The day of the test came and I remember Rory had been up in his room doing some computer programing. I had had to call him twice, to get him to come down.
‘So,’ Dad said when Rory floated in. ‘Where are all the aliens?’ He held up the prize. A lock knife with a dark, polished wood handle. I salivated as Rory rubbed his chin, oblivious.
Though there are plenty of Earth-like planets – enough to guarantee that there’s intelligent life out there – the Universe is so vast that the likelihood of finding them is vanishingly small. Aliens living, say, only ten million light years away would need to travel at the speed of light for ten million years before they reached us. Which means they’d have to leave their home planets before humans came into existence. And then head over to us on a huge cosmic gamble.
‘But what if they mastered interstellar travel?’ Rory asked.
I smiled.
‘Not possible,’ I said. ‘The amount of energy, even if somehow there was a way around the limits on the speed of light, you would need – would be – well – astronomical.’
‘But an advanced civilisation, with technology expanding in accordance with Moore’s Law, could tap the energy.’
‘What?’ I sneered. ‘Fusion?’
‘Well, maybe fusion. It doesn’t matter. If you could harvest all of the energy on the planet, that would probably be enough.’
‘Not enough. Not if you calculate the rate at which you’d be using the energy and multiply it by the distances you’d be covering.’ I knew this. I’d researched it. Type I civilisations. That’s what he had stumbled on, just from thinking.
Dad smiled and then winked at me.
Rory scratched his head.
‘Could harness the energy of your star. That would be enough.’
‘What?’
‘A planet would need a star to sustain life. If you could collect all of the sun’s power, that would be enough.’
And now through pure thought he’d stumbled on Type II civilisations. I stopped smiling.
‘You couldn’t do that. It’s impossible,’ I said.
Dad rubbed his hands and smiled at Rory.
‘Or is it?’ Dad said, arching an eyebrow at Rory.
Rory raised his eyebrow with his finger. It annoyed me that he couldn’t do it without physically pushing it with his finger.
‘Wait. What if you, I don’t know, built a thing around the sun that captured all of the energy, or most of it? Then you could have something that self-replicated using the sun’s energy.’
I pushed my chair back along the tile and stood up. I gave him a hate-filled look and left. Later, after I’d accused him of cheating and he’d convinced me that he hadn’t, he said, ‘Statistically speaking, the difference between winning and losing is that over the longer term, losers give up. You give up too quickly,’ he added plainly. He wasn’t being mean or smug or irritating; he was just saying it, as an observation.
‘And that’s how you win, is it?’ I snapped.
‘I don’t care about winning. You can have the knife,’ he said, holding it out to me.
‘Then what is it?’
‘It’s solving the equation. Sometimes you have to keep going to solve it. You give up. There’s no fight in you.’
There’s a tapping on the crown of my head. It is sharp, icy, as if needles are being driven in. My eyes flicker but I’m in the warmth of a dream that draws me back.
‘Okay, fella,’ a voice says now. My eyes open reluctantly and I am drawn from one place to another, colder one. A figure looms heavily in the doorway and for a moment I feel as if I am about to be attacked.
Static. A flash of fluorescence on the sleeve.
‘PC 375 X-ray Tango. Calling for assistance on Lordship Lane East, Dulwich. LAS.’
The police.
My heart begins to race. Somehow, they have found her dead body and have already connected me to her.
‘I didn’t do it,’ I say to him. He puts his hand out in the direction of my face and continues to speak into his shoulder.
‘And uniform. Roger that. Sir, we have paramedics on the way. Can you give me your name?’
‘What? Xander Shute.’ As soon as the words leave my mouth, I curse. If I’d been even a little more awake, I would have given a false name. But he’s caught me under the vapour of sleep.
‘Okay, Xander. Just have a seat where you were and keep your head up. They’ll be along any minute.’
I try to blink some sense into my brain.
‘Paramedics?’ I say at last. The sun has just begun to paint light into the sky and the gold gives everything a dreamlike tint.
‘Yes, sir. You’ve had a nasty injury there. Just keep your face turned up,’ he says and gently eases my head back.
The bottle. The idiot who threw the bottle. The cut must have started bleeding. I touch my head gently, fingers hovering in my hair. The tips come back red. I struggle to my feet but then the world begins to spin, forcing me back down.
‘Officer. Wait,’ I call out to his luminescent back.
He dips his face into the radio on his shoulder. ‘Just sit still. Try not to move, sir,’ he says, making a half-turn away.
‘Really,’ I say. ‘I don’t need paramedics. I’ll be on my way in a second.’
He continues to mutter into his shoulder, holding a palm out towards me to pause me. Then when he has finished his call, he crouches over me.
‘They’re on their way now. I’ll just take some details while we wait. Address?’ he asks and then, catching up to the dirt and the tatters, he adds, ‘Or is there somewhere you can stay?’
I shake my head and he ticks a box on a pocketbook form he is holding.
‘Date of birth?’
‘Thirty, seven, sixty-nine.’
‘Family? Next of kin?’
‘No. Mother’s dead. Father too,’ I say.
‘Okay, fella,’ he says and then takes a serious look at my head. ‘What happened there then?’
I stumble around in my head trying to remember. It just happened, but I can’t immediately catch it. There was a man. A bottle.
‘Tripped,’ I say. The woman in the house obscures everything else, but I can’t tell in this spinning state whether I have done something I need to hide. I could have saved her. Does this make me guilty of some kind of manslaughter?
He writes something in his book, licking the tip of the pen as he does.
‘Where?’ he says.
I straighten up against the door to get a better look at him. He is young. His face has the glow of youth.
‘Where did I trip? I have no idea.’
He looks at me suspiciously.
‘In the park,’ I say then. ‘Hyde Park.’
He smiles a little and rubs his hair. The blond is gold in this light.
‘How did it happen?’
‘I told you. I fell,’ I say, feeling my temper rising.
He swallows and looks at me again, pen poised.
‘How though?’ he says. ‘What made you fall?’
‘I don’t know. It was wet. I fell.’
‘What did you fall on?’
‘The ground.’ I narrow my eyes at his persistence. ‘Does it matter?’
‘On the grass?’ he continues.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Look. I’m feeling better now, Officer. I think I want to go,’ I say and make to get to my feet. I catch the eye of a young woman as she passes. She is no more than curious – probably on her way home after a party – but still I feel the connection she is creating with her passing glance.
‘Hold up, there’s the paramedics now,’ he says, and waves at the ambulance flashing towards us. He helps me back to the ground and continues with the questions as the vehicle draws to a halt. ‘I don’t get it,’ he says then, sniffing the air.