The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  Why did this happen?

  Why was this city here?

  Revelstoke provided answers.

  Far from being kleptocrats, he said, the Avalon Cpy had saved their world, and its economy, from the ravages of Smear economics. “Spacers need a place to invest in,” he said. “Agreeable and properly managed. This is that place. It’s good business.”

  “A place where the trains run on time,” said Box.

  “There are no trains here,” said Revelstoke.

  They were relaxed on a beach. The tumbling waves were like carbonated milk crashing. The sand was made of seashells, miniscule crabs and bivalves, so silky-soft it was like talcum powder.

  [Biogenic silica,] said her wetware.

  She’d decided that Revelstoke was attractive, in a craggy, Sherlock Holmes kind of way.

  “And besides,” he said. “The oligarchs are real people. They don’t want their home to become a sordid little appendix to a spaceport.”

  “So, they get filthy rich,” she said.

  “Of course,” said Revelstoke. “Why not?”

  “It’s unequal.”

  “Why should anything be equal?”

  “There’s no freedom here.”

  “Political freedom is the illusion of freedom.”

  “Says the secret policeman.”

  “Dr Box, the Po are the secret police.”

  “Humph, maybe so.”

  The skin of the Water Bear came away like a veil, to reveal the workings beneath. First it was swarming with Tung; then she was naked.

  She was dense.

  [Half of me is battery,] she said, [and half is processor. My humans live in the other half.] She was only half joking.

  Her chassis was a billet of titanium, into which cavities had been drilled, to accept interchangeable parts. Those parts were being replaced. Box was with Pax, looking down from a gantry. Kitou was playing the Geometry Game, deep inside the gutted chassis, with a half-dozen Tung workers. For once, she was hopelessly outclassed.

  “Nine years?” said Box.

  Pax nodded. It would take them nine years to reach Fluxor, at the Water Bear’s cruising warp speed, although they planned to make a few stops along the way. Her crew would sleep, in stasis.

  “It’s like time travel,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Pax. “It is a form of time travel.”

  “Did it take you nine years, when you went there?”

  “No,” said Pax. “We were given a ride.”

  “On a lightship?”

  “No, the Xap carried us there.”

  “A Tung in a bar told me the Xap are a myth, an invention of the Thousand worlds Civics.”

  Pax laughed. Like all the sounds he made, it was a bassline. “Yes, that’s one theory. Like all negatives, easily disproved.”

  “You’ve seen a Xap?”

  “I have.”

  “What are they like?”

  “They’re the most interesting beings imaginable.”

  “Tell me more.”

  Pax shook his head. “Your turn will come.”

  She laughed. “You tease.”

  He laughed back. “The process by which a story unfolds can be as revealing as the story itself.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Did I really make a pass at you?”

  Pax and she had spent a night on the surface below, in the Otel room. She remembered strong liquor, and fumbling.

  “You did,” he said. “I was a perfect gentleman.”

  “A perfect gentleman would’ve performed as I requested.”

  “For that, you’ll have to wait till after the mission.”

  Revelstoke invited them into his home, which was in the weapons blister of a gun emplacement. The Po soldiers were fascinated by this. Personal weapons were easily dismissed, but there was no debating with a house-sized hydrogen maser. He’d brought platters of Avalonian street food, with brisk apologies for not having made it himself. There were soft, nutty rolls, and vine leaves baked around chewy cephalopods, and sweetmeats, and bone-dry, fizzing white wine, and the ubiquitous sausages.

  “Why did the Po send a mathematician to this remote place?” he asked, when the food was all eaten. His apartment overlooked the central bazaar. Box could see the cafê where they’d been arrested, and the hill where Kitou had outrun her pursuers.

  “I’m not even a Po. I’m an expert.”

  “To count all the money?” she asked.

  “Very droll. You trusted me with your secrets. I’ll trust you with mine. I was sent here to solve an urgent cryptology problem.”

  Alois Buss looked up at that. He was present in his ambulatory body: a metal skeleton, with remote access to his recovering brain, which Box found uncannier than any alien. It had only limited mental capabilities. Alois had spent most of the meal, pushing a single pastry disconsolately around his plate.

  Revelstoke conjured up two beings. One was an opulently beautiful woman, the other a humanoid reptilian.

  “These are Thesps,” he said.

  [I’m not aware of this species,] said Alois.

  “It isn’t a species,” said Revelstoke. “It’s an artform.”

  “They have a disease,” he said. “A cryptographic virus, called the Thespian disease, and it’s killing them.”

  The party atmosphere on Avalon Station was like carnival night in the most debauched place she could imagine. The nakedness was just the start of it. She’d heard stories of New Orleans, when it existed. They could be in wartime Berlin, except that parts of the Station were in freefall, and parts were in gravity.

  Night here fell like a switch. Unlike Praxis, which floated at the confluence of gravity waves, Avalon Station was in a geostationary orbit. One moment Xerxes’ star was blazing, filling the Station with light, then it was hidden behind the planet.

  Box was thrilled to be out with her friends. They dressed for the event. Alois’s skeleton was entwined with black ribbons, and Kitou had found it a top hat to wear. Kitou had reprised her emerald pajamas from the Pnyx. Box wore her baroque judo suit. They’d chosen a play, whose cultural nuances escaped her, despite the best efforts of her wetware to translate it. It seemed to consist of three people, in a room, talking elliptically about nothing.

  One was a ghost. The other two were partygoers.

  Or all three of them were ghosts.

  Like Japanese cinema, she decided.

  Her companions seemed equally baffled.

  Revelstoke took them backstage. This didn’t consist of going behind a stage, as it would in an ordinary theatre, but into a street, then through a nondescript door, into a hidden part of the Station.

  “This precinct is called Backstage,” he explained. “It’s a shared service area.”

  Here there was gravity. Box’s heels clacked dully on dull metal.

  Box could see the players from their show, disrobing.

  Bacchanalia, on the cusp of beginning.

  Backstage was gloomily lit, and full of dramatic shadows. Revelstoke clicked his fingers, and a streetlight ambled towards them.

  Box giggled. This was fun.

  Revelstoke explained that this was the oldest part of the Station, which had originally been an orbital brothel, out of reach of the laws of the city. The rest of Avalon Station had grown from the embryo of the bordello, to become first a dormitory, then a factory, then part of a planetary defense system, and now this.

  He took them to a rundown house, that appeared to survive by leaning on the houses beside it, where he knocked on a door, which was opened by a reptile. He was a beautiful being, almost two meters tall. Box knew he was a he, by his astonishing genitalia.

  “Flex,” said Revelstoke. “These are the covert operatives I talked about. They’ve been working on a problem like yours.”

  Box sensed Revelstoke was pleading. There was a backstory here.

  The reptilian sighed, and let them in.

  Flex’s partner w
as called Salmonella Dysonsphere, and she was a shadow of her former beauty. Where she’d been a big woman, now she was emaciated. She reminded Box of a famine victim, in a society where there was no scarcity.

  Flex proved to be a demonstratively tender person. He took his lover’s hand, and wept openly.

  [Flex is a Span,] said the ship in Box’s sensorium.

  [Hey, Water Bear. What are we doing here?]

  [I don’t know,] said the ship.

  The dying woman lay in an unmade bed, in a clothes-strewn room, and she was barely conscious. She was murmuring, incessantly, with feverish energy. Her boudoir resembled a proscenium stage, with chairs around the bed for an audience, and sliding theater flats behind. Tonight, the room was set as a forest, with shafts of sunlight falling through majestic trees. Box could see it’d been set that way to give the poor woman some peace.

  “Alois,” said Revelstoke. “This is mainly for you.” He projected symbols in their heads: page after page of abstruse mathematics.

  They reminded Box of the blackboards from Threnody. They had a shape that even she could recognize.

  The skeleton clacked. [Where did this come from?] it asked.

  “From an autopsy,” said Revelstoke.

  [Yes,] said Buss. [It’s like the Fa:ing number.]

  “It is the Fa:ing number,” said Revelstoke. “Or I think so. But seen from a different angle.”

  [Yes,] said Buss. [I see what you mean. Its simpler. Like a weaponized version.]

  “What can you do?” asked the Span. His voice was pitched as low as his testicles suggested.

  Buss said, [Let me think.]

  [Why Avalon?] asked Buss, after they left the woman and her partner to their suffering.

  [And why the Thesps, of all people?]

  “Good questions,” said Revelstoke. “I don’t know the answers. That’s why I’m here. So far, I’ve failed. So, you see, our tasks are somehow related.”

  They were returning through the backstreets of Backstage, followed by their streetlight, casting looming shadows in the encroaching darkness. Box felt like a thief, stealing glimpses of shows, seen through half-exposed theater sets.

  Just a few meters away, though meter-thick steel walls, the party was only beginning. Here, behind the scenes, it was quiet.

  All they could hear was the sounds of their voices, and the clack of their heels on the roadway.

  The skeleton clacked again.

  [Why didn’t I know about this?

  [Why didn’t the thousand worlds tell me?

  [Let me get back into a human body, with my real brain,] he said. [And then I’ll see what I can do. We might have already solved this problem. How long does she have?]

  “Salmonella? A few days.”

  [Merde. Then there’s no chance to save her.]

  “Why?”

  [I’m months from a full recovery.]

  The Water Bear said, [Alois?]

  [Yes?]

  [You remember I have a full backup of you?]

  “This is exceedingly strange,” said Alois, holding up a hand in front of him. The Water Bear had installed a copy of Alois Buss’s full consciousness in her androform body, which was a military cyborg, with ship-level wetware.

  [This raises complex legal issues,] she explained. [A restored copy is a person, and it has rights. You have rights. We can’t just turn you off now.]

  The new Alois smiled. “Astonishing,” he said.

  [It’s a very good body,] said the ship. [Ready for combat. Please don’t break it.]

  “I was referring to your brain.”

  [It has ship wetware.]

  “You’re like this, all the time?”

  “Better.”

  Buss laughed. “My goodness. Now I have ship envy.”

  Brin and Kitou grinned. They loved this development. Since his sacrifice, and his brave way of dealing with it, Alois Buss had gone from being a mildly eccentric passenger, to their hero. If he hadn’t been before, then he was a part of the hand of the Water Bear now.

  Pax arched one eyebrow.

  “So,” he said. “The disease?”

  “In 2135,” said androform Alois, “with the help of sixty more years of crypto research, we’d begun to understand that the Fa:ing number wasn’t a problem at all, but an attempt at an answer. It’s a question the Fa:ing have been working on asking for centillions of years. Essentially, it’s trying to infer our universe from its ending conditions, working backwards in time. A task of immense computational difficulty, since in theory a whole universe is needed to model its own state.

  “But it’s done very well. It’s found you, Dr Box, which seems to be a milestone.

  “It’s also sentient, although we already knew that, but not in the way we’d imagined.

  “Consider this. The Fa:ing number sees time backwards. Your Hopf number, Dr Box, is no longer in it, because it’s in their future. To them, we’re the time traveling aliens. Us bringing you to Threnody allowed them to find you. You’re not part of the answer. You’re part of the question.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Box.

  Alois nodded. “Understandably.

  “But

  that’s beside the point. We don’t have to understand the Fa:ing number to know how to use it. We’ve been harvesting its symbols for decades. Felix, does the Thespian disease begin with bad dreams?”

  “Yes,” said Revelstoke.

  “Can you describe them?”

  “Not from experience.”

  “But?”

  “Like nothing.”

  “Like our end-time war?”

  “I had made that connection.”

  “Those are our dreams too,” said Kitou.

  “Followed by... a fugue state?” asked Buss.

  “Yes,” said Revelstoke. “Dissociative fugue, then psychosis, and death.”

  “Those are symptoms of the Fa:ing number in its terminal phase,” said Alois. “Think of it as crowdsourcing neurons. The computation uses up all the brain’s processing capacity. First, sleep suffers. Then mental disturbance. Neurosis. Dementia. Finally, death as the lizard brain is consumed by the task.

  “Left unattended, the Fa:ing number would kill people, just like the Thespian disease is.”

  “How do we stop it?” asked Revelstoke.

  “Simple,” said Buss. “By surgery.

  “It’s just a few cells, in the occipital and parietal lobes of the brain. An organ. We literally call it the Antenna.”

  “We?” asked Box.

  Androform Alois nodded.

  “Have you had this operation, Alois?” she asked.

  “I have, and I’ll probably have it again.”

  “Do you know how to perform it?”

  “No, but I bet Cloethe does.”

  Later, when Revelstoke had gone to find Cloethe, Box took Alois to one side.

  “Why the Thesps?” she asked. “Why performers? Do you have any ideas?”

  “I’d have to reach for hypotheticals.”

  “Please.”

  “The virus is conscious. It seeks to succeed. The most successful virus is the one that infects the most hosts, not the one that kills the most victims.”

  “So the Thesps are infectious?”

  “Not in the terminal phase. But they once were, or the disease wouldn’t spread. I think the mode of transmission is ideas. The same ideas, repeated over and over.”

  “You mean they’ve been infecting their audiences?”

  “That’d be an elegant virus.”

  “How long has this been happening?”

  “Diseases have phases. Revelstoke’s been here two years. That’s just the terminal phase. Quite a lot longer. Years. Maybe decades.”

  “That’s a lot of audiences.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do they come from? Who comes here?”

  “Everyone, eventually.”

  “Why is it killing the Thesps?”

  “Why does any su
ccessful pathogen destroy its host?”

  “Because it’s already served its purpose?”

  “A terrifying idea.”

  Cloethe made house calls. She arrived outside the Dysonsphere brownstone, wearing a birdlike androform woman, with an acoustic scalpel engineered into one hand.

  “Is that all you need?” asked Box.

  “Ample,” she said.

  Inside Salmonella’s boudoir, which now resembled a nautical scene, with seafarers waving cutlasses at sea monsters, the surgeon waved her scalpel at the dying actor. Dysonsphere’s eyes flicked open, then fluttered shut, and she sank into a calm sleep.

  “There,” said Cloethe.

  “She’s cured?” asked Flex.

  “Yes,” the surgeon said briskly. “When she wakes, give her something nourishing to drink. Then love, plenty of love. She was lost, now she’s home. She needs to know that.”

  A printout emerged from her breast pocket.

  “Get this script filled, and visit me. This is for her nutrition.

  “You people,” she said to the Po team. “If you’d only told me about this earlier, I could’ve saved others.”

  “We didn’t know,” said Revelstoke.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “We are where we are,” rumbled Pax.

  “Leave out the homilies, young homo sapiens,” she said. “Do you know what your species’ problem is? Too much secrecy.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Revelstoke. “Our investigations should’ve converged before this.”

  “You’re supposed to be the great strategists. Space help us if that’s true. It took two heads being banged together by randomness to make this connection. It took Alois’s head to be turned to soup. How do you explain that? Do you know how angry this makes me? How can you hope to solve the actual problem, if you don’t talk?”

  “What actual problem is that?” asked Pax.

  “The end-time war?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “How do you think I know, master Navigator? Because I rewired every goddamn synapse in Alois Buss’s space-forsaken brain.”

  “Then we must swear you to silence.”

  “Or what?”

  Box said, “Cloethe, please.”

  The doctor scowled. “I’m outraged, Ophelia.”