The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

“That’s impossible,” said Nim.

  “Gods,” said Marius. “I cannot believe it.”

  [It’s not here,] said the Water Bear. [It’s in realspace above the event horizon.]

  “Can it stop Kronus firing his beams?” asked Marius.

  “Let’s hope so,” said Box.

  It was over in minutes, ten thousand years of development in apex weaponry against primitive copies. Soon there were only lumps of degenerate matter. What was left was reduced to particles by military nanotech, warfare’s killer app, abhorred by peaceful societies everywhere. By using it here, the Orbiter was making a point to anyone watching. Don’t fuck with us. We might look cuddly [or disgusting, depending on your programming] but we will fight you.

  It was a point worth making - once.

  More problematic were the Horu necropolii. Their geometry drives were deadly offensive weapons, but no use in a brawl against swarming attackers. They tried throwing rocks at the surface, but they weren’t keyed into the helix the same way the Gray ships were.

  One by one, they folded space, and disappeared.

  [I control nearspace,] said the Orbiter, as though he was announcing a routine arrival.

  [Boy, am I glad to see you,] said Box.

  [Likewise,] said the Orbiter.

  While the Interdictors fought in the Real, artillery pounded the Blue army, pinning them in place. They were winning the war in space, but losing the war on the ground. It was slaughter.

  Kronus had prepared well. His field guns were ceramic howitzers, like she’d seen in the forest. Primitive, but deadly.

  By the hundreds, Blue riders died. And with each death, this place became a little more unstable.

  The Water Bear could do little to help. There were too many. Now the Po warship was asking her if they needed extracting.

  She considered using her powers. They were a blunt instrument, like dropping fuel on a village you’d hoped to save. She could do it: roll a soundwave like thunder, but if she were to kill the Enemy’s soldiers, she’d kill all the Blue people too, and that’d be the end of the war.

  Maybe the next time they did this, she’d be more efficient.

  Yes, this was a learning experience.

  If there was a next time.

  “My brother is coming,” said Kitou.

  The Cult headquarters erupted out of the helix. It reminded Box of a submarine crashing through ice, except that instead of the sea, there was a slippery abstraction, and instead of a black submarine, there was a storm, spitting lightning.

  [Hey,] said Macro.

  [Macro von Engine,] said the Water Bear. [You’ve brought reinforcements?]

  [I have,] said Macro.

  [And they’re awesome reinforcements.]

  The storm-shaped disturbance sprayed the battlefield with railgun rounds, in a single murderous spiral. It was witheringly accurate. The Gray artillery was melted by hyperkinetic pellets. Then it injected a thousand Pursang into the arc where the Blue met the Gray.

  The holy warriors didn’t float, like Pax Lo and Jaasper Huw, but were fired in a thousand individual gravity fields, like bullets. They fell on the Gray army like a storm, but not a storm of destruction. It was a whirlwind, and it encircled the embattled Blue army. Armed with carbon axes and swords, with the benefit of close air cover, the Pursang were invincible.

  The Gray army tried to retreat, but couldn’t. There were too many. They filled every available space. Instead, it breathed in and compressed.

  “By the gods,” said Marius, “those people can fight.”

  “They’re your people,” said Box.

  An eerie calm settled over the battlefield, like the eye of a terrible storm. The stench of death was everywhere. The Gray army had nowhere to go. The Pursang had no interest in pursuing them. Only the cries of the dying interrupted the silence.

  Box waited for the killing to resume. She knew Kronus could do it: spur his army to an act of willful self-destruction. Why not? They were his weapon. He may as well spend it. Instead, he unfolded himself from the sky, until he was human-shaped.

  He was smiling his charisma.

  She realized, he still expected to win.

  “So, Kali, here we are again.”

  Kali; did she once answer to that name? Kali, who wears a skirt of dismembered arms?

  She shivered. “Kronus,” she said.

  “But you’re injured,” he said. “Your human is broken.” There seemed to be real concern in his voice; human emotion. “We can do this again,” he said. “Maybe some other time?”

  It wasn’t a question. He was... cavorting. There was no other word for it. He was prancing. It was disgusting.

  He started to speak, but she held up her hand.

  Now she was here, in her fury.

  “You were right about one thing,” she said. In the Water Bear’s memories – her memories - she saw Fluxor. Kitou, carried from the fire; the human homeworld destroyed. In databursts from the new ship – the bicameral Cult - she saw the death of a galaxy, not by fire, but in a slow-moving sphere of annihilation.

  The abiding theme was war. Everywhere, war. Species against species. Worlds in flames. Strangers destroyed, simply for existing.

  Then, the end of everything.

  Two million years of suffering, for what?

  Kronus was as she remembered. He had a certain, unkempt magnificence. A rogue. A mystic. But that was a pose.

  He was a monster.

  He had a scent, like rancid patchouli. She only needed to whisper.

  “Life threw up the perfect answer to you,” she said.

  “It took us some time, but now here we are.

  “A single perfect human.

  “But it’s not me you’ll be fighting.

  “I’m the messenger.

  “It’s Kitou.”

  She turned and looked across the battlefield of her dreams; bones broiled clean by the ruined beam emplacement. She looked in the sky, and saw herself looking down, in a dream. Kitou had shucked off her coat and was picking her way towards her, dressed in training gear. Loose shorts and a halter top, despite the interstitial wind.

  Sensible clothes for fighting in.

  On the ground, only Kronus and Kitou were moving, her nimble and calm, picking her way across the bones, him strutting his magnificence, drawn together like opposite charges.

  She saw the whole truth of it now. The cosmos wasn’t as fragile as she’d expected.

  Then there were the three of them, together in the crucible that Kronus had made to alloy his victory. It was a rough place; bare dirt and a circle of stone. It reminded her of the mountaintop training arena, where she’d fought the psychopath.

  “I won’t fight her,” Kronus was saying. “It’s a mismatch. Where’s the power in that?”

  “Silence,” said Box, softly, and her command rang over the battlefield like a rifle shot. Kitou was unconcerned by events. Her eyes were on her opponent.

  “Are you ready, kiddo?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be, Dr Box.”

  Kitou wasn’t the child anymore. There was hard muscle, under the training gear.

  “This one’s for Ito, and Brin,” Box said.

  Kitou nodded.

  Kronus snarled and threw his clothes away, until he stood bare-chested in the arena. He was magnificent, she had to admit; a beast of a man, golden maned and twice Kitou’s size. He seemed to have lost interest in himself, and was glaring at his opponent, like an animal, radiating violence. Even as he took up his starting position, his movements seemed to blur into one another.

  He would’ve destroyed me, she thought.

  She tried to parse his emotions, but couldn’t. It was like he was made of nothing. As though the mask had fallen from his face, and revealed the true Kronus.

  An impulse, hellbent on causing only pain.

  The real Enemy.

  How far had she come, in so short a time?

  Worlds and galaxies, in flames.

  Her close
st friends, dead.

  She turned and rode towards her soldiers, then turned and gave Kronus a last look.

  “Observe the Po art in combat mode,” she said.

  Coda

  2079

  They rented a car at the airport, a Cadillac De Ville. The towheaded boy at the counter explained that the fist-sized power unit in the trunk could take them cross-country on a charge, should they run out of gas, and gave them a paper map of gas stations.

  It was as big as a whale, with fins from an imaginary spaceship. Sky blue, like the sky over the Denver parking lot.

  Box stretched like a cat in the morning sunshine.

  “It’s perfect,” she said.

  They drove west, towards Green River, for tea and gas, and the swelter flowed over the blacktop in waves. Box gazed at Pax, so gracious and strong, and such a wonderful father, although she sometimes saw him look up at the night sky. In Elsinore, two old women, as old and parched as the land, made a fuss over three-year-old Hamish, who matter-of-factly explained his daddy was a Po master, and aunty Kitou was a goddess.

  She swore the two women gave her the same complicit look as she shared only with Kitou.

  Freshly full of fuel and sandwiches, they skipped across the open blacktop of Route 70, between painted hills, towards the Fishlake National Park, Pax relaxed at the wheel, in his white t-shirt and Levi jeans, an American. This was the high desert, like an oven, cupped between a broken red plate and one made of blue.

  Along one sweeping curve Pax tipped the old car into a four-wheel drift, and they all whooped with the inexpressible joy of it.

  In the back, Hamish shouted, “hero driver,” and they laughed.

  They reached the aspen forest at dusk, and spread their sleeping bags on the forest floor, around an open fire. Slowly the stars appeared, and Kitou told Macro the story of the deer, and how they ate its heart raw.

  “Ew,” said Hamish, and asked if he could eat a heart raw.

  Instead they ate beans, and toast made on sticks, and it was delicious.

  By first light, Box drank her hallucinogenic brew. Her friends slowed down, and became still. There were no psychedelic fireworks. Her world already seemed like a dream, filled with wisdom and light, with vivid pleasure in the simplest things.

  What did she even need the drug for, anymore?

  But then the sacrament went about its work, and the forest became like the stars, with pulsating lights, and shimmering leaves. It occurred to her that this wasn’t an hallucination at all, but how the Xap saw the world, in rotating filaments of spacetime. If she could just turn her head a certain way, she’d see Avalon, and Praxis, and faraway Fluxor, and be able to step there.

  There’d be Sama, in her tower, and Sama would see her, and smile.

  She had so much to see, and was just beginning.

  Then Pando appeared, laughing between the trees. “Ophelia,” she said, and Box burst into tears.

  “What are your plans?” Pando asked her, a million years later.

  “Brin is building a ship,” said Box, over tea. Somehow, it was the same billy tea they’d made that morning over the open fire.

  “An old Pursang colony ship,” she explained.

  “Or a new one,” she said. “Only a million years old.”

  “The Pursang are as good as their word,” she said. “They’d do anything for us.”

  Beings of mythos, alive in the world.

  “Come with us.” said Box. “There’s room for an aspen glade, a space we’ve set aside, among the sequoias and stringybark trees. You’d like it there.”

  “You know I can’t leave here,” said Pando.

  “There is one thing,” she said.

  She conjured a seedling. “I’ve flowered. At my age. Can you believe it?”

  “Take this with you,” she said. “Your forest will need her.”

  “Her? I though all your newborn were males?”

  “Not this one.”

  “Kitou,” she said, and Kitou sauntered across, Hamish dangling from her hands.

  “You can see her?” asked Box.

  “Of course,” said Kitou, while Box’s quicksilver, black-haired boy clambered into Pando’s lap, fascinated by the feathery trinket around her neck, which she took off and gave to him.

  How was Kitou even here? Box could still see her, motionless beside the fire.

  “You know what this is?” said Pando, holding out the seedling.

  “Yes, mother forest,” said Kitou.

  Pando nodded.

  “Time for you to go,” she said, and handed a squirming Hamish over to Box. There was a warm breeze, through the trees, and it felt good.

  “This won’t be the last time we meet,” she said.

  “Wait,” said Box. “I have questions.”

  “Ask.”

  “Ito. How will we find him?”

  Pando shrugged. “Who can say?”

  “And Slim... where is he?”

  “Again, who knows?”

  “I thought he worked for you.”

  “He does, sometimes.”

  The forest faded away, and Box rejoined her friends, chattering and laughing round the fire. The sky wheeled overhead, a vault of cornflower blue.

  And beyond it, everything.

  About Groucho Jones

  Groucho Jones lives by the sea in Mandurah, Western Australia.

  Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, won’t you please take a moment to leave me a review at your favorite retailer?

  August 3, 2019.

  6.jones@protonmail.com

  Acknowledgements

  The red right hand of Box’s dreams is from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  How can we war against that?

  is from Alan Ginsberg’s Iron Horse.

  O brave new world, that has such people in it.

  is from The Tempest.

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  is from Hamlet.

  The Spirit Molecule is from Rick Strassman. DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences

  Buy the ticket, take the ride.is from Hunter S Thomson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

  Like a mighty river, desiring the end of its journey. is from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power.

  Nietzsche saw it coming. “The story I have to tell,” he wrote, “is the history of the next two centuries... For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection... Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist.”

  As quoted by Erich Heller in The Importance of Nietzsche.

  Bunjil the eagle is a creator deity of the Kulin nation in south-eastern Australia.

  One man, alone with God.

  Is from by Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.

  At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass. Man will be gone. There will be nothing to show that we were ever here... but stardust.

  O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells.

  is from O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman.

  Thanks to the Bibbulmun people of the Noongar country of south-western Australia, custodians of the land this book was written on.

  Finally, heartfelt respect to Iain M Banks for the inspiration to write a book like this. I hope my prose wears its thanks on its sleeve.

  PS.

  I’ve been asked to explain my use of Milton’s red right hand. I’m not a Christian. I do believe in the divine. Kitou is nat
ure. Mess with it and be prepared for it to mess with you.

  www.rebellion.earth