The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  [Are we still in the Möbius universe?] Brin asked.

  [That ship sailed a while ago,] said the ship.

  Nim motioned for them to be silent.

  In the Room was a desk. At the desk was a Gray. He was better resolved than the Grays she’d seen previously. Instead of being made of mucous, he seemed to be stitched together from burn tissue. He was anxious, and bored. He shuffled papers on the desk. He appeared to be an officer. His belted grey tunic was pinned with iron paraphernalia.

  Iron. So this place has metal.

  It was cold here. The Grays liked the cold.

  She filed that information away.

  [Brin, I’m firewalling you now,] said the ship.

  Brin nodded. She was just the delivery mechanism. The ship was delivered. Now she must be protected.

  She wondered where her body was. In her bed? In a cave? A mote in Respit’s brain? In orbit around Horax? A smear on an event horizon somewhere?

  Then she was in the ship’s gamespace, with its wireframes and malleable time. The resolution wasn’t what she was used to, but the ship’s algorithms were still impressive. She leaned down and inspected the Gray soldier. Up close, he was as ugly as she expected him to be.

  She zoomed in. He was literally stitched together.

  She could sense the Enemy, behind the sky.

  She hoped he couldn’t see her.

  The Ride of the Spinifex Reach manifested in their usual way: at first there was only the industrial sky, then a few scattered riders. Brin knew that for every one she could see, there’d be ten more she couldn’t. She watched the Gray officer stiffen. Through her heightened senses she could smell his fear. Sour sweat and endorphins. A head-up display showed her his vitals. He was responding as any human would, to a threat.

  The Blue riders rode down, taking their time: these were her friends, Markus, Velo, Viki, Alis, Ox and Bravery. They carried themselves like imperious savages, a look she knew they cultivated.

  To put the fear of death into their enemies.

  Then Marius rode down, like the arrogant young warlord he was. Without breaking rhythm, he flowed from his saddle, into a chair.

  He allowed his blue-painted horse to wander away, uncommanded.

  “I’m here for a parlay,” he said.

  The Gray officer was about Marius’s size. He would’ve been handsome, but for his stitched skin.

  “Then talk,” said the Gray.

  “Not with you.”

  The man stiffened. She saw his nervousness give way to annoyance. There was no flight response there. He’d already conquered his fear.

  This soldier would be a worthy opponent in combat.

  “I speak for my people,” he said.

  Marius raised an eyebrow.

  “Then who?”

  “I desire Kronus.”

  “Impossible,” said the soldier, reaching for his papers.

  Marius produced a knife and pinned the papers in place, in an unhurried gesture.

  “Do as I say,” he said. “Or we’ll kill you.”

  The Enemy unfolded himself from the sky. He was a magnificent man, with a poet’s huge and shaggy head, and a corpulent belly, that only seemed to add to his magnificence. Brin was transfixed. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  Marius rose from his chair.

  Kronus stared at the walls. “What a beautiful morning,” he said, spreading his arms. “Black,” he said, “like ink.” It was true. The pestilent sky had gone black. Brin could see the ship’s telemeters read off the scale. The man’s heartrate read zero. His temperature was tending to infinity.

  “Who are you?” he asked, with the formaldehyde whiff of someone examining a specimen.

  “I’m Marius, Ride of the Spinifex Reach.”

  “I don’t know you,” he said. “You look very young, for a Ride. Where’s Bardo?”

  “You killed him.”

  “I did?

  “Your people did. In the last war. Ten years ago. Kronus, you’ve met me before.”

  Kronus raised his hands, as if to say people, these days.

  Brin wanted to trust him.

  She wanted it, badly.

  The ship dropped a packet of encrypted information at her virtual feet. She opened it, carefully, like a child unfolding her lunch from a waxed paper bag.

  [I’m getting a storm of exploits,] it said. [Primitive, but effective. Very like the Thespian disease. Marius seems to be fully immune: his neural architecture can’t run the code. Your Horu telepaths are both unaffected by it. You may be feeling some backwash.]

  [Backwash?] What Brin was feeling was like waves of heat from a furnace.

  Marius was a big man, but Kronus was bigger. A genuinely massive man, with a laborer’s musculature, and forearms like hams. A beautiful man, for all his fatness and ruin. While Brin watched from the safety of the ship’s gamespace, Marius told him everything. About Dr Box. Fluxor, the Fa:ing, his fears about Ito. Everything except Brin’s presence, which the ship had scrubbed from his memory, using a combination of strong opioids and hypnosis.

  “There’s no point in lying,” he’d said. “As soon as you open your mouth, he knows what you’re thinking.”

  “So why talk at all?”

  “To exchange information. This isn’t just a war to him,” he’d said, “ He allows us to make moves, and to win if they’re good ones.”

  “Or he’s insane, and making it up as he goes along, to see you struggle.”

  “Yes, that’s possible.”

  “You trust him not to just kill you?”

  “He plays by the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “His own rules.”

  “What do you want in return for this information?” Kronus asked, when Marius was done.

  “Your surrender.”

  Kronus made a show of considering the offer. He was a natural performer. He held up his hands. He shook his mane like a beast, as though clearing his head of a physical irritant.

  “Your attack on Fluxor is thwarted,” said Marius. “The powers of the Real are aligned against you. Don’t you see? Let’s have an end to the killing.”

  “What killing?” asked Kronus, cocking his head. “We have a truce.”

  “Because you imposed it.”

  “You’d rather I didn’t?”

  “What does that have to do with your surrender?”

  “You’re right,” said Kronus, his face lit up from within by emotions: hilarity, rage and surprise. “What does any of this have to do with my surrender?”

  “You’re twisting it round.”

  “I’m untwisting it.”

  “You can’t win.”

  “But I am.”

  “How?”

  He laughed. “You expect me to tell you?”

  Behind the ship’s firewall, Brin was struggling with her own devils. Knowing the malware existed made her want to reach out and touch it. What did it feel like? Maybe she was infected, maybe from Avalon.

  [You’re not infected,] said the ship. [It’s my emotions you’re feeling.]

  [Are you safe?]

  [My defenses are tested, but we’re in no real danger.]

  “Then we’re done,” Marius said.

  “We are done,” said Kronus.

  The torrent of exploits turned off like a switch. Kronus laid a hand on Marius’s shoulder. “I understand your predicament,” he said. “I do. But the way to my future goes through your people. There will be a reckoning, and I’ll win it.”

  “Why? Kronus, why does any of this have to happen?”

  Kronus raised his eyes to the sky.

  “Who am I to go against the word of God?”

  “Oh,” he said, as Marius remounted.

  “One more thing. Tell your Po bitch I can see her.”

  17 ∞ Nubeculae Magellani

  2065

  He awoke in a rattling acceleration chair, his companion unconscious beside him.

  It began with a mist, surrounding a v
oid. The mist became a cloud, of world-sized water spheres, orbiting a dark star, visible only by its influence on the matter around it. The spheres flowed, over cosmological timescales, into a celestial riverine system, like the lines traced by particles in a physics experiment.

  Around the void was dust and gas, stirred to incandescence by dark matter destroying itself deep in the star, the physics of the process barely understood. The star was called Nubeculae. The cloud was the Magellani nebula.

  In the water spheres were cities.

  The whole system was called Waterfall.

  The home world of the Magellanic civilization.

  During the crossing, the corals that lined the cochlear corridors had erupted throughout the vessel, leaving lush voids where the passengers’ stasis fields had been. Filaments and stamen floated all around them. Nothing was left that resembled a machine. He could almost believe it was a stage in the Tung reproductive cycle. It had that fecundity.

  In the final approach, when the gravities crushed them in their seats, it rained; a crisp, pure rain squeezed from the foliage by the deceleration. It made him want to laugh out loud. There was something about the crazed way the Tung did things that Macro was starting to like. Of all the species he’d seen, the Tung had the least fucks to give.

  Which made their current state of mind more worrying. They seemed desperate to get Alois and Macro to Waterfall.

  Alois awoke as they were decelerating towards a water droplet the size of a moon. He flapped his hands for a time, then relaxed, as his wetware oriented him.

  “Did I sleep the whole way?” he asked.

  “We both did,” said Macro.

  Magellanic history was hidden in hearsay and shadows. They were an aquatic civilization, but they’d never evolved into water breathers. They clove as strongly to the ideal of natural human evolution as the thousand worlds did. Their respective philosophies sat well together. They were metaphysical bedfellows. Macro thought it was nonsense.

  Maybe not nonsense. Maybe semantics. Evolution did have a direction, and it was towards a kind of synchronization, but it was a function of entropy. It was directed in the same way as gravity favors ellipses, or a door favors closing.

  Evolution was directed towards survival; the definitive numbers game.

  But he wasn’t here to compare philosophical ideas. He was here for an army.

  And that meant the Pursang.

  The Tung pod continued to shake. Macro could imagine it shaking the whole way from Avalon. Then they were in the grip of a gravity tractor, and Macro felt no more deceleration.

  Another thing the Magellanics shared with the thousand worlds was that they were both warlike civilizations. The thousand worlds pretended they weren’t. The Magellanics made no bones about it. Magellanic space was filled with war machines. This was due in part to where they were. Magellanic space was filled with enemies.

  They were a civilization always at war, and the Pursang holy warriors were a vital part of their war effort. A mystery was why. The Pursang were excellent soldiers, but the Magellanics had warfighting robots, and nanobiotics, and none of the Thousand worlds conflictions about using them. Why did they need the best human ground fighters?

  It was a good question, much argued by the scions of the bank. It led to problems in strategy, so Samppo encouraged it. Macro’s theory was that it was a form of remedial branding. To prove they were righteous. The Finance Engine knew, but wouldn’t say, which deepened the mystery.

  Macro’s wetware wasn’t much help.

  [I don’t know,] said his twin. [I can only speculate.]

  [How do they compare to the Po?]

  [The Pursang holy warriors are a class above the regular Po military. On a par with the Po special forces.]

  [The hands of the Po?]

  [Yes.]

  [Except they have weapons.]

  [They do.]

  This was red meat to a boy brought up amongst budding game theorists. The Po had fought the Pursang hundreds of times, in the battlefields of his imagination.

  [So the Pursang would win?]

  [In a fight between handwaving monks and atomics? Yes. But the Po wouldn’t fight them that way.]

  [Who are the monks?]

  [The Po are. They eschew weapons.]

  [But the holy warriors fight for the forest.]

  [They do.]

  [Wetware v worldspirits?]

  [Wouldn’t happen.]

  [What if someone had both?]

  [That’d be nice.]

  They plunged into a calm sea, with dark energy crawling all around them. For a moment they bobbed in a gravity field. Then he felt the pull of a tractor effect, and they submerged into an undersea city.

  This was an industrial world, home to millions of beings, from hundreds of species. Unlike humans elsewhere, the Magellanics didn’t have to look far to find strangers. The Clouds were a crossroads. They’d been fought over since before humans existed.

  They sank into a transit zone, and then into a dockyard. Everywhere Macro looked was lights and activity. The lights of the surface faded. There were other Tung modules here.

  Macro’s habit morphed into sleek vestments, slippery like a seal. Alois’s suit folded into a backpack, leaving him wearing absurdly modish swimwear.

  “Take one of these,” waved a Tung. It was the Tung from the Discothèque. Pfft. It expelled a cloud of pills, which spread slowly in the local microgravity.

  “What are those?” asked Macro.

  “Ozenges.”

  “Air supply?”

  “One is enough for an Avalon day.”

  “If I forget?”

  The Tung gave a vivid impression of drowning.

  The Tung in water were graceful, flashing creatures, soaring on slippery wings. There was no sense of the phage-like ghastliness they exhibited in air. Macro followed them in spurts of propulsion, squeezed from his vestments.

  Fast currents carried them between sprawling industrial precincts. They weren’t alone in the water. Every kind of sea creature seemed to be swimming beside them. The Magellanic preoccupation with natural evolution seemingly didn’t extend to body enhancements. Many of the sea creatures here were cyborgs.

  [Some of them are sentient,] his wetware said. [Some are the local biome.]

  [How can I tell?] he asked.

  As if on cue, a creature devoured another.

  He hoped the eaten was the biome.

  The bar was shaped like a cave, lit by the photoemitting creatures inside it. Shadows rippled and loomed as patrons got in and out of the water, many of them naked. Public copulation seemed to be acceptable here, including between species. The otherwise androgynous Magellanics exhibited every combination of primary sex characteristic, from female to male, to ungendered, and everything between.

  Alois, unconcerned, restored his lounge suit to its original, rumpled shape. Macro, seasoned by his Avalon experience, bought beers. They were deliciously cold in the soupy air of the bar. After a few, he began to be drunk. He had no idea what he should do, so he did nothing.

  The Tung seemed more relaxed. Perhaps they’d had cabin fever.

  Too much deceleration.

  Relax, and the universe relaxes with you.

  A Magellanic androgyne leaned in towards him.

  “You’re new here,” ze said.

  Ze had the celestial body art of a fully-fledged Magellanic navigator. By the look of the designs, ze’d been everywhere it was possible to be.

  “I am, zir,” said Macro, careful to use the ungendered honorific.

  “It’s a strange place,” ze said.

  “It’s me who’s the stranger,” said Macro.

  The Magellanic chuckled, hir wry tone expressing hir obvious physical maleness.

  “It’s hard to say who’s who,” ze said, “in a strange place as this. Forgive me this trespass.” Macro felt a delicate touch on his wetware, and a transfer of information.

  Alois leaned in. “We’re about to be arrested,” he sa
id.

  The music stopped playing. Tung flopped and skittered into nearby pools. Macro’s wetware clicked into action. His intoxication disappeared. He felt his perimeter defense systems powering up: a gritty mechanical whine in his vestments.

  Then power down again.

  Oh shit, he thought.

  His new friend was nowhere to be seen.

  “Don’t worry,” said Alois. “Finish your beer.

  “Oh, and ignore what they say about me.”

  Alois’s suit powered up, and enclosed him in a field of pearly energy.

  “Sorry,” said Alois, “but they mean to hurt me.”

  Then the waters erupted, and slug-like creatures dragged Alois into the water.

  More emerged and took Macro.

  A different industrial seascape unfolded around him, through a curtain of foam from the drives of the slugs. Autonomous manufactories, lit by sodium lights, and the looming shapes of insectile starships. His captors were cyborgs, as far as he could tell, with human features engineered into streamlined machines. Their police identification flashed in their carapaces, and was broadcast into the water around them. That was all he could hear: the bleep-bleep-bleep of their sirens, and the whine of propulsion systems.

  Who would choose to live like that, he wondered?

  Like being a monk in a bank, he supposed.

  Alois was being pulled, unresisting, behind them, still inside his pearly field. They passed through a succession of gates, until they reached a complex of spheres, one inside the other, like worlds within worlds. A disembodied voice read out charges. Except for the slugs, there were no other people. This part of the city was deserted.

  Although his Broca was down, Macro understood some of the words.

  Pathogen, it said, in a language not unlike Pursang.

  Bioweapon.

  Disease.

  He knew he wouldn’t be the first one to die here. It was the local equivalent of the Avalon interview room, except this was real. There was a smell in the water, like the smell of burnt meat in the air of a crematory. Here, they did kill strangers.