The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  “We’ve got a range almost this size,” said Box. She told them about K2, and Chomolungma in the Himalayas, and the perils of the death zone. She described the problem of altitude acclimatization, which Iris and Kitou called mountain sickness. Iris was amazed that people on Earth climbed mountains for pleasure.

  “It’s like a religion,” said Box.

  “We’d never think of doing that,” said Iris.

  “Are your mountains holy?” asked Kitou.

  “No,” said Iris, “they’re lethal.”

  Soon they were sailing above clouds. Iris warned them of frostbite, and showed them gussets in their hoods, that they could hide in. Soon just their eyes were exposed.

  “Who’ll tell us a story?” asked Iris, her voice muffled through layers of animal skins.

  “I will,” said Box, her teeth beginning to chatter. It was beyond cold, and she was starting to suffer.

  “It’s about a bird spirit,” she said.

  “Is it a Horu myth?” asked Kitou.

  “No, it’s from Earth,” said Box. “From the Kulin people of south-eastern Australia.”

  “Is that near Utah?” asked Kitou.

  “Not so far,” said Box. “Maybe twelve-thousand kilometers, as the Bat flies.

  “Bunjil was a bird spirit,” she began. “The wedge-tailed eagle. He brings the cold weather.”

  “He must be flying around here,” said Iris.

  “Bunjil is also the star Altair, in the constellation of Aquila.”

  “Altair,” said Kitou. “I’ve been there.”

  “Kitou, please shut up. Bunjil lived on Jaithmathangs, the tallest mountain in the Kulin nation. One day a Kulin hunter was camped on Jaithmathangs, when a heavy snowfall came. He didn’t have modern snowshoes, so he was trapped.”

  “This is a parable about my footwear,” laughed Kitou.

  “Lost in the wilderness, and with no way home, he called on the bird spirit of the mountain to save him. He called out ‘Bunjil’, three times.

  “Eventually, the air spirit Bunjil appeared in the sky.”

  “What was he like?” asked Iris.

  “Like a fucking monster,” said Box. “The head of a goanna, and the wings and feet of an eagle.”

  “A chimera,” said Kitou.

  “Yes,” said Box. “A cryptid.”

  “This being exists?” asked Iris.

  “It’s Australia,” said Box. “A mysterious land. Anything’s possible there. Now, our Kulin hunter…”

  “What’s his name?” asked Kitou.

  “Let’s call him Claude,” said Box.

  “A good name,” said Iris.

  “It is. Claude made a sacrifice, to call Bunjil down from the air to help him. He burned his stocks of food, until he ran low, and then he burnt more, until nothing was left. When Bunjil finally landed, Claude said ‘You’re welcome here, friend, in my campsite.’ And Bunjil said ‘It’s lucky you called me friend. I’ll take you inside the mountain, and you’ll be happy with me there.’”

  “They entered into a relationship?” asked Iris.

  “Of sorts,” said Box. “If Claude had called him anything else, he’d have been eaten.”

  “This is a metaphor,” said Kitou.

  “It is. Now listen.

  “Life was good in the mountain. It wasn’t made from cold stone, as you’d expect, but like a comfortable home. Bunjil had a wife and daughter, and he gave Claude his daughter.”

  “Gave?” asked Iris.

  “He was a creator being. They were his humans. He possessed them.”

  “Like Kronus possesses the Greys?”

  “Yes, like that. Claude grew increasingly comfortable. Bunjil brought him all the meat he could eat.”

  “Do you remember the deer we ate?” asked Kitou.

  “I do,” said Box. “Bunjil’s meat was like that, hot from the fire, and delicious. Claude had a wife now, so he was happy that way too. In time, he became so comfortable that he became more like Bunjil, and Bunjil, learning his ways, became more like the human. Until one day, they changed places, and Claude, desiring his own freedom, set the man free.

  “And that was how the Kulin warrior Claude escaped from the bird spirit of Jaithmathangs.”

  There was only the low keening of the wind.

  “The man became the spirit?” asked Iris.

  “They’re the same,” said Box.

  “How can it be? Good and evil are opposites,” said Iris.

  “It’s about moral ambiguity,” said Box.

  “Like Kronus?” asked Kitou.

  “Maybe. Maybe about all of us.”

  “Kronus is evil,” said Iris.

  “Maybe he wasn’t always,” said Box.

  “He is now.”

  “Kronus is trying to possess Ito,” said Kitou.

  “What?” asked Box.

  “I know it. The others know it too.”

  “What do you mean, possess?”

  “Like the Red Lady possesses you, but not so kindly. Like this Bunjil possessed his women.”

  “Kitou, how do you know this?”

  “I see it.”

  Brin and her acolytes emerged from the cerebral darkness, as night was starting to fall. Nim and Respit were exhausted. Brin took a long, deep breath of real air. It was a great relief, to be out in the open.

  The first sign that something was wrong was when Nim fell to her knees.

  “The Enemy,” the girl said. “It’s started.”

  They made their way back to the Chancery. The Chancery yard was deserted. Marius hadn’t returned. Amelia Chance confronted Brin, and asked, “Where have you been?”

  Brin said, “Where’s everyone?”

  [Ito is firewalled,] said the ship.

  [Kitou and Dr Box?]

  [No idea.]

  [Firewalled? Who did that?]

  [His autonomic defenses.]

  [That sounds bad.]

  “Brin,” persisted Amelia.

  “I’m sorry,” said Brin. “But I’m busy.”

  [Why?] she asked, turning away from the politician.

  [He’s entered a new stage of the disease.]

  [Marius was right.]

  [You already knew that.]

  [Why now? It can’t be a coincidence.]

  [No. The start of the war. Your absence. Ito’s condition. They’re related events.]

  Seen from the outside, Ito seemed like himself, except he was standing in the shadows, silently watching. Brin now saw this fit the pattern of his recent behavior. A slow withdrawal from normal society. How hadn’t she noticed?

  [Options?] she asked the ship.

  [Wait for the others. I have a fix on them now. They appear to be flying.]

  [In the airwaves?]

  [Unless they’ve found a light aircraft.]

  [Where have they been?]

  [We’ll find out.]

  Brin took a breath, and turned to face the Magister.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re about to be at war. Nim will brief you.”

  They landed at a canter, on a high moor overlooking the river valley of the Spinifex Reach. The Chancery was a smudge of woodsmoke in the near distance. Kitou had to hold Box, to stop her from falling. The spell of the Red Lady was fading.

  [Dr Box,] said a voice in her wetware.

  [Ship! Thank goodness.]

  [Hurry up and get here,] said the ship. [The excrement is hitting the recirculator.]

  Seabiscuit had no objection to galloping home. Box gave him his head. Iris’s mare was left behind. It was exhilarating, hurtling through twilit fields. Kitou shrieked with pleasure. It was the most girlish thing she’d seen Kitou do.

  [Shit hit the fan?]

  [If you like.]

  [How?]

  [I’ll tell you when you get here.]

  “It’s Ito,” shouted Kitou in her ear. “I can only see a firewall.”

  [Two firewalls,] said the ship. [Mine outside his. I’m taking no chances.]

&nb
sp; [With what?]

  [The disease.]

  They arrived just as Marius was landing in the yard. He’d been on a sortie. His riders were milling around him.

  Amelia Chance was looking apoplectic. Then Iris arrived, not far behind them, and went into a huddle with Marius.

  The dark-haired rider from high Eagle told him all he needed to know, or so he believed. They were at war, and he was the last to know about it. He cursed his bad timing. Then Brin spoke the codeword that unlocked his memories, and he knew a lot more.

  He was their leader now. He looked at Amelia Chance, who nodded.

  “Nim, can you speak for the Po warship?” The girl looked appalled, then she nodded too.

  “Good girl. Magister, please join me in the Chancery hall. Riders, ready this place for war.

  “You,” he said to the new rider, Iris. “Come too.”

  Chaos erupted, but it was a form of chaos he recognized. The Chancery was always kept on a war footing. Now those preparations would be activated. The greater chaos - the one involving the Numbers disease - he liked less. Still, he would deal with it. The mantle of leadership fell naturally on him. It was what he was trained for.

  In the Chancery hall, he gathered his leaders around him. Marius’s preferred method was to think first, then go hard, in that order.

  Now it was time for thinking.

  “Brin?”

  She described her encounter with Kronus, in precise military terms.

  “You’ve met the Enemy?” asked Kitou.

  “I saw him,” said Brin. “He didn’t know I was there.”

  “Maybe he did,” said Marius. He described his own sortie, in similar language.

  “Red Lady?”

  Box colored. She felt like a small child, asked to explain herself to the grownups. “We... we saw the Ghost,” she said.

  “Explain who the Ghost is,” said Marius, more gently.

  “The Ghost is the original Mr. Chance,” she said.

  “Why did you go there?” asked Brin.

  “We didn’t choose to,” she said. She described her and Kitou’s journey, ending up with the Chancery yard, not even trying for clipped military language. She told it with nuance, like an historian would.

  “Very good,” said Marius. “Po ship?”

  Nim, looking inward, spoke in a shaky soprano.

  “I know some things,” she said. “But not everything. I can join dots. Let’s start with the Fa:ing. Ito?”

  “The Fa:ing are the Möbius machine,” he said. Ito looked even more awkward than Box did. “Their subaural hum is a psychoacoustic artefact of its processing. Its programming is based on harmonics.”

  “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” asked Box.

  “Because he’s been struggling to separate reality from invention,” said the ship, through Nim. “And it’s going to get worse.”

  “Ito is this true?” asked Box.

  “We’ll get to Ito next,” said Nim. “First, the Fa:ing. How did they get here? Brin?”

  “If what Ito says is right, they’re here because they started out here.”

  “Correct. And how did they get to Threnody?”

  “From the future.”

  “Whose future?”

  “Ours?”

  “No. That’s where our assumptions were wrong. They got here from their future. There is no ‘our’ future.

  “Ito. How did you catch this disease?”

  “I met Kronus.”

  “Marius, did you know about that?”

  “Yes, I allowed it.”

  “Why?”

  “Ito instructed me to.”

  “Ito?”

  “I had to know. Whether I could resist him. Keep my personality intact.”

  “Why?”

  “It was always my plan B. In case you couldn’t get here. Fight him myself.”

  “And did you? Withstand him?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Can you beat him?”

  “Who knows?

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I’m not the best one to ask,” said Ito.

  They were in Ito’s rooms. It was a different type of firewall. He called it his cell. For now, his incarceration was voluntary.

  “Why are you sick?”

  “A self-inflicted wound,” he said.

  “Why? Why does the disease exist?”

  “It’s a virus. It transmits Kronus’s madness.”

  “So he is mad.”

  “Assuredly so. But the evil that haunts him, isn’t.”

  “What evil? Is it from the future?”

  “It comes from ourselves.”

  “A creature of the eternal darkness?”

  “Yes, that’s apt. Is it a quote? I think of it as a shadow.”

  “No,” said Box. “It’s Kronus that’s the shadow. The unseen part of our consciousness.”

  Ito nodded. “I feel better with these bars in place,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I could do damage, without them.”

  “Am I at risk now?”

  “No.”

  “What’s it like? What are you experiencing now?”

  “Paranoia. Ecstasy. Aphasia. Surprise.”

  “Surprise?”

  “Yes. It’s hard to explain. I have the most incredible ideas.”

  “How did you cope before the ship firewalled you? All the time we were here?”

  “Mostly I was okay. Then, by my training.”

  Box made love to him, after asking if it was safe to do so. The ship told her yes. Ito agreed. It was a strange. mystical kind of sex. Ito didn’t try to please her. She didn’t ask him to. This was for him.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I bet you say that to all the historians.”

  He laughed, and for a while he was Ito again, her bushy-bearded amanuensis from the space shuttle.

  They fucked a second time, because that was what it became, after Box lost control, and ground herself down on him until she orgasmed.

  They talked.

  “What’s the prognosis?” she asked.

  “I’m not getting out of this alive,” he said.

  “Be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you backed up?”

  “No.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To finish my work. So if I die here, my story’s not finished.”

  Ito smiled. He seemed so ordinary, after such exceptional sex. No, not quite ordinary. He still had his sleepy Po competence. But he was safe. Nothing could hurt him here.

  One wall was half-covered by a half-finished painting. A sunset, in shades of ultramarine.

  “A new one?” she asked, and he nodded.

  On another the wall was written in chalk: Love. Honor. Duty. Peace. It was Pax’s mandala.

  “My prognosis,” he said, “is that one of four things will happen to me. I’ll go harmlessly mad. I’ll go dangerously mad. I’ll gain the Enemy’s powers. Or I’ll become him.”

  “What, the fuck?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What does dangerously mean?”

  “That I’ll hurt the people around me.”

  “You can?”

  “Trust me, I can.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t have to explain psychosis to you.”

  She shuddered. “What kind of powers?”

  “I don’t know. Kronus is an imperfect vessel. I could be far worse than Kronus.”

  “Merde.”

  “Again, yes.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “We find a useful purpose for me.”

  “Useful, how?”

  “We activate plan B.”

  “What, you want to fight Kronus?”

  “Yes, while I can.”

  Over the following days, Box watched Ito deteriorate. She once ha
d a friend who was schizophrenic. She’d had a strange kind of power about her. She could speak in the most lucid way about the irrational. Cognitive dissonance. Ito became like that.

  He began to declaim about gods and religion.

  “Gods are a metaphor,” he said. “We raise them up on holy altars because they created us. In so doing we gift them existence. If we can only get past them, only the divine remains.”

  “That’s good. Can I use it?”

  “What do you think about gods, Ophelia?

  “A nest of vipers, redeemed only by the fact they don’t exist.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “Not in the way you mean. Bootstrapped sky fairies; give me a break. Overachieving aliens, maybe.”

  “How can we know?”

  “Occam’s Razor?”

  “The divine isn’t supernatural, Dr Box. It’s all around us.”

  “I wish I could see it.”

  “I wish you could see what I see.”

  At other times, he seemed almost sane.

  “I don’t have your verbal skills,” he said, after an argument in which he’d become confused, which Box had allowed to become heated.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re the smartest person I know, and you know it. You Po understand your strengths - and weaknesses.”

  “What weaknesses?”

  She sighed. “A messiah complex, for starters?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “You think you have to save the world, and you’re going to die doing it. It’s what you were born for. Sounds like Po Jesus to me.”

  He nodded. “I have to die so I can come back. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “The Red Lady? Returning from the end of time?”

  She bit back a laugh, then some tears.

  “It’s a tough job,” she said.

  He grinned. “But someone has to do it.”

  She did laugh then, and everything was alright for a while.

  They all responded to Ito’s decline differently. Brin made military plans with Marius. Kitou stepped up her training. Box asked the ship questions.

  [Your copy in the forest said you were dying.]

  [She was dying.]

  [Why?]

  [You couldn’t sustain her. Not enough qubits of wetware.]

  [What about you?]

  [I’m also going to die.]

  [When?]

  [When you split up.]

  [What do you mean, we split up?]

  [I’m not at liberty to say.]