The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  Ballurian played the host, walking around the table of food and drink, explaining the origin of the various indigenous delicacies, how they were cultivated in the life-resistant environment of Europa. Patricia discretely waved her palm over the platters – scanning for toxins – before taking a small plate and placing small portions upon it. She tasted the food with trepidation, and her response withheld approval. Reckon was hungry, and it was almost possible – as she gathered dried kelp between the tongs and placed it upon a plate – to believe that everything was going to be OK, and that they would work out their differences through civilised negotiation.

  Patricia introduced herself to Reckon, and apologised for the way the Destructives had gone about establishing contact. I hope you understand, she explained, our reasoning. They had been unable to find a way to communicate remotely with the colony so one of their team had to go ahead as an advance scout. If the Europans had proven hostile, then they would have captured Theodore and tortured him for information. Theodore’s memory blocks precluded hostile parties from gaining any advantage through interrogation. It had not been an ideal solution, but it seemed good enough. Patricia’s explanation reminded Reckon of why she had left Earth. Lies had become its native tongue. No one even noticed they were lying anymore. The culture could not admit to what had happened in the Seizure. What the Seizure meant for the dominant way of life. And so the culture stumbled on, propped up with more and more elaborate deceptions. Any resistance was accelerated into unreason, so that it could be rejected. All meaningful discourse took place in the tiers of insinuation and suggestion that comprised the meta-meeting. Real work, true work, became impossible.

  Ballurian watched their guests eat. He confined himself to the whisky. He’d saved it for a special occasion – now it occurred to Reckon that the occasion might not be a celebration. He played the host but they had his son. There was only so long a parent could stifle that fear; through Doxa, she shared his unbearable suspense.

  Time to move on from the pleasantries. Reckon approached Patricia.

  “So Theodore’s your husband?”

  Patricia assented with a tense white smile.

  Reckon said, “Our community has found that looser sexual ties within a culture of total honesty and transparency to be a more advanced way of life than pair bonding. It’s better for the community, particularly if you take reproduction out of the equation.”

  Patricia took a small bite of her cracker, then put her plate back on the table.

  “I’m old-fashioned,” she said.

  “We made progress curing your husband’s condition. Why hadn’t you tried to rectify his damage yourself?”

  “I love him just the way he is,” said Patricia.

  “That’s the risk with marriage. Stasis. Stagnation.”

  “Marriage is a solid base upon which to build,” said Patricia. “A safe haven.”

  Reckon nodded, seemingly accepting the wisdom of this, and then when she was sure that Patricia had stepped back from the argument, she redoubled her attack.

  “But if marriage is your safe haven, what happens when your partner breaks your trust? Doesn’t that make you entirely vulnerable?”

  She put it right out there in the meta-meeting for Patricia’s consideration: I have enjoyed sex with your husband. The old time marriage taboos really mattered to this woman, which would be comic, if she wasn’t so violent.

  Magnusson was explaining to the party that – thanks to Theodore’s work on the Claim – their colony was grounds for their legal ownership of Europa. Earth’s moon was, like Antarctica, protected from corporate or national claims. But new rules had been written for the rest of the solar system. The Europans were the first owners of extraterrestrial real estate. Magnusson coerced them all into raising a glass. Any future revenues generated by the colony, he explained, would flow to the families who had settled Europa; it was up to Ballurian and Reckon and the others to decide how this ownership would be divided.

  “We stand at the beginning of a dynasty,” said Magnusson. “Four generations – from your children to your great-great-grandchildren – will profit from what you have made here.”

  Ballurian listened with a pained smile to Magnusson’s rhetoric. At the mention of his children, he could stand it no longer, and set down his glass.

  “My son,” said Ballurian. “You captured him, in the skirmish.”

  “Did we?” asked Magnusson, with ostentatious surprise.

  “I can feel his pain,” said Ballurian. “He’s drugged but he’s struggling. You have put him in a machine.”

  “That boy is your son?” Magnusson was surprised. He considered pointing out the lack of physical resemblance between Ballurian and the pale fisher, but then thought better of it. This phase of the meta-meeting, in which both parties displayed their skill at performing friendship, was at an end.

  “Your son attacked Patricia with a harpoon.”

  “He was defending his people. He would not have killed her.”

  “I didn’t harm him significantly,” said Patricia. “He will wake with a headache, that’s all.”

  “What is the machine for?” asked Ballurian. He summoned a holographic representation of the docks. The flickering coloured outlines of the Destructives’ tech team, monitoring a pyramidal device, and there – sleeping upright in one of its five chambers – the figure of Hamman Kiki. “What are you doing to him?”

  “Monitoring him.”

  “Please. Release him to us. We can take care of our own.”

  This suggestion pained Magnusson.

  “Let us finish our tests.”

  Ballurian wanted to insist upon the return of his son. Magnusson was not giving him up easily. Reckon wanted to know what kind of tests they were running, what were they looking for?

  “You have a unique community here,” said Patricia. “We want to understand that uniqueness so that we can reach mutual understanding.”

  The bitch. The stalling, inhuman bitch. Reckon had enough.

  “Give him back his son,” she said. “Is this really the only way you know how to behave?”

  “No,” said Patricia. She saw a fruit she liked the look of, and took an experimental bite, asking, “Do you have a counteroffer to make?” The fruit was more sour than she expected, she dropped the half-eaten pulp onto the floor.

  “We would like you to leave,” said Reckon.

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” said Patricia.

  “We can’t negotiate while you have a hostage.”

  “Wrong on two counts,” said Patricia. “He’s not a hostage and there is no need for negotiation.”

  The woman introduced only as Security moved to Magnusson’s side. Her team shut the main doors. Turigon wouldn’t stand for it, not in their own meeting chamber. With his hands tucked in the ends of his sleeves, he stood before Security as an angry pacifist, insisting upon his moral right to leave the room in protest at their behaviour. When they ignored him, he put his hand on the door and yanked it ajar. Ballurian told him to stop but he was adamant; he would not allow them to order him around.

  “Let him go,” said Magnusson. “We can resolve this situation without him.”

  Turigon stood in the doorway, and offered his hand to Reckon, suggesting she too should leave. They wanted her safe. The embryo was a priority for the colony, and clearly they felt that the meeting had reached the point at which some form of confrontation would occur.

  Magnusson raised an armoured hand, as if admitting that it was his fault, his responsibility. “I wanted Europa for myself,” he said, shrugging as if to imply that he was helpless to resist this want. He moved between Reckon and the way out. Everything these people said or did was a deception: put simply, they had already decided on a course of action and would say anything to buy time for the right moment to put their plan into action. This was not a negotiation. Rather, it was a stage in their process. The stage where they try but fail to resolve the dispute amicably. The stage that makes es
calating the conflict easier.

  No, she would not leave. Turigon sensed this resolve, and reluctantly stepped away from the room. Security closed the doors. One fewer witness. She felt that uncertain feeling in her womb again.

  Magnusson walked around Ballurian, one powerful hand raised, either volunteering for war or calling for calm, the gesture was deliberately ambiguous. “Originally, I wanted Titan because of its petrochemical lakes. But Titan is too far, and anyway, who needs rocket fuel in this day and age? I’ve spent ten years and considerable resources putting a legal framework in place to incentivise corporate investment in space travel and colonies. After Titan, we identified Europa as the next potential acquisition. Only to discover you had beaten me to it.” With his big armoured paws, Magnusson silently applauded Ballurian’s achievement. “You found a way of stowing away on emergence ships. I hired Patricia to retrace your movements, find out how you did it. Beginning with your time at the University of the Moon.”

  “We don’t care about ownership,” said Ballurian. “We care about exploration. The future of humanity.”

  “I know,” said Magnusson. “We share the same vision. But with Doxa you broke the rules, and I have merely bent them, and that is the degree by which we separate first from second place.”

  Reckon said, “We will not allow you to destroy Doxa.”

  A sheath of hexagonal petals unfurled from Patricia’s wrists, forming – piece by piece – the enormous gauntlets that enclosed her tiny fists.

  “Destroy it?” said Patricia. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  25

  BLACK BOX

  Patricia’s diminutive poise was not overwhelmed by her armour. Rather it exaggerated her shape: the shoulders were boxy and broad, in the way that futuristic shoulders have always been broad, and the breastplate and plackart were tailored to her concavities and convexities: the mid-section was fitted, in a way that the gauntlets, helmet and sabatons were not. The armour focused her will.

  “We’re here to study Doxa,” she said, direct and intense, “and present our findings to the client.”

  Reckon could do direct too. “And then destroy Doxa afterwards.”

  “Why would we want to destroy it?”

  “Your husband told us. Doxa breaks a Cantor Accord, so the emergences want it destroyed. First, they wanted to satisfy their curiosity as to how the Doxa works.”

  Patricia crossed the pipework of her arms. “When Theodore said this to you, was he under duress of any kind? That is, was he concerned with saving his skin?”

  She remembered the fishers dragging Theodore from her bed, then the interrogation: the dark storeroom and the acrid closeness of men. Theodore, sat on the chair, negotiating himself a yard of freedom; he had emphasised his role in buying time for the colony. Using a partial eclipse of the truth to appear indispensable.

  Patricia said, “Think about our actions, not our words. We circumvented the colony defences but did not hurt anyone. The fight in the dock was entirely in self-defence. You came at us with knives and harpoons and we deployed nonlethal weapons. It was your agent Matthias who tortured hundreds of innocent people.”

  Patricia’s plausibility was dependent upon her audience wanting to believe her. Reckon thought that she had the inside track on Patricia. She recognised her particular strain of misanthropy: anyone outside her circle of trust did not warrant human rights. You’re either with us or not real – and this fierce attachment to her people on the one hand, and callous detachment toward outsiders on the other, was presented as business-as-usual realism. It was clear that Magnusson, in his armoured dotage, had become a fantasist. Patricia was stringing him along for the fees, supporting his delusion of a return to human supremacy. A tyrant’s fixer is a good role. The pragmatist among the mad.

  Reckon was dangerously angry. Her actions would be unwise and uncalculated. Dad had schooled her in anger at the dinner table when a request or complaint at the wrong time would trigger his desperate temper. Reckon breathed deeply to calm herself. The lesson her father learnt in the Seizure was that power will conceal its true intent for as long as possible so that its victims remain passive and even compliant in their own destruction. Rarely are we granted the mercy of a confrontation.

  Patricia suggested an expedition into Lake Tethys. The Destructives would like a guided tour by the intellectual leaders of Europa of their astonishing creation. Magnusson took this suggestion up and infused it with patriarchal gusto.

  “Show me your work,” he dared Ballurian, “show me the brain in a jar.”

  Magnusson’s appeal to his work was irresistible to Ballurian. The colony had been established on Europa so that they could exist in a state of total work, free from the distraction otherwise known as the rest of the human race. With a submissive nod, he accepted their request. It was a subtle tell, and only those close to him would notice it. Ballurian was only submissive when the demands of others matched his secret intention.

  On the walk to the docks, Ballurian pressed Patricia on the matter of his son and the nature of their tech, appearing convinced that the Destructives’ pyramidal device was a bomb of some sort. Patricia explained that it was an interface. One capable of handling enormous amounts of biological and digital data. Their tech team had placed Hamman Kiki into the interface to analyse the flow between him and Doxa. “Once the results are in…” she said, and then made a fluttering shape with her armoured fingers, implying freedom.

  They passed through the infirmary. In one corner, there were signs of a recent struggle: open drawers, medicine cabinets in disarray and, at a height of about six foot, a spray of blood across a white wall, and scuff marks on the tiled floor below. Reckon realised that this was evidence of Patricia and Theodore’s disagreement. Blood. His, presumably. Then he must have slunk off to some other part of the colony. She noticed Patricia discretely searching the infirmary, also looking for Theodore, her expression one part relief to two parts trepidation. But there was no sign of him. Theodore had abandoned them.

  The pregnancy made Reckon feel raw and hunted. Paranoid, even. She reached into a cabinet and took out a kit of antifreeze serum. Then she stuffed painkillers, tranqs and adrenaline shots into her coat pockets. And then, with darker resolve, a capsule of methotrexate, which she had used to treat the blood cancers induced by exposure to Jovian radiation; methotrexate slowed down cell division so was equally suitable for early-stage abortion.

  Ballurian led the party out of quarantine and out into the chill damp air of the dock. There was the pyramidal interface unfolded into a five-pointed star attended by two female technicians, with Hamman Kiki strapped into one of its five chambers like a human battery. Ballurian went to his son. Hamman’s eyelids were heavy, he had no strength to lift his head from the black cushioned surround. The telemetry on his suit played a modest sine wave. He tried to speak but couldn’t; in Doxa, his presence was a dark cloud. Ballurian held his son’s head against his chest, closed his eyes, poured his love directly into Doxa.

  “The drugs are already wearing off,” Patricia assured him, “he’ll be back with us in an hour or so.”

  Magnusson went first along the gangplank. The Destructives had taken the Europans to the very quick of their fears, made it seem as if their position was hopeless, and then – at the last moment – bait-and-switched their despair for muted hope. The others, drawn to this hope, came to the dock to join the expedition: Turigon, as justified in his misery as a mule’s cadaver, walked carefully across the loading bay. Seeing the submarine, his posture slumped, as if the vessel was the final augur in a personal prophecy. Jordan arrived too, her intelligence keen and to the fore, ready to interrogate the methods of analysis used by the Destructives.

  Patricia took up a casual position beside the gangplank, her sharpened elbows resting against the wall mount of a resus kit, now and again leaning over the railing to watch the loading of the submarine. Reckon found herself in Patricia’s personal space, agitating for a confrontation.


  She said, “If you’re really here just to collect data, we can offer you the genework that went into adapting the cephalopolis. And the lab has Matthias’ records from before he went into the asylum mall.”

  Patricia nodded. Yes, they were interested in all of that. The two women regarded one another. Patricia would not attack her directly. Either because she was waiting for the right moment, or because her intent was benign. Reckon could not be certain either way, and that was how they got you. You never acted in self-defence until it was too late. Patricia was expert in the higher tiers of the meta-meeting, she couldn’t be bested on that level, so Reckon decided to take it to the basement,

  “I had sex with your husband,” said Reckon.

  “When he was out of his mind,” replied Patricia, turning away, gazing across the moon pools.

  “I knew he was married to you. I didn’t care. We had sex a lot. When you interface with Doxa, you’ll be able to experience his infidelity personally.”

  “I already know what it’s like to have sex with my husband.”

  “This was different.” She reached over and, with both hands, took hold of Patricia’s oversized gauntlet. Patricia had to look at her now, her face unaccustomed to jealousy in the same way that a building is unaccustomed to falling down. Reckon guided Patricia’s armoured hand over her lower abdomen.

  “I’m pregnant,” she whispered, savouring the blasphemy of it. A faint fizz and a sonar blip as the armour scanned her womb, confirming the presence of the embryo.

  Something quivered under Patricia’s controlled pallor but did not enter her voice. “I never wanted children,” said Patricia. “They make you vulnerable.”