The Destructives (37 page)

A blue pulse wriggled down each of Hamman’s fingers and rested in the well of his palm. He passed it onto her, and it flickered across her telemetry and then she passed it onto Theodore, and it pulsed across him also. She swam on.

Here, the dunes ended, and the lakebed become rougher, and sloped downward. There was a city below her. A nightscape of translucent bioluminescence, varying in pattern from district to district. The fishers called it
cephalopolis
. The outskirts of cephalopolis were marked by a playful fringe of pale blue dots, and this circumference was connected to a central brain stem or russet minaret by ferrous-tinged muscular spokes. New patterns rippled through the cephalopolis, a steady pale tan striping and then, passing through the stripes, a large livid red spot. Hamman’s palm followed the spot in the same way that the head of a sunflower tracks the sun across the sky. Cephalopolis was a biological substrate of neurological complexity that had no anatomical resemblance to the human brain but contained such a glut of integrated synapses, firing in sync, that human and human-like thought could be gathered within it. The name of that gathering was Doxa. She stopped swimming, drifted on the tether in a supplicant posture. Almost foetal. Curled up around an ecstatic gut. Abject worship of Doxa, the living library of their memories and feelings.

Hamman pulled them in closer, showed them the cluster of black eggs under the ruffled edges of the cephalopolis. Each egg contained within it the knowledge of their community encoded as instinct. Ballurian’s plan for panspermism, the seeding of distant stars with emergent life. Because if consciousness was a basic property of matter then space did not belong solely to physics and chemistry. It belonged to biology too. To humans and emergences alike. Doxa’s bioluminescence saturated her with awe. The balm of its benevolent radiation, a mother’s hand on a child’s fevered brow.

Follow me, beckoned Hamman. They swam under the ranks of black eggs, and then the fisher took them close into the tough thick flesh. He showed them a hole cut into the cephalopolis – not an orifice, as such. It was wide enough for them to swim two-abreast. With a sarcastic humble bow, Hamman offered Theodore the chance to lead. Revenge for the baiting in the submarine. Theodore did not accept the dare. The translucent walls of the tunnel lit up with ponderous contemplative lightwaves. The tunnel ended in a thick lidded valve: Hamman reached out with his palm and the valve opened before he could touch it. Together, they climbed out of the tunnel and found themselves within an oxygenised chamber in the cephalopolis. Hamman removed his mask to show them that the atmosphere was breathable. Theodore could not remove his mask, so she helped him. His hair was matted with sweat. Either from exertion or a reaction to the injection. He was more agitated than usual.

Underfoot, the shifting rising motion of the cephalopolis in the water. If it swam far from the submarine, then they would be stranded. This was dangerous, and she said so to Hamman.

“Doxa will not put us in danger,” he replied. “Doxa knows that we are within her.” He ran his fingers along the walls, which responded with inky traces.

“How long have you been coming here?” she asked.

There were three tunnels leading out of the chamber. He walked down one with the rolling gait of a man negotiating a rope bridge.

He dared them to follow him. “Aren’t you curious?”

They were still attached to Hamman by their tethers. She looked to Theodore. But he was racked with nausea, his hands clenched to steady himself.

She was wary of leaving the chamber. “What is there to see?”

Hamman called back, “Just one more room, I promise.”

The tunnel opened up into a small cold side room with an upward curving ramp; this ramp led to a room with architecture that was a cross between a cathedral and a gullet. The high ceiling was vaulted with muscular tendons. In the far wall, a large churning dial of multi-coloured tendrils. Hamman reached out to them, and they erected in return, putting forth cerulean and ochre energies.

“After my mother died,” said Hamman, “I discovered this place.”

He climbed up on a raised dais of gelatinous material, the tethers taut. The coloured tendrils wavered at his approach. The air crackled with energy.

“I realised that part of my mother lives on in Doxa. All of our dead live here. Their knowledge and emotional traces.”

Theodore finally spoke, “
All
of your dead?”

“Their footprints, their echoes, their marks, their works. My mother’s compassion. That is how I found this place. I followed the feel of her voice. Whenever my memory of her starts to fade, I come here and I experience her presence again as if I was her little boy, and she is comforting me.”

Gregory.
His breath had been sour with medication. She became the caregiver, obligations she secretly resented. He was never part of Doxa. He was not here.

Reckon said, her voice tremoring, “What if I don’t want to be with my dead?”

“Then be with the living,” said Hamman. “This will be our city of god.”

Reckon wondered if the young man had lost his mind.

“How will we live here? What will we eat?”

“Doxa will nurture us. She will feed us from her own belly.”

An image of placenta, and all the fishers connected to it. Back to the womb. She had an idea. A solution to the problem of gestation in low gravity. All the time, she had been looking at cellular formation even though it was not clear why these processes should be affected by low gravity, especially if she fooled the organism into sensing a typical Earth gravity. Instead, she should have been looking at the placenta. The problem of blood flow in the supporting environment that would lead to retardation of growth. A flash of insight. Either from Doxa or from her own genius, it didn’t matter. She saw what had eluded her, all this time.

Theodore was on his knees. His telemetry was sparky. Head bowed forward in anticipation of judgement, but not mercy. He gasped, “What did you do to me?”

She shook her head. No, no, it was not like that. She had meant for him to join them in Doxa. Not suffer like this.

Theodore lifted up his empty hands, and whispered, “What are these feelings for?”

The ground shifted, the grey walls of the cathedral rippled at the pressure of adjacent disturbances. Hamman looked concerned. He leapt off the dais and ran back down the slope. She lifted Theodore up by his arm, and they followed the young fisher back through the chamber. As she ran, she felt the way her surroundings were shifting position. The tunnels pulsed with leading lights. She helped Theodore with his mask, and then they were through the valve and back in the dark lake water.

Theodore floated stunned in the water. His telemetry showed agitation, rapid pulse rate, spiking blood pressure. She put a gloved hand on him. Behind the mask, he was blinking away sweat, and the look on his face was one of such dread.
What are these feelings for?
Their silhouettes against a red curved section of cephalopolis. She reached out for him through Doxa but he was not there. He remained apart. The injection had not worked in the way she had hoped, and he was confined to his own private pain. Behind the mask he was crying, and his chest heaved with sobbing. What was he thinking? What had upset him? Sealed away in his suit, she had no idea. Was blinded by her own joy, so found his sorrow inexplicable.

The cephalopolis turned in the water and rose upward. A pressure wave buffeted them. Theodore did not resist. He let the wave roll him back. And there, in the space vacated, was the chasm leading down to Oceanus. Black silted water spilling upward through the vents in the lakebed. The tether jerked tight. Hamman overhead, treading water, watching but not interfering. Something glimmering in his hand. A knife. To cut Theodore free. Vortical currents, warmer than the surrounding water, the presence of a deeper darkness below. Then there was a sound. A sound like a leviathan tapping stone fingers against electromagnetic strings. Echoing up from below and then all around her. Theodore was yanked out to the full extent of the tether, caught in the current rushing up from Oceanus. Lonely and quivering at the end of life. Gregory had died the same way. And then, in a joyous rush, long tube worms whipped out of the chasm, each lit from within by waves of cerulean blue exhilaration. When Jupiter lifts Europa up by its scalp, the scream of the ice resonates throughout the moon, and the worms respond to the vibrations of that call. It was as if nature had recalled her seed, rewound creation and then poured forth destruction instead.

Theodore was knocked upward by that wriggling mass, buffeted from side to side on the tether. Hamman tested the edge of the knife against the elasticated cord. And then Theodore fought back. He found his strength. He started to swim out of the current. His first few kicks were fruitless but then he found his stroke and he turned free of the uprushing column of megafauna. And this satisfied Hamman Kiki, he began pulling on the tether, to reel the stranger in.

They swam back to the submarine. It lit up at their approach. Hamman unclipped the tether, and opened the hatch. Inside the submarine, Theodore removed his mask, and put it aside, the sheer black layer of his wetsuit already dry. His face was puffy with the pressure of the dive, making his twisted scars seem even deeper. He was reluctant to catch her eye, preferring the neon holograms of the guidance system. She should comfort him. But how? Doxa was comfort. She was not Doxa. Accustomed to sharing feeling with the rest of the community, her ability to read the subtleties of other people had diminished.

The submarine lifted up from the lakebed, and turned back in the direction of the colony.

Hamman, strapped into the pilot’s chair, was amused by Theodore’s stupefaction. Had no sympathy with the older man’s sorrow.

“What did you think of that?”

Theodore rubbed at his eyes.

“You’ve made a brain in a jar,” he said.

Hamman looked askance.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I remember why I’m here.”

He wouldn’t say any more than that. She pressed him on it. But, no. It seemed to upset him, and she didn’t want him to be upset. She wanted him to share in her sense of wonder and worship. She took his hand in hers, put her other hand on his cheek. He was cold to the touch.

“I should leave,” he whispered.

She withdrew her hand.

The water in the moon pools was dark and maroon under the secondary lighting. She left the submarine bay and returned to the changing room, stripping off her wetsuit, and stepping into a hot abundant shower. She washed the rubberised smell of the suit off her skin, saturated her braids with water, massaged shampoo into her scalp and then bent forward so that the water and soap ran down her braids. The abandon of it. She stood up and let her braids drift up and cover her face. Shame on her for what she did to him. Experimenting in that way. She didn’t know why the serum had failed. She bound her braids tightly in a towel.

When she emerged from the shower, naked, he was sat on the bench opposite, his wetsuit unzipped to expose his upper body. She covered her exposed breasts by crooking her arms. But that was absurd. He should see her. The darkening tips of her nipples, her full hips and strong thighs, the stripe of freckles across her shoulders, droplets of water quivering upon the coiled hair of her pubis. And then she slipped the towel from her head, turned her back to him, and covered her body. After exposing herself, she was entitled to ask him direct questions.

“You were upset by the Doxa.”

“I was a weirdcore addict from the age of seventeen. I was very close to my grandmother. She raised me. But when she died, I was still an addict. I couldn’t grieve. I never grieved. Until today.”

This was fascinating. Her serum had worked, but instead of integrating him with Doxa it had first restored his emotional capacity.

“That’s positive,” she said.

He shook his head.

“It’s not the only thing that I remembered. Forgetting makes life bearable. I’ve come to rely upon it.”

“You seemed scared back there.”

“I was. Being scared is something I’m now capable of.”

He stood up and walked over to her, and they were kissing. His lips were still cold but there was a strong suggestion of warmth to come. He stepped back, sat back down and took off the rest of his wetsuit. His penis sat up strongly. He walked past her into the showers to wash off the smell of the wetsuit, the door of the cubicle ajar so that she could watch. His hair ruckled up at all angles. She was certain that sex was the right thing to do: her worship of Doxa still tingled in her body. There was a similar awakening within him. Long stifled needs, suppressed possibilities, wanton yearnings. The shower stopped. She removed her towel and offered it to him. He dabbed his body with its still-warm cloth, and then put it aside. He gripped her backside, pressed her back into the cubicle. She guided him into her.

23

IN VIVO

The second time they had sex, it was like he was heaving his soul into her. She clutched either side of his head, took the sweat of his scalp under her fingernails, ran her heels along the strong ridged muscles in his lower back. Afterwards, she joked that with the low gravity, it was like he was trying to push them both into orbit. The third time they had sex, she sat astride him, kept him still and deep. Europa’s groans echoed along the air vents as the moon was stretched then compressed by the gravities of its Jovian siblings. She hitched herself up to quiver with orgasm against the head of his penis and, when he was unable to hold back any longer, helpless in the face of her ecstasy, he came deep into her.

She knew what she was doing.

Afterwards, under red secondary lighting and thin municipal blankets, they argued about Earth.

“You must miss it,” he insisted.

She didn’t miss Earth. He composed doggerel praising Earth to remind her of its qualities: the morning mist drifting over patchwork fields, the sublime majesty of a thunder mountain. His nature talk was not persuasive.