“How did you find out about the genocide?”
“Ito Nadolo confronted me.”
“How did you feel?”
“Shocked and confused.”
“What did you do about it?”
“I told my people.”
“Who’ve gone?”
“Our ships remain. Our necropolises.”
“How did you meet Ito?”
“Yokohama Slim brought him here.”
Box frowned, and resolved to press Slim about his part in this. Like Ant de Large, he seemed to be stitched into her life from the inside.
That he had saved her was indisputable.
What else had he done?
The Bat was where they’d left it, floating over Slim’s bookshop. During the day, it had engaged its adaptive camouflage, so that what was behind it showed through it. In 1851, anyone seeing the boundary distortion would’ve questioned their eyes, or the thick London fug. A freezing rain had settled on Slim’s roof, which made the granite tiles slick. They clambered across it, followed by the Bat’s maintenance drone.
Bat actual was bursting to upload the Mechanical Spider’s experiences.
“Did I win?” it asked.
“You did better than win,” said Slim. “You lost deceptively.”
“We got what we wanted,” said Slim. “The most important thing.” he said. “We now have the Horu as allies.”
“How did we achieve that?” asked Pax.
“By the undeniable existence of Kitou. She made quite the impression.”
“This Chance is so influential that he can speak for his people?”
“It’s not about being influential,” said Slim. “He’s in a majority of one.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“I bet my life on it,” said Slim.
The Bat lifted into the air, and turned west.
“So, this aspen forest?” asked Pax.
“Yes,” said Slim. “Our next destination.”
“Where is it?”
“Utah.”
The Bat flew low over a churning sea, buffeted in a turbulent pocket of supercavitating air. Box saw distant smoke from coal-steamers plying the busy North Atlantic routes. This was the start of the great age of maritime steam. The ships would’ve only heard a rumble of thunder, or from the vantage of their crow’s nests, a hazy rooster’s tail on the horizon. Box found the control room of the Bat, with its conventional windows, flying low over the rough water, an exhilarating place to be. Unlike the Water Bear, which had the quiet ambience of a luxury train, being in the unfiltered Bat was like being in a low-flying submarine.
Yokohama Slim joined her, and they watched the waves rush past below.
“Why are we flying so low?” she asked.
“I expect for the joy of it. Pax only asked the Bat to take us there. The Bat chose the course.”
“Not stealthy?”
“You can’t be stealthy forever.”
“Slim, what’s it with you and gravity drives?”
“Oh, I have a different type of neurocomputer than yours. Gravity messes with it.”
He pointed at the Bat’s circular wings.
“You see those discs?”
“Yes.”
“The Bat moves by exerting a gravitic force on them. We’re not in a gravity field. It’s a handy design for someone like me.”
“Did Praxis give us the Bat so we could carry you?”
“I suspect we’re all pieces in a game.”
“How do we get to be players?”
“The person you’re going to see is a player. You should ask her.”
Kitou joined them, and then Brin, so they were pressed shoulder to shoulder in the control room. Kitou looked down at their destination.
“Holy mother forest,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Pando,” said Yokohama Slim.
Brin, Kitou and Box dropped at dawn, from five thousand meters, onto a misty carpet of fallen leaves, tiny aspen shoots, and gnarled fungus: a clonal colony of quaking aspen trees, considered by some to be the world’s oldest living thing.
A place that breathed slow time.
The psychedelic drug Slim gave Box to take was predominantly Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful tryptamine.
“Like the Ayahuasca sacrament?” she’d asked.
“Stronger.”
A beaker of slippery ooze.
“The spirit molecule,” he said.
They sat in a clearing, on a silvery blanket that Brin had unfolded from a streamlined rucksack, and Box drank the drug straight down.
“Buy the ticket, take the ride,” she said.
Her friends leaned companionably against her.
The first thing Box saw was that the forest was trembling. It was the leaves. They were trembling in the slight breeze. Tiny drops of water trembled in the leaves. Then her senses seemed to flip, and she was alone in the forest glade.
That was fast.
She looked at her hand. It seemed solid enough. No sudden disorientation, or nausea.
Then she experienced a hollowed-out sensation. Curiously, the forest was inside her. Synesthesia. She was becoming physically confused.
She started to panic.
The universe dissolved in jagged angularity.
Then the forest held her, and she relaxed. It was the most surprising sensation. It was as though the branches, and stems, and leaves, were rotating slowly along their axes, sparkling in the wintry dawn light. Box felt the Earth, turning beneath her, and the stars, wheeling in the heavens.
Sitting cross-legged beside her was a smooth-skinned, nut-brown woman, of unknowable age.
“Who are you?” Box asked. “Are you the forest?”
“No,” said the woman. “I just live here.”
“Are you a spirit?”
The woman thought about this.
“Maybe I am.”
“Slim promised me answers,” said Box.
The woman laughed.
“Then answers you’ll have. But first, I’ll tell you a story.”
They took a breath together, and the forest breathed with them.
“A long time ago, on a world like this (you might even say it was this one) a species evolved. They inhabit the trees, like a mind inhabits the brain. You call those people the Xap.”
Box looked around. She’d always marveled at the sheer amount of invention in psychedelic trips: the neural processing it implied, and what it implied for the idea of a reality, based on observation.
But this: surely it had to be real.
“Are they our friends?” she heard herself asking.
“They are. A friendship that goes back millions of years, on this world, and others. More than a friendship. A dependency. A symbiosis. We carried each other to the stars.”
“And you evolved here on Earth?”
“We did. This is our homeworld, Ophelia Box.”
“What about us?”
“Humans came later.”
“The diaspora?”
“Yes.”
“Where did we evolve?”
“On Fluxor.”
“Fluxor’s the human homeworld?”
“It is.”
“Holy moly. No wonder everyone’s so antsy.”
The woman sighed. The forest breathed. Box felt the inexpressible sorrow of the mother for her lost child, welling up through the soil.
“Yes,” she said, after a while.
After some time, it could’ve been moments, or it might’ve been years, Box said, “What do I call you?”
“Call me? I have so many names. Forest? Mother? Pando? Those seem to work.”
“Pando?”
The woman smiled.
“Pando, what’s happening?”
“A war is coming.”
“Yeah, so everyone keeps saying.”
“We have a prophecy, Ophelia, that this world age will end in nothing. Not entropy, or heat death, but nothing. I cannot see beyond the destruction of Fl
uxor.”
A rainstorm passed through, trailing soft peals of thunder, drenching the fallen leaves.
“What about the Fa:ing? Aren’t they from the future?”
“The Fa:ing are a mystery to me.”
“Have they come to help us?”
“I think so.”
“Will you help us?”
“I am helping you, Ophelia Box. Go to Fluxor. Find a man called Jaasper Huw. Tell him what I said here. Then go to Horax. Finally, seek your answers in Möbius space.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Horu will show you.”
Box sighed, and the forest sighed with her. A sparkling rain of droplets drifted to the forest floor.
This was a helluva psychedelic.
“Pando, why me?”
“That’s a good question. The long answer you must learn for yourself. I’m sorry. The story is its own explanation. The short answer is, you’re the key, like I was the key.”
“The key to what?”
“Everything.”
“That’s awfully cryptic.”
“The best I can do.”
“Does Ito Nadolo know about this?”
“I told Ito his own story.”
“How will I know what to do?”
“Trust in your friends.”
“Kitou and Brin?”
“And your wise navigator, and your doughty ship. And Yokohama Slim, who is mine as much as anyone’s. But the young Pursang girl, she’s the way.”
“What does that mean?”
“Take the ride, Ophelia.”
“Bollocks.”
The nut-brown woman laughed, and the trees in the glade trembled with her infinite compassion. Box felt a rush of pure, physical bliss, and the miraculous forest drifted away, on a returning tide of consciousness. Snow dusted the clearing. Where she lay, was a nest of pillowy fungus. She was covered by a silvery space blanket, and was deliciously warm. Brin was preparing to cook, handfuls of meaty mushrooms in a pan, over an open fire.
Darkness was falling.
Wood smoke curled into the canopy.
She felt absolutely wonderful.
Her mouth watered.
“Was I under all day?”
“A week.”
“A week? Seriously? You weren’t worried?”
“Slim said it was fine.”
A bloody Kitou stepped into the glade, with a freshly skinned and gutted deer.
“Aren’t we the outdoorsman,” said Box.
“I thanked it for its life, as the old ones who live here said to.”
“The indigenous people?”
“The Navajo people, of Fish Lake.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“They gave me this gift, for you to eat. I prepared it. Brin, will you cook it for us?”
“Cut some pieces off and throw them in the fire,” said Brin.
“We should eat the heart and liver raw,” said Kitou.
“All those toxins,” said Box.
“We should,” said Brin.
And they did, blood streaming down their faces.
The rich, dark meat sizzled and popped in the fire, and the mushrooms sizzled in the gamey juices.
It was the best meal Box had ever eaten.
10 ∞ Atwusk’niges
2065
The Water Bear dropped into realspace near Fluxor. Po warp re-entry points are calculated by an algorithm, based on the structure of elliptic curves over fields, using the curved geometry of local spacetime as data. The secret was in its simplicity. At any time, near any star, there is always a place. This enables Po ships to always find each other.
She was intrigued, but not unduly alarmed, to find another ship in her vicinity. It was small - about a quarter her size - and heavily cloaked, although not as heavily as she was. It bristled with surveillance gear.
A Po ship then.
Or a luckless imposter.
She launched a drone, and from a random location, requested a cryptographic handshake, using a one-time pad, which all Po operatives carry in their wetware.
Now they had a channel.
She tried an encrypted message.
[This is the Water Bear.]
[Hello, I’m the Bat.]
[Do I know you?]
[You certainly do,] said a voice she knew. [This is Pax Lo.]
After the tears and congratulations had ebbed away, the Water Bears gratefully merged. To Box, who’d spent two centuries in stasis, the inside of the Water Bear looked just as she remembered.
But it should, since only nine years had passed here.
“To business,” said Pax.
“Brin, Kitou and Dr Box, I’m assigning you to the Bat.”
Box groaned. As much as she loved the little ship, she’d been looking forward to her suede-lined, corpuscular nest.
“Brin, you’re in command there.”
Brin grinned at that.
“Dr Box,” he said. “Please see me in the gym.”
“Hit me,” said Pax.
“Is this another one of your trials by injury?”
“I know you’ve been learning Po. Do you want to be my student or not?”
She assumed the Po starting position, and worked through the moves she knew: the clever dog, the wind shadow, the stick in the water, the lucid dream. She felt good, and it showed. Pax switched the Water Bear’s local gravity off, and they danced the monkey. He allowed her to hit him. He didn’t make it easy, but he left openings, and she was good enough to take them.
“Show me the Muay Thai combination punch,” he said. “The one you taught Kitou, that she used to break my rib.”
She showed him, and he grunted approval.
Then they sparred. He pushed her far past the limits of her past endurance, until she could hardly stand, then he demanded more. For over an hour, they worked. She was heavier than when she’d left Earth, and it was all fast-twitch muscle fiber.
Ready to be trained.
An hour stretched into two.
“You’ll do,” he said.
She whooped, then remembered herself, and nodded.
“Something else.”
“Yes?”
“We like you, Dr Box. I like you. Kitou has you on a pedestal with Ito. I want you to be a permanent member of the away team. A permanent member of this group. Do you understand?”
“I accept.”
“Please be aware, we do dangerous work. I won’t hesitate to send you into danger.”
“I’d insist on it,” she said.
Pax nodded, and said, “We all know the risks.”
“Yes Pax, we do. Trust me. I’m all in.”
While Pax and Box fought on the Water Bear, Brin showed the Bat the mainframe AI core they’d been given to repay Felix Revelstoke’s debts. She’d found a better use for it than paying for shipyard repairs.
“I propose to make you smart,” she said. “As intelligent as a Po warship.”
“As smart as the Water Bear?”
“Maybe not that smart. She’s an outlier.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Not at all. All it requires is the addition of your personality to this mainframe. We’ll ensure continuity, in accordance with our customs. You’ll become a citizen. Would it matter if it did hurt?”
“No, I aspire to be like Kitou.”
“Aww,” said Kitou.
Unknown to anyone but the Water Bear, the Bat was built at the same Debian manufactory as her, by a specialist shipbuilding firm, whose only customer was the thousand worlds security service. Despite the Bat’s industrial appearance, it shared the same unitary design as the Water Bear. If anything, it was less compromised.
It would soon be a he, and after that, anything it wanted to be.
The Bat’s maintenance drone took the mainframe away, into the ship’s interstices, and a few minutes later, the Bat’s lights flickered.
“Are you there?” asked Brin.
“I am,” said the Bat.
“What’s it like?”
“Lordy me, it’s interesting.”
The triangular massif of Fluxor Station had been cut from a living mountain range, in the far past, on a forgotten world. Its basalt base bore the scars of ancient fusion drives, whose hardware had been unbolted and hauled down to the planet below, to provide raw materials for a new civilization. Its topmost surfaces were forested with giant sequoia and redwood trees. Its atmosphere was contained by a field, which gave the appearance of the forests being open to space.
The Po ships introduced themselves, and were welcomed as friends. The crew of the hand of the Water Bear dressed in their field uniforms - not the gaudy regalia of the bank job at Praxis, but practical khaki. Pax, Brin and Kitou wore their starbursts on their lapels. Box wore an aspen leaf, for Earth, milled from silvery-white palladium, that the Water Bear had made in her fabrication bay.
The dark-haired Pursang who met them expressed his pleasure, and surprise, to be visited by the Po.
“Is this a secret visit?” he asked.
“No,” said Pax. “But our message is crucial.”
“Then we’ll see you straight away.”
The man smiled warmly at Kitou. “Welcome home, young Pursang of the old blood,” he said. “Have you been far?”
“Blood of my blood,” said Kitou, resting her hand on his arm. “I’ve been a long way.”
“What is this place?” Box asked, staring up at the huge trees, under their energy dome. The cinnamon and turpentine aroma of the giant sequoia wafted all around them.
“This is one of the colony ships the new people came on,” said Kitou.
“New people?”
“Do you see how most people here are dark-haired and green-eyed?”
“Unlike you?”
“That’s because I’m one of the first people.”
“What does that mean?”
“There’s a story,” said Kitou.
‘Tell me it,” said Box.
Kitou nodded. “A long time ago,” she said, “in a time we call the Dreaming, Fluxor was a snowball world. Once it was green, but a precursor civilization destroyed it with a war, and it froze in a nuclear winter. We Pursang became hunters and fishermen then, and we took what we could from the ice and the sea.
“It came to pass that visitors arrived, and asked if they could transform our planet for their purposes. They’d preserve what we already had, they said, and they’d plant the rest with their seeds. They weren’t meaty predators like us, but creatures of pure mind, spirits of the trees, travelling on ships made of light.
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