The Destructives (34 page)

Graviceptors calibrate in vitro according to prevailing gravitational conditions. An embryo or larvae takes readings of its environment and develops accordingly. Transfer cephalopods grown on Europa to Earth and their graviceptors would be too sensitive. Gestate species native to Europa in Earth’s oceans, however, and their graviceptors would adapt. This was a crucial finding. It meant that graviceptors were not Earth-specific: the sense had the capacity to adapt to other gravitational conditions so long as it was calibrated to those conditions during gestation.

Humans had graviceptors in the trunk of the body, around the kidneys. There, statoliths registered gravitational shift and communicated this information along the renal nerves to the centre of the brainstem, which connected to the motor system via the cerebellum. A shift in mass caused by the major blood cells was another indicator of orientation.

For a primate swinging through trees, knowing how the body is orientated in relation to the ground is vital. The brain organ responsible for matching visual information (tree branches, vines) with the sense of the body (the outreaching hand, the hovering foot) was the angular gyrus. The gyrus was a junction between the senses. Its role as a sensory crossroads could be observed in the cross-modal nature of metaphor. Relationships are
hard.
The
sharp
smell of cigarettes. Sounds can be described according to touch – your voice is
cold
– or the way that, in metaphor, abstract notions such as truth were conflated with visual concepts such as bright white light.
If truth is white, then what does black mean
?

Reckon put down her scalpel, and stepped back from the dissecting table. Rubbed her eyes so that she could think. Always, whenever she got this deep into her work, she would step back and consider different pathways that might be open to her.

Could fooling the graviceptors that they were under Earth gravity during gestation stabilise the development of the larvae? That is, were the mutations she witnessed in the icefish botched attempts by the organism to adapt to Europan conditions, an adaptation it could not make because the variance in gravity was simply too great? Another pathway was to isolate the gravitationally agnostic aspects of complex organisms, and see what she could stitch together out of them. Thirdly… Thirdly… she was very tired.

Theodore had said to her, pointedly, that he did not know her position. Was this an allusion to her research into graviceptors and proprioception? Did he know what she was working on? Was his remark a move within the meta-meeting?

When she first met Ballurian, he had a different name. When she was a graduate student, she knew him as Professor Elisson. Then, when she became his research assistant, she knew him as Simon Elisson. In the private sector on Earth, he was known as the Cutter, but no one had called him that for a long time.

They had all changed a lot in the seventeen years since escaping the University of the Moon. Changed physically, emotionally, psychologically. Reckon had helped create Doxa: a communal exosomatic memory within a biological substrate capable of independent life in the waters of a Jovian moon. This achievement was previously unimaginable to her, and a testament to how well their colony worked. Ballurian had changed too, and not just his name. Liberated from the restrictions of academic and corporate etiquette, he had given himself over to the bioengineers. Now he stood seven foot tall in his grey robes, bare-footed, femurs like baseball bats and his skin glimmering with radiation blockers. His body temperature was high, invariably in the process of resisting a new implant; his bald head was tense with perspiration, like granite after rainfall.

She had sex with him on the moon, back when he was an American. Professor Elisson had been a broad-shouldered, corn-fed second generation Malaysian-American male in a J-Crew blazer. Middle aged, yes, but acceptably maintained. Mostly retired from his private sector interests in the arrays and accelerated culture. Keeping his hand in here and there with consultancy.

In their time on Europa, longevity treatments and life under the ice had made him into something
other
. Memories of their lovemaking existed in Doxa: he visited them more than she did, always leaving a nostalgic token as a trace of his recollection.

Ballurian Kiki was his Europan name. The trend for Europan names began among the young. His son took the name Hamman Kiki when he was eighteen, and his father followed his example. Their chosen names moved past you like Europan megafauna: a bulbous welcoming head and trunk – Ham
man
, Ball
urian
– with the flicking, lethal spiky tail of
kiki
. In the dark waters of Lake Tethys, sounds were more important than appearances.

Ballurian Kiki and his son dined in the refectory. The roof of the refectory was transparent, its edges illuminated by pale green guide lights diffused by sediment. She hung back, waiting until they were finished. The family assistant – a pale silver-haired girl, another fisher like Hamman – informed her that the Kikis were ready for her interruption. Ballurian leant back, pulled a chair out for her, offering it with an expansive hand gesture. Hamman was less welcoming; unlike his father, the son was pale and immune to her.

Ballurian’s voice was deep, mannered in its precision, a leader’s way of speaking, in which ambiguity was always intentional and designed to manipulate others.

“Should we let Theodore out of quarantine?” he asked her.

“You know all that I know,” she said.

“Do you believe him, though? That story about his wife.” Ballurian rubbed a distasteful word between his fingertips. “
Sympathy
. That is what he seeks to elicit.”

Hamman nodded at his father’s wisdom. They were eating pemmican made from smoked megafauna, powdered then mixed with mammal tallow and mashed berries from the hydroponic farm. They dipped at the pemmican with kelp crackers. Whereas she’d been subsisting off Yomp for weeks. The presence of the richly flavoured pemmican made her salivate. She realised that Theodore had not eaten properly since his arrival.

“Theodore is damaged,” she said. “It makes him hard to read.”

“Your feelings are contrary,” said Ballurian, placing his hand on his heart, closing his eyes. Each member of the colony was connected to Doxa through their stripe. It required an act of will.

Ballurian came out of his Doxic link with his insight into her. “You suspect that, when you get to know Theodore better, that he will disappoint you, and that you will hate everything that he stands for. For now, you accept him, are even fond of him, though you regard that fondness as a weakness. Am I reading you accurately?”

“We could interface him with Doxa,” she said. “Give him a stripe. Incorporate him. Use him.”

Hamman sharply rapped the table. He did not voice his objection, considering his body language to be sufficiently commanding. That was how the young people did it.

“Yes. Doxa would reveal him to us,” said Ballurian, “but it would also expose us to him.”

“Vent him,” said Hamman.

Ballurian turned to Reckon, opening a space for her to disagree with his son’s violent verdict.

She said, “We are scientists and artists. We learn and we create. Theodore will challenge our assumptions. Perhaps what we learn reaffirms our faith in our seclusion.”

Three great nods from Ballurian indicated his consideration and approval of her suggestion. He smiled at a private joke. “And I am
curious
to hear about Earth,” he admitted. “
Schadenfraude
on my part. Delight in the misfortune of the rest of the human race. That is my weakness.”

The Ballurian’s mind had many chambers in the Doxa. Some were as cold and lethal as the surface ice. He took her hand in his great paw.

“Your
work
,” he said, inflecting the word as if he had spoken of love.

“It’s proceeding,” she said.

“An impossible child born on Europa.”

“I’m doing my utmost,” she said.

“Do whatever is necessary,” he smoothed the skin on the back of her hand. “When I first met you, you were drifting.”

“That was the low gravity.”

He laughed like a cold engine turning over once, twice.

“Anger fixed you.”

Be the anger you want to see in the world.

“Show your anger to this hollow man. It will force him either way. And then we will know what is to be done with him.”

She decided to sleep on it. She lay in the dark, tuning into the lamentations of Jupiter’s magnetic field, a sorrow extending along filigrees of space dust and vagrant atoms. Europa orbits Jupiter in resonance with Io and Ganymede, three of sixty-three moons in the Jovian system. Jupiter, the thwarted star, and its livid blind eye, The Great Red Spot. What must it be like to be caught in that seething eternal storm? Ammonia riddled with lightning and winds that cut you to the bone. Europa is massaged by the massive gravitational pull of Jupiter and tugged this way and that by Io and Ganymede. These contrary forces expand and contract the moon, wringing its heart, generating tidal heating. The interior of the ice ball thaws with every orbit. Cut out of the bed of Lake Tethys, the chasm through to Oceanus, its water a hundred miles deep. At the precipice of sleep, her thoughts branched and diffused.

Next day, she showed up to the infirmary with a set of freshly printed clothes tailored to his measurements. Theodore knew the meaning of her gift before she even had a chance to explain it. He was being allowed out of quarantine.

“One question first,” she said. “Why ‘the Destructives’? It’s not even a real word.”

“We’re the opposite of creatives.”

“And you’re proud of that?”

He took off Gregory’s old shirt, and put his hand out for the new outfit.

“You said ‘one question’.”

She put the new outfit into the decontamination drawer and shunted it over to him.

She gave him the tour, beginning with her laboratory. She explained her work in simple terms, the role of gravitation in gestation, the importance of that research in terms of man’s colonisation of space.

“There were gravitational chambers on the sailship,” he said.

“We haven’t successfully reverse engineered the emergence tech.”

“But if you got back on a sailship, couldn’t the pregnant woman just sit in a gravitational chamber?”

“It would have to be constant. Gestation does not proceed healthily in suspended animation, and the variance in gravity of her coming in and out of the chamber massively increases the chance of malformation and miscarriage.”

“Could you grow the baby in a jar, and put that inside the chamber?”

“
Ex vivo
? It’s definitely an important research pathway. Partial ectogenesis has been possible ever since the invention of the incubator. To intervene at an earlier point in gestation, we are developing an artificial womb. We have made our own amniotic fluid and grown the endometrium – the uterine layer that nourishes the embryo – as a cell culture. We’re on our way to cracking that.”

“You could seed the universe that way.”

“
Panspermism
. I don’t believe in it. My work will preserve the mother and child relationship. Do we really want to send a motherless human race into the stars?”

He walked at a careful pace, the bruising on his side still painful. The corridors were quiet, the refectory empty apart from Turigon, who invariably dined alone and at eccentric times. Turigon looked like he was in the middle of a three-day lab session. Hair unwashed and awry. He was the leader of the team reverse engineering emergence tech. She went to introduce Theodore to him but Turigon shook his head, and waved them away. It was the same when they encountered the Szwed twins in the chapel, and Milan in the jungle gym. The campus was quiet and those who were around did not want to speak to or meet Theodore.

Theodore looked inquiringly at her.

“What have I done to upset everyone?”

“It’s what you represent.”

He stopped.

“What do I represent?”

“We came to Europa to get away from people like you.”

“Like me? You don’t know me.”

“I know that you take pride in destruction.” She remembered Ballurian’s counsel. Show him your anger. She decided to turn on him.

“What did you teach on the University of the Moon?”

“The Intangibles,” he replied.

“By ‘intangibles’ you mean philosophy, art, literature, the history of ideas?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think intangibles is a reductive way to frame a body of knowledge that represents our achievement as a civilisation?”

“It wasn’t my decision to call them that. I came to teaching late.”

“What were you doing beforehand?”

“I was an accelerator on the arrays.”

“You engineered culture for the benefit of your clients?”

“Yes. That’s how it works,” he sounded testy, and a little bored by her questioning.

“And you just went along with that. You didn’t try to change it?”

“Not on my own.”

She reached over and ran her thumb along the spiral of one of his scars.

“You teach but you don’t know anything. You talk about your wife but you can’t feel. You made a travesty of the world until it reflected the paucity of your soul.”

He bit his lip, considered unloosing his temper.

“I’ve added significant artefacts to the restoration,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes.

“The restoration? It’s detritus. You dig up bits of crap from the past and hand them over for the approval of a machine. You’re nearly thirty and you have done nothing of consequence. Oh, sorry. I stand corrected. You took drugs once, and thought that made you interesting.” Speaking to him like this was exhilarating. The anger flowed through her, and she gave up trying to moderate or control it.

“We left Earth because it was overpopulated with people like you. The ecosystem was devastated, but we could fix that. Culture was reeling from emergence, but we had the artists to show us a new path. What we couldn’t work with was the wilful devious ignorance of people like you. You weren’t the majority but you were in power. Half a billion miles and still you can’t leave us alone. And what did you bring for us? What do you propose that you can add to our community? Nothing. You’re stuck. Stuck and recessive, like the whole bloody planet.”