The Destructives (36 page)

“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 little 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 showed 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 ice gave way to coarse-grained blue dunes divided by rocky channels stained red by the indigenous endolithic algae. Hamman swam ahead with forceful kicks. She felt the pressure waves from his kicks ripple underneath her body. Then he turned to face them. He held out two ends of a long elasticated cord that was secured to his waist. She attached it to her belt, and to Theodore’s. As she did so, she peered inside Theodore mask. His pupils were vast. He was breathing quickly. Highly stimulated. The orange line on his telemetry. Did he guess what they were doing to him? He grasped her shoulders. Wanted to say something to her but comms were shut off this close in. His hands moved to her waist. Excitement. Desire? Perhaps. Or the onset of fear. She took his hands in hers, as much to remove them from her body as to reciprocate his touch. His telemetry was also changing. From the mere representation of biological function, it was becoming more expressive, spinning out radiating spokes of mood states. She ventured a thumbs-up at him. But he was already swimming away and following in the wake of Hamman Kiki.

She swam good and strong, more comfortable in the water than on land. Ahead, the dips and swells of the dark dunes were rimed with a shifting paisley pattern of curling indigos and toxic reds. These projections from Doxa, played out on the mounds of hypothermal dust, were wheels-within-wheels, cyclones and vortices twisting inside one another – like a weather front observed from space. And then the lights vanished. She felt a tug on her tether. Without the lightshow, all she could see was the steady telemetry of Theodore and Hamman. The weak light of lifesigns overwhelmed by blind water. Another tug on her tether. She swam in close to Hamman. He held one palm out. The dark outline of his fingers reaching into the deep cold black. Then, as if responding to his signal, a new rhythm of blue pulses appeared up ahead. These pulses wriggled out from a central hub and across a great expanse of the seabed. Her first thought was of a landing strip or another colony. But a colony much larger than home. The blue pulse reached the end of its line and then it wriggled quickly along the circumference, and then back along a radius to the central hub. The afterimage flared on her retina.