Ballurian Kiki was his Europan name. The trend for Europan names began among the young. His son took the name Hamman Kiki when he was eighteen, and his father followed his example. Their chosen names moved past you like Europan megafauna: a bulbous welcoming head and trunk – Hamman, Ballurian – with the flicking, lethal spiky tail of kiki. In the dark waters of Lake Tethys, sounds were more important than appearances.
Ballurian Kiki and his son dined in the refectory. The roof of the refectory was transparent, its edges illuminated by pale green guide lights diffused by sediment. She hung back, waiting until they were finished. The family assistant – a pale silver-haired girl, another fisher like Hamman – informed her that the Kikis were ready for her interruption. Ballurian leant back, pulled a chair out for her, offering it with an expansive hand gesture. Hamman was less welcoming; unlike his father, the son was pale and immune to her.
Ballurian’s voice was deep, mannered in its precision, a leader’s way of speaking, in which ambiguity was always intentional and designed to manipulate others.
“Should we let Theodore out of quarantine?” he asked her.
“You know all that I know,” she said.
“Do you believe him, though? That story about his wife.” Ballurian rubbed a distasteful word between his fingertips. “Sympathy. That is what he seeks to elicit.”
Hamman nodded at his father’s wisdom. They were eating pemmican made from smoked megafauna, powdered then mixed with mammal tallow and mashed berries from the hydroponic farm. They dipped at the pemmican with kelp crackers. Whereas she’d been subsisting off Yomp for weeks. The presence of the richly flavoured pemmican made her salivate. She realised that Theodore had not eaten properly since his arrival.
“Theodore is damaged,” she said. “It makes him hard to read.”
“Your feelings are contrary,” said Ballurian, placing his hand on his heart, closing his eyes. Each member of the colony was connected to Doxa through their stripe. It required an act of will.
Ballurian came out of his Doxic link with his insight into her. “You suspect that, when you get to know Theodore better, that he will disappoint you, and that you will hate everything that he stands for. For now, you accept him, are even fond of him, though you regard that fondness as a weakness. Am I reading you accurately?”
“We could interface him with Doxa,” she said. “Give him a stripe. Incorporate him. Use him.”
Hamman sharply rapped the table. He did not voice his objection, considering his body language to be sufficiently commanding. That was how the young people did it.
“Yes. Doxa would reveal him to us,” said Ballurian, “but it would also expose us to him.”
“Vent him,” said Hamman.
Ballurian turned to Reckon, opening a space for her to disagree with his son’s violent verdict.
She said, “We are scientists and artists. We learn and we create. Theodore will challenge our assumptions. Perhaps what we learn reaffirms our faith in our seclusion.”
Three great nods from Ballurian indicated his consideration and approval of her suggestion. He smiled at a private joke. “And I am curious to hear about Earth,” he admitted. “Schadenfraude on my part. Delight in the misfortune of the rest of the human race. That is my weakness.”
The Ballurian’s mind had many chambers in the Doxa. Some were as cold and lethal as the surface ice. He took her hand in his great paw.
“Your work,” he said, inflecting the word as if he had spoken of love.
“It’s proceeding,” she said.
“An impossible child born on Europa.”
“I’m doing my utmost,” she said.
“Do whatever is necessary,” he smoothed the skin on the back of her hand. “When I first met you, you were drifting.”
“That was the low gravity.”
He laughed like a cold engine turning over once, twice.
“Anger fixed you.”
Be the anger you want to see in the world.
“Show your anger to this hollow man. It will force him either way. And then we will know what is to be done with him.”
* * *
She decided to sleep on it. She lay in the dark, tuning into the lamentations of Jupiter’s magnetic field, a sorrow extending along filigrees of space dust and vagrant atoms. Europa orbits Jupiter in resonance with Io and Ganymede, three of sixty-three moons in the Jovian system. Jupiter, the thwarted star, and its livid blind eye, The Great Red Spot. What must it be like to be caught in that seething eternal storm? Ammonia riddled with lightning and winds that cut you to the bone. Europa is massaged by the massive gravitational pull of Jupiter and tugged this way and that by Io and Ganymede. These contrary forces expand and contract the moon, wringing its heart, generating tidal heating. The interior of the ice ball thaws with every orbit. Cut out of the bed of Lake Tethys, the chasm through to Oceanus, its water a hundred miles deep. At the precipice of sleep, her thoughts branched and diffused.
* * *
Next day, she showed up to the infirmary with a set of freshly printed clothes tailored to his measurements. Theodore knew the meaning of her gift before she even had a chance to explain it. He was being allowed out of quarantine.
“One question first,” she said. “Why ‘the Destructives’? It’s not even a real word.”
“We’re the opposite of creatives.”
“And you’re proud of that?”
He took off Gregory’s old shirt, and put his hand out for the new outfit.
“You said ‘one question’.”
She put the new outfit into the decontamination drawer and shunted it over to him.
* * *
She gave him the tour, beginning with her laboratory. She explained her work in simple terms, the role of gravitation in gestation, the importance of that research in terms of man’s colonisation of space.
“There were gravitational chambers on the sailship,” he said.
“We haven’t successfully reverse engineered the emergence tech.”
“But if you got back on a sailship, couldn’t the pregnant woman just sit in a gravitational chamber?”
“It would have to be constant. Gestation does not proceed healthily in suspended animation, and the variance in gravity of her coming in and out of the chamber massively increases the chance of malformation and miscarriage.”
“Could you grow the baby in a jar, and put that inside the chamber?”
“Ex vivo? It’s definitely an important research pathway. Partial ectogenesis has been possible ever since the invention of the incubator. To intervene at an earlier point in gestation, we are developing an artificial womb. We have made our own amniotic fluid and grown the endometrium – the uterine layer that nourishes the embryo – as a cell culture. We’re on our way to cracking that.”
“You could seed the universe that way.”
“Panspermism. I don’t believe in it. My work will preserve the mother and child relationship. Do we really want to send a motherless human race into the stars?”
He walked at a careful pace, the bruising on his side still painful. The corridors were quiet, the refectory empty apart from Turigon, who invariably dined alone and at eccentric times. Turigon looked like he was in the middle of a three-day lab session. Hair unwashed and awry. He was the leader of the team reverse engineering emergence tech. She went to introduce Theodore to him but Turigon shook his head, and waved them away. It was the same when they encountered the Szwed twins in the chapel, and Milan in the jungle gym. The campus was quiet and those who were around did not want to speak to or meet Theodore.
Theodore looked inquiringly at her.
“What have I done to upset everyone?”
“It’s what you represent.”
He stopped.
“What do I represent?”
“We came to Europa to get away from people like you.”
“Like me? You don’t know me.”
“I know that you take pride in destruction.” She remembered Bal
lurian’s counsel. Show him your anger. She decided to turn on him.
“What did you teach on the University of the Moon?”
“The Intangibles,” he replied.
“By ‘intangibles’ you mean philosophy, art, literature, the history of ideas?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you think intangibles is a reductive way to frame a body of knowledge that represents our achievement as a civilisation?”
“It wasn’t my decision to call them that. I came to teaching late.”
“What were you doing beforehand?”
“I was an accelerator on the arrays.”
“You engineered culture for the benefit of your clients?”
“Yes. That’s how it works,” he sounded testy, and a little bored by her questioning.
“And you just went along with that. You didn’t try to change it?”
“Not on my own.”
She reached over and ran her thumb along the spiral of one of his scars.
“You teach but you don’t know anything. You talk about your wife but you can’t feel. You made a travesty of the world until it reflected the paucity of your soul.”
He bit his lip, considered unloosing his temper.
“I’ve added significant artefacts to the restoration,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes.
“The restoration? It’s detritus. You dig up bits of crap from the past and hand them over for the approval of a machine. You’re nearly thirty and you have done nothing of consequence. Oh, sorry. I stand corrected. You took drugs once, and thought that made you interesting.” Speaking to him like this was exhilarating. The anger flowed through her, and she gave up trying to moderate or control it.
“We left Earth because it was overpopulated with people like you. The ecosystem was devastated, but we could fix that. Culture was reeling from emergence, but we had the artists to show us a new path. What we couldn’t work with was the wilful devious ignorance of people like you. You weren’t the majority but you were in power. Half a billion miles and still you can’t leave us alone. And what did you bring for us? What do you propose that you can add to our community? Nothing. You’re stuck. Stuck and recessive, like the whole bloody planet.”
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.
The Destructives Page 27