The Destructives (38 page)

“You advocate Earth but you’re ignoring the humans,” she said. “And they are the planet’s defining feature. The rest of the solar system has sublime geology. But Earth has
people
.”

He did not mount a convincing defence of people.

“I believe in people,” she said. “In the end, it’s the only intangible position that you can adopt. You must begin with trust, search for and speak truth, conduct yourself honestly, defend yourself and others with passion.”

He slid out from under her body. “If you love people so much, why do you live half a billion miles away from them?”

“Because Earth has a massive population that does not believe in people.” She was angry again. What was it with him, that he made her so angry and greedy at the same time? “I’ll give you an example from your
intangibles
. It’s like the Vichy regime in France during the Second World War. Paris was kept intact on the proviso that the leadership internalised and enforced the Nazi value system. Earth is like that. It is stuck because it made a compact with a colonising power.”

“The emergences.”

“Yes. Partly. But the emergences only put in place an ideology that was already there, left over from the Seizure.”

He continued with the doggerel. “You’re the resistance from a distance.”

She never made her political points with any concision because her theories were bound up with her anger, and this intense emotion expanded the scope of her ideas, made them hard to control. In Doxic terms, her politics tripped the breakers – the biological switches that ensured one person’s emotional intensity did not overload the system.

“The control is internal and external. People have chosen to make their souls over in the image of the enemy. Liberation is not a matter of bombs and bullets. It’s about reimagining the human future. That’s why I don’t miss Earth. Here my life can matter in a way that it never could if I’d remained a lunar academic or given myself up to the asylum malls.”

Bare-footed, she padded across the cold linoleum, picking up her clothes as she went. When she looked back, his gaze was unreadable. They were a hopeless doomed pair. Explicable to one another only in the act of sex. Even she couldn’t misread
those
signs. Otherwise, they were obscure to one another. The truth was – and this was something she would only discover later that week, around sex act number whatever, after she had stopped counting – his feelings toward her were profoundly conflicted. This conflict arose during another argument about Earth: he confessed that he could not forgive her for what she had done to him, the injection that had repaired his emotional pathways.

“I am happy,” he said. “But that happiness is tinged with worry that it will soon pass.” His hand considered her naked breast, and then withdrew.

“No. It’s more intense than that.” His hand returned to her breast as if it were the substance of his argument. “You’ve made me care. And caring is indivisible from fear. The clouds have lifted and I realise that the road I am travelling runs parallel to death. A coast road with death as the sea; every time I glance out of my window, death is there
.
”

He confessed that he had never spoken in this way to his wife. She asked about his marriage.

“We are business partners,” he explained. “Bound together in the pursuit of excellence. I can’t be weak with her.”

“Will you tell her about us?”

He turned away from her, mumbled, “I don’t think it will matter.”

“Why?”

“Time is running out.”

In her exercise class, her friends asked about him while heaving at the rowing machine or pummelling away at the treadmill. Jordan and Lygia extracted salacious details from her under alibis of concern about her well-being. Lygia, a professor of linguistics, wondered if Reckon – by shacking up with an oppressor – was working out issues regarding her father. Jordan, a geneticist, maintained that the opposite was the case – it was Reckon’s mother, with her martyr’s pragmatism, who was the guiding influence in this liaison. Theodore had the air of a good provider, even if he stank of evil.

Reckon exercised until her thighs quivered with exhaustion. The friends went for tea together. Lygia was drinking a dried kelp brew and the smell of it turned Reckon’s stomach.

She went into her laboratory and confirmed her suspicions.

Pregnant. In vivo
.
Despite the radiation. Despite the low-gravity. Despite his corporate marriage. A flush in her cheeks brought her freckles to the fore. There had been no morning sickness but her aversion to the smell of Lygia’s tea showed a heightened sensitivity to toxins. Doxa remembered how, after becoming pregnant, some women found that they could not stand the smell of their partners, and turned them out of the marital bed. Because they reeked of toxicity. The polluted long lunches. The poisonous after-work drinks. The fetid cant. With this in mind, she wondered if Theodore would now seem repulsive to her, a return to their true relationship as enemies.

She didn’t tell him the news. He noticed that she was distracted, as she lay in bed, listening to the changes creeping through her body.

“What does Doxa feel like?” he asked.

“I always feel safe and loved and part of a community. Before Doxa I was anxious, uncertain and distrustful, and profoundly alienated. Either I’ve just grown up or I owe my sanity to Doxa.”

“Can you access the knowledge of others?”

“Yes, and with meditation, integrate that knowledge into myself. Internalise it entirely.”

“So, in a way, I might be sleeping with the entire colony.”

She put her hand on his chest.

“Yes. When I’ve been lonely, I’ve explored other people’s memories of sex. They are still only memories. Not a replacement for the real thing.”

“So Doxa is just a library.”

“No. It’s more than that. Doxa suggests. Doxa surfaces what you need, sometimes before you ever knew that you needed it.”

He was thoughtful.

“You talk about Doxa as if it has its own identity.”

“I suppose it does.”

“As if something has emerged to bind together and direct this collective mind.”

“Doxa is like a better version of yourself. A nicer voice inside your head.”

“What would happen if Doxa died?”

The thought had never occurred to her. Or to Doxa. Deep wells of foreboding opened up within her. She felt sick. And then the wells closed over, the sickness tapered away, and she was comforted again.

“We can move Doxa to other biological substrates. It will always exist, and even after I die, I will always be part of it.”

“Don’t you lose track of yourself?”

“Yes.” She reared over him, let her braids enclose them both. “But what’s so great about being locked up inside yourself?”

She stopped asking him why he had come to Europa. Or why he had said that their time was running out. Her treatment had restored his emotional capacity and his memory, but he would not share those secrets with her. If she pressed him then he would only lie. It was inevitable that their relationship would end badly, so she hoped that they could, at the very least, avoid lies.

In the infirmary, Jordan informed her that the blastocyst had formed an embryo. It had been twelve days since fertilisation. With Jordan, she discussed her theory that low gravity affected blood circulation within the placenta and that this was a crucial factor in impeding foetal development. Her stints on the rowing machine helped her cardiovascular system maintain form in low gravity, so they had to devise an equivalent regime for the placenta: nutriceuticals to regulate production of nitric oxide, sildenafil to dilate the blood vessels. As Jordan administered the first course of this treatment, Reckon lay on the surgical table, wondering if she would make it to the quickening; the first kick – a fluttering sensation, supposedly – and then the outline of a single foot or elbow pressing out against her skin.

“Why him?” asked Jordan, over the top of her glasses.

Reckon gazed up at the geneticist.

“I wanted to test my theory about gestation, and he was the nearest option.”

“Ligia thinks Ballurian is using your wiles to get inside his head.”

“I took Theodore to Doxa. We healed him but the link did not take.”

Jordan swabbed Reckon’s lower abdomen clean, and indicated that she could get down from the treatment table.

“Have you told him you’re pregnant?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Our relationship is based on keeping secrets from one another. Secrets and sex.”

“That’s wise. Don’t get too close.”

“Oh, we are close. It’s just that we don’t know anything about one another.”

It was not her first pregnancy. She had fallen pregnant on the University of the Moon.
Fallen?
No, she had
hovered
over pregnant for a few weeks, ignoring the physiological evidence, scared to resolve the existence or otherwise of the embryo. Her miscarriage came as a relief, gouts of bloody relief, and she wept with abandon afterwards, although that was just the hormonal gush. She flushed the cells away, and wondered why the child had not formed. Was it her? Was it him? Or was it the moon?

She didn’t tell the prospective father. Instead, she took a sabbatical on Earth, for a restful month arguing with her mother in a cottage in the Lake District. It was the last time they were able to be their disputatious selves with one another before her mother’s illness enforced mutual tolerance. She was trudging furiously across a field, smoking again, looking for the footpath that would take her away from her mother and directly to a pub. She loathed every step in the countryside. No aspect of her upbringing had inculcated within her a love of the English pastoral. Her father had been strictly cities and hot beaches, her mother was urbane and metropolitan – and yet, through cussedness, they had decided to holiday in mud together. Pacing out her rancour across ploughed fields, she looked up and saw, among the gathered cumulus, a cloud the shape of her lost child, a wispy arm waving goodbye as it returned to the inchoate matter of the universe.

In the third week of angry love with Theodore, she realised they were not alone in her quarters. The smell of fishers, cold and salty in the dark. Low light was their element. They caught Theodore by his ankles and yanked him in one motion out of the bed so that he was stunned by the cold linoleum, then they cast him sprawling half-naked into the corner of the room. She turned the sidelight on, and screamed, you don’t need to do this, this isn’t necessary, this is not how we behave.

She calculated that they were not about to kill him and therefore she did not physically engage, given the risk such an act would pose to the embryo. For the sake of the experiment, and the greater good, she let them take him. Any pregnant woman would have made the same call. Theodore was not so compliant. Others fishers came to haul him away.

Then she dressed, composed herself, fixed her braids. She thought about the embryo. Her motherliness was seeping into Doxa. The others would know soon enough, and if they were attentive, then they would know already. There were memories of childbirth in Doxa, though the emotions involved were softened and reduced by the breakers. Feeling her way through these memories, she learnt of a transition stage, before the final push. Memories of this dark hinterland were hunted, primitive, almost pre-lingual. Pregnancy augmented instinct, diverting resources away from abstraction and complexity to focus upon vulnerability.

Healing his emotional damage had made Theodore vulnerable. The two of them had become raw, and space was the wrong environment in which to be so exposed. He had not forgiven her for making him capable of love. Now he had so much to lose. Love for her. Love, even, for Doxa and what was at stake: deep connection between people, new possibilities of knowledge and feeling. His love was skittish and untrustworthy, like a river in high season.

She walked through the corridors of the colony, on her way to Theodore’s interrogation. Colleagues sensed her approach and came to meet her, drawn out from their laboratories and studies. All thought turned to her. Nobody vocalised their congratulations about the embryo but their smiles were knowing and kindly. She was unaccustomed to being looked at in that way. Reckon imagined herself to be unpredictable, multi-channel, overflowing with ideas and intensity. Sharp and stingingly brilliant. But the smiles of her friends and colleagues suggested that – after a lifetime of resistance – she had finally been brought to her true destiny: barefoot and pregnant. A stately martyr to the colony’s need for a child. Gestating virtue.

“How are you doing?” asked Ligia.

“They took him away,” said Reckon.

“But the baby.”

“The embryo.”

“It’s exciting.”

“It’s terrifying.”

Reckon said to Ligia, “You don’t think it is exciting. You feel sorry for me.”

Ligia’s smile faltered, her gaze turned blank: creative acts – such as lying – shut down the visual centres so that the brain could make the synaptic leaps necessary to devise fiction. She noticed these instances of blindness in the faces of her friends. They weren’t happy for her. Saying they were happy for her was old Earth talk. If they upset her, it might lead to miscarriage. In reality, they were worried about her, worried about themselves. The embryo represented considerable physical and psychological risk to Reckon. She would end the pregnancy at the first sign of malformation. Nobody had performed an abortion in low gravity before. Also, if she carried the embryo to term and it became a baby, then would her friends also be expected to gestate? They had not travelled half a billion miles just to become parents. Only the fishers like Hamman, who had grown up on Europa, were keen to breed.

The low-gravity was oppressively weak. She steadied herself.

She didn’t want to be mother.

She didn’t have to be a mother.

They would all raise the child. The whole community. Not her. Not alone.

Doxa protect her from the compulsive attachment of motherhood. Doxa protect her from instinct. The embryo was an experiment, and if it didn’t take, then would she end the experiment and try again. With Theodore or another man. She thought of Gregory, leaving her laboratory, to die alone on the surface. Would she feel differently if the child was his?