The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  “But it isn’t my day to die.”

  The two young women turned and nodded to each other.

  “Now you.”

  Box’s personal space was almost the exact opposite of her stateroom on the Pnyx: a soft corpuscular nest, that could be gently spun to provide the impression of gravity. It was cosseting, and for once in her life, she had no trouble sleeping. The others’ nests were the same, set in a ring of nine identically shaped pods around the ship’s middle. Kitou’s had a bonsai aspen tree, with miniscule golden leaves, which she said she’d grown from a sliver of wood. Pax’s and Brin’s had images and sounds of the sea. Ito’s was a surprising thicket of words, a collection of holograms of poems and scraps of language he’d collected.

  Box said,

  “An old silent pond...

  A frog jumps into the pond,

  splash! Silence again.”

  Ito looked up from a book, to where Box was floating outside his slowly turning cocoon.

  “Haiku?”

  “Matsuo Basho,” she said.

  She chose her moment, and settled beside him.

  “Splash,” she said. “Am I okay here?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re a gracious man, Ito Nadolo.”

  “Thank you, Dr Box.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  “Can I ask you some questions?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What do you do for sex around here?”

  “Here on the Water Bear?”

  “Yes. It must be hard, locked up with two beautiful women.”

  “Three beautiful women, Dr Box, counting you, and one of them a child.”

  She blushed.

  “I didn’t mean to suggest... but, you’re all so... attractive.”

  “Even Alois?”

  “Even Alois, in his way.”

  “Post-evolutionary societies tend to select for physical attractiveness.”

  “Post-evolutionary?”

  “Evolutionary pressure has become the same as social pressure in our society, and we’ve been at it for a long time. People select partners with heritable qualities they admire.”

  “Like wit and intelligence?”

  “And beauty.”

  “What about places where bucktoothed gingers are considered attractive?”

  “Then there will be more, as you say, bucktoothed gingers. But to answer your question, we do nothing together, sexually. This ship is a family. Instead we have virtual worlds, that we can each visit separately.”

  “Sex sims?”

  “Yes, as real as you desire. Do you want me to show you?”

  She blushed again.

  “No, I’ll ask the Water Bear.

  “I guess Brin and Pax’s sexual orientation helps?” she ventured.

  “To a certain degree.”

  “I mean, I suppose it means no one’s available.”

  “Except you?”

  She felt naked.

  “What, I can’t make a pass at you?”

  He laughed. “You may do as you like. But while we’re on this mission, on my ship, I’d politely decline.”

  “Then you and Pax had both better watch out, when we’re finished.”

  “Am I forewarned?”

  It was her turn to laugh.

  “Yes, please consider it official.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that’ll help me.”

  Brin and Kitou invited her to a virtuality, but it had nothing to do with sex. It was a training simulation, set on a domed monolith, looming over a cloudy infinity. A fitful wind drifted thin wisps of snow across a stone circle. Even now, with her vertigo gone, all her senses tingled.

  Pax was waiting there.

  “Dr Box,” he said. “Your mission with us here isn’t a combat mission.”

  “Thank goodness for that.”

  “But, as they say, shit happens. Since you’re already a martial artist of repute, then if you’ll consent, we’d like to teach you a skill. You may think of it as a life skill, that you can take away and use elsewhere. One day, it might save your life, or ours.”

  “Okay.”

  “But please be aware, the lesson’s a harsh one. It will test your emotions.”

  “In what way?”

  “We’ll show you how to deal with fear.”

  “Does it involve fighting you?”

  “It may. We have to see what frightens you.”

  “You don’t frighten me.”

  He nodded.

  “Dr Box, are you a brave person?”

  She thought about that.

  “No,” she said. “I’m reckless.”

  “Interesting. And candid. What do you mean?”

  “I’ll take on any halfway plausible challenge. It’s compulsive.”

  “What would you say, if I said that was courageous?”

  “I’d say you’re talking horseshit, mister.”

  “Courage is the willingness to put yourself in harm’s way. The rest is technique. I can improve your technique.”

  “How?”

  “What frightens you most, Dr Box?”

  “Sharks with lasers?”

  He waited.

  “You want a serious answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything, Pax. I’m frightened of everything. I’m feisty, but weak.”

  Did she just say that?

  “And yet you will fight,” said Pax.

  She shrugged.

  “How we acquire fear is important,” Pax was saying. “Cognitive fear is rational. Fear you can see is fear you can use. Do you fear pain?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  She shrugged.

  “Less than most, I suppose.”

  “Good. This lesson may involve pain, but not injury. We’re in a virtuality, as you can see.”

  “But injury, here?” she said, eyeing the fall to a virtual infinity.

  “Maybe.”

  “Can I think about it?”

  “By all means.”

  What choice did she have, after what she’d just said?

  “Alright,” she said, “let’s do this.”

  Pax nodded, which appeared to be the go-to Po mannerism. The girls looked on impassively, providing no answers.

  This is what we do, they seemed to be saying.

  “In past times,” said Pax, “when humans fought routinely in disorganized close combat, they became seasoned fighters, or they died. The first time they fought, some froze, and of those, some were killed. With each passing fight, they became harder to kill. By about the tenth such mêlêe, those that were left sought only to do damage. They’d become soldiers.

  “Three synergetic processes were in play: the least able and the least willing were the first to die; the more able became more willing over time; and the most willing became the most able, by surviving the longest in battle.

  “Some people never freeze. We consider this to be evidence of psychopathy, or an overstimulated fight response combined with insufficient empathy. We don’t invite such people to join us.”

  “Are you inviting me?”

  “It means we value you enough to wish to trust you.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m not going to train away your flight response. That would be foolish, although I could do it. I’m going to help you prevent it taking control.”

  She was starting to feel nervous. This was quite some preamble.

  “Nor am I going to plumb your worst terrors. Cover you in spiders. Plunge you into a fire. That would be an assault. This is more subtle than that.

  “Ten contests,” he said.

  The Water Bear’s hand-to-hand training apparatus appeared. Instead of being fixed to a ceiling, it descended from a floating torus. Instead of soft pads, it had a convincing facsimile of elbows and fists.

  “This machine is set to a level below yours,” said Pax. “Fight it.”

  She squared up, and started
to spar. As Pax had promised, it was set to a level below her, but when it snuck past her defenses, it stung like a bare-knuckle boxer.

  “Ow. Motherfucker.”

  Pax nodded.

  “I said it would hurt. Now fight.”

  She squared up again, and it knocked her off balance. The domed convexity of the rock caught her, and she fell into the abyss, where she was caught by an invisible membrane, that sagged and swayed like an old-fashioned net.

  “Fuck!”

  The net spasmed, and she was thrown back into the ring, in an ungainly tangle of limbs.

  “Do we continue?” asked Pax.

  She nodded.

  Now she fought wisely, knowing when it would hurt, riding the punches. This lesson made sense. She’d learnt to fight what was in front of her, instead of avoiding the pain it would cause.

  It wasn’t even pain. All this was happening in her sensorium.

  Pax called a halt.

  “Very good,” he said. “It’s like fighting a man with a knife. There is no man; there is no knife. There’s only a line, and a point.

  “Now for a human opponent.”

  The training machine was replaced by a soldier, dressed in a gambeson tunic. He was filthy, and stank: the ripe aroma of feces. He was shifting his weight from side to side, staring in her eyes, getting her measure.

  She knew straight away that this wasn’t a victim. In Pax’s taxonomy, this was the one who survived.

  Or worse, a predator.

  She felt a flutter of anxiety. This shit just got real.

  “Is he better than me?”

  “Find out.”

  She stepped forward, and he was straight through her defenses, hammering her with blows to her vulnerable parts, poking his fingers into her eyes, blinding her, until he had a hold of her ear, and with a kind of wet rip, flung her out of the ring.

  She lay in the net, in the fetal position, cradling her injuries. Blood trickled over her face, from where her earlobe had separated.

  It had taken maybe five seconds.

  She found herself back in the ring, her wounds healed.

  “That’s enough,” she said.

  “No,” said Pax. “We continue.”

  “What?”

  “I’m instructing you to continue.”

  “I don’t respect your authority, mister.”

  Pax shrugged, and waited.

  What exactly was going on here? Feeling in turns nauseous and angry, she decided to find out.

  “Alright,” she said.

  Pax held up his hands.

  “Before you resume, Dr Box. Why did you lose? Because you’re afraid: You fear to risk everything against this violent, unhinged man, for fear he might hurt you.

  “This can never be a winning strategy.

  “Put it behind you. I want you to stop thinking about fighting. Be like the wolf, Dr Box, protecting her children.”

  It took five rounds, but in the fifth, after more painful injuries than she’d suffered in a lifetime of martial arts competition, something shivered inside her. Her world didn’t change. Nothing changed. It went deeper than that. Like a small ripple, on the surface of a still lake.

  She won, easily. With a flurry of Muay Thai combinations, as good as she’d ever produced, she backed the berserker up to the edge; then she stepped behind him, and helped him off the mountain.

  She was angry, and exalted.

  “Fuck you,” she said, as he fell through the clouds.

  Well, she wrote in her diary that evening.

  Now that was a bracing experience.

  On the ninth day, they reached Threnody. They’d come nine light-years from Aldebaran, to add to the sixty-five already travelled from Earth. When Box looked back at Sol, which she hoped to do soon from the surface, the light will have left at the start of her millennium. In the last few moments before their arrival, she cornered Alois Buss, by allowing Brin to strap him in, like a hapless opponent in Po.

  “Alois, you owe me a briefing,” she said.

  Buss tried to shrug, but failed. Brin grinned at his predicament.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Kitou, please strap Dr Box in now,” said the ship.

  Box felt herself being pulled back in her seat by a gravity pulse. Kitou snapped her harness closed, then strapped herself in. After a sustained burst of lateral acceleration, during which the gimbals swung through a hundred degrees, they fell back into realspace, and below them was their destination.

  Where Earth is a blue-white jewel in space, Threnody was all the vibrant colors of an Appalachian autumn. What shocked her most was its tonal complexity. It was like a world made of living coral. The polar ice caps were white gold, as were the clouds that marched across the face of tangerine seas. As they approached, a great river system caught the light of the system’s yellow dwarf star, and for an instant, a whole autumnal continent was limned with golden fire.

  “A cinnabar-rich world,” said Alois Buss, by way of explanation.

  “I’m speechless,” said Box.

  Buss smiled, then grinned at her.

  “It is beautiful, yes?”

  “Beyond words.”

  “My home.”

  3 ∞ Threnody

  2075

  “You want me to what to the surface?”

  “It’s what we do,” said Pax.

  “No,” said Box.

  “It’s really quite easy,” said Buss.

  “Fuck off, both of you.”

  She was aware of her companions, but only as voices. She was floating in space: not physically, but in an immersive simulation. The ship conjured a viewport. She saw a snowcapped mountain range, towering over a striated desert. The peaks looked like metal, burnished bronze-gold in the sunshine.

  A dot moved over the landscape, towards the mountains, and began to rise overthem. Under increasing magnification, which helped convey an impression of scale, the dot became a cone, then a conical structure, with spiraling ramparts, like an Italian hill town, or a fairy-tale castle.

  Tracking the town [a number in her sensorium said twenty-five kilometers, and closing,] was a storm, its bruised anvil head towering over the landscape. Lightning flickered in its depths, and crawled over the top of it.

  This floating castle, she guessed, was their destination.

  “If we’re fast,” said Ito’s voice from one side. “We can beat that weather system.”

  The idea of jumping from space didn’t terrify Box in the same way as it would’ve before the Water Bear messed with her neurology. There was no longer a primal fear of the abyss, just a rational rejection of the impossible.

  “No fucking way,” she said.

  Brin and Kitou held her close as they edged towards the circular portal. Box could already see the haze of the upper atmosphere in her peripheral vision. They’d squeezed her into a skin-tight black jumpsuit, which had morphed out of nothing, then extruded a face-shaped mask, like uncanny scuba.

  At least she was in shape. Alois looked ridiculous.

  “Remember, all you have do is to step out,” said Ito. “Your suit will do the rest.”

  Box pulled back instinctively. Falling through space in a carbon titanium spacecraft was one thing. Falling in a spandex catsuit was something else altogether.

  “Trust me,” said Kitou.

  Objects in planetary orbit burn up on entering an atmosphere because of their angular momentum. Orbital speed is typically measured in thousands of meters per second. That velocity must be washed off by friction. The Water Bear, with its gravity drive, could simply hover over any point on the surface.

  That meant they could jump.

  After that it was a matter of falling.

  If the view through the ship’s shared sensorium had been impressive, the reality of being immersed in it was overwhelming. The stars were like jewels, scattered on black velvet. She felt like she could reach out and take them. The vacuum had texture. The plane
t had the hyperreal appearance of an animation.

  She started to retreat into the safety of her imagination, before a neurological helper gentled her back to full attention.

  They fell.

  At fifty thousand meters, they were accelerating through near vacuum. After thirty-five seconds, they went supersonic. At ten thousand meters, they experienced mild buffeting, as if the air had developed washboard corrugations. Brin and Kitou let go, and her suit grew vestigial winglets.

  Now she was flying. Overhead, the sky went from black to mauve to a piercing blue. The suit began to let air into her mask, jolting her fully awake. It smelt just like real air, from Earth.

  At five thousand meters, the winglets spread out to become a circular wing, and she felt a pillowy whoof of deceleration. Her companions sailed around her like helicopter seeds. Kitou grinned and gave her the universal thumbs-up of approval. It occurred to Box that she’d led a sheltered childhood.

  If only her father could see her now.

  They glided for several minutes, the suit flying for her, making steeply banked turns that wiped away the last of her vertical momentum. The city loomed up below, suddener than she expected, and they were on top of it. With no input from her, her wingsuit blossomed, and she settled on gossamer wings in an empty piazza.

  Her facemask retracted.

  She took a breath of cold, clean air.

  Took one step, and fell over.

  Mission specialist Box.

  Who would have thought it?

  The two younger women were smiling down at her. Only Alois Buss looked concerned.

  “The suit gave up on me,” she said, groggily.

  “Sensory overload,” said Ito.

  “My head is still buzzing.”

  “It isn’t your head.”

  She scrambled to her feet. There were no people in this city. Instead, there was the hum of a trillion wings. Every surface was covered with insects. What Box had thought were painted rooftops were layers of glimmering exoskeletons, colored to match the flagstones and tiles. The piazza was a vast, crawling, heaving mass of insect life, which had somehow parted to provide a safe landing zone.

  Ito said, “You have nothing to fear.”