The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “You would break your own Accords?”

  “No. Never. But I would like to witness a birth of a new emergence.”

  “Are class of ‘43 still alive on Europa?”

  “We don’t know. They went deep under the surface of the moon. All that we know is that Matthias was beaming enormous amounts of data to the surface of Europa.”

  “How?”

  “The first sailships established a network of powerful lasers. On asteroids and in orbit around moons. Anywhere without too much of an atmosphere. The lasers propel the sailships on their return trips. They are also used for transmission.”

  She could not tell whether the robot was lying or not. Its body gave off no cues that helped her read its intention in the meta-meeting.

  “Why do I feel like you are manipulating me?”

  The robot raised its index finger again, to point at a zone in the starfield that, to her eyes, appeared to be empty space. She had almost given up on her dreams of greatness. Almost settled for normality. Theodore’s hand in marriage. Space was her lethal ambition. She had schemed for Europa but the ’43 had beaten them to it. Worse, she had created the law that gave the ’43 ownership of Europa. However, if the ’43 were recreating emergence then they would all be killed, and ownership of Europa would pass to her and Magnusson.

  Owning a moon. Steering the future. Before plans can be made, there must be fantasies.

  She imagined the three-sectioned silhouette of a sailship passing across the sun, its surface turbulent and rippling with energy, white holes and curling filaments – the corona straining at gravity’s leash. Codes delaying the deployment of the solar sail until beyond Mercury. A space liner coming alongside the sailship, accelerating to a speed at the very limit of human technology. Security leading a spacewalk between the ships, racing to secure access before the engines burn out, and attach life support systems to the hull. She would have to jump too. Another leap into the void. Hand-in-hand with Theodore, drifting from the liner into the open airlock of the sailship. Magnusson would be there too, in his regal armour, zipping across the gap between the two craft. Would that work? Or would they need to stay behind carbon foam shields throughout the heist. Security could work out the details. Once the Destructives were on board, a second code would be transmitted to deploy the solar sail, its taut black disc forming a pupil against the iris of the sun.

  20

  ICEFISH

  The crocodile icefish, scaleless and white-blooded, swam in ponderous circles around the water tank. It had taken five months for Reckon to mitigate against the effect of low gravity upon the cellular formation of the larvae; the fish still didn’t swim correctly, veering off now and again to the edge of the tank. The fish had a fixed facial expression that she had come to regard as stubborn indignation; that is, indignant at the bad information coming from its body yet refusing to countenance alternatives. The icefish lacked haemoglobin, and used other mechanisms to move oxygen through the body. She took hundreds of fish apart at a genetic level and then put them back together again, and through that intensive study she had concluded that the lack of haemoglobin was a simple maladaptation. Not a trait that helped the fish survive in cold waters but another one of nature’s errors.

  In an adjacent tank, she kept a lifeform native to Europa. The cephalopods. Quiet discs of brainless but complex life, incredibly complex for an off-Earth species. If she could understand how they grew in Europan gravity then perhaps she could induce those qualities in species native to Earth, compensate for differences in gravity, and therefore, create hope that there was a future for humanity beyond the reach of the home planet.

  Without exact Earth gravity, the gestation span off in a lethal direction. Living organisms could compensate for low gravity through exercise and diet. But the quickening of new life needed gravitational pull of 9.80665 metres per second squared. And the early stages of gestation needed that pull constantly – any pregnant woman would have to live inside a personal centrifuge for the full term. Including conception. For human babies, a lack of gravitational loading in the final trimester caused hypotrophy in the spinal extensors and lower extremities. Malformed heart valves. Couldn’t walk or stand. There were no pregnant women in space. Her work, her interminable bloody research into low-gravity gestation, had progressed to the point that the fish survived long enough to hatch and grow. But, once born, growth retardation in the brain and organs of the fish were apparent, and it was the same with mammals.

  The water in the ice pool had been drawn from the surrounding Lake Tethys. The colony was spread over the lakebed, far beneath the surface ice of Europa. The thickness of this ice varied. The surface of Lake Tethys was an ice shield two kilometres thick and provided vital protection against Jovian radiation. The blue ice of the lakebed ruckled into a chasm. Through this fissure lay Oceanus, the largest ocean in the solar system. Largest, ocean, solar system – words were too human and too meagre. Off-Earth, language, like biological life, did not take. Only mathematics and emergence seemed native to strange moons, gas giants, and space.

  Sometimes she woke from bad dreams of blue sky and green fields, her braids matted with sweat, hands clutching the sheets. As if she was afraid of Earth and not this inhospitable moon. She never dreamt of Europa. At the first indication of fear or doubt, she would zip on her diving suit and swim with Doxa, a cephalopod the size of a city. Doxa held the group mind of the colony. Its lightshow played on her mind like sunlight on the surface of the sea.

  Doxa and the other native cephalopods could survive in Lake Tethys because the water was oxygenated to the level of Earth’s seas and oceans. The icefish could also survive these alien waters; indeed Tethys was more hospitable to the physiognomy of the icefish than the warming Antarctic waters they had left behind. Oxygenation on Europa was chemical rather than biological: the radiation from Jupiter broke the surface ice into hydrogen and oxygen molecules, which were drawn into the underlying lakes at the great vents, raw breaks in the thick surface ice of the moon. The vents opened up whenever Europa blew hundred kay plumes of liquid water out into the vacuum of space. The fishers named these plumes the waterrise.

  From the icefish, she had developed a serum that gave humans some protection against the Europan cold. Millions of years of evolutionary adaptation meant that Arctic and Antarctic fish could synthesise antifreeze glycoproteins in the pancreas, proteins which inhibited the growth of ice crystals within the body of the fish that would otherwise rupture cell membranes and kill it. She found it interesting that the glycoproteins did not prevent the formation of ice crystals but merely arrested the development of the slivers that had been ingested in the gut. She could steal from the hard-won wisdom and persistent errors of nature alike. But on Earth, no species had evolved to survive different gravitational forces. That knowledge – to her – was a white space, an opportunity.

  She took out a net and hooked a dead icefish from the pool. It rolled dreamily in the bottom of the net. Another one that didn’t make it.

  She had brought the extremophiles with her from Earth, a selection of species that had adapted to environmental conditions once thought inhospitable to organic life: the sulfolobus acidocaldarius, the archaeon that inhabited sulphurous hot springs at 80 degrees centigrade (10 degrees hotter than the point at which organic molecules denature) and could thrive in acidity close to the strength of lemon juice; the tardigrades or “water bears” that enter a desiccated state akin to suspended animation in which they can survive a temperature variation between minus 253 to plus 151 degrees centigrade. Even the vacuum of space did not kill water bears.

  And then there was the Ozobranchus jantseanus, the turtle leech, a parasite that could survive -90 degrees centigrade for nine months. Nine months. The gestation period of the human child.

  The turtle leech was long thought native to East Asia, and so, for a century after it was first discovered, the leech’s adaptation to extreme cold was a scientific mystery. This mystery was finally solved – by
her – when she discovered Ozobranchus jantseanus under the ice in Europa. It was parasitic to the native cephalopods. This was her first significant mark on the white space.

  Gregory had disagreed. He insisted they had brought the leech with them when they made their escape from the moon, and had contaminated the Europan ecosphere. Native or not, the leech showed significant adaptation to Europan gravity. In her lab, it reproduced and the larvae survived. But only once. Like a blip in the rules of reality. A miracle from heaven sent to torment her.

  Gregory was dead. He had been terminally ill and didn’t want to die slowly in front of her. He’d never given himself over to Doxa and so he didn’t benefit from its lightshow of empathy. Gregory went out onto the surface ice, and opened his suit to the raging red eye of Jupiter, and let its judgement take him apart. It was a sudden decision, she believed. A bad morning after a difficult week. She saw how it could happen like that.

  Reckon mourned and worked, worked and mourned. Grief came in the moments when she took body breaks – to do her low gravs, to eat, to skim in and out of sleep and sadness. And then the universe, that miser, gave up another handful of hope. A second successful reproduction of the turtle leech under Europan gravity. A third. And so on.

  She hypothesised that the turtle leech was a migrant to Earth and Europa alike, spawned on the body of a turtle or other amphibious species that was native to the hypothetical planet they called Nemesis that span silently out beyond the heliosphere. The leech had been carried into the inner solar system on a long order comet. The thought of Nemesis made her heart beat faster. The hope that had brought them out into the infinite unknown was so extreme as to be painful. The hope that humans could adapt to this terror.

  That was the last question Gregory had asked her, as she dressed for her day’s work and he remained in bed.

  What do you take for the fear?

  The same thing that I take for the hope.

  She was interrupted by the red pulse of the alarm. She wiped the air, and in the wake of her hand, there appeared a shimmering chart displaying the thoughts and feelings coming off Doxa. One spike moved like a tall wave through the surrounding sea of data. She concentrated and this spike became the colony’s questions and musings which focused into a single wave of alarm.

  What is that?

  An object was speeding toward the colony against the cold current of Dream 6 vent. Tracking data coming in from cephalopods clinging the side of the object indicated that it was artificial.

  They’ve found us.

  Hamman Kiki strode into her laboratory. His alabaster musculature held a thin layer of fat making his abdominal muscles appear smooth and round like new surface ice. Hamman was leader of the fishers. They all used her antifreeze serum to spend hours swimming in Lake Tethys, maintaining their physique and bone structure in the low Europan gravity.

  He pointed to the shimmering cross-section of the vent.

  “The object is a pod containing a man,” he said. His gaze was black and flat, like an icefish, but his hand gestures were complex and expressive. Hamman was Earthborn but since the age of two, he had been raised first with his parents on the moon and then, when they abandoned the university, here on Europa. He had been shaped by a lifetime of lowgrav exercises and solar starvation, along with the on-the-fly enhancements produced by their labs. He swam in Tethys every day. A true consort of Doxa. The young people were growing into something quite strange under the ice.

  “We’re going to bring the object into the colony. Then we want you to meet with the man,” said Hamman. His voice was seductive yet passive. Giver and receiver. Undertones of self-reproduction like the larvae of the icefish.

  “They’ve found us.”

  “Obviously. We need to know how they found us.”

  “Because if we kill him now then–”

  “–Then they will come with more.”

  She shivered.

  “Why me?”

  “My father decided it should be you. You have the right–” Hamman struggled to find the correct word, or rather how to translate Doxic terms back into language, “–passion and ruthlessness?”

  Not quite right. But good enough. The boy smiled by way of apology.

  “How do you know there is a man inside the object? Has there been communication?”

  “Doxa sensed him.”

  She looked around her lab. Disinfectant. Quarantine. The colony would have to be protected against whatever pollution he had brought with him. Biological pollution. Chemical pollution. Psychological pollution.

  She asked Hamman to supervise a lockdown of quarters surrounding the moon pools and docks beneath Dream 6. Fifteen years on Europa and they had replaced terrestrial orientations of north and south, up and down with something more metaphorical. So Europa had its dream side and its wake side, its poles of hope and despair. Dream 6 was a reinforced tunnel leading out from Lake Tethys and through the ice of the Dream side of Europa. The surface ice was thinner there, breaking out into vents, and deeply scored by the intense radiation belt of Jupiter. Like the back of a slave exposed to the tails of the lash, she thought. Scarring healed by the waters bubbling up from the fathoms below, spilling out of the vents. Forming young ice. Bright. Reflective. The white space of possibility.

  Reckon Pretor was black because her father had been black. Caribbean, a descendent of the slaves owned by Pretor, a slaver from Bristol. A quiet beach still bore his name. Daddy was a doctor. Her mother had been white Jewish. Publishing. Another doomed North London marriage. A marriage with two holocausts in its genes. She wove white thread into her dark brown braids to remember them; she remained their only entanglement. Daddy left and then he died, and Mum stayed close until she died. Reckon was a good girl at Cambridge, tried to fit in with the elite children, turned down the volume on her London accent and filtered out the colour of her skin. And when that didn’t work, she chose excellence instead. She was the first postgraduate student of the University of the Moon and that was where she met Ballurian, or as he was called back then, the Cutter. He took one look at her disappearing act and suggested a different strategy: be the anger you want to see in the world.

  The architecture of the Europan colony was a plug-in tetrahedron structure, modelled after crystal lattice. She liked living inside the frame, inside the spaces. The interior of the base was airy and cool. It used voids positively. The walkway to the moon pool was a bluely lit transparent tube of reinforced plastic, with the dark lake all around, and swirling overhead, a question mark of megafauna. From the ventilation shaft, the sound of fans winding down, the air settling warm and still. Quarantine. She went to the edge of the moonpool still in her labcoat. Fifteen years since her last cigarette but at times like this… moments of risk… no, she would keep her distance. There was more at stake than her wellbeing. Ballurian had chosen her for this role. She should take satisfaction in that. But she did not. It only confused her in the way that all compliments confused her, because she distrusted the intent behind the flattery.

  She went into the observation post and sealed it off from the rest of the dock. Through reinforced glass, she watched the moon pool rose up in foaming gouts, and then the pod broke the surface. The jellyfish, having steered their cargo successfully, slid off and back into the water. It was the same type of pod they had used to land on Europa fifteen years earlier. Whoever this man was, he had travelled by sailship too.

  The pod opened. The man climbed out of the forward hatch. He wore a tattered grey sensesuit and his face was marked with the coiling scars of a weirdcore habit. The sensesuit was charred down one side and the front was streaked with blood. He looked around for the welcome committee, then understood that it was just her, behind the glass.

  He introduced himself. “Theodore Drown. From the Destructives.”

  She flicked on the intercom. “I am Professor Pretor,” she said.

  “From the University of the Moon.” He did not look directly at her but rather tried to take in as much of t
he surroundings as possible while maintaining an air of casual interest.

  “I’ve seen you before, Professor Pretor. There is a statue of you among your colleagues at the university. There are also recordings of you. Everybody thinks you are dead.”

  She wondered if he was from some offshoot of law-enforcement.

  “I’ve seen scraps of your old spacesuit in moon craters,” said Theodore. “We followed your footsteps.”

  She said, “You came to Europa by sailship.”

  “Yes,” he winced at a pain down his side.

  “How did you hitch your ride?”

  “You showed me how. You and your colleagues. I found the emergence you left behind on the moon. It is biddable and has influence over the sailships.”

  “We didn’t ask you to follow us.”

  With one circular motion of his index finger, Theodore indicated their environment.

  “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.”