The Water Bear
Page 19
Part of the Gorgonza home was cut into the Atwusk’niges rock, with a curving glass wall, overlooking the Algoma’aa valley below. Box watched a rain squall come marching along the valley, spread its load of rain, then march away again, leaving a sky like watercolor.
They discussed the defense of Fluxor.
“There’ll soon be a thousand worlds battle group stationed here,” said Jaasper.
“Stronger than any possible Horu force?” asked Akito.
“Perhaps not. But a deterrent.”
“When does it arrive?”
“Imminently.”
“Our son would want to be in that,” said Vanja.
“Where is he?”
“Fighting the Badoop,” said Akito.
“As far as it’s possible to be from here, and still be in the human galaxy,” said Vanja.
“In our timeline,” said Kitou. “Totoro fights with the Free Pursang.”
“I pity his enemies,” said Akito, with emphasis.
“Totoro kicks ass,” piped young Kitou.
“Shush,” said Vanja.
“How long till the genocide?” asked Akito.
“Three years,” said Jaasper. “In our timeline.”
“What if they come sooner, in this one?”
“There’s no defense against sooner,” said Jaasper. “If the enemy can adapt retroactively, there’s no time soon enough for us to begin. So, we defend against the attack we know, and beat the underbrush to frighten the snake.”
Kitou took Box and her little sister into the high rainforest canopy, a mile overhead, where she’d fought the fire. The Water Bear lifted them up, to the younger Kitou’s pure delight. “Normally we climb by muscle alone,” said big Kitou. “But the climb to the top takes a day.”
It truly was a cloud forest. Scallops and lenses of damp mist hung between the ancient rainforest trees. Trickles and runs and tumbling cascades of pure Lhotse meltwater appeared out of nowhere, only to fade back into misty whiteness a few meters below. Kitou showed them a streaming rock face, carpeted in fungus and moss.
In the rock face was a notch, barely wide enough for a small girl to climb into.
“Here,” she said. “Here is where Ito saved me.”
She showed them a narrow arête.
“And here is where the fire first bit me.”
“High,” said little Kitou.
“Yes,” said her older sister.
“I can’t imagine all this destroyed,” said Box.
“All down there was burnt,” said big Kitou, pointing out into the valley below. “Burnt trees and dancing flames, for five thousand kilometers. All the world, burning.”
“Stratego,” said Box. “All those little children.”
“And Jura,” said Kitou. “Sama in her tower.
“Everything, gone.”
11 ∞ The Möbius Trip
2065
Ophelia Box watched an origami bird unfold in space. It hurt her eyes to watch it happening.
“That’s an impressive trick,” she said.
[Geometrically impossible,] said the Bat.
Box, Brin and Kitou were strapped in the Bat, watching the event from close quarters. They were the away team. The Water Bear was a thousand kilometers distant, with Pax and Jaasper Huw, ready for fight, flight, or parley.
Half a system away, three Wu warships guarded Fluxor Station: advance units of the new Fluxor fleet. They were the same cylindrical design as Box had seen at Aldebaran. She was told that to attack, they would remember their target in three different places.
When it finished unfolding, the Horu ship was larger than all the Wu warships combined, and incorporeal, with the ghostly blue-green glow of ocean bioluminescence.
Box glanced at Kitou, who watched with rapt attention.
[Horu ship,] broadcast the Water Bear, over a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum. “We are Po ships, the Water Bear and the Bat.”
The Water Bear had acquired a good working knowledge of Horu, and was about to try a dialect, when the Horu ship responded.
<
“How are you getting this?” asked Pax.
[Semantic primitives, directly into my eloquent cortex,] said the Water Bear.
[New tech,] said the Bat.
[Are we friends?] asked the Water Bear.
It seemed to take a while for the strange ship to consider the question. Moments passed. Either it was pretending to think, or relaying messages over a long distance.
<
[Can we meet?]
<
[In person?]
<>
[Your crew?]
<>
Pax considered this.
They were under instructions to treat this as first contact.
Contact was what they were here for.
“Yes,” he said.
<
An opening unfolded in the bird. To the crew on the Bat, it was like seeing an uncanny flower blossom, until it was the size of a mountain, then spread its petals wide, until there was a city-sized hole in its stigma. Through the hole was a space whose volume defied physical explanation. Based on the optics of the sunlight slanting through the opening, it was a flattened sphere, five thousand kilometers across, and hazy, as though it held an atmosphere. It was many times larger than the Horu ship that contained it.
Inside the chamber was a pulsing light.
<
<
The Water Bear accelerated, and a few minutes later, so did the Bat, and they fell through the portal together. The interior walls of the Manifold were a fathomless grey, with a slippery, viscous appearance, that seemed to ripple with their passing.
Like the aspen forest in Utah, this place breathed old time. If anything, it seemed incredibly older.
Like a mausoleum, thought Box.
They fell for hours, to all appearances becalmed inside the world-sized void. Wispy skeins of dust caught long shafts of light, shining from nowhere.
“What is this place?” asked Box. She’d felt lost in the big empty. Here she felt like she was nowhere at all.
[You want me to speculate?] asked the Water Bear.
“Please,” said Pax.
[A transportation abstraction. This spheroid correlates to physical spacetime in some nontrivial way. I suggest we’re going to exit far from where we entered.]
“No shit,” said Box.
“Like a wormhole?” asked Brin.
“Not an unreasonable analogy. Perhaps a wormhole in a higher dimension.”
“Do we have those?” asked Box.
“In experiments only. Not for transportation purposes.”
A second flower unfolded. It followed the same uncanny unfolding as the original flower. Through a portal was space. They decelerated through it, and were falling towards a dark, turbulent planet. Fire and lightning flickered in the planet’s atmosphere. Below them was a smaller, more corporeal version of the bird-shaped ship. It was made of the same viscous, depthless material as the walls of the chamber they’d passed through.
Surrounding the planet were hundreds of similar ships.
[628 ships,] appeared in Box’s head-up display.
How can we war against that?
<> said the small ship. <
<
<
Box, Brin and Kitou found themselves in the Grosvenor Hotel suite, that they’d visited with Yokohama Slim in 1851. They were accompanied by the Bat, who had puckishly taken the form of a bat.
[Acerodon jubatus, a golden-capped fruit bat,] said the Water Bear, in Box’s sensorium.
[Can I be anything I want?] Box
asked.
[If you like, although some things, like the sound of the rain on a hot summer night, are harder to personify,] said the Water Bear.
Apart from the Bat, who was suspended from a gasolier, they were seated in green velveteen chairs. The pile of the cloth was worn thin, where a thousand hands had rested on it. A fire guttered and spat in the grate. Box could sense the gritty darkness outside. Facing them were two people: small, neat, muscular dark-haired men.
If this were a film, Box thought, they’d be vampires.
One resembled the Horu fighting robot.
“Mr. Chance?” she asked.
It was strange to see how the man resembled the machine. It was something about the way he carried himself: in a surprised way, with his head held back at a certain angle.
“Dr Ophelia Box,” he said, in a perfectly ordinary voice. “It’s good to see you again. With your eponymous ship, who clearly enjoys a good joke.”
“Aren’t you departed by now, Mr. Chance?”
“Long since, Dr Box. I’m in Felicity space. Hopefully doing well, though I can’t say for certain. This is a projection of my original self: a visual-interlocutor; a form of AI, my emissary in the Real.
“Please meet our host, Mr. Flux.”
The other man leant forward in his chair. He was about Box’s age, but with an old man’s rheumy eyes.
“You have so many questions,” he said.
It was warm in the room. It had exactly the air of a real Victorian sitting room, at the onset of a harsh winter: at first stiflingly hot, then bitingly cold, through a flue, or a gap in the wainscoting.
“Please explain,” said Brin.
“It isn’t an easy explanation,” he said. “But follow, and I’ll show you everything...”
They were on the bridge deck of a spacecraft. The bridge was manned by humans, dressed in military uniforms. They were strapped into acceleration chairs, under a canopy, like an outsized jet fighter, giving a view of the world above them. They were shorter and more muscular than Earth normal, with small, high ears set back on clean-shaved heads, and their faces tattooed with elaborate designs.
“Fluxor?” said Box. Or was it? She saw the line of the Aø, where it crossed the Igháán.
“But not Fluxor,” said Kitou. “The icecaps are smaller, and there’s desert.”
“Fluxor, two million years ago,” said Flux.
“Is this a recording or a simulation?” asked the Bat.
“Neither,” said Flux. “And both. We are here. Now watch...”
A scattering of small, hard points of light limned a coast of one of the seas, spreading like an aurora. The humans on the bridge averted their eyes. Some shouted. One sobbed. A few minutes later, a field of searing pinpricks lit up another part of the world.
“A limited nuclear exchange,” said Flux. Two hundred thermonuclear weapons, about a kiloton each.”
“The dawn war,” said Kitou.
“Watch...”
Hundreds, then thousands of progressively larger explosions erupted in waves on the surface. The watchers looked on in horror, interlopers and bridge crew alike, as nuclear firestorms incinerated cities and forests. Plumes of ash and smoke eructed into the atmosphere, merging into continent-spanning storms. In an hour, the surface was obscured.
Under the clouds, firestorms raged.
“All the atomics deployed,” said Flux.
Box looked at Kitou.
“Are you okay, kiddo?”
“I’m not sure. It was so long ago, but these were my people.”
“Want my advice?”
“Please.”
“Don’t prosecute the past. There’s so much wrong there; it’ll drive you insane. Let it go.”
“Then what must I do?”
“The reason history exists is to learn from.”
Kitou nodded.
“This is the story of our people,” said Flux. “All of us here, including you Dr Box. This is your past you are seeing.
“Now forward five years.”
They were on the same bridge, but the crew had visibly aged. All semblance of military formality was gone. Beards were entangled with military insignia and primitive cultural charms. Men and women, all bare-chested. Unsheathed knives were thrust in belts, and by the appearance of scars on the bodies of the crew, sometimes used.
The ship fell into the atmosphere, in a spiraling dive, and after the thunder and fire of re-entry, flew under the roiling clouds, over a shattered, frosty landscape. They circled low over a wretched community. People came out to see, waving their arms in the air, emaciated, dressed in rags, some naked to the cold.
A woman held her swaddled baby in the air.
“Nuclear winter,” said Flux. “The ice-albedo effect. As the planet cools, more ice forms, which reflects more solar radiation into space. Fallout, pyrotoxins, ozone depletion. Extinction. We were the Pursang politico-warrior class. We started this war, and we ended it. We escaped in the remaining spacecraft.”
“You left these people to die?” asked Box.
“Yes.”
“That’s despicable.”
“Yes, we were despicable.”
“You were the precursor race,” said Kitou.
“Yes child, we were. And we left your people to die.”
“Now forward five hundred years...”
There were no humans left on the bridge. Instead, systems flashed in the dark. They were orbiting a green world, like Fluxor, but less obviously oceanic. Instead of oceans, there were extensive, interconnected river systems.
“Horax,” said Flux. “A goldilocks world, near-perfect without terraforming.”
“I was born around this time,” said Chance.
“Wait,” said Box. “Are you saying you’re two million years old?”
“In elapsed time.”
“Watch...” said Flux.
The planet spun faster. Days became minutes, then seconds, then instants. Small clouds of lights, spreading out from river ports, became sprawling megalopolises. The ice caps shrank, and disappeared. Green swathes of wilderness became checkerboard farms, then heavy industry, then an industrial waste, and finally desert. The sky grew grey with pollution, then black with particulate clouds. Vast fires burned as toxic waste then methane in the soil caught fire.
Finally, it resembled the storm-wracked, vaporous world they’d seen in the Real: Horax.
“This was our legacy,” said Flux. “In two thousand years, we destroyed a second world, not by war but by greed. The Pursang child is correct. We were the precursor race, but also her race. There were two castes of human on Fluxor. We believed ourselves to be the warrior elite, but it was a fantasy. We were a political class. We pursued wars, to stimulate production, to improve the breed, to gain wealth, for our pleasure, until finally we pressed a button too many. Then, given a second chance, on a perfect new world, we destroyed that as well.
“Eventually, we were faced by the truth. The problem was us. Something inside us was broken. We were a bacteriophage, killing the cells of its host.
Ships like the Flux appeared in orbit around the dead planet.
“Totemic arks,” said Flux. “Flowers, spiders, birds. Charms. Symbolic offerings, to unknown gods. We digitized what was left of our people, and set sail for the future.”
One of the ships was the Flux. The warship they were in slid in through an iris-shaped port in its side, which was sealed shut behind them. Its systems grew dim, then flickered off.
“Our last, best hope was that our species might someday be saved from itself. That a better, more productive strain of humanity might emerge.
“Little did we know that strain already existed.
“Now, forward two million years...”
A shining disc, ten thousand kilometers across.
A water conveyor, encircling a dark star.
An orbiter, the size of a planet.
A swarm of city-sized habitats, travelling at near lightspeed, halfway to Centaurus A.
A juniper forest, orbiting beneath the blazing glory of the galactic core.
Moon-sized spheres and cubes.
Hollowed-out asteroids.
Natural worlds.
Avalon, a painted fortress, basking by a milk-white sea. Threnody, all the colors of Autumn. Earth, in all its jeweled glory.
“Behold, humanity. Nothing special, by the standards of a successful galactic species, but we exist. We passed through the eye of the needle. We’re still in the game.
“The Horu abandonment proved to be a beneficial culling event for our species. By accident, we extracted the worst from our gene pool, and left the rest to abide, in testing circumstances, and then to succeed. Not just persist, but excel.
“Not by war, but by a just society, and with the help of the Xap.
“How do we feel about that? We feel humbled and ashamed, but proud, like absent fathers looking on a lost child from afar. We were abusive, so we took ourselves out of the picture.
“We’d do nothing to hurt this species.
“We’d do anything to defend it.
“But there’s a problem, and I fear it’s our doing.”
Now they were floating disembodied, over a dense knot of circuitry, like a convoluted Möbius strip, curling in on itself with oily precision. It was orbiting a planetoid of similar construction. It reminded Box of a particle accelerator, but turned inside out, with its intimate engineering on the outside.
It was hard to judge size, but Box guessed the planetoid was about the size of Earth’s moon, and the device itself was about the size of the Aldebaran orbiter.
“The Möbius machine,” said Flux.
“Also known as Rabbithole,” said Chance.
“As in down the?” asked Box.
“Yes,” said Chance.
There were no stars in this place. Below them was a geometric plane, as though the universe was split in two halves. The only reason Box could see it was her wetware, telling her it was there. The reason there were no stars was that they were under a world-sized umbrella.
Box sensed more stars than she could possibly imagine, above the umbrella.
“I will explain...
“But first, observe...”