The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  “Pigment-bearing cells,” said Alois. “Combined with Rayleigh scattering.”

  “Chameleons,” she said, wanting to reach out and touch them. She had no fear of insects. This was completely astounding.

  “Listen,” said Buss.

  Their hum was like a song, of inexpressible sadness.

  “Once they tune in, they’ll speak to you.”

  “Are they intelligent?”

  “Singly, not so much. But the colony is unknowably more intelligent than we are.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “We built this place for them.”

  “Incredible.”

  The storm announced itself with a rattle of thunder, followed by an alien coda, like firecrackers exploding. The hair on her neck stood on end.

  “Time to be inside,” said Ito.

  He pointed at the anvil cloud, that rose like a bruise in the near distance. Lightning flashed in its center, then crawled along its extremities, more delicately and for longer than lightning would on Earth. It looked more like a physics experiment than natural weather. An icy gust of wind blew across the piazza, lifting the wings of the insects. Ito led them to a door, then up a spiral stair. Box followed, then the others. She saw that there were no metal fittings or fasteners. What looked like timber and brick was honeycomb composite. She picked up a flake of masonry and dropped it. It drifted like a feather.

  “Like Disneyland,” she said.

  She watched the others access the cultural reference.

  Buss nodded.

  “The Fa:ing are fascinated by humans.”

  “Fa:ing?”

  “This species.”

  “Alois, I’ve just realized.”

  “Yes?”

  “These are aliens.”

  He laughed and said, “Unquestionably.”

  They entered a control room, in the top of a forest of spires, overlooking the piazza. The city was still rising. On its lee side, a wall of carroty granite slid past a low stone balustrade. She could feel a slow rocking motion, like a ship in a long swell, or a tall building swaying in the wind.

  The room was how she’d imagined the bridge of a spaceship would be, with contoured chairs and holodisplays, and expansively curved, photochromic window walls.

  She felt her ears pop.

  What keeps this place afloat? she wondered.

  [The Fa:ing do. Their wings provide lift.]

  [Is that you, Water Bear?]

  [None other.]

  [How’s the forecast?]

  [Hang on, and enjoy the ride.]

  [Brace,] rumbled Pax in their heads.

  The city swung through forty-five degrees then back again. Sheets of snow and hail marched across the piazza, mixed with curtains of rain. In the control room, remote from the storm, holographic screens flickered into life. The only sound was the faraway thrum of weather on polycarbonate. Her fellow travelers seemed completely relaxed. Box decided she should relax too. She pointed out the nearby roofs, where sheets of Fa:ing were being peeled off by the wind.

  “They’ll find their way home,” said Alois.

  “Won’t we lose lift?”

  “No,” said Ito. “The real drive comes from beneath.”

  “Why are we still climbing?”

  “To outrun that,” he said. He conjured a viewport, and magnified a toroidal wall of inky-black cloud, writhing in the crimson heart of the storm.

  “What’s that? A tornado?”

  “Similar.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Not to us. We can gravitate away.”

  “To the Fa:ing?”

  “Yes, these storms are a menace to them.”

  “Is that why we’re here?”

  “It’s why we hurried down, yes.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Wait...”

  She felt weightless, even though she was still standing.

  “A petatonne gravity source, positioned directly above us,” said Alois.

  The city gathered speed, as though a huge weight had been lifted from it, until they burst through into brilliant sunshine. Then they were sailing through clear air, between snow-capped cinnabar giants. Alois Buss had climbed into an oversized captain’s chair, and was studying a holodisplay of the storm.

  “Do you see how it’s pursuing us?” he said.

  He was right. Tendrils of the storm were rising in the clear air behind them.

  “How can that be?” she asked.

  “It’s a psychic event.”

  “It’s not real?”

  “No, it’s certainly real. But it has a psychic component.”

  “See that notch up there?” said Ito. He pointed out a narrow gap between the highest mountains. “That’s safety.”

  She stared at the notch, and down at the storm, and realized it’d be a close-run thing. The city was rocking again, as the uncanny vortex snapped at its lower extremities. Slowly, then with increasing speed, the city started to spin.

  Still they climbed.

  Darkness rose up and engulfed them.

  Then, in the last moment, the city threaded itself through the high mountain pass, thanks to some adroit twisting by whoever was steering, and they were falling down the other side, fast enough for Box to feel unsteady, followed by clouds of insects that had been blown clear.

  Below was a forest, stretching into the boundless distance, and the gathering night.

  “What would’ve happened if we weren’t here?”

  “There wouldn’t have been a storm.”

  Ito and Box were watching the young women fight. It was dark, and they were in the piazza, gathered round a fire, made in a ceramic brazier. Fa:ing insects flew around them in the darkness. Kitou and Brin were in a state of high excitement. Blood flew. Suddenly, with a haymaker blow out of nowhere, Kitou broke Brin’s nose, with a sickening crunch.

  Box blinked as the girls conferred, then carried on.

  “Aren’t you going to stop that?”

  Ito gave her his quizzical stare.

  “No.”

  She sighed.

  “What do you mean, no storm?”

  “It was a psychic event.”

  “So, it really was an hallucination?”

  “No, but the eye helix was.”

  “So, when Alois said it was following us?”

  “It was.”

  The girls gave up, and approached Ito. Brin was bleeding profusely.

  “Ito?” asked Kitou.

  “Up you go and get that fixed,” he said to Brin.

  Brin nodded.

  “And don’t tell Pax what caused it,” he called after her.

  “Kitou, learn some control.”

  Kitou nodded. Ito motioned her to sit down.

  “Dr Box, there are incredible mysteries here. Tonight, you may experience some of them. But remember, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

  “Except perhaps children with unintelligent fists.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll explain as best we can.”

  He touched Kitou’s shoulder.

  “Now you, up to the ship and apologize.”

  Box watched as Kitou’s training gear morphed into a skinsuit, and extruded a facemask. In just a few seconds, the girl was sucked up into the night.

  “You people don’t muck about.”

  Ito grinned.

  “No, we don’t.”

  Box did experience an uncanny event that night.

  The city spoke to her. It emerged from the hum, like a binaural beat.

  Ophelia.

  Ophelia Box.

  Alois had installed her in a comfortable room, overlooking the piazza. Soft downlights bathed the room in a gauzy light, reflected off a honey-colored floor, that she knew wasn’t real timber. Her bed was a riot of flowery iron, that she knew wasn’t metal, covered in pillows and duvets of billowy cotton, that just might be cotton. She could see the last embers of their dying fire, glowing in the brazier in the piazza below.

  At
first, she thought she was dreaming.

  Ophelia Box, it said.

  Open your mind.

  She sat bolt upright in her bed. She’d been dreaming. Her sheets were a sweaty tangle.

  Ophelia Box.

  Open your mind.

  [Are you getting this?] she asked the ship.

  [Loud and clear.]

  [It knows my name.]

  [It does this all the time.]

  [Does what?]

  [Says your name.]

  The following day, over breakfast, an ebullient Alois Buss explained that she hadn’t been dreaming at all.

  “But you will be,” he said.

  They were gathered in a dining hall, with trefoil windows that looked over the forest below. The breeze of their passing filled the hall with scents of damp earth and pine resins.

  Box was nursing strong coffee, and a bad attitude. She didn’t like the way this was heading.

  “Here’s the thing,” Buss said, “The absolute crux of it. The city knows you. You, personally. It’s been saying your name for years. Since before you were born.”

  The girls had reappeared, and were eating. Box had always been bemused by how much elite athletes could eat, and these young soldiers were no exception. Ito was taking his turn to cook, and was making real food, in pans, over electrical appliances. Some of it had near Earth analogues. She could see convincing eggs, and large meaty mushrooms.

  There was fresh bread, and crumbly, artisanal sausages.

  One of those, and coffee, were her breakfast.

  Alois only drank coffee.

  Box said, “Alois, that’s ridiculous.”

  Buss shrugged.

  “And yet, here we are.”

  “There must be hundreds of people with my name.”

  “It’s an unusual name.”

  “Come on, Alois.”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe thousands. It’s a large galaxy. But only one with your Hopf number. Ship, if you please?”

  A viewport opened in their shared sensorium, the size and dusty appearance of a university mathematics blackboard. It loomed over the breakfast table. Alois produced a virtual chalk and wrote on it:

  2058958648037070910624043636186979521846382864016625616496507239719948728727633873185926790861674787.0179353454570050768156391968572352509817711989490279405697080854177626612002936345304273785723738584.8832822273477396024228984832693638480307020377516729301393892611702094877027776898105156343247277743.9438954355255350037770526825253618276243165189080695316222840219246266667927944402121633290017440052.

  “Very impressive, Alois. Do you do children’s parties?”

  “Dr Box, this is your Hopf number. It’s a coordinate in four dimensional spacetime. Give or take a few seconds, or several meters, it’s the time and place of your birth.

  “Specifically, the Henderson Maternity Unit of the Caithness General Hospital, in Bankhead Road, Wick, on Earth, at 4:16 p.m. on September 30, 2049.”

  He wrote all that on the board.

  The girls had stopped eating, and were watching Box expectantly. Ito wore an enigmatic expression.

  “Alois, where did you get that?”

  “Good question.”

  After breakfast, on a grassy prow, overlooking the forest below, a swarm of Fa:ing waited expectantly. Buss wheeled out his treasure: a battered Scottish golf buggy, with a small selection of clubs. He grinned, and threw a ball in the air. A swirl of Fa:ing followed and caught it.

  “We call the Fa:ing ‘insects’,” he said. “But they’re not Insecta.”

  The Fa:ing dropped the ball at his feet.

  “Insects have distributed brains. Fa:ing individuals have mammalian brains. An interesting case of divergent evolution.” He teed up and hit the ball, a curling fade that only went thirty meters. He groaned. A flurry of Fa:ing followed and caught it.

  The forest slid serenely below.

  “Brin?”

  A squadron of Fa:ing flew into the middle distance.

  “Observe their behavior,” said Buss. “They know just how far Brin can hit it.”

  Brin teed up and easily hit the ball two hundred meters. The Fa:ing followed, matched trajectories, and caught it. A shimmering, hand-sized individual deposited the ball by Brin’s feet.

  “In analytical-deductive terms, they’re about as intelligent as dogs are. In spatial terms, about as clever as we are.

  “Ito, please?”

  Ito repeated Brin’s easy stroke, almost meter for meter. The swirling Fa:ing swarm chased and caught it.

  They were enjoying this.

  “Dr Box, would you like a turn?”

  Box picked out a ball. The Fa:ing seemed unsure. They appeared to confer, a swirling conversation of fluttering wings, until they split in two groups. One group flew a hundred meters. The remainder stayed close.

  “They talk with their wings.” she said.

  “Very good! They converse by sound, using a phonetic language, like we do. And we can talk back to them in the same way, as individuals. The Water Bear is especially fluent.”

  Box hit the ball, a shank. The closer group of Fa:ing caught it, and swarmed it into the sky, before dropping it at her feet.

  “I was never a golfer,” she said, biting her lip.

  “Better than me,” said Buss.

  “Now, here’s the thing,” he continued. “The Fa:ing are a colony mind. One mind, consisting of about a trillion individuals. There are Fa:ing here so small you can’t see them. The colony thinks in numbers. Beautiful, perfect mathematics. The neurons – these individuals – propagate the underlying signals using sounds. That hum you hear, it’s the hive thinking. That’s not the same as its thoughts.”

  Box thought about that. “What does that mean? I mean, what does it mean when it hums my name?”

  Brin cleared her throat.

  “Brin is our codebreaker,” said Buss.

  “Dr Box,” nodded Brin. “Are you familiar with steganography?”

  “Messages hidden in text?”

  “Yes. The words we hear in the colony hum are like finding language encoded in an encephalogram readout. The hum is packed with that type of information. Literally packed. We only hear a subset addressed to us. There’s much, much more we don’t hear.”

  “It’s a profoundly different way of performing the act of thinking,” said Buss. “Signals encoded within signals, as though real textual meaning emerges from the tones of a choir, or a symphony, or the sound of a loved one’s footsteps in a crowd.”

  Kitou took a ball.

  “Watch this,” said Buss with a grin.

  The Fa:ing became more animated, zooming and chittering before all spiraling off into the far distance. Kitou unwound, and with no obvious effort, hit the ball four hundred meters.

  “Golly,” said Box.

  That night, Box took a bottle of Alois’s scotch whisky, and sought out Brin. She found her perched on a balustrade, listening to the sounds of the forest below.

  “You can’t hear it by day,” said Brin. “We’re too far up, but by night, listen.”

  Box heard a faraway crashing.

  “A big beast,” said Brin.

  Box showed her the Lagavulin bottle.

  “Brin, tell me something about yourself.”

  “What’s to say? I’m a soldier.”

  “Then tell me something about the Po.”

  The younger woman smiled, and her face lit up in a way that Box hadn’t seen before.

  “We come from Polota,” she said.

  “The Po, Lo and Ta?”

  “That’s right. The Ta administer our world. They’re traders and merchants. The Lo are seafarers. You see this makeup I wear? It’s the Eye nebula, in the constellation of the Navigator. It points true north on Polota. The natural-born Po, like Ito, are a warrior cult from antiquity. Today, the Po military are the elite soldiers of the thousand worlds.”

  “So, are you a Po or a Lo?”

  “Both. I’m a natural-born Lo, and I fight with th
e Po. I’m a Po soldier. We’re a hand of the Po. A special forces unit. We’re an elite of the elite.”

  “We?”

  “Ito, Pax, Kitou, me and now you. And the ship of course. We’re the hand of the Water Bear.”

  “Alois?”

  “Alois is a 6.”

  “Aren’t I a 6 too?”

  “Of course not, Dr Box, you’re our mission specialist.”

  Box felt a thrill of pleasure at that.

  “Ito’s your First?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Pax is your Navigator.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who ranks higher?”

  “They’re equal.”

  “What rank are you?”

  “A soldier.”

  “What rank is Kitou?”

  “A novice.”

  “When does she become a soldier?”

  “That depends. There are protocols. Excellence in the field. Approval by her peers. A trial by combat.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Perfectly. She’ll be a great Spirit.”

  “What’s a Spirit?”

  “An exceptional leader. Ito will be a great Spirit.”

  “What about Pax?”

  “Pax is already a Lo Navigator, one of the most respected roles in thousand worlds society.”

  “And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Will you be a great Spirit?”

  “No, I aim to be a science officer.”

  “Mathematics?”

  “No, an exobiologist.”

  “Will you study the Fa:ing?”

  “And the rest. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the cosmos, Dr Box. I want to go and see it, in a Po expeditionary mission.”

  “How do you get to do that?”

  “Five years of study, at the university in Praxis.”

  “Can’t you just download the knowledge?”

  “I could, but what would be the point of that? My development as a person will benefit from the experience of learning.”

  “Nicely put.”

  The crashing in the forest became louder, as though they were descending closer to the beasts there. It soon became clear they were. Soon, the highest treetops were visible around the piazza.

  The city, giving them a present.

  The following morning, Box felt sordid from having drunk nearly a third of a bottle of Alois’s whisky. Brin seemed unaffected, and was making breakfast. Buss was in his most expansive mood, and excused her for taking it. While the Po soldiers were eating, he unfolded his blackboard again. This one covered almost half of one wall. It was covered in mathematics. He swiped his hand to one side, and the blackboard was replaced by a similar blackboard, similarly covered with symbols and numbers.