The Destructives (33 page)

“We? Where are the rest of the faculty? Or is everyone dead by now?”

His dry humour appealed to her. And he was different. Obviously, men of his type remained as morally compromised as ever. Accelerators of distraction and delusion, keen to waltz around the meta-meeting for a few bars. He proceeded as if she would ignore the blood on his sensesuit, the burns on the back of his hand.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’ll tell you everything. Rest assured. But I would like a strong drink first. Perhaps some sleep. I wasn’t sure the shielding on the pod would survive the radiation belt. And then I flew into the ice. If I wasn’t emotionally cauterised…” he traced his weirdcore scars with his fingertips, just in case she had failed to notice them, “…then I would have entirely lost my shit.”

She released the door to the infirmary, and asked him to go through so that the quarantine procedure could begin. He took off his sensesuit, stripped down to his vest and pants, and she noted the gold wedding ring on his finger.

“That will have to come off too,” she said. He twisted the ring past his knuckle, grimacing as he did so, and then put it on the table. He removed the rest of his clothes. His thigh muscles were more developed than his biceps. She would devise an exercise regime for him so that he could maintain his form under the too-forgiving gravity of Europa.

He emerged from the shower in a paper gown. She knocked on the security glass to draw his attention to a lidded beaker of clear liquid on the nearby table. He picked it up, tilted it under the light and inspected the wobble of the meniscus.

“What is this?”

“A purgative.”

“When I asked for a strong drink, that wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“I need to inspect your digestive flora. The colony has to be careful of bad influences.”

He didn’t want to drink it. He was suspicious of it. Someone had dosed him before.

“I have to warn you. I am entirely a bad influence,” he said.

“No doubt. But you can be contained. The bacteria in your large intestine activates certain genes within your brain and they interfere with–” she was going to say
our link with Doxa
but decided against it, “–how we work here.”

“Gut instinct,” he said.

“Exactly. The termite eats wood because its indigestinal parasites crave it. We want to avoid unnecessary behaviours of that ilk here.”

She watched him drink the purgative. It was fast acting. She dimmed the observation glass as he staggered to the toilet, closed her eyes, reached into Doxa for responses to her first encounter. The chorus sighed at her admiration of his naked form. She put one clear insight to Doxa.

He followed our path
.

We thought we had disappeared
.

But everything leaves a trace.

He is hard to read
. The weirdcore damage and something else, at the neuronal level.

Take a closer look
.

His bloods and stool samples were consistent with a year in space travel. His bad character was apparent in his denuded bone structure, fibre deficiency, markers of liver damage and distorted red blood cells. A relapsed alcoholic. His radiation levels were elevated. Seriously elevated thanks to Jupiter’s merciless wielding of the radiation belt. Within ten years of passing through Jupiter’s radiation, a quarter of the faculty had developed cancers. To survive, the colony had been forced to go back to quantification: invasive telemetry to detect early signs of rogue cells. Ballurian was adamant that he would not submit them to the Process. That early attempt at algorithmic quantification had been a disaster for all who went under it. So between the faculty, they invented something less rigid, more thoughtful, and this was Doxa. An exosomatic memory and emotional centre hosted on a genetically modified cephalopod. A creature the size of a city. It feels like something to be a city.

She had work to do. She wanted to make a closer inspection of Theodore’s brain, for which she would have to break quarantine. She smoothed out the tired shadows under her brown eyes. In the infirmary, he was still wearing his paper gown, and had not changed into the clothes assigned to him: a brown shirt and blue trousers with white piping up the side. From Gregory’s wardrobe.

She felt the intense scrutiny of Theodore’s gaze, the way he took in the layers of her. Where men were concerned, she was not perceptive, and had become indifferent to their occluded hearts.

She said, “You can change out of the gown now, if you’d like.”

“I would like my sensesuit back.”

She shook her head.

He held up Gregory’s trousers, and gazed with concern at the white piping running down the seams.

“You’ve been marooned here for a long time, haven’t you?”

“Fashion is not our main concern.”

“Because you are intellectuals.”

“Yes,” she was confident in that assertion.

“Surfaces are important,” he said. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that answers can only be found in the depths of things. In their guts. Sometimes, what you are looking for is right there, written all over the face.” He was alluding to his scars, and perhaps to her blackness also. Attempting to connect the two and form a bond of outsiderness.

She instructed him to lie down, then brought the neuronal scanner down low to his skull, and flicked it on. His mind was a city at night.

“You can tunnel down into my synapses in search of the truth or you could just ask me,” he said, trying to catch her eye from behind the scanner.

Neuronal damage. But it wasn’t just weirdcore. She recognised the scatter pattern of altered cells consistent with optogenetic manipulation. Matthias’ work. She hesitated. And in response, his eyelid flickered. Not animal fear. A philosophical fear. A quiet resignation at his own mortality.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Your brain damage is familiar to me. You met Matthias.”

He nodded.

“Did he bring you here?”

Theodore shook his head.

“Matthias is dead.”

“Did he tell you how to find us?”

“Not directly. But you have been in contact with him, while on Europa.”

This was a guess. An informed one, but the readings were clear: he was uncertain of this assertion. In fact, he was uncertain of far more than his confident manner let on.

He went to sit up, to speak to her face to face. She applied gentle pressure to his shoulder so that he remained under the scanner.

“Were you in contact with him?” His physiological readings were elevated. “Not just chitchat. But serious data transfer between Matthias and here.”

He was excited, beginning to apprehend hidden connections.

“Yes. We were.” she said. “It’s been two years since we last had contact from Matthias.”

“You remained undetected all that time.”

“Like the bacteria in a gut. The bacteria
Toxoplasma gondii
, when active in the stomachs of mice, makes them attracted to cats. The prey is manipulated so that it falls in love with its predator, just so the bacteria can complete its life cycle in the gut of the cat.”

“That’s so romantic.”

His arms were flat by his side, and yet, by straining a finger, he was able to snag the corner of her labcoat.

“I’m not here to manipulate you,” he said.

She turned away, went over to the tray holding his possessions, and handed them over to him.

“You can put your wedding ring back on now, if you would like.”

He worked the gold band back over his finger.

“When do I meet the rest of the colony?” he asked.

“When I declare you safe for contact.”

“Am I carrying a disease?”

“Some kinds of infection are particularly dangerous to a community such as ours. We will proceed carefully.”

“But you have exposed yourself to me?”

She smiled.

“Yes. That was why I was chosen.”

“Because you are expendable?” Another attempt to bond with her.

“Because I have experience of men like you.”

In her laboratory, she transferred a new batch of icefish to the tank. One sank immediately, another tried an experimental flick of its tail. Even if this batch failed like all the others, then it could still be harvested for cryoprotective serum. That was how she would leave Europa, when the time came: in suspended animation, locked in a lead casket with antifreeze in her veins.

In the tank, the icefish found their rhythm. She timed and tracked their movements as she had a hundred times before. The patience of a saint is infinitesimal compared to the patience of a scientist. This was the seventh batch to be spliced with a sequence of turtle leech DNA.

There was precedent in human embryonic formation for in vitro adaptations to exterior environmental conditions. There were recorded instances of human embryos adapting to the nutritional environment of their mothers. Children born to mothers raised in starvation conditions retained fat more easily, and developed obesity when transplanted to a land of plenty. The turtle leech was the first species to have made in vitro adjustments according to prevailing gravity. The question was could that adaptive sequence be transferred to a larger species – the crocodile icefish. Gregory had believed not. He said that no ecosystem had developed under changing gravitational conditions and therefore gravitational adaptation was not a pathway for biological organisms. “Space resists organic life at every turn,” he said. “But, to emergences, space offers resources and power in abundance. Space is their Eden. It is their dark garden.”

The last time she made love to Gregory, his cancer hurt him. The emotional breakers in Doxa gave her a muted translation of that pain; it crackled at the edge of her perception, like the foreshadow of a migraine. He touched her carefully, at first, because it would be the last time, and then he was the greediest thinnest man she had ever known. Like the cancer wanted to fuck her too. The final fuckadee-doo. A last lingering kiss.

Gregory found enough strength to keep his intentions from her. The young surface ice reflects heat, so the exterior of Gregory’s suit would be somewhere in the low hundred Kelvins. She imagined Jupiter overhead, its malignant reflection filling the visor of his helmet.

Before he was ill, they would lie in bed together and talk about all the things they missed about Earth: for her, cigarettes, new shoes, walking into a party and not knowing anyone there, the beach, the smell of freshly turned soil, clouds, her artist friends; for him, hot salt beef bagels at midnight, waking to the peal of church bells, the crunch of frosty grass underfoot, and so on. They could play this game all night, and it never depressed her, because no matter how the long the list of missing things, it was outweighed by what they had found: not each other, Europa was far more important than love. On Europa, they mattered. More than that, they were building a pathway to the stars.

She must have fallen asleep. Painfully, she levered herself up from her desk. In the tank, the icefish swam wrongly into one another.

21

HAMMAN KIKI

Reckon visited Theodore twice a day while she waited for Ballurian to decide what to do with him, a decision that rested on learning the location of Theodore’s colleagues. Theodore said that he could not remember. Forgetting and blackouts were consistent with the neuronal damage she had observed in the lab.

He stood on the other side of the glass, dressed in Gregory’s old clothes. What had she been thinking, giving him those to wear.

‘‘I think I was betrayed,” Theodore said. “By my wife. And my client.”

“How so?”

“They threw me overboard.”

He took off his wedding ring and let it roll away. Reckon inspected her braids, adjusted the white thread running through the smoky hair.

“You must have
really
upset your wife.”

“I have been drinking again. And we had a deal concerning monogamy, and I broke that too.”

Reckon stepped toward the partition.

“So. There’s no one in orbit waiting for you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He wanted it both ways. To keep the threat of a larger force in play while at the same time showing willing to transfer his allegiance to the colony.

Reckon said, her palms against the glass, “Tell me what happened exactly.”

“I can’t. It’s a blur. I remember an argument. One of those arguments that you are in before you’re even aware of it. I said things. Bad things but I don’t think I meant them. Space travel is hard on a marriage. And then security were on me. And there was chaos, and I was in a pod.”

“So you don’t remember?”

“If I’m here, it’s a fair inference that my wife had something to do with it. She was definitely upset with me. But I didn’t deserve to be thrown into deep space.”

“Thrown at an inhabited moon, not outer space.”

“I was lucky. Pods home in on other pods. According to my instruments, there are active pods in this colony.”

She stepped back from the glass. Her ghostly handprints evaporated.

She said, “We need to know if your Destructives are still out there.”

Theodore said, “Can’t you scan space or something?”

“Jupiter bathes Europa in a lot of noise.”

“Do you get many visitors?”

“You are the first. We had a line of communication to Earth. As far as I can tell, you cut that line, and then you came to look for us. That could be interpreted as an act of aggression.”

“Hell of a long way to come just to start a fight.”

“If you were in my position, what would you do with you?”

He smiled, and gestured at the infirmary and the moon pools beyond.

“I don’t know what your position is.”

“Take a guess. Infer,” she insisted.

“My guess is that we’re all vulnerable out here.”

She returned to her laboratory, and her work on the graviceptors of the cephalopods. The graviceptors were pouches containing small crystals surrounded by sensitive hair cells. When the cephalopod changed direction, the crystals rolled to the bottom of each pouch, triggering the hair cells, so the organism could orientate itself: know which way was up and which way was down. The pouches were much larger than the equivalent organ in jellyfish raised on Earth, from which she inferred that, in a low gravity environment, graviceptors grew until they attained a particular level of response.