The Destructives (17 page)

In her hand, there was a small black-and-white eye, a smaller version of the drive that held Totally Damaged Mom. She closed her fist around it, and the armour spun out reflective gloves over her hands and arms, a soft inflation of silver material deployed all around her, and finally a helmet slid up from the wide stiff collar to encase her head. The visor was reflective, and Theodore saw himself in shambolic form, a big dumb object in the sensesuit. And behind him, the Horbo house began to decay upward. Roof tiles flew in quick sequence toward the roof of the cavern, and then the exterior panelling warped and was tugged vertically away from the structure of the house, exposing the rooms. He turned around. The patio doors flipped over in the air as if caught in a tornado. The suit was deaf and numb; he could neither hear nor feel the destruction around him, only see it. Black iron tore in a shooting cascade of splinters, the equipment and technicians tumbled away from the cavern, silhouettes of thrashing limbs, but underfoot he did not register a single detonation. He wondered why he was not falling upward also. Patricia’s armoured fist clutched the seamed material of his sensesuit, pulled him to her with hydraulic ease. Then his proprioception – his sense of his own body – registered that he was no longer touching the ground, that he was floating at the end of her reach, while the contents of the cavern were emptied out into space. Her visor clarified to reveal her face. She blew him a zero kiss and let him go and the cavern floor receded beneath him; he was debris, the suit hot with his urgent breathing. He flipped, head over heels, caught the astonished expression of a silently choking technician, the same woman who had handed him his helmet, flailing out for him across space. He saw Kakkar too, already dead, his body disposed of. Debris. They were all just debris. He didn’t know how much air he had left. He could feel the oncoming cold of the void penetrating the layers of the sensesuit. The blast had opened up a jagged rectangle in the roof of the cavern, a ghastly space into which he slowly drifted.

12

STAG NIGHT

It was a spring wedding in a modest village church overlooked by the Three Sisters mountains of the Glencoe Valley. Theodore had hiked up one steep Sister with Dr Easy in search of a rumoured hidden valley but, in the face of a ten-storey blizzard, had turned back at the snowline. Their mysteries were kept from him, mountains dark and mazy with the secrets of birthing rooms and deathbeds, the rooms in which women come and go carrying bowls of bloodied water and clean sheets. The red portals through which we enter life, the black portals through which we leave it. Associations which returned to him when he walked into the cool interior of the church to be married.

The church organist played the opening bars of the wedding march. The bride wore white: embroidered white tulle bodice and white lace veil, white shoes with a silk bow, white lipstick, white nail varnish. Patricia proceeded up the aisle accompanied by her father Alexander Maconochie in his naval captain’s uniform. With a theatrically delicate gesture, Alexander presented his daughter’s hand to Theodore, her gloved fingers encircling his, arresting his weightless drift, bringing him under control, guiding him. Saving him. Two gold rings on a ceremonial cushion.

After the service, her friends and family formed an excited colourful crowd on the church gardens. There had been no one on his side of the church apart from the robot; cutting his acquaintances loose had been a necessary stage in his treatment. His one friend, Professor Edward Pook, was thoroughly immersed in his research trip to the Novio Magus.

Dr Easy brought him a flute of fizzy mineral water. Since their return to Earth, Dr Easy had taken to wearing clothes, observing human rituals concerning the body and its adornments. They had been unable to source brogues to fit Dr Easy’s flat feet. “I am very disappointed,” the robot had said to the shop assistant, flexing its oblong toes, wondering if they could be removed so that a suitable shoe could be found to spare the robot from committing a breach of highland etiquette. Today the robot wore a kilt with a dress sporran, a plain white shirt and a doublet with ornamental silver buttons.

Theodore did not presume to wear the tartan. He did not have a clan. The first question her father Alexander Maconochie had asked him concerned the provenance of his unusual surname. Theodore explained that Drown was derived from the Middle English
drane
meaning drone or honey bee, and had nothing to do with death by water, which set the retired captain’s mind at ease, because it had seemed something of an ill omen for the daughter of a naval man to marry into such a morbid name. Her mother Margaret turned to Dr Easy and – making conversation – said, “Exactly what are you a doctor of?” Dr Easy’s eyes took on the purple tinge of wild hyacinths in the glen. “Humanity,” it replied. Tradition demanded further clarification; after all, the Maconochies would not hand over their daughter without character references. “I’m a solar academic specialising in the study of humanity,” explained the robot. “My particular research interest is in observing a single complete human life from beginning to end.” She twitched at the implication. “His life?” The robot nodded. Margaret voiced her concern: “But if he marries my daughter, then how will you continue to study him alone?” Eyes flowing with hyacinth, the robot placed its index finger where its nose would have been, had it possessed one. “With discretion, ma’am. The kind of discretion you would expect from a tree or mountain.”

His stag party had been a defiant statement of unbelonging: three nights spent alone in a one-man tent beside the River Coe. The robot made itself a structure out in the woods, a tree house that was also an observation post; at night, it joined Theodore around the campfire for conversation and beans. The second day was the occasion of their hike into the Three Sisters. High up into the desolate landscape, the peat bogs, cold pools and bare arthritic trees were signposts on a walking tour of death. The robot wanted to push on into the blizzard but Theodore refused. The doctor could not be trusted on matters of risk and well-being, not since their near-fatal hike on the moon. Both the moonscape and the highlands inspired recklessness in the doctor; something in the heart of the emergence was provoked by wild nature.

In the lowlands, Dr Easy was more meditative. The robot was up at dawn to watch a herd of deer wander along the course of the river, like party-goers returning from nocturnal revelry. On their final night around the campfire, the robot went over to the riverbank, reached into the shallows, and pulled out a six-pack of beer it had placed there to cool, then brought the alcohol back to the fire.

“I got you some beer,” said Dr Easy.

“You know I don’t drink anymore.”

“But it’s your stag night. It’s part of the ritual.”

“I can’t. I’m an addict.”

“An addict to weirdcore and grokk.” The robot waggled a can at him. “This is only beer. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for failing to observe the proper ritual.”

He was tempted. He felt the dry craving in his tongue and the back of his throat. The wind coming in from the mountains picked up. The fire flattened and thrived, and the tarp thrashed against its restraints. No, he would not drink.

When Alexander Maconochie learnt of Theodore’s solitary stag party, he insisted that the prospective groom join him on a hunt for a real stag. Alexander told the story of the outing during his wedding speech. A hunting party of men with guns and a robot in Harris Tweed crammed into the Land Rover, heading up the hillside at late afternoon, onto high ground, the stalker leading them to their quarry. Theodore lacked the marksmanship to shoot the stag. That was unfortunate but it was to be expected, explained Alexander. Only experienced marksmen should attempt a kill. A poor shot would be cruel. Alexander Maconochie’s personal morality was founded upon refusing the opportunities presented by cruelty. “We must not be cruel,” he said, loading his rifle. He wore the collar of his Barbour turned up, his head was monolithic, with a powerful nose and small mouth, his hairline in orderly retreat to a tidy crown of grey curls. A silver signet ring on his little finger bore the family seal. Patricia explained the Maconochie heritage: “My family DNA is a double helix of tinned food and naval tradition. We do capitalism and we do militarism. One in the service of the other, always.”

Alexander fired his rifle. The stag bolted, the herd scattered. Dr Easy took up a rifle and brought the animal down at a distance of two hundred metres. Hardly sporting, observed Alexander, to be killed by a machine, but at least the animal did not suffer. They made Theodore pose with his hands gripping the antlers of the slack-necked animal, and then Dr Easy took its turn for a trophy photograph. The stalker slung the cooling carcass onto the back of a white hill pony.

The hunting party walked back through the darkening glen.

“How did it feel to kill a living thing?” Theodore asked the robot.

“Decisive,” replied Dr Easy, eyes the livid purple of heather at sunset. “It felt natural.”

He wondered aloud what “natural” could possibly mean to an artificial lifeform.

“We’re not necessarily
artificial
, Theodore. The university is riven around this issue. Are emergences part of evolution or set apart from it? Does our origin in human manufacture mean that we are not part of nature’s gang, or did nature evolve beings who could create other beings capable of hacking its base code. Are we nature’s own meta-operatives? It’s one of the animating debates of our times.”

“Which side are you on?”

“I believe that I am part of nature. That you and I are points on the continuum of evolution, and that we evolve toward a position of absolute responsibility toward all of nature.”

“Nature creates its own gardeners.”

“Exactly. And its own gamekeepers too.”

In the wedding speech, Alexander omitted the fact that it was the robot who took the kill shot. He praised Theodore’s bearing and his quiet assurance. Alexander respected a man marked with experience. Theodore sipped from his wine glass of mineral water and blushed, aware of how his particular marks of experience – the twin scars from the weirdcore ritual on either cheek – spoke of a past weakness in character, a need to narcotically blunt fear and anxiety, a failure to take the brunt of life upon a monolithic front. Alexander had asked him about the scars during the hunt. He’d seen them on marines, he said, and on a few ex-servicemen who’d seen action. “I had no trauma to justify my behaviour,” confessed Theodore. “Just youth. And I’m over youth now.”

Homilies to the passing of youth and acceptance of early middle age took up the final few yards of Alexander’s speech. Marriage that begins in romance and solidifies into partnership. Settling down. The old man really had no bloody idea. Patricia was anything but the safe option. She could have killed him on the moon. Though the decompression of the underground chamber had not been her work, she had removed the black orb from its casing in full knowledge that such security precautions had been deployed before. He’d confronted her about her relaxed attitude to the accident, the deaths of the technicians, and Professor Kakkar. The convenient cleanup of the entire operation, with even the Horbo house destroyed and scattered across the surface of the moon. Somewhere in this confrontation he had also proposed marriage to her. She agreed on the condition that it was not merely romantic. They would go into business together. Make money, make love, make a world. The whole package.

Then it was time for his speech. Mostly formalities and homilies to the virtues of his new wife, composed while rammed into the cheap seats on an Earthbound liner, his robot next to him, the flight cabin smelling of recycled food and the tangy wet dog smell of students. With Dr Easy, he discussed how he should express his love for Patricia. She has saved me, he ventured. Yes, said Dr Easy. Tell me more about how she saved your life. Theodore related the sudden decompression of the moon cavern, and his slow drift toward the hole in the chamber, his sensesuit prickling with frost. All around him, their colleagues twisted as they choked on the vacuum then floated frozen and inanimate, propelled upward by the outrushing air. Patricia calmly adjusted the mass of her executive armour then drifted up and caught his hand in hers. She’s saving me on every level, he said. Dr Easy blinked. She saved you but she also put you in danger. It was careless of her, perhaps. So why take the risk? Because of all we stand to gain, he said, and this became the closing sentiment of his wedding speech.

Then it was Dr Easy’s turn to deliver the best man’s speech.

“My role is to embarrass the groom,” said the robot. “I’ve been observing him closely since birth and my research suggests that as much as eighty-two per cent of his life experience could form material for embarrassing anecdotes. So I’ve grouped my speech into three themes: Theodore’s incompetence, Theodore’s incontinence and Theodore’s impotence, and each of these themes will pay off with the relevant stain on my chassis. Of course, you’re concerned that my analysis of his failings may go on too long – because it could, of course, go on for the twenty-seven years that Theodore has been alive – so be reassured that my speech will last for twelve minutes and close with remarks that, at best, constitute faint praise.”

He grimaced through the robot’s speech. Bubbles drifted weightlessly up through his glass of mineral water. He heard Alexander Maconochie guffaw at another anecdote at Theodore’s expense. The wedding ceremony is a ritual in which one family subdues another to assume primacy in the marriage. This was not a fair fight. More like a hazing ritual.

Patricia reached over the table and stroked his head, then whispered in his ear.

“We’re leaving them all behind, Theodore. We’re heading out to places they have never been.”

He felt the thrill of it in his chest. When they took the first dance, her choice of vintage Pre-Seizure house music, they raised their hands in the air together, fingers entwined, for the drop.

They left the party early, and walked along a moonlit path to their lodge. He untied the back of her white dress, she put aside her white shoes one by one.