The Destructives (35 page)

She sobbed with anger. Had never felt so overwhelmed by it. As if the breakers in the Doxa had been removed so that all that communal hatred was channelled into her: the anger at being driven away from Earth. The woods and rivers. Lost lovers. Lost family. Denied mammalian comforts, forced to live on an icy rock, just because they wanted meaningful work, not the distracting status games that work had become. She fell onto her knees, gasping, and looked up at him with a tear-streaked, twisted face. He was unmoved.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

She was out of breath.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She wondered what for.

“I’m sorry that what you said doesn’t upset me. Or offend me. I’m not indifferent to you. It’s just…” he tapped at his scars again… “Everything you say makes sense but no one gives a shit.”

She wondered if she could fix him. Reverse the damage caused by the weirdcore. Neuronal plasticity. Route around damage. Help him back to true feeling.

“It’s the Doxa,” she said. “I’m not normally that angry.” She felt clear and purged of her grievances.

“Doxa?”

He helped her back onto her feet.

“I am connected to everyone on the campus through Doxa. It’s our version of the Restoration. Except where the Restoration is a dead archive of objects and loops, ours is a living repository of emotions and memory.”

A thought passed through his features like the shadow of a gull across blue water. He tried to repress it but she saw how this thought, this realisation, changed his bearing subtly and entirely.

“How are you connected to Doxa?” he asked.

She explained about the stripe: an array of quantum interference detectors implanted throughout the brain structure, reading salient patterns in the brain activity. These patterns were captured by the tech embedded throughout the colony and in their wetsuits, and transmitted to Doxa. The striping of a community had been in the experimental stage throughout the Seizure; they had found a way of making the link take input and output, and more crucially, encoding it in a biological substrate meant there was no need to translate the neuronal signals. Everything could stay analogue. “The link is a new kind of corpus callosum,” she explained. “We’ve taken the cabling joining the two hemispheres of the brain and replicated it wirelessly, hooking us up to the wider brain of Doxa.”

They resumed walking. She felt a little high, full of happy hormones after the release of tension. She had torn a strip off him, and it had felt sexual. God, how contrary of her. To discover this peculiar desire for the enemy. There was rohypnol in the infirmary. She could dose herself and jump right in.

“We are vulnerable,” she said. “The colony’s best hope of survival is cooperation. The sharing of knowledge. And emotional understanding too. As you said, space is hard on a marriage. In our planning for Europa, we researched previous attempts at forming a quantified community. We didn’t want to make the same mistakes as the early quants – the psychosis induced by simulated people and the Red Men, the people who died under the Process in Sussex. We started collating insight from early soshul and family data hearths. Emergence destroyed most of it, but we were able to locate, here and there, intact archives.”

“And then you found the hearth of the Horbo family.”

“Yes. And the proto-emergence living there. Matthias found a way of communicating with it. He explained it to me as a kind of base code for emergence. A back door that we could use, if we were careful, and access emergence tech. It brought a sailship into orbit and set a course for us. We established life support in the ship and packed our bags. When we tried to bring the emergence with us, there was an explosion. We lost a few people but we decided to use the disaster to cover our departure.”

“But you can never go home.”

“We had an escape route. Ballurian left his agency Death Ray with Matthias, if we needed a sailship to pick us up.”

They climbed up to the aerie overlooking the hydroponics domes and the microfauna farms, cubes of weighted nettings swaying in the lake’s downward cyclonic current.

He gestured to the dark clusters swirling in the netting. “Prawns?” he asked.

“I prefer microfauna and megafauna. The fishers have named the indigenous species. You’ll have to ask them.”

“I thought you were all connected,” he pointed to his head. “Doxa?”

She took his hand, and pressed it against his heart.

“We share body memory. Flashes of insight. Deep emotions. Not nouns.”

Through the gloomy green water, the dark shapes of approaching craft. The fishers were returning, a flotilla of submarines trailing the daily catch in their nets. Silently, Theodore and Reckon watched the submarines dock. Spotlights sliced the dark water into columns. The fishers swam out to transfer the still-living catch to the pens, a wriggling ball of wormy microfauna from which they set aside, here and there, a stray cephalopod. The pens were infused with bubble ladders of carbon dioxide. The marine ecosystem was dependent upon the banks of endolithic fungi and algae that grew around the geothermic vents on the lakebed. Working with Turigon, they had accelerated the growth rate of the algae to support larger and diverse organisms: their first act of terraforming.

She recognised Hamman Kiki moving among the fishers, checking their progress as they secured the nets back on board. A single strong kick propelled him three metres.

“The last fish of the day,” said Reckon.

“Earth day?”

“Europan day. Measured according to our orbit of Jupiter. Equivalent to three and half Earth days.”

Theodore peered down at the docks. The young fishers in their pressure suits congratulated each other with an inverted and more sinuous variation of the traditional high five.

“Interesting. The way they low-five each other.”

“You approve?”

“I wonder if it is a sign of heliodeficiency.” His face bathed in the green light rippling off the deep water. “The lifegiving sun is the origin point of religion and therefore culture. Your sun is Jupiter. The death giver. You will never look up for inspiration. You will never put your hands in the air to give thanks.”

She saw the colony through Theodore’s eyes. The shabby plastic tables in the refectory. The terrible psychofuel they served at the bar. He had thoughtlessly asked for whisky or beer. The faint but constant smell of smoked fish. The gloomy corridors where no one had bothered to fix the lights. The absence of the colony elders, who had withdrawn into Doxa. She kept forgetting that he lived apart from Doxa.

At his request, they sat in the bar and watched the fishers party. Hamman Kiki went around the party with the pale girl with the silver bob. Small-hipped. She wore a vial around her neck into which Hamman poured two fingers of psychoactive tincture. The fishers took their turns in bending down, as if in supplication to this girl, to drink from the vial. The tincture removed the breakers on positive emotional feedback, allowing the group to get high off one another’s joy.

“Generation Ex,” said Theodore. “Generation Extra-Terrestrial.”

His breath had a high-octane whiff, and the layers of his watchful gaze had been smeared together by the alcohol into an intellectual leer. Watching the young fishers cavort, he judged and desired them. He measured how far they had deviated from the norm, and whether that deviation matched his own. Low-gravity and alcohol were never a good combination. She knew from his bloods that he shouldn’t be drinking. That he had problems with drink. She took sidelong glances at the worst of him as he nodded his head in time to the music, and then ahead of the beat, as if willing it faster, more intense. The accelerator.

At a signal from Hamman, the lightshow began. The furious striping of Jupiter was projected over lolling heads and swaying bodies. The music was synthesized oblivion. Doxa overwhelmed her. She found herself dancing among the fishers, her hands on somebody’s abs. Waves of creamy toxins and spotted storms projected onto a male torso. The eyes of the fishers, averted from one another, were dark and unreadable. They met in Doxa. All of them. Except for Theodore. He stood apart from the dance, drunk, sheathed in the projection of Jupiter’s swirling gaseous surface, his face a violent red vortex.

22

DOXA

At the centre of a round table, there was a large black egg suspended in a transparent casket of water. Ballurian and the other senior members of faculty sat around the table in patient Doxic concentration. Hamman Kiki stood outside of the circle, veins crackling beneath his pale cranium. As with all the fishers, he had been raised on her antifreeze serum and the long-term effects were becoming apparent. Something of the icefish larvae about him. Genetic transference. Impossible, but still – she should take a look at his bloods.

The domed ceiling was transparent to the waters of Lake Tethys. Doxic art decorated the room. The variable frequencies of emotion expressed in pure slabs of light. Two empty seats had been set aside for Theodore and Reckon. As he came out of meditation, Ballurian’s expression tightened, focused upon Theodore, seeking in the stranger’s movements some clue as to his intention. His mission. Then Ballurian blinked and became hospitable.

“The black egg is part of Doxa’s reproductive cycle. It’s a gift to you.” The large man rose from his seat, unclipped the casket from the table, and placed it before Theodore. Ballurian did not walk with the low-grav hop. His gown was weighted, so that his gait had the substance befitting a leader.

He continued, “The black egg is fertilised and grows within the skirts of Doxa. It hatches and tiny planula drift down to the vent dunes in the lake bed and form a polyp. This polyp feeds on the microrganisms that can survive in the vents. Over time, the polyp develops into a tiny colony itself, linked together by feeding tubes. It can take years for the colony to grow and transform itself into cephalopods, which then float free to begin a new phase of life. We accelerate the strongest of these to become new Doxa. The black egg reminds us that the life cycle of an organism contains transformation after transformation.”

Reckon said, “When we arrived, we found life in the waters. We have brought that life on. Accelerated it. Introduced diversity and increased the carrying capacity of the ecosystem.”

“So new life is possible on Europa,” said Theodore. “But not for humans.”

Ballurian put a hand on the shoulder of his son.

“We brought our children with us. But they have grown up. Soon they will want to reproduce. The future of the colony is dependent upon it. We want full-blooded humans. I would rather not tinker with the genome to the extent that their offspring cease to be human.”

“We are life bringers,” said Turigon. The scientist was lean and careless of his appearance, his ill-fitting robe hung off him like a surgical gown. Reckon found his thick yellow fingernails particularly repulsive. Turigon was terminally ill. Like Gregory had been. She should be more sympathetic.

From out of the ruin of his body, Turigon spoke with such light. “Life is change. Only the dead stay the same. We believe in change.” The grey wisps of hair around his jaundiced pate – it was as if he had worked himself into an early grave, and then kept working. No more longevity treatments for him. With a frail hand, he gestured at Theodore. “We regard you as an agent of stasis. An accelerator of delusion.”

She had been avoiding Theodore since the fisher party. Because of his drunken leer. Because of the narcotic pleasure she had taken in being angry toward him. Instead, she returned to the solitary discipline of her work and made significant progress with the reproductive cycle of the icefish. There was not one solution to the problem of gravity but she was close to devising a program applicable to the particularities of each trimester. While she drew up this treatment plan, Theodore was confined to quarters. After five days of solitude, he bargained his way into her laboratory, and asked her to set up a meeting with the leadership. So that he could plead his case. And what did he want, she asked? To return to the sailship or stay in the colony? Did he crave their acceptance.? Or just hers? He didn’t answer.

Pleasantries over, Ballurian questioned Theodore directly. “You said that your wife and client threw you overboard. Who is your client?”

Theodore said, “My client was Magnusson.”

Ballurian laughed in recognition at the name.

“
Magnusson
. The same old arguments among the same old men. He came all this way?”

“With six of his children. He wants the same as you. To break the ark.”

“Him and his ark. If he is so concerned with Earth, what is he doing out here?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Of course. You are the messenger who does not remember the message. Do you know what that says to me? That you
are
the message.”

Turigon leant forward, and with his zombie grin, said, “And the message is: I found you.”

“I know one good reply to that message,” said Hamman, working his violent tapered jaw.

“Tell me more about Magnusson,” said Ballurian.

Theodore explained about the Europan Claim the Destructives inserted into the Restoration, then pointed out that thanks to this work, Ballurian and the rest of the colony now had legal rights over Europa. They had already bested Magnusson.

“So you don’t need to hide anymore,” said Theodore. “You own Europa.”

“Ownership is not important,” said Ballurian. “That is where we differ from Magnusson. If we wanted to own shit, we would have stayed on Earth.”

“Breaking the ark,” said Reckon, “frames the solution to our problem as an act of destruction. Not an act of creation.”

Her reflection glimmered in the shell-sheen of the black egg. Thoughts of creation came with a surge of positive feeling from Doxa. She felt a dizzy passion to share and create. She wanted to work on Theodore. Repair his damage, restore his capacity to feel the deep thrill of their existence – a colony of men and women holding hands on the edge of the abyss.

“Is Magnusson waiting in orbit?” asked Hamman, brooding in his dark wetsuit. “Are you going to signal him?”