The Destructives (42 page)

Reckon withdrew. She concentrated on Doxa, to sense what was happening with the other colonists. An image of the dark forms of the fishers darting into the crevasses and gorges of Tethys, harvesting the black eggs, taking them to secondary cephalopods. Even as she was connected to them, these Doxic links were disappearing. Why was that? She would feel – even through the breakers – if they were dying. She remembered the fishers and their light show at the party, their bonding rituals as they brought in the catch. Generation Extra-Terrestrial, Theodore had called them. Their thoughts and emotions had grown obscure to her. Now she realised why; the young people had formed their own culture, their own Doxa. One not shared with the older generation. That was how culture worked on Earth and they had replicated it on Europa. They were unplugging themselves from the communal mind and plugging into their new Doxa; with it, they would escape the Destructives, journey through the chasm, and begin the exploration of Oceanus.

The hull creaked and groaned with its usual mechanical complaints. Then, gradually, as the submarine came up on the chasm, the machine resonated with a deeper lament, one coming from the substance of the moon itself, as ice and rock were twisted in the contrary gravities of Jupiter and the other moons. On the surface of Europa, the ice crust cracked, new glaciers forming in the weals.

“What is that sound?” asked Magnusson.

“Jupiter pulling at the heartstrings of its child,” said Reckon. She thought of the effect of gravity upon foetal formation. The ongoing experiment in her womb. Twenty-five weeks into gestation, when the brain forms a thalamus, she planned to inject the foetus with quantum interface detectors so she could observe the emergence of its consciousness within Doxa. Right now, it had insufficient neuronal connections to qualify as life to anyone but a sentimentalist. But life would emerge. That was the fundamental lesson of this century: sufficient interconnections make consciousness. Baby cells, silicon chips, jellyfish genes, or Matthias’ inmates of the asylum mall – it didn’t matter. Really, all you needed was complexity and connection.

Ballurian stopped the submarine two kay out from the cephalopolis. He explained that the mechanical action of the screw disrupted the signals within Doxa, and so the fishers always swam the rest of the way.

“No,” said Magnusson. “Bring us in closer.”

“The interface has to be physically proximate to complete the analysis,” explained Patricia.

“We could bring up a pod,” said Ballurian. He was stalling for time, trying for opportunity. He flicked on the intercom and requested that the dock send out a pod to help them. Reckon closed her eyes, trying to sense if there was anyone out there in the dark waters, an ambush waiting to help them. No one. Not yet. If he could put the Destructives in the water, then the fishers would have the upper hand.

She glanced through the porthole, in the direction of the cephalopolis, saw, in the dark distance, the flickering aurora of its bioluminescence. She injected herself with antifreeze serum.

“The pod will be here in no time,” said Ballurian.

“Closer, please,” said Magnusson. “Now.”

“We’ll go slow,” said Ballurian, “to minimise disturbance.”

The screw started up again, thrumming with a slow, doubtful rhythm.

“How is my son doing?” asked Ballurian.

Patricia promised to go down and check on him. Reckon followed her, at a discreet distance, moving through the cabins. Her friends waited on narrow benches; Turigon sat meditatively, and Jordan looked haunted and tense. Under submarine lighting, they all looked like death. She squeezed Jordan’s hand, knelt down to hold her. Jordan toyed with one of Reckon’s braids, to bring her closer.

“I had a look at their interface,” whispered Jordan. “It’s designed for data transfer, as you’d expect. But there is no sign of any data storage. The pipes are human tech but there are missing drives. The way it is configured at the moment, there is nothing to store input or output.”

She thanked Jordan for this information, kissed her on the cheek. For the two months after Gregory died, she had moved in with Jordan. There is no time limit on grief, explained Jordan, and when you are this close to the loss, it helps to have others nearby. She could not imagine an immortal species like the emergences knowing kindness. The emergences had the wiring for consciousness but they were immune to time. Love is made out of time; that is, love is experiential and our emotions the connection to that experience. It followed that if the emergences were immune to time, they were also immune to love.

She climbed down the ladder into the hold. The interface had unfolded under the attentions of Patricia and the technicians, revealing that Hamman, in his chamber, was no closer to consciousness. Ballurian was trying to buy time for the fishers. He too could feel them disappearing from Doxa, and knew that they were fleeing the lake. Prolonging this expedition would give the fishers a head start. All of the young would be saved, except for Hamman, his own son.

Patricia’s armour was open at the front, and the tech team were extracting something from within the shoulder sections. A small black pyramid, each side about ten centimetres in length, had been stowed away there.

“What is that?” asked Reckon, moving closer. The tech team – two women in wetsuits and breathing apparatus – stopped, and bristled at her approach. It was as if she had disturbed some primitive rite. The black pyramid resonated with tangible presence, so dense with complexity and interconnectedness that it exerted a kind of psychic gravity

“It’s a baby,” said Patricia.

The black pyramid was emergence tech, it had that sheen of out-of-placeness. Jordan had said the interface was missing devices for input and output.

“It looks like a storage device,” said Reckon. Yes, the black pyramid contained data and constituted the input. So what was the output? Through the porthole, the green and blue edges of Doxa’s aurora. They were not going to destroy Doxa, Patricia had repeated that point over and again. The Destructives were going to use the interface to transfer the contents of the black pyramid into it. This explained why they had placed Hamman within the interface; his Doxic connection already translated between his neuronal activity and Doxa, so it would act as a Rosetta Stone for the translation of the contents of the black pyramid onto the biological stratum of Doxa.

Reckon pointed to the black pyramid. “Give that to me.”

Patricia ignored her and gave the pyramid over to a technician, who installed it then resealed the section.

“Tell me,” said Patricia, “which would be crueller: death by drowning or death by freezing?”

Reckon was confused. Then afraid.

Patricia said, “I only ask because my father taught me never to be cruel. There are oxygen masks stowed overhead. Grab one.”

The armour spun out a helmet for Patricia, a blast plate slid down concealing her face entirely. The technicians took up their oxygen masks and braced themselves, their suit telemetry lit up with jagged peaks of heightened anticipation. The locking clamps in the hold doors withdrew. Bad news. Reckon leapt upward, and yanked open the store, found an oxygen mask, fiddled with the straps. The airlock opened. Cold lake water sluiced over her toes. Without a wetsuit, she would not last long, even with the antifreeze in her blood. She climbed up to the ceiling to give herself more time to think. Once the inrush of lake water spent its force, Patricia and the two technicians floated the interface out of the hold, her armour firing twin cyclones of propulsion, leaving Reckon alone. She should immerse herself as slowly as possible in the water to minimise the shock response. The antifreeze would keep her alive for now. Her breathing became quick and shallow, and she pulled the mask over her face and inhaled its rubbery oxygen.

So: drowning or hypothermia? She quietened her breathing. There was a hope somewhere in Doxa. A suggestion of hope streaming through the lake toward her. The pod requested by Ballurian. She shifted her concentration to this point, to investigate it, but there was nothing more than that fleeting suggestion. She flexed her feet, stretched her cold muscles. The antifreeze was working. Thank god for the icefish, and its glycoproteins. She sank into the water, stripped off her shoes and gown, then swam out of the hold, out into the widening gyres of the current around Oceanus chasm.

The submarine had come to a stop, its spotlights forming light tunnels through the gloom. The oxygen mask had a weak head torch. Ahead the three Destructives swam with the interface between them, their silhouettes visible against the churning light storms of the cephalopolis. Doxa’s luminescence sounded in her heart like a distant church organ, celestial music to sing her to her death. No, she was not ready for death. Not yet. She swam through warmer currents heated by the tidal friction flowing out of Oceanus chasm. Warm moon breath on her neck. Turning back, she saw, framed in the observation window of the bridge of the submarine, Ballurian slumped on the floor, Magnusson standing over him in full armour and helmet. Ballurian’s heart burst; in Doxa, its sparks of debris fell onto all their upturned faces. And then the breakers spared her the rest of his death. His final thought was
save the young
.

The Destructives swam up into the ruffled skirts of the cephalopolis, through the clustering of black eggs, and into its inner chambers, bearing the apex of the interface before them. They were uncertain of the route, and had to cut their way through where the arteries were too narrow for the interface to pass, so she was able to gain upon them. She took a parallel route. Darkening purples and bloody traces churned within the close walls. The Destructives reached the thick-lidded valve that led into the pressurised inner chambers. The technicians worked the valve open, clamping its thick muscular ridges aside so that the interface could be pressed through. Hamman was still within the interface, as was the smaller black pyramid. She waited in the tight cold passage, counting out minutes, the white flesh of the cephalopod clammy against her skin. She would not survive a direct confrontation, not against Patricia’s armour. She would have to surprise them, and for that she needed the Destructives to be distracted.

She closed her eyes and the harmonies of Doxa thrilled her; during clinical death, the human brain experiences gamma coherence, a flare of hyperconsciousness in which all the neurons of the brain are focused as one. In her final moments of consciousness, she could expect an intense savouring of the real; she preferred to adopt a detached curiosity to this event, and block out her fear. The hymn of Doxa, the coming together of many voices into a single rising note, they would pass into death as one. She swam along an adjoining palpitating tunnel then pushed her way through the valve. Rising slowly out of the pool, slipping her body over the smooth rounded edge, she kept her stomach low against the floor of the chamber.

The interface was on the other side of the room; unfolded, it was the net of a pentagonal-based pyramid, with five triangular sections. Hamman Kiki was suspended in one of these sections, and was barely conscious. Patricia and the technicians had their helmets on, and were deaf to her arrival. She raised herself into a crouch. The cephalopolis shifted in the rising waters, she went down onto one knee. Her bare skin exposed, she started shivering violently. She reached into her pocket and took out the adrenaline shot, tried to load the capsule into the pen, but her fingers were numb. She concentrated on aligning the dithering of her left hand with the shaking of her right.

A nervous system of light flowed within the surrounding walls. Patricia unwound a long fat pipe from the base of the interface; the pipe had a bladed cap, which she held into position over the intersection between the coloured impulses, triggering the cap so that it drilled into the flesh of the cephalopolis then stuck fast. The technicians sent a test signal down the pipe: the room flashed with the sudden shift in the pattern of the light traces; from the organic branching and rebranching of tributaries, the pattern assumed an angular complexity. This shift lasted five seconds, and then the signal stopped; long enough to reassure the technicians that the interface was functioning. They looked to Patricia for permission to begin.

Reckon loaded the adrenaline shot. How could she get close enough to deliver it? Then, she heard footsteps coming down the passageway on the other side of the chamber, from the recesses she had explored with Hamman and Theodore. Yes, she understood now. The pod that Ballurian had requested. He had sent for Theodore.

Theodore’s wetsuit seemed bulky, and she realised – by the crosshatched pattern pressing against the taut material – that he was wearing it over a sensesuit. In his hand, an oxygen mask. Patricia and the technicians heard him, and as they turned, they saw Reckon too, shivering beside the pool. Theodore kept walking toward his wife, reaching forward as if he was about to embrace her. The uncertain pulse of the telemetry on his wetsuit, his face bruised and sour, he didn’t know how this was going to play out. He would speak directly, avoiding the rules of the meta-meeting or the habits of his marriage, find a way for him and Patricia to communicate vitally. He had to stop his wife from achieving everything they had worked for, and persuade her that Doxa should be saved.

“No,” said Theodore.

Patricia’s helmet slid back. She was biting at her lower lip, bringing her gauntlets up, either to return his promise of an embrace, or as a warning. She too was unaccustomed to speaking and acting outside of the meta-meeting; this crisis was one of uncertainty. Reckon closed her shivering hands around the adrenalin shot, and Patricia turned furiously toward her; when he took a step closer, her attention turned back again to Theodore. He unzipped the front of his wetsuit, reached inside, and brought out a black box on a chain. It was smaller than the black pyramid the technicians removed from Patricia’s armour but it was made from the same material – it had the same dense shimmer of heavy neuronal weather.

“I’ve been wearing this black box since I was a boy,” said Theodore. “It records my thoughts and experiences but I can never see inside it. All of these memories have been captured but they are not accessible to me; in a way, they are no longer mine at all. Do you understand?”