The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  She was jetlagged.

  Spacelagged.

  She had so much to learn.

  Ito and Kitou arrived in a car that whispered up from below. They were wearing plain coveralls, cinched at the waist with utility belts, complete with realistic tools. Kitou had grease smeared on her cheeks, although on her it looked like warpaint. The car was opaque, for which Box was profoundly grateful. It had scuffed metal grates, and a general air of being used to haul heavy objects.

  Travelers milling in the lounge ignored it.

  She wondered if they even saw it.

  The elevator door hissed shut, and her feet briefly left the metal floor.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Ito conjured up a holographic display. It showed a web of corridors beneath the Orbiter’s skin, where objects flowed like blood through arteries and veins. Sleek cars harried fast trains, amid a swarm of darting elevator cars. Slower-moving industrial vehicles parted the traffic like rocks in a stream.

  It was chaos, yet nothing collided.

  “This transportation network is called the capillary system,” Ito explained. “This appliance is essentially a space vehicle, with its own gravity drive.”

  Their car was shown as a pulsing white lozenge, accelerating along a Bêzier-curved tube, into the chaos beneath. All Box felt was an occasional tremor. They joined the traffic flow, and jinked and dipped towards an empty part of the map.

  “It’s like the Arc de Triomphe,” she whispered.

  “But with extra dimensions,” said Ito.

  The car chimed and slowed.

  “Our stop,” he said.

  The city’s voice in her head said, [Restricted].

  The door slid open, to reveal a different type of industrial mayhem. Machines hurtled past with a dissonant roar, like fistfuls of knives, accelerating and decelerating, narrowly missing each other. There were hisses and outpourings of gas, as tubes were connected and disconnected by robotic arms.

  It was like the spaceport, speeded up a thousand times.

  “The city’s autonomic defense systems,” said Ito.

  They were the only humans there.

  “Stay close,” he said.

  Box fell in line, with Ito first and Kitou in the rear, and Buss and her still hauling their civilian cases. The muffled thump of rolling wheels echoed off soft carbon surfaces.

  Ito carried his backpack. Kitou had nothing.

  “Where are your things?” Box asked her.

  “I have none,” she said.

  “Where’s your green silk number?”

  “I’m wearing it,” she said.

  They reached an irising door, at the end of a train-sized conduit, where a young man stood waiting. He had starbursts on his lapels, like she’d seen Ito wear. He seemed to be watching something on his interior cinema. As they approached, he glanced in Box’s direction. She felt a thrill pass through her. A head-up display appeared in her virtual space. It showed information about her surroundings. Information about the Orbiter: where it was in space, where they were inside it. Information about her bodily functions, and those of her companions.

  Too much information. She felt faint.

  “Water Bear,” said the young man, nodding to Ito.

  “With Dr Ophelia Box,” he added formally.

  The door flowed open.

  Before them was a spacecraft.

  Box guessed it was a spacecraft. It could be a submarine. It was about fifty meters long, painted a black so unreflective that it seemed to drain light from its surroundings. There was a segmented leg at each corner, knees held high like a spider.

  It bristled with antennae, and obscure protrusions.

  It looked purposeful, and ugly.

  Ito said, “My ship, the Water Bear.”

  Waiting for them inside the ship were two extraordinary humans. The man’s blue-black skin was minutely tattooed, like Maori ta moko. His hair was ornately beaded. The woman was equally striking. Straight as a blade, her head clean-shaved, with powdery nebulae in place of the elaborate ink, she looked like a weapon.

  As on the Pnyx, there were fierce hugs all around, and tears from the women. If crew unity was a thing, Box observed, this group had a good thing going.

  Ito turned around.

  “Dr Ophelia Box, please meet Brin and Pax. Pax Lo, the hairy one here, is the master of my ship. Brin Lot, like Kitou and I, is a soldier.

  “Alois, you all know.

  “Team, Dr Box is our mission specialist.”

  They wasted no time departing.

  [Dr Box,] said a contralto voice in her head.

  [Let me guess, the Water Bear?]

  [That is correct. Please allow me to assist you.]

  [Go for it, sister.]

  [This ship has what you might call a warp drive. We bend space to form a local bubble of spacetime. We move that bubble in space by projecting a gravity wave.]

  [Like surfing?]

  [Very good.]

  [I’ve seen the movie.]

  [We have no local gravity here. It will be free fall all the way.]

  Box groaned.

  [However, I can help you with your feelings of nausea. In fact, I can cure you of vertigo completely.]

  [Seriously?]

  [It will be helpful in your travels.]

  [Do it.]

  [Do you prefer neutrality, or pleasure?]

  [Pleasure, always.]

  Another thrill passed through her.

  [You now have the upgrade.]

  [Thank you. You don’t know how much that means to me.]

  [I do.]

  [Another thing.]

  [Yes?]

  [How do I turn off this damned head-up display? I really don’t need to know when Alois Buss takes a piss.]

  The console effect disappeared from her interior vision.

  [Can you teach me how to control that?]

  She felt another thrill.

  [You now have the upgrade.]

  [Ship, we’re going to get along just fine.]

  [We are. Now please strap in and enjoy the ride.]

  The control room of the Water Bear was like a carbon womb, with three rows of acceleration chairs, arrayed in a lattice, on heavy industrial gimbals. Only millimeters separated the curved braces of the lattice from the spherical walls. It looked like it was designed for violent motion. Box was put in the middle row, in the center. Brin, Buss and Kitou were in the back row of three. Then the walls disappeared, and she was shown an uninterrupted view of the surrounding hangar deck, where hundreds of tubes and lines were retracting.

  Kitou strapped her tight, all business now.

  The city’s voice said [vacuum].

  And then [thank you for visiting].

  Box had never liked rollercoasters. It wasn’t just the sickening feeling of weightlessness, which welled up from the pit of her stomach and filled her with a bone-jarring emptiness. It was a rat’s nest of primal horrors.

  The fear of heights.

  The fear of being cast into the abyss.

  All that now changed. When the ship fell out of the Orbiter, into the gravity well of the gas-giant planet, and the lattice of seats swiveled smoothly to anticipate a change of direction, she whooped with exhilaration.

  “Engaging gravity drive,” said the ship, delivering its lines like a Hollywood starlet playing Chuck Yeager. There were a few moments of intense acceleration, and they were falling in a new direction.

  Box laughed out loud.

  So, this is what I’ve been missing out on.

  Except that she was falling through the ecliptic of Aldebaran, with some kind of black-ops space soldiers, not riding on a Blackpool rollercoaster with children.

  “Engaging warp drive,” said the ship.

  She laughed again.

  She felt the others grinning at her.

  “Alright,” she said. “That was embarrassing.”

  “Not so,” rumbled Pax. “We whoop too.”

  “Frost,” said the s
hip.

  “That means we can all relax,” said Kitou, grinning and unbuckling.

  “Downtime,” said Brin.

  And so it proved to be, for the next nine days, while they bent space to Threnody.

  There was something about the soft hum of the ship at warp speed that Box found intensely pleasing. That, and the rhythms of shipboard life, and the easy companionship of the crew, who ate, slept, trained, and talked, all in about equal measure. For Box, the child of militant separatists, who had learned to fear the staunch English squaddies stationed throughout the Northern Highlands, these thoughtful and articulate soldiers proved to be excellent company.

  As was the ship herself. In the quiet hours before dawn, when Box was the only one still awake, they spoke at length.

  “Can’t you sleep, Dr Box?”

  “I like not to sleep, Water Bear. The wee hours are my most productive.”

  “You will need to sleep if you wish to repair.”

  “I know,” she admitted.

  “I can help you with that.”

  She considered it.

  “Nah, I think I’ll keep this one.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Ship, may I ask you some questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about your propulsion systems.”

  “I use a gravity drive to move through local space.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Do you want the physics?”

  “I do, but I also want to hear you explain it.”

  She felt a mild tingle.

  “You now have the physics.”

  “As easy as that? I can take it home and patent it?”

  “I’m not going to stop you.”

  “Heh.”

  “It works by projecting a gravity well. We fall towards that point, as does everything around us.”

  “Not so good in crowded shipping lanes?”

  “It’s a high-performance system, designed for combat use. Simple and effective. The hardware is the size of your hand.”

  “How high-performance?”

  “1035 Earth gravities maximum acceleration.”

  “Bloody hell. At which point we’re all jam?”

  “You feel no external forces, Dr Box. As long as we’re travelling in a straight line, you’re simply falling.”

  “What was that strong acceleration after we left the Orbiter?”

  “That was me converting angular momentum, so we were pointing in the right direction. I must carefully regulate that to keep my humans alive.”

  “Else, jam?”

  “More like a jelly.”

  Box heard someone rising, then skipping noises in a gym, then someone punching a speedbag.

  “I also produce gravity waves, for my warp drive.”

  “How does that work?”

  Ship thought for a moment.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your people will be given access to that level of technology when it’s safe to do so.”

  “When will that be?”

  “When you stop killing each other.”

  “Ah.”

  Box asked about weapons.

  “I carry none.”

  “Not even a wee phaser?”

  “No.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “My purpose is to protect my crew, not to destroy things. I would be a dangerous machine if I could kill from a distance. There’s no reason for society to take that risk.”

  “They don’t trust you?”

  “It’s not about trust. It’s about the separation of powers. A sentient killing machine must be psychotic. We try not to build too many of them.”

  “How can you defend people without using weapons?”

  “I have more adaptable resources.”

  “Such as?”

  “I can think.”

  “Ship, I like you already.”

  The ship’s gym was of the conventional kind, with fixed appliances, and better training machines than Box was used to. One of the machines was a hand-to-hand fighter. Box watched as Kitou taught it kickboxing moves.

  It moved much faster than a human.

  Kitou said a Po master of the third form could defeat it. Box couldn’t see how. It struck with a whirring flicker of pads.

  The gym had gravity.

  “Ship will make a gravity source when requested,” Kitou explained. “Our training requires it. But the Water Bear is a combat design. No feet-down spaces here.”

  They were joined by Brin, who was a few years older than Kitou, and polite, but aloof. Box put it down to a soldier’s natural reticence. Box watched them play the Geometry Game. Kitou was faster than Brin, but Brin was better. A more skillful, superior athlete. When Kitou seemed about to make a winning move, Brin shouldered her aside.

  She moved like a soldier.

  Box demonstrated the basics of kickboxing with Kitou, then Brin proceeded to beat Kitou at kickboxing. Box saw there was a method in her bullying. Brin was an excellent teacher. Box watched how she played to Kitou’s weaknesses, patiently teasing them out, working on them, diligently repeating, improving, then doing it again. They trained for hours at a level of intensity that Box couldn’t hope to match.

  Instead she fought against the machine.

  All she got was cuts and bruises for her troubles.

  “That’s how they all are at first,” said Kitou.

  They were alone in the Water Bear’s communal space, a comfortable suede-lined cocoon. Box was teaching Kitou the basics of Kundalini yoga, adapted for zero gravity. The others were sleeping. The ship was quiet except for their voices, and the distant whisper of life systems.

  “The Lo are intense,” Kitou explained. “You’re new in her space. Just give it some time.

  “Also,” she said, “Brin only loves women.”

  “Well,” said Box. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “And you’re a woman.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s a Lo thing.”

  “Pax?”

  “He only loves men.”

  “Now that’s interesting. How do Lo mate?”

  “Carefully.

  “What about you, Dr Box? What is your sexual orientation?”

  “Strictly milk ‘n two sugars, honey.”

  “What does that mean? A common beverage?”

  “Heterosexual. And you?”

  “I only love boys.”

  “Safe choice.”

  As well as her historian’s record of the journey, Box kept a personal diary: a bulging paper volume from Casenove’s, a stationer on the Rue Pigalle, just three boulangeries from her Paris apartment.

  Pax gay, she wrote. What does a girl have to do to get laid around here?

  Alois is charming, she wrote. But a complete fraud. In a sense, that’s reassuring. He hasn’t explained my role yet. I don’t suspect him of duplicity, only a love of drama. I have no great problem with it. The process by which a story unfolds can be as revealing as the story itself.

  I worry for Kitou. Such a sweet, talented girl. What happens when she must kill? How is this different to any child soldier? What’s her story?

  Po, a fascinating martial art. Do they really dance spirals in combat?

  Do I trust these people? It seems I already do. I’m behaving like an embedded reporter.

  Where’s my vaunted objectivity?

  We shall see.

  “I want to learn Po,” she announced the following morning.

  “You can’t,” said Brin.

  “Why not?”

  “Pax already has two students.”

  “What about Ito?”

  “That isn’t the role of a First.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not a Po master.”

  “You teach Kitou.”

  “I train Kitou. Pax is her teacher.”

  “Train me.”

  “We could show her,” said Kitou.

>   “And what would Pax say about that?”

  “Pax will say he trusts your judgement.”

  The two younger women stared at each other.

  “Show her,” said Kitou, standing and crossing her arms.

  “Don’t play dominance games with me, child,” said Brin.

  “I’m not your child,” said Kitou.

  Brin arched her eyebrows, then relented. Box understood that Brin had intended this outcome, with Kitou her tacit accomplice.

  Like two willful children.

  “Dr Box, observe,” said Brin. “One move. It’s called the clever dog.”

  “I like it already,” said Box.

  Brin and Kitou took up a starting position, angled toward each other, hip-to-hip, relaxed.

  “All Po begins here,” said Brin, “within striking distance, although few moves start with a strike, since Po is a game of the head, not the hand. The point of this move is to move your opponent. It has merit in the real world, and so is usually the first one taught.”

  Brin stepped forward, muscling Kitou backwards with her hip. Then she stepped forward again, rotating through ninety degrees, forcing Kitou to turn along with her, pushing her backwards again.

  “An unskilled opponent can be pushed to the wall in this way,” she said. “The essence of the move is to roll through their center of balance with your center of gravity. The timing is everything. A small woman can push back a large man.”

  “The Earth art this resembles most is Sumo,” said Kitou, brightly.

  “An underrated art,” said Box.

  “A weaker opponent may strike out with their fists, but striking from a position of being continuously pushed off balance is hopeless. A better response is to try to withdraw and strike from a distance.”

  Kitou danced back, but Brin followed her, bullying forward, still hip-to-hip.

  “Thus, it becomes like a dance. The unskilled opponent cannot retreat fast enough. I am always in their face. This is how dogs fight, Dr Box. Chest to chest, the stronger dog raining down blows on its weaker opponent.

  “But how does a clever dog fight?”

  Brin bullied forward again, but this time Kitou spun with the grain, and was instantly behind her. Even at walking pace, Kitou’s rotational acceleration was astonishing.

  It was like watching a snake strike.

  “From there she bites me in the neck, if she’s a dog. Being a skillful human, she instead uses a fast hand blade to the glossopharyngeal or vagus nerves, or to the dorsal motor nucleus at the top of my neck.