And, for good measure, I decided to be a concert pianist too.

  The research period took far longer than I expected – nearly four decades in fact – but I was rich by then and I was mainly doing this for my own satisfaction. And, through the application of science, and a steadily growing insight into the power of relaxation techniques, I managed to train my body to be “instinctive’. I learned how to move without thinking about it; learned to step outside of my body and let the body itself control me. And, because my fitness level never declined, I was able to make slow, steady progress towards excellence in all those related spheres. By the time I was sixty, I was a black belt fourth dan in tae kwon do and judo. By the time I was seventy, I was as good a tennis player as a gifted individual would be at the age of fifteen. Almost, but not quite, good enough to play at Wimbledon.

  In music, too, I trained myself to achieve that instinctive, visceral grasp of musicality which is possessed by ten-year-old musical prodigies. And what I proved through all this hard work is that what the naturally gifted have as their birthright, the rest of us can learn. It just takes time, and practice, and a body that doesn’t decay with age but instead grows sharper, and stronger, and fitter.

  I played six hours a day some days. I sang along with my own music, badly at first, then rather well. I learned to count with my pulse. I learned to immerse myself, surrender myself. And, though my focus was on the classic repertoire, I practised jazz and blues and boogie-woogie and rock. I learned to be funky, I learned how to swing. And my musical memory became phenomenal; I knew literally thousands of pieces by heart.

  And all the while, for the best part of forty years, I applied myself religiously to the task of general self-improvement. I embarked on a year-long Grand Tour of the entire world. I spent two years in Florence, a year in South America. I studied art and architecture, local customs, I made friends, I took lovers. I became fluent in seven languages.

  During these years, I often spent two hours a day in the gym, but religiously observed a schedule of rest days to prevent overtraining. I had my knees replaced. I had my hip replaced. I had a hysterectomy to remove a fast-growing cancer, and had my womb replaced with a bioplastic alternative. I pioneered skin-replacement implants, and shed my entire skin like a snake and lived for three months in intensive care looking like a cadaver. But the skin grew back, as youthful as a twenty-year-old’s.

  I had the most joyful time imaginable. And yet, for all this, despite experiencing statistically more moments of pleasure than any other person so far in the history of humanity, there were times when I became bored. And, indeed, on the brink of clinical depression.

  Why? Because I was lonely, I suppose. And envious. Every time I met a young man or young woman I yearned to have what they took for granted; sheer, naive ignorance of the nasty, spiteful awfulness of life. I yearned to be natural, unselfconscious, at peace with the world and myself. And I was convinced, too, that other people found me boring. Even though I was, by now, beautiful and gifted, I still looked at myself in the mirror and saw that strange shadowy creature: “It’s Only Me”.

  It’s Only

  Me.

  How could this be! Why wasn’t I happy?

  I was haunted by a fear of death and, absurdly, its aftermath. My fear was: when I do, eventually, die, how will I be remembered? And how soon would I be forgotten? I hugged to myself the idea that those closest to me would never get over my death, and would live barren empty lives from that point on. But I knew, in reality, that my passing would be greeted with a wave of relief, even from those who loved me. Thank heavens she’s dead, my friends would all think, and I’m still alive.

  So I resolved not to die. Just to spite those fuckers. I continued to keep fit, and I continued my rejuvenation treatments. I wasn’t, of course, the only person to be embarking on a systematic course of anti-ageing therapy. All over the world, people were getting older, and looking younger. The film star Sheryl Martinez was, at seventy-four, relaunching her career as a singer. Over several decades, her reedy voice had, with the help of surgery, evolved into a sexy husky growl, which she had modified with extensive training into one of the all-time-great soul voices. And she was hot, the poster girl for the over-seventies rejuves.

  And…

  I play the first chord. The music ripples through the hall. Joy suffuses my being as the piano reveals its soul and I play, and I play, and I play, and…

  And then there was the Billionaires’ Club – a group of 490 men and women who had devoted themselves to anti-ageing with all the resources at their disposal. These middle-aged obsessives had become playboys and playgirls, with perfect physiques, whose sex lives were the subject of relentless tabloid gossip, and…

  All too soon, the first piece, a playful scherzo, comes to an end. The hall explodes with applause. I bask in it for a moment. Then my hands hover over the keys again, and…

  And there was Andrei Makov.

  Andrei was a triple Gold Medal winner at the 2032 Olympics in Seoul. He was nineteen years old, and he broke the world record in three separate events – the 400 metres, the 800 metres and the triathlon. Andrei’s achievement was formidable, the result of ten years of intensive training. With his tall, gangly frame and his intense Russian stare, he became an international teen idol, as well as going down in sporting history as one of the all-time greats.

  Andrei’s most remarkable achievement was to challenge the African domination of running events, which over the years had seen the African runners seize medal after medal after medal. These athletes, mainly from Kenya, were gifted with bodies that defied all previous standards of human performance.

  Then along came Andrei… who left the poor Kenyan runners literally gasping in his wake. Andrei’s approach was inner-focused, based on an explicitly Zen training method that liberated chi while also scientifically analysing and improving length of stride, oxygen intake, and all the other controllable aspects of the human performance.

  And when he ran, he seemed more than human.

  In 2044, Makov won five more Olympic gold medals – for the 400 metres, the triathlon, the pentathlon, freestyle swimming, and weightlifting. Never before has a single athlete dominated such a vast range of events. Makov was bulkier now, but still had that lean and dangerous look. His physical strength came not from a ripped physique, but from relaxed muscle fibres of vast tensile strength. Makov had studied pilates, he was a black belt seventh dan in goju ryu karate, and he was also a keen undersea diver. His versatility was matched only by his sang froid. Everything he did, he did effortlessly. At the age of thirty-five he took up tennis for the first time. At the age of thirty-six, he won the tennis Grand Slam, defeating the number 1, 2 and 3 seeds in humiliating straight sets. At the age of thirty-nine, he won the Tour de France and, at his own insistence, was drug-tested before and after and shown to be totally clean.

  But at the age of forty, Andrei developed a brain tumour. Over the space of three excruciating years, he dipped in and out of madness, as he intensively studied the nature of his disease and the possible remedies. Andrei refused to take chemotherapy and radiotherapy, because he felt they interfered with his perception of his own chi. Instead he used complementary medicine to control the growth of the tumour. And Andrei then volunteered himself as a guinea pig for a radical new therapy which used a viral agent to mutate the tumour. The tumour would not be excised from his brain; it would be transformed, it would become part of his brain.

  The technique was successful; the tumour went into recession, and became a benign “spare brain” which, as an unexpected side-effect, activated the rejuvenation mechanisms in Andrei’s body. And so, without any radiation treatment or injections or gene th
erapy, Andrei’s body began its journey to eternal youth. The viral agent had the further effect of clarifying and cleaning the neural pathways, almost like a defragmenting and disk-cleaning program. After the treatment, Andrei’s memory was crystal-sharp, and his ability to manipulate numbers mentally was astounding.

  His judgement, however, was all too fallible. Andrei retired from athletics and went into business. He lost millions in the course of fifteen years, after being cheated by a series of sophisticated advisers, all of them advocating arcane mathematical approaches to investing. He fell in love with a glamorous actress, who cuckolded him and then did a kiss and tell. He fell in love with an attractive nuclear scientist, who drove him to the brink of violence with her paranoid jealousies. And he fell in love with two sisters, who wrote a book about him mocking his every word and deed. And, finally, a tabloid spy succeeded in filming him having sex with two hookers in St Petersburg, one of whom was only fifteen; and the resulting scandal shattered his reputation in his home country.

  Andrei became addicted to alcohol, heroin, cocaine and chocolate. His body weight ballooned. He became a parody figure.

  But at the age of fifty, Andrei went into training again, determined to halt the decline. He attempted to win a place at the forthcoming Olympics, but failed to make the grade in any of the qualifying events. Andrei was still a strong, fit man. But he was no longer the fastest sprinter in the world, or the best swimmer, or the strongest weightlifter. He was, of course, over the hill. His friends advised him to try the marathon, traditionally the event in which older athletes can still credibly compete.

  And so Andrei spent five years training for the marathon; and then he ran five marathons in five days, following in the footsteps of the ageing heart-diseased Ranulph Fiennes, who achieved a similar feat in the late twentieth century. The difference is that Fiennes’s triumph was to actually complete all his events, at painstakingly slow speed. But Andrei ran and won all five marathons, at a terrifying pace. And, after breaking the world marathon records five times in a row, he finished each race with a sprint of legendary and astonishing swiftness.