The Turing Test

Dark Eden

Tommy:

Space is a very dangerous place but for me personally it always felt like a safe haven. And especially this time. In the final days before our mission, it seemed to me, just about every newspaper and TV station on the planet had been carrying revelations from Yvette. I couldn’t pull back a curtain without a storm of flashbulbs and a chorus of voices. I couldn’t pass a newsstand without seeing my own name:

Tommy Schneider’s Ex Tells All

Sex-Mad Schneider Broke my Heart

The void between the stars, sub-Euclidean nothingness, life in a metal box with nothing but vacuum beyond its thin skin – all that was fine with me. It always had been fine. Living in space was simple and straightforward compared to trying to live on earth. But now it was beginning to look as if this sanctuary of mine would soon be closed off.

“I think this could be one of the last trips before they shut down the program, yes?” said my crewmate Mehmet Haribey on the shuttle out.

He was a Turkish Air Force officer. We usually had one non-American seeing as the program was nominally international. I’d worked with Mehmet several times before and liked him. He was an open sort of guy, and he had warmth.

“I guess, but I so hope not,” I said. “Who in God’s name would I be if I had to spend my life on Earth?

Mehmet grunted sympathetically.

“Or it would be one of the last trips,” said our captain, Dixon Thorley, “if it wasn’t for the fact that this time we are going to find life.”

Mehmet and I exchanged glances. Dixon Thorley was okay when he was just being himself, but he found it very hard to forget that God Almighty had called him personally to carry the good news of Jesus Christ to alien civilizations. It was a tale he had told to many a rapt congregation and many a respectful interviewer on the religious networks: God had put him on Earth to perform this one task. And for him it was just inconceivable that the program could end without contact with any other life form.

Poor guy, I suddenly thought. He’s in for quite a fall.

The fact was that over two hundred fantastically expensive missions had traversed the galaxy and found no trace of any living thing. Human beings had trodden lifeless planets right across the Milky Way and now it looked as if their footprints would just fill up with stardust again. Silence would return like nightfall to all those empty solar systems whose planets held nothing but rock and gas and ice and sterile water.

I say ‘like nightfall’, but really it’s not the right word to use because of course in any solar system it’s really always daytime, always sunny everywhere, except in the tiny slivers of space that lie on the lee side of planets, and in the even more miniscule areas on planetary surfaces that are cut off from the light by clouds. As we approached it in the shuttle, the galactic ship Defiant basked ahead of us in a perpetual noontime, an enormous cylinder half a kilometre long, covered in gigantic pylons that made it look like some kind of weird spiny sea-slug. It was huge, but 99% of it was engine. The habitable portion was a cramped little cabin in the middle. We crawled through into it from the shuttle, closed the airlock doors behind us, and gratefully breathed in the familiar space smell of dirty socks, stale urine and potato mash. How I loved that smell! It was the smell of freedom. It was like coming home.

“God I’ll miss this,” I said as I began switching on monitors.

(I’ve been thinking about this recently – I’ve had a lot of time to think – and what I’ve come to realize is that I have always been most at home in transient, and dangerous places. Even when I was a kid, danger was always somehow reassuring to me. Safety and security always made me feel uneasy and afraid.)

Dixon flicked the radio on to a county music station and we settled into our positions and started running through the pre-activation procedures. Soon we’d start the ship’s gravitonic engine and then we’d head out into deeper space while the engine built up power for the leap. Finally – blam! – we’d let it loose. In a single gigantic surge of energy it would drive us out in a direction that was perpendicular to all three dimensions of Euclidian space. A few seconds later, we’d bob up again like a cork. We’d be back in Euclidean space but we’d be a thousand light-years away from home.

“The spaceman who wrecked my life,” said the radio, “New revelations from Yvette Schneider! Exclusively in tomorrow’s Daily Lance.”

“Poor Tommy,” Mehmet said. “You can’t get away from it, can you?”

Dixon gave a snort, but refrained from saying anything. He’d already told me that as far as he was concerned I’d only got what I deserved. And of course he was right. I didn’t expect sympathy. But I couldn’t help responding to the self-righteous baying of the radio ad.

“There’s always another side to the story,” I muttered. “I behaved badly, yes. But there were things she did too.”

This was too much for Dixon.

“Tommy, you just can’t…”

But he was interrupted by a voice from Mission Control.

“Tommy, Dixon, Mehmet, this is going to come as a shock…”

It was Kate Grantham, the director of the Galaxy Project, in person.

“The mission is cancelled boys. The whole project has been terminated. Sorry, but the President has decided to pull the plug, and as the US funds 95% of the project, that means the end of the project itself. We all knew this was likely to happen soon but I’m afraid it’s happening now. The shuttle is coming back for you. Please shut all systems down again with immediate effect. The Defiant will be mothballed pending further decisions.”

“But excuse me the project has barely started!” Mehmet protested. “Of course we haven’t found life yet. Doesn’t the President know how big space is? The galaxy would have to have been bursting at the seams with life for us to have found it already.”

“The President has been thoroughly briefed,” the director said shortly. “He has a number of competing priorities to consider.” And she couldn’t help adding: “The bad publicity around Tommy hasn’t helped.”

“Oh that is logical!” I burst out. “One of the explorers gets caught cheating on his wife, so cancel the exploration of the entire galaxy.”

Dixon switched off the radio.

“I must say,” he said, “I’ve never been able to understand how people can do things they know are wrong and then still get indignant when it causes problems for them and other people. But that’s for another time. Right now, crewmates, I’ve got a simple proposition to make. We have power and provisions enough for one trip. Why not do it anyway?”

“Dixon!” Mehmet gave an incredulous laugh. “This isn’t like you!”

“I’m quite serious,” he said. “How can they stop us?”

“How about by sending an interceptor after us?” I said.

There were interceptors in Earth orbit, a dozen of them at least at any one time, looking out for illegally launched communications satellites and for the killer satellites which big business and organized crime sent up to disrupt the communications of rivals.

“It’ll take them an hour to figure out what we’re doing,” said Dixon, “and an hour after that to decide what to do about it. By then we’ll only be about six hours from the leap point. And it could take six hours at least for one of them to catch up with us. It’s not as if they are going to try and laser us.”

“Yes but…” Mehmet stopped himself and laughed. “Well, okay. This is a very stupid idea. But, yes, I’m up for it if Tommy is.”

I thought about the alternative. Going back to live among daily revelations of my own duplicity. Walking down a street in which every passerby knew what, precisely, I liked to do in bed. And maybe never again coming up to this place – or maybe non-place would be a better word – which was where, more than anywhere else, I actually felt at home.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in. Even though it’ll mean a court martial when we get back. Who cares?”

“Oh we’ll be okay,” Mehmet said. “The public will love us won’t they? The public will think we’re heroes.”

“It’s the goddam taxpaying public who’ve pulled the plug on us,” I pointed out.

“Yes, I know,” said Mehmet. “But that makes no difference. When they see us defying the bureaucrats they’ll yell at the bureaucrats to leave us alone and get off our backs. They won’t remember that the bureaucrats were acting at their own request. They never do!”

So we were agreed. Contrary to our orders we started charging up the engine.

Angela:

People laughed at me when I put myself forward for secondment to the UN’s ‘space-cop’ service. The British police forces had only been given a quota of four secondees altogether and I was only twenty-five, black and a woman. Plus I was only an ordinary uniformed cop and had no training as a pilot beyond what I’d done with the air cadets at school. But then my mum and dad had always taught me to believe in myself.

Yeah and look at me now, I thought, as our hundred million dollar interceptor passed five thousand miles above India. Who says a black girl from Peckham can’t get on in the world?

This was my third patrol. My captain Mike Tennison and I were looking for Mafia satellites, which we would either tow to destruction points or, if they were very small, simply nudge down into the atmosphere to burn up like meteorites.

Mike was an air force secondee, a former RAF fighter pilot. He was decent, sporty, stiff upper lipped. He was a brave man too. He’d served and won medals in several recent wars. But something was happening to him that neither he nor anyone else could have predicted. He was becoming a cosmophobe. Space was starting to scare him.

“It’s a silly thing,” he’d confided on our previous mission, “I’ve flown in all kinds of dangerous situations and never thought twice about it. I didn’t think twice about this at first either. But now I can’t seem to forget that out here I’m not really flying at all, I’m just constantly falling. Please don’t tell anyone, Angela. I’ll get over it I’m sure.”

But it was getting pretty obvious to me that he wasn’t going to get over it. His face streamed with sweat. He kept wiping his hands so as to be able to grip properly on the controls. And his eyes, his weary frightened eyes, were just unbearable to look at. I was going to have to confront him about it at the end of this mission, I knew. I couldn’t sweep this under the carpet any more. He was putting us both in danger.

But that was for later. Right now we were heading towards a rogue satellite which had been launched a few days ago from Kazakhstan. We were just about to get close enough to actually see the thing when we received an unexpected order from ground base. The intergalactic ship Defiant had been hi-jacked by its own crew and they were taking it out of orbit. We were the nearest interceptor and we were to go after it, grapple it if necessary and prevent it from making a leap.

“Jesus!” I breathed.

Mike gave a kind of groan. I realized that up to that point he’d coping by counting off the minutes until we could drop out of orbit and return to base.

But he was a professional. He put his fear to one side, located the Defiant and calculated a trajectory which would intercept theirs in about three and a half hours. Then off we went, me leaning out of the window to stick a flashing blue light on the roof.

Well, okay, I made that last bit up.

Tommy:

They used to say there were only five people on Earth who really understood how a gravitonic engine worked, and I certainly wasn’t one of them. What I do know is that, for a few seconds at the point of leap, what an engine does is generate an artificial gravitational field that converts the space around it into the equivalent of a black hole. And because an engine works by gravity, it can’t be used too close to any large object with a gravitational field of its own. This would distort the field and would result, at minimum, in the ship emerging in a completely different place from the target area. At maximum it could result in the field failing to properly enclose the ship, so that the ship itself would be damaged or destroyed.

This was why, at the rate of acceleration that the Defiant could achieve with its conventional Euclidean drive, it would be eight hours before we could reach the nearest safe point to make our leap through sub-Euclidean space: the so-called leap point. It would take half that time in any case for the engine to build up a sufficient charge.

It was after we’d been going for about an hour that we became aware that we were being followed.

“It’s gaining on us too,” Mehmet said.

“Shall we talk to them?” Dixon asked.

I thought better not. But the others decided we should call and tell them if they didn’t back off, they might get sucked down into sub-E with us when the time came to make a leap.

We were surprised to hear the voice of a self-assured young Englishwoman in reply.

“We’ll reach you long before you get to your leap point,” she said in response to our threat, “and we are certainly not going to back off.”

Dixon winked at us.

“Listen,” he radioed back, “When you get close to us, we leap, even if we’re four hours short of the leap point. It’s up to you.”

Mehmet looked at me with an expression that said, “He’s bluffing, yeah?”

But he hadn’t seen the gleam in Dixon’s eye, the mad religious gleam as he turned back to watch the power monitor.

The interceptor drew closer. There was no sign of them backing off.

“I meant what I said,” Dixon told the orbit-cops.

“So did I,” said the young woman who we now knew to be Sergeant Angela Young.

Dixon shrugged.

“Okay, then,” he said, “here goes or it’ll be too late! God save us all.”

“What!” Mehmet and I simultaneously yelled. We were still three and a half hours short of a safe leap point!

But Dixon laughed as he switched on the field.

“Thy will be done!” he hollered as we plunged into the pit.

Angela:

Purple lightening prickled up and down the Defiant’s pylons, and the stars all around it shuddered like a mirage. Our vehicle shook violently, its metal groaning with the strain as it was sucked towards the artificial gravity the galactic ship was generating. And then suddenly the stars and moon and sun and earth all vanished and all around us, in every direction, was something like a huge distorting mirror. It was like when you’re under water and look up and you can’t see the sky or the world outside, only the silvery undersides of waves. Our own faces were there in front of us, little distorted reflections of our frightened faces maybe fifty yards away, peering back at us from a distorted reflection of our cabin window. There was a jolt like an explosion and I vaguely remember hearing a hissing noise coming from somewhere and Mike giving out a despairing groan. Then I blacked out

When I came round again I was in the Defiant, and those three famous galactonauts were looking guiltily down at me like naughty little boys who’ve done a stupid dare and it’s gone wrong.

“Hi, you okay? Listen, I’m…”

“Where’s Mike?”

“Your partner? He’s okay. He’s not come round yet, but he’s okay. Listen, I’m Mehmet Harribey and…”

“…and I’m Dixon Thorley.”

“…and I’m…”

“I know. You’re Tommy Schneider. The famous love rat.”

My head was killing me, and I was very scared and feeling sick, but I was damned if I was going to show any sign of weakness.

“I meant to leap before you got too close to us,” said Dixon, “but I must have left it too late because we pulled your interceptor vehicle through sub-E with us. It was very badly damaged but the three of us came over and managed to get you and your crewmate out before the pressure dropped too low.”

“So we did complete the leap then?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid we’re kind of…”

“So where the hell are we?”

“Well, we’re…”

“The truth is,” Mehmet said, “that we don’t exactly know. We’re in intergalactic space, I’m afraid, which… um… is kind of a first. But we believe that the nearest galaxy is our own. So it should still be possible to…um…”

“…to get back to Earth and not suffocate or freeze to death in space – although that is the most likely outcome. Is that how it is?”

“Well, yes, I’m afraid so,” Mehmet laughed ruefully. (I grew to like him best of the three. He was nice-looking, had natural friendly manners, and didn’t come with a reputation either as a religious nut or a serial adulterer. I remembered seeing a photo of him in some magazine with a pretty wife by the Aegean somewhere and three or four pretty little Turkish kids.)

I looked around. The cramped little cabin was about as big as the back of a small delivery truck and it smelled like the boys’ changing room at school, but as far as we knew it was the only habitable place for thousands and thousands of light years: the only place in which a human being could remain intact and alive even for a single second.

“You arseholes,” I told the three of them, and I felt like I was a copper back on the streets of London, pulling up three silly naughty little boys. “You selfish, childish, thoughtless little arseholes.”

They never had a chance to respond because suddenly Mike screamed. He’d opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the wheel of the galaxy outside the porthole.

Tommy:

It was pure hell there for a while. The British guy hollered and roared and grabbed us and snatched at the controls and swore and wept. I got a black eye, Mehmet got his shirt torn, Angela was yelling at us to back off and not make things even worse (but where the hell were we supposed to back off to?) and all of us were getting dangerously close to seeing ourselves just like the Englishman saw us: doomed, doomed to die slowly and horribly in a stuffy tin can with nothing but nothingness outside.

Eventually Dixon managed to get to the medical box and whack a sedative into the guy’s ass.

“He’s afraid of space,” Angela explained as he slumped down.

“A space-cop who’s afraid of space?”

Even Angela reluctantly laughed.

I’d never gone for black girls particularly before, but I found myself noticing that this was one attractive young woman. She was tough, and funny, and sharp – and she looked great. Maybe this was what I’d been looking for all this time, I couldn’t help thinking (as, God help me, I’d thought so many times before). Maybe I’d just been looking in the wrong place?

Yeah, I know, I know. We were in a damaged ship in intergalactic space and so far from home that, if we could pick out our own sun in that billion-star wheel, we’d be seeing it as it was back in the Pleistocene era. And yet even then I was thinking about sex. I guess that is what you call an obsession.

I mean we had a month’s supplies at most. Maybe six week’s oxygen.

But I caught her eye anyway and smiled at her, just to let her know she was appreciated.

Angela:

It turned out that their stupid leap had not only sucked through our interceptor and turned it into scrap, it had also damaged the Defiant itself. Because they’d made the leap too early the artificial gravity of the field had been pulled back toward the Earth by real gravity – that was why Mike and I had been caught inside it. Some of the pylons at the front end of the ship had actually remained outside of the field, and so literally ceased to exist, while others further back had been bent and twisted. This was very bad news. To get home from this distance would take a minimum of three or four leaps, which was pushing things at the best of times, even without a defective engine.

So Dixon, Mehmet and Tommy suited up and went outside to see what repairs they could make, Tommy cheesily asking me if I was sure I’d be okay minding the fort and keeping an eye on Mike. Can you believe that he’d already given me the eye several times? Was this bloke entirely ruled by his dick?

“I’ll be okay,” I said, “and I promise not to answer the phone or to let in any strangers.”

Answer the phone! Even if my mum and dad could have called me up from Earth – even if there was a signal strong enough to reach this far, I mean – I’d have been dead a million years by the time their message got to me.

Pretty soon all three gallant galactonauts were back. They’d been able to straighten out a few bent pylons. But now something else was on their minds and they rushed to the sensor panel and started playing around with frequencies and filters like kids with a new video game.

“There was this dark disc in front of the galaxy,” Tommy explained to me eventually, “Mehmet spotted it first…”

“Never seen anything like it!” Mehmet interrupted. “It was…”

“Here it is!” called Dixon, pointing to a screen.

He’d used radar on whatever it was and it turned out to be a solid object the size of earth, a planet in other words.

“There’s a thing called the Ballantyne effect,” Mehmet explained to me. “A ship’s trajectory through sub-E space is always twisted in the direction of any large mass that’s in the vicinity of its notional exit point. It means that you always end up nearer to stars that you would predict on chance alone. But who’d have thought there would be any sort of object out here to pull us towards it, eh?”

“So it’s a planet with no sun,” I said.

“Yes,” Dixon told me excitedly. “A planet all on its own. It’s been assumed for a long time that they existed, but we’ve never found one before.”

“Well so what?” I said. “What use is it to us? Even Pluto would be hospitable by comparison with a planet that has no sun at all and Pluto is so cold it’s covered with solid methane. We’re trying to survive, remember? What use is a dismal place like that?”

“But the thing is, Angela,” Mehmet said excitedly, “the thing is that this planet isn’t cold!”

“And it’s not completely dark either!” said Tommy.

They were all over one another in their haste to show me the evidence. Somehow, even without a sun, this strange object had a surface as warm as Earth’s. Seen in infrared it glowed. In fact, even in the visible spectrum it glowed, though very softly, so softly that against the blazing mass of stars it still seemed dark.

And when Dixon did the spectrometry on the starlight passing round the planet’s edge, he made the most sensational discovery yet. This was a planet with breathable air.

Tommy:

Mehmet, Dixon and I had made a whole career of looking for habitable planets. And now, with very little chance of ever being able to bring the news back to Earth, it looked like we’d finally succeeded, by accident and in the least likely place imaginable.

Of course we had to go and look at it. The thing was only few days away across Euclidean space and a short delay wouldn’t make our next leap any more or less likely to succeed. The only difficulty was Angela and Mike, but she shrugged and said okay, if she was going to die, she might as well see this first – and he was strapped to a bunk and peacefully off with the fairies.

Angela:

When we’d got the Defiant in orbit, we climbed into the ship’s landing capsule and sank down towards a surface that we could now clearly see to be gently glowing over much of its area, as if the planet was covered by a huge candle-lit city. But it wasn’t a city. It was a forest. It was a shining forest of glowing trees and luminous streams and pools, that filled up all but the highest ground.

The trees were like gnarled oaks, leafless but with shining flowers along their branches. Their trunks were warm to the touch and they constantly pulsed. You could feel it if you touched them. You could even hear it. Hmmmmph – hmmmmph – hmmmmph, they went, and the sound of all of them together combined into a constant hum that pervaded the whole forest. The ground under the trees grew strange leafless flowers that shone like stars. Under the surface of pools and streams waving waterweed carried more shining flowers that made the water luminous, like a swimming pool lit up by underwater lights. And the whole forest was mild and scented like a summer evening on Earth.

“Look at that!” cried Mehmet as something bird-like with neon blue wings swept by overhead.

“Hey, come and see this!” called Dixon, squatting down to look at a clump of small shining flowers like miniature sodium streetlights.

Tommy wandered off in one direction, Mehmet in another. Neither of them said where they were going, and no one asked. Dixon settled down under a tree with his back to its warm trunk. I settled down on the mossy banks of a nearby stream. Strange melodious cries came to us from other parts of the forest. All around us the trees throbbed and hummed and shone under the great wheel of the Milky Way galaxy that filled up most of the sky. Fluttering creatures resembling fluorescent butterflies fed on the shining flowers and in the warm air vents that many of the trees had on their trunks. Bird- and batlike creatures swooped and dived among them.

I was lying by the stream watching little shining fish-things darting around in the water when I remembered that Mike was still inside the capsule.

“Dixon,” I said, “would you mind giving me a hand?”

My voice sounded very strange and looming, like when someone suddenly speaks after a long silence during a night journey in a car. It was as if this planet wasn’t used to human voices.

Tommy:

Angela and Dixon fetched Mike down from the capsule and settled him on the ground, still fast asleep. He came round a few hours later. There was no screaming and yelling this time. He just wandered through the trees like the rest of us and found a place to sit down and stare and try and take it all in. It turned out that he was some kind of amateur naturalist back home – he went on bird-watching holidays and stuff like that with his wife and kids – and now he had a whole new set of plants and animals to explore. It was him that came up with the theory that the trees worked like radiators, pumping water through hot rocks underground, circulating it through their branches, and warming the surrounding air. They got their energy from the planet’s core, he reckoned, instead of from a sun.

Eventually everyone got hungry and we reconvened round the capsule for a share of the rations we’d brought down with us. We supplemented this cautiously with fruit we’d found on the trees. Most of it turned out to be good to eat.

“Isn’t this great?” exclaimed Dixon, munching contentedly, his back against a warm tree-trunk. “This is what it must have been like in Eden before the Fall.”

And Eden is what we decided to call the place.

Angela:

Mehmet was the one I got on best with. He was friendly and interested and fun to be with. Dixon was okay I suppose but I was really angry with him for selfishly doing the leap when Mike and I were so close. I’m not a person that likes to hold grudges but I really did need to get some of that anger off my chest before I could get along with him – and he simply wouldn’t let me. Whenever I tried to challenge him, he just said that God had told him to make the leap: the fact that we’d found Eden was proof of it.

‘I’m sorry I dragged you away from your family and your friends Angela,’ would have been nice, or even: ‘I quite understand why you’re so angry.’

But I wasn’t going to get any of that. Instead it was: ‘Angela, you need to try and accept the will of God.’

The will of God! The arrogant prig! It seems wrong to talk about him like that now, after what’s happened since to the poor bloke, but that’s how I felt at the time.

Mike, on the hand, was really sweet in this context. Free of the role of RAF officer and free of the fear of space, he became a sort of gentle, dreamy, solitary child. He’d spend his time making lists of all the animals and plants he could find, and giving them names.

But Tommy, he really got on my nerves. He tried to be charming and helpful but he was this world-famous lady-killer and he couldn’t forget it. In one way I felt that he just took it for granted that I’d want to fall at his feet, yet in another way he was quite afraid of me and needed to keep testing me out all the time to see if he could get a reaction and work out where he stood with me. So he was complacent and insecure, both at the same time, a weird and seriously irritating combination.

Annoyingly, though, he was just as handsome as he’d always looked on TV, so you couldn’t help looking at him, whether you wanted to or not.

Tommy:

Angela was graceful, funny, natural. I thought she was wonderful. Stranded a million light-years away from home and very probably in the final days of her life, she was dignified and undefeated and unbowed.

I’ve been with all kinds of women in my life – models, film stars, university professors, athletes and, yes, I admit it, even whores – and I guess what everyone says about me is true in a way. Women are not just people to me: they are also a kind of addictive drug. But, and I guess this is the part that many people don’t understand, I really do like women. I mean I just like being with them, I like them as human beings – and I always have. I remember when I was five years old my teacher asked the whole class one day to pair up for a walk in the local park – and all the boys looked for other boys and all the girls looked for other girls, but I risked the ridicule of everyone to ask a girl called Susan if I could hold her hand. I remember another time I was chasing round the school yard with a bunch of boys, yelling and hollering and waving sticks around, when I noticed a bunch of girls quietly playing in a tree. And suddenly I wanted to be in their game with them, their quiet game, and not with the boys at all. That’s how I felt about Angela. I just wanted her to let me join in her game.

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 1^st 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 3^rd 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 4^th 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 5^th, 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 6^th 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 8^th 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 7^th 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 8^th. 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!”

“You don’t get it!” I told her. It was such an old, old script she’d recited there and I felt so weary of it: “None of you get it. I don’t want you to think I’m perfect. I know I’m not. I’m nothing special at all. I’m good at flying space ships, that’s all. I’ve never asked anyone to think I’m perfect. I’ve just wanted someone to make me feel that I’m wanted anyway for what I am. Why is that so hard to understand?”

And then I grabbed her. I honestly don’t know what I intended to do next. To shake her? To beat her against the ground? To rape her?

I never found out because next thing I was in the pool with those little shining fishes darting away all around me.

“I don’t think I told you I was in the British national judo team,” said Angela from the bank.

“No. Now that you mention it, I don’t believe you did.”

Angela:

There was a moment there, looking down at him in the water, when I really panicked. I’d made the wrong decision! I was trapped with a violent brutal man without any possibility of escape!

Then I got a hold on myself. Don’t be so silly, I told myself. You made a choice between this and death, that’s all, and death will always be an option. (Maybe that’s how my ancestors thought too, out in the cane fields? It’s this or death – and death will always be there for us, death will never let us down)

Tommy:

I climbed out of the stream. My anger had vanished, the way anger does, so you wonder where it comes from and where it goes to and whether it’s got anything to do with you at all.

“Since we’re the entire population of this planet,” I said, “I guess we’ve just had World War One.”

That made her laugh. She took my hand again and then we lay down together again in the moss, as if nothing else had happened in between.

Angela:

“Hoom – hoom – hoom” went a starbird far off the forest as we pulled back from each other.

I thought to myself, well there is something about him that is okay. And I cast back in my mind and realised that I’d read many, many bad things about Tommy – that he was a serial adulterer and a liar and all of that – but I’d never actually heard it said, or even hinted at, that he ever hit a woman or beat her up.

And I thought too that, after all, I had been a fool to go straight for the place that would hurt him and frighten him the most, even though, God knows, I had a right to be angry. No one reacts well when you deliberately prod their deepest wounds. And there was some wound in Tommy, some old wound to do with love.

Of course I knew that the time would soon enough come again when I would hate him again and want to do everything in my power to hurt him. There would be a World War Two and a World War Three and a World War Four. But this peaceful place we were in now would still be there, I thought. With any luck it would still be somewhere to come back to.

“Aaaah! – Aaaah! – Aaaah!” called back a second starbird, far off in the opposite direction to the first one.

“Hoom – hoom – hoom,” returned the first. It had got nearer since it last called. It was just across the pool.

“They don’t give a damn, those starbirds, do they?” Tommy said. “They don’t even notice that great wheel burning up there in the sky.”

Tommy:

Angela didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. I was just speaking my thoughts aloud.

But then, five or ten minutes later, after we’d been lying there in silence all that time looking up at the stars, she spoke:

“No they don’t,” she said. “You’re right. This dark Eden, it’s just life to them, isn’t it? It’s just the way things have to be.”