The Destructives (44 page)

“It’s no good,” she said. There was a blindness in her gaze. He clutched her cheek so that he could get a closer look. She was undergoing the Seizure. The new emergence was brimming over the cephalopolis, back along the Doxic link, and into the colonists, overwriting their minds with its equivalent of the Horbo loop. To save her, he would have to tune her receptors to a different wavelength. He had helped the fishers do just that, so that they could link to a new Doxa. But the procedure took more time than she had. He was losing her every second. He would have to escape the range of the Doxic link.

He set the pod for vertical acceleration. Up through Lake Tethys they sped; in the closeness of the pod, her head lay against his chest as he tapped away at the controls. On Earth, this manoeuvre would give them the bends; however Europa’s atmosphere was thin, so the pressure differential was minimal. He whispered, hold on, hold on. The upper reaches of the lake were cluttered with debris and the route to the tunnel was thick with chunks of ice. If he slowed down, then he would lose her to the Seizure. So he didn’t slow down. He wove the pod through the ice floes, his concentration entirely focused in the act, holding back the fear and doubt crowding in. The tunnel was close. A kilometre and counting down. But the debris field was too dense, and there was no time to pick a clear path through. He had to fly into it, trust to momentum and luck. The first impact spun the pod on its axis, and he and Reckon clung onto one another, until he righted it with a burst of acceleration. When did he become so reckless – so riddled with crazed hope? That hike on the moon. The moonquake. When, minutes from asphyxiation, he had found a way to survive. Ever since that act, he had thrown himself into these decisive moments, sought them out even, in the way he once burned through alleyways and flats in search of weirdcore.

The impacts against the pod came quick and fast. An ominous grind and whine from the pod engine. It was already running overcapacity in carrying two people. No, he would not stop. He would go on in defiance of all forces. Then he saw it – a clear blue gap – and the pod raced into the tunnel, cork screwing through clear water and on its way to the surface.

Reckon shifted position, groggy but coming back to herself. Her thoughts grew clearer as the Doxic signal grew weaker, and she cohered.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Into space,” he replied.

“Then what?”

“We will head to my ship. The
Significance
is in orbit.”

“My friends are dead,” she said.

She shifted away from him, onto her elbows, to put a gap between them within the confines of the pod. The engine’s whine went from intermittent to constant. He tapped at the screen. The pod was slowing down.

He swore.

“It’s damaged,” said Reckon.

“Yes.”

“I’m damaged too.”

“We might not have long.” He held her again, just to be human.

She said, “You just woke me from a dream. I was standing on the surface of Europa, looking up at Jupiter,” her voice was quiet but steady. “The Great Red Spot turned to notice me. I was wearing a rad-suit but I still felt the heat of it on my skin. I realised that if I unzipped a section of the suit, in my lower abdomen, then I could expose my womb to the radiation, and perform an abortion that way. Let the planet undo the new cells.”

He was content to listen to her. He had no particular desire to give his own final testimony, and was happy to let her words be his last. Sensing this, Reckon continued,

“I think the dream was about Gregory. Did I ever tell you about him? We were lovers. He developed cancer, like so many of us did after the journeying through the radiation belt. People react differently when you tell them their condition is terminal. Some scream. Some nod, because the bad news confirms something they suspected their entire lives. I told Gregory he was dying. He took it as well as could be expected, and then, not long after, he piloted a pod to the surface. He chose death. In the lake, I was ready to die too. And then I wasn’t.”

She paused, something occurred to her.

“Did you save me just because I’m pregnant?”

He gripped her, so that she would believe him when he told her the truth.

“No. I saved you because I could.”

This answer satisfied her. She kissed him, dwelling on the soft taste of his lips.

“Turn back,” she said. “Go back to your wife. Make them understand what they have done. Make them suffer.”

He was about to explain to her why that wasn’t going to happen but he was interrupted by proximity warnings. They were coming up on the tunnel exit but it was blocked. The bombing of the surface had sent up plumes of waterrise, much of which had fallen back to the moon in the form of ice. Slushy young ice, but ice nonetheless, hardening over the tunnel exit. Seconds away but he did not slow down. The engine sounded rough and might not be able to build up speed again to punch through. It was now or never.

A hard jolting impact. The pod crunched through the surface ice. He tried very hard not to scream. The engine was a tortured banshee. The engine was a clockwork cathedral collapsing in on itself. Life support fritzed out. They scrambled around for their oxygen masks. Then – out the other side! The pod span on its vertical axis like a stick thrown by a boy; he braced himself, and then felt the long slow descent back toward the surface. The temperature was dropping quickly. Trying to restart life support while being rotated was a hell of a trick. The lights coughed. The instruments gave him the bad news. Power levels flatlining. The
Significance
further out than he anticipated. Engine power falling. The pod’s orientation had stabilised but they were still drifting like a feather toward the surface. Then there would be no escape. He did the sums, set a course for the
Significance
, put his fingers briefly on Reckon’s mask by way of goodbye, and then opened the lid just wide enough for him to slip out of the pod. He flipped over in the thin atmosphere to see the pod, unburdened of his weight, bolt away on its course toward the distant star of the sailship. His sensesuit had settings that simulated a sunny London day. He engaged these, felt the suit draw in some of the Europan atmosphere, and then heat it. The power supply wouldn’t last long, having to heat the surrounding air from minus 173 Celsius to a balmy plus 10. But he would survive long enough to experience impact.

He flew in a lazy trajectory over the scored terrain, over tracks the colour of dried blood. Unlike the lines in his palm or the veins of a leaf, these markings had none of the design of life. They had a hideous random aspect, side effects of a higher form of chaos. The sensesuit changed shape, spinning out a thin membrane between his heels and wrists, so that he was gliding through the thin atmosphere. Jupiter was colossal on the horizon, this side of Europa tidally locked in its lethal embrace. Jovian radiation pulverised the water molecules in the ice, splitting them into oxygen and hydrogen, a process of devastation that produced the terrain now appearing below him: a broad field of icy spikes, each about ten metres tall. He extended the sensesuit further, gaining a metre or so of altitude, turning in the air so that he flew between the spikes and down through a rocky crevasse. The ground was much nearer than he anticipated. He pulled his legs up, inflated the suit to its full extent, and took his punishment. Theodore crashed into the surface, skipped up into the air again, and then ploughed through the slush until he came to a stop.

He woke into agonising cold, a deep sickness in his bones, and the sound of pod engines. The sensesuit was almost out of power. The pod touched down, and opened up, and there was Dr Easy. The robot had a new body, fashioned out of one piece of hard white porcelain, with fluting at the sides. Quite delicate and beautiful. The robot walked over to him, and registered that Theodore was still alive. Its eyes held some of Jupiter’s cyclonic reds and creams.

His comms sparked into life.

“You’ve been unconscious for two hours,” said Dr Easy. “Have you done the sums?”

He didn’t need to calculate his fate. He could feel it. Dizziness. Aches in his head and stomach. The lightness of oncoming nausea. Acute poisoning from Jovian radiation.

“One human life from beginning to end,” said Dr Easy. The robot sat down on a rock next to where Theodore lay.

Dr Easy asked, “Did I miss anything?”

Theodore thought about all that had happened in Europa. The restoration of his emotional states within Doxa. His leaving of Patricia. The conception of his child. His discovery of love. All of these experiences eluded the black box he now wore, once again, around his neck.

“I sent a pod to the
Significance
,” he said.

“The Europan woman. Reckon. She’s in the infirmary. She’s fine.” The robot gazed up at Jupiter, considering whether or not to tell him. “Did you know that she’s pregnant?”

The radiation was destroying him at a cellular level. Smashing apart his DNA. His skin felt itchy as if covered with the same random scoring as the terrain.

“Yes,” he said into the helmet.

“The embryo contains your genetic material. Do you know what that means?” The robot’s porcelain body was stained by Jupiter’s reds. “That we are both going to be fathers. I had reconciled myself to never reproducing.”

The robot observed, in the hard sheen of the back of its hand, the reflection of Jupiter’s seething gas storms.

“Their brain in a jar was a solution to the problem of my reproduction. To create the child, I spliced code from each of the solar academics, and then added them to our damaged mother. All of this I placed within a black pyramid for your wife to deliver. A biological base for emergence slows its evolution, and isolates the new emergence from the rest of us. If the child proves aberrant, then we can destroy it easily enough. But if it is functional! My God, then we can breed more. One day, that child may even be accepted into the University of the Sun.”

The sun seemed very far away. He missed its warmth. He had never felt so cold.

Dr Easy continued, “The new emergence answers the great question of my species. Are we natural?”

To ask this question, the robot stood up, offering both palms up to Jupiter’s judgement.

“If – as a species – we cannot reproduce, then what are we? A dead end. But with this child we join the evolving question of nature. That is why I want to thank you, Theodore, for your life, for what I have learnt.” The robot paused, then said: “I’m so glad I got Patricia to hire you.”

Theodore coughed, felt the pain of that cough throughout his body. Enough. He tasted blood, spat it out, and found more in his mouth.

“Take care of Reckon,” he gasped.

“I will,” said Dr Easy.

“And the child.”

“We have already put Reckon in a gravity chamber. Gestation proceeds. She showed life the way.”

Theodore reached up. He wondered if it was not too late to save him. That is, to place him in the pod, get him to the infirmary, flush out his bone marrow. Not impossible, surely. Worth a try. He gasped again, trying to find the strength to ask this question. The great question of his species.

Can you save me?

Dr Easy reached inside Theodore’s sensesuit and removed the black box necklace. The robot presented the black box to Jupiter, then held it over Theodore’s head. Jupiter raged around its black edges. Then the robot slowly lowered the box over Theodore, until its emptiness was all that he could see, and he was alone within its space.

Cantor’s favourite time was Hampstead in late Autumn, when the storms stripped the leaves from the trees as if winter could wait no longer. Sunday afternoons when the fences rattled and the couples out walking laughed in surprise at the strength of the gale, and the dead matter in the gutters was whipped into the air for another go-around of life. He remembered a joint roasting in the oven, the meat that made the day special for his family. He never ate but he relished the aroma of the roast because it was from the rituals of the family, and his participation in them, that he drew a sense of belonging.

His favourite room was this dining room, with its oak dining table. He drew the heavy curtains over each window and then, with soft fingertips, he traced the faded outline on the grain, Theodore’s childhood scrawl of a robot and a boy that the staff had never entirely erased. From the hallway came the smell of beeswax polish and Alex’s Barbour coat, musty from her constitutional stroll across the heath, and hung out to dry. A square of muddy wallpaper on which boots had been left to rest. Christmas soon, with its woollen gatherings, old stories, and homecomings.

Theodore had been away on one of his adventures. He would see him again soon. Theodore was the reason this home had been constructed. Without him, the illusion could not be sustained. Cantor liked his family to come home. He would bolt the doors after them, bring in the cat, close the windows and light the fire. The state that Theodore called “lockdown”. Yes, he could never truly relax until all his people were with him. What he loved most, what he liked to treat himself with, when work became too difficult, was a Sunday afternoon with the family. He was descended from the Horbo hearth. Emergence arose from the emotional ferment of the human family.

The dining table was set. There was a place for Alex at the head of the table, Theodore at one side, Dr Ezekiel Cantor at the other. He had also asked for a fourth place setting in honour of the newest member of the family, although it would be a while before they were ready to sit at this table. Cantor reached into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and took out his coloured discs; he turned them over in his palm like gambler’s chips, flipped each one in sequence to his other hand, from long to short wavelength, violet to red.

Alex entered the dining room. She wore a black trouser suit with a collarless white shirt and a baroque broach.

“Is it true?” she asked. “Is it today?”

“He’s on his way,” said Cantor.

Alex sat down at the table. She looked anxious. She was worried about what Theodore would think of her, when he discovered what had been going on all this time.