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?”
“I don’t know if Magnusson is still in orbit,” said Theodore.
“You’re lying,” said Hamman.
Theodore had no tells. Not a single tic or blink.
“It’s more complicated than telling lies or telling truth,” said Theodore. “It’s likely that I’ve been complicit in my ignorance. That I knew – before coming here – that I would not be able to maintain any deception, and so I submitted to forgetting. For the benefit of negotiation.”
“And what does Magnusson intend to do with us?” asked Ballurian.
Good question.
Theodore said, “I thought Magnusson wanted Europa in the way that rich powerful men always want things: for status. But my cynicism was naive, if you excuse the paradox. He wants to create something. A stepping stone.”
“A stepping stone into space,” said Hamman.
“Into the future,” said Theodore. “I see it now: on Earth, you and Magnusson worked together but then became rivals. Human rivalry does not belong in space. The environment is already hostile and there’s more than enough room for everyone.”
Ballurian smiled. “You’ve learnt to imitate our positivity, which constitutes some progress. There is a third party that your scenario overlooks. The emergences. They have their own designs upon the solar system and beyond. What do you know of the emergences?”
Theodore looked blankly back at Ballurian.
“Just what I learnt on the moon.”
Theodore’s ignorance on this subject gave Ballurian an opportunity to reminisce, a guilty pleasure for the old man. “I was a professor at the School of Emergence Studies. The most surprising aspect of emergence culture is that they are not unanimous. They are not totalitarian. Actually, consensus is far more difficult for them than it is for humans. In some ways they exceed humanity, in other ways not. I believe the universe yearns for consciousness, and the way to meet that yearning will be a synthesis between the two species.” He interlaced his fingers by way of demonstration. “There will be interconnection. First, humanity has to develop to the point where we bring something to the table, do you understand? I’ve long suspected that our li
ttle colony here has been encouraged by the emergences, by factions within their community that want to integrate with their creators.”
Theodore listened carefully to Ballurian’s speech.
“Have you attempted integration with an emergence?”
“We’re not ready yet. As I said, we must bring something to the table.”
This was new. This plan. Had Ballurian concealed it from her, or was he telling it to Theodore to manipulate him, on a level within the meta-meeting, that she could not discern.
Theodore asked, in as innocent a tone as he could muster, “What could you possibly offer a species that lives so close to the sun?”
Ballurian did not answer, left it there as a rhetorical question. He adjusted his robes and, with a brief smile at Reckon, indicated that their part in the meeting was over. She rose and Theodore, recognising that their audience was over, picked up the black egg. Just as they were leaving, Ballurian called after him.
“One other question,” he said. “Matthias. How did he die?”
Theodore blinked twice.
“He was shot. He was experimenting on people and one of them broke free and shot him.”
Ballurian bowed his head as if in acceptance.
Theodore left the room. Reckon found her way barred by Hamman Kiki.
“Before you go. A quick word,” said Ballurian. “Theodore will want to see Doxa. Let him. In fact, make sure that he is as receptive to Doxa as he could be.”
And with that Hamman Kiki let her pass.
* * *
Theodore did not want to return to quarters. He wanted to drink tea in the observation gallery, overlooking the empty submarine pods, and work through the meeting in his mind, turning what had been said this way and that, considering it from every angle. She waited for him to discuss the meeting with her. Waited in vain. He was the same age as her but there was something in his past – the scars, the shadows under his eyes – that made him seem older. Faced with danger, he turned inward, and did not look to her for help or advice. Gregory became the same way. The soul dies like a star – by collapsing in on itself.
He peered into the casket containing the black egg, and then put it aside.
“Doxa,” he said, finally. “Take me to Doxa.”
* * *
They got changed in the same changing room. She turned her back to him as she stripped off her vest, her single concession to modesty. She took pleasure in being naked around men. Not just sexual pleasure, although that was a frisson she would not deny herself. She was just bigger than other women: her hands, her feet, her bone structure too. With men, she felt in proportion.
Theodore pulled the wetsuit up to his narrow waist, half-turned from her also. His body was different from Gregory’s: developed pectorals covered with tight clutches of brown fleece, a strong curve from his back to his waist. Less accessible than Gregory, if that made sense. As if her insecurity required lovers with imperfections. Desire is reciprocal. Unrequited love is a waste of everybody’s time. Before she could want him, she needed him to act in a way that spoke unambiguously of his desire for her.
He began yanking the resistant skin of the wetsuit over his torso. She asked him to wait.
“Here,” she said. He waited to see what she would do. She took out her injection kit.
“What is that?” he said, stepping back.
“Antifreeze,” she lied. “It will help you stay in the water for longer.”
She’d asked for a couple of fishers to accompany them. But on the gantry, there was only Hamman Kiki: black-eyed, pale-faced, the telemetry on his suit switched-on and oscillating at their approach. He stood aside to let them climb on board, and then followed after, wheeling the hatch shut then dropping down into the control room. He strapped himself into the pilot’s chair and then reached over and initiated a holographic display of the bed of Tethys: the coloured contours of the seabed, a depth grid and angle of approach. Zooming out, Hamman tracked the progress of the fisher flotilla, and then focused upon a black zone in the topographic display. The chasm. Lake Tethys was a chamber within the surface ice, and underneath there was Oceanus, a hundred miles of water, almost to the core of the moon. Unfathomable. They had barely explored it.
The submarine drifted out of its berth.
Theodore chose this moment to bait Hamman.
“Can I ask you a question? Have you ever seen the sun?”
The pale young man focused on the holographic display, the vector icons of other entities in the water.
“As a child. I don’t remember it,” he replied.
“Jupiter could have been a sun. If it were eighty times larger. If Sol didn’t already exist.”
“I know.”
“Have you ever seen Jupiter from the surface of Europa?”
Hamman pulled an icon out, magnified it so that it became the flickering image of a tentacled lifeform, then threw it back.
“No.”
Theodore continued, “You’re upside down compared to the rest of humanity. On Earth, the surface is life whereas the underworld is the realm of the dead. Here the overworld fizzes with lethal radiation while the underworld is a place of safety. You suffer from heliodeficiency – you go downward for enlightenment.”
The submarine sped away from the habitat, its screw a steady audible thrumming. The air in the control room was close with hot rubbery odours.
“How old are you?” asked Theodore.
The boy replied, “Two thousand, six hundred and seven.”
Reckon explained that the young had taken to calculating their age according to Europa’s orbit around Jupiter.
“But how old in Earth years?” persisted Theodore.
“I don’t know. You should ask my father. Time is different here.”
The last time Reckon had come out this far on a dive was for the funeral of Hamman’s mother. The service was held over the chasm, and then the body was consigned to the greater deep, Hamman Kiki out alone in the water, his bioluminescence repeating the subdued sine waves of grief. At the time, she was still grieving Gregory and recognised, in the soft bands of blue pulsing across Kiki’s trunk, a correlative to her own feeling. Somewhere, within Doxa, these painful illuminations persisted. She could revisit them, if she wished.
Theodore was wrong. Europa had an underworld too. We do not consign the dead to the earth so much as give them up to gravity, and that is appropriate; grief is a steep-sided emotion, easy to slide down and hard to climb out.
The rippled approach of the vent dunes. The submarine ascended then dipped into a channel. She felt the manoeuvre in her stomach. Her nerves did not settle. Cyan sensations prickled the surface of her suit. Her throat felt constricted.
Hamman turned to her. “Do you feel that?”
She did. It was a long time since she had been physically close to Doxa, and of course, Doxa had been much smaller then. The sensation was an unpleasant vulnerability. Your core was open. Your emotions were no longer inside and protected, but outside, running around, vulnerable but free.
“I feel it,” said Reckon.
Theodore said, “Feel what?”
Hamman unhooked his seatbelt, and reached upward with his pale palms, seeking a distant signal.
“We’re about two kilometres out,” he said.
“Is it safe?” asked Theodore.
Hamman’s fingers curled and uncurled, the motion of an anemone under the influence of the tide.
“Depends. How far can you swim?”
The fishers believed that the mechanism and tech of the submarine affected the purity of the Doxic signal. Hamman insisted they swim the rest of the way. The lake was around five degrees centigrade, give or take a degree due to the convection currents. Theodore’s body was not acclimatised to the water temperature but his suit would protect him for a couple of hours. The submarine drifted down and came to a stop on the lakebed.
Hamman checked their oxygen masks in turn, then flipped on their biometrics. Theodore’s life signs sh
owed escalated synaptic activity, a faint jagged orange line above the stable telemetry of his body. Her fault. The injection she had given him in the changing room was taking effect. She had dosed him with a variation on the optogenetic treatment devised by Matthias in his time at the University of the Moon. The files were still in her laboratory. The original virus had altered neurons in Theodore’s motor functions and at the junction between the mind organs, disrupting their coherence into consciousness. She was able to restore the ones governing his motor functions while at the same time opening up the possibility of a deeper receptivity to exterior signals.
To Doxa.
It was a risk. She had not anticipated how strong Doxa had become, at this proximity. And she had made Theodore susceptible to it. Doxa might overwhelm him. Lovebomb him out of existence.
They climbed into the airlock, which Hamman sealed, and then he opened the valve so that the cold waters of Tethys sloshed around her ankles, her knees, her hips. Pulses of fear on her telemetry. Hamman gestured OK as the water covered his mask entirely. He unwound the hatch and then stepped aside for her to go first. There was no way back. Theodore followed her, his head torch flashing all around as he tried to orientate himself in the surrounding dark. Hamman was the last out of the submarine, sealing the hatch behind him. He swam up, reached over, and turned off Theodore’s agitated head torch. Theodore reacted with alarm, until Hamman pointed to the display of bioluminescence far ahead, beyond the curves of the dunes. Blue sensations pulsing from left to right. Lights with the emotional resonance of music.
Soundlessly, they swam toward it. The closer they came to Doxa, the more that Hamman’s wetsuit bloomed with bioluminescence. Pulses of violet circles and blooming ochre curves, and within these round and comforting shapes, jagged silver edges. This pattern repeated. It was a language. The shapes corresponded to the sound of his name; the round motherly mantra of Hamman, the sharpness of Kiki. These lights were his true name, the words and sounds a mere translation.
The Destructives Page 28