The Water Bear
Page 6
He did it again, and again.
“I could do this for years,” he said. “Each board holds about a megabyte of data. There are millions of boards. He swiped his hand again, and there, in glowing text, was the string he’d chalked up the previous day.
Box’s Hopf number.
“So, Dr Box, to your question. Where did we get your personal information? We got it here. This is the Fa:ing number.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the thoughts of the hive.”
“How did you get this?”
“By analyzing their synaptic processes: their binaural hum. The same way the colony talks to you.”
“You interpreted its brainwaves?”
“Yes.”
“Alois, that’s horseshit. You can find any string in a sufficiently large set of data.”
“Of course, that’s true,” said Buss. “There’s a chance we’re producing a self-fulfilling prophecy out of noise. That’s the nature of strings. The difference is the mathematics is real. It’s much harder to find random strings in a formula.”
Box scowled, but could see no immediate flaw in his arguments.
She shook her head in annoyance.
“Alois, that’s where I start to have problems.”
“I thought you might.”
“I’m not here as an historian, am I?”
“Not strictly, no.”
“Did you invade Earth because of me?”
“No,” said Ito and Buss together.
“But because of... this?”
“Dr Box,” said Buss. “We saved Earth because it’s a piece in a game that we don’t understand. Your society was in the act of sacrificing that piece, by random obtuseness, for the sake of your politics. We couldn’t allow that to happen.”
“Dr Box,” said Ito. “We brought you here because the Fa:ing asked for you.”
Kitou was sitting cross-legged on Box’s bed, in the Padmasana lotus position Box had shown her, when Box returned sweating from a conditioning run.
“Do you know I have a brother?” asked Kitou.
Box sat down beside her.
“No, what’s his name?” she asked.
“Totoro.”
Box rose and looked out the window. It was a wet day, streaming and grey, but nothing like the storm that announced their arrival. It was a pleasing, melancholy kind of rain. Ordinary water pattered on the windowpane.
Box was dripping wet, but she’d ceased to notice.
“I once had a brother,” she said.
“You did?”
“Yes, but he died.”
“Oh, Dr Box.”
“That’s okay. I was only small. Tell me about yours.”
Kitou nodded. “My brother’s a soldier,” she said, “a good one, like I am, but fiercer than me. He’s fighting for the Free Pursang, in the war against the Horu.”
“Is he safe?”
“He is.”
“You’re sure of that.”
Kitou nodded.
“I know it.”
Alois led her into the bowels of the city, to the industrial base, where the service zones were. “The Pursang? A remarkable people. You know they’re originals?”
“Originals?”
“First humans. Not a product of the diaspora.”
“One of your thousand worlds?”
“No, non-aligned.”
“Who are the Free Pursang?”
“Well, that depends which side of the fence you sit on. Some excoriate them as a terrorist group. An asymmetric insurgency. Or else they’re freedom fighters.”
“What side of the fence are you on?”
“Again, that depends. The Pursang have just cause. Ten years ago, a race called the Horu laid waste to their world. Not just laid waste, but made a show of it. An infamous genocide, and a provocation, with us the provokees. We decided not to be provoked. We leave it to the Pursang. For now, they’re our terrorists.”
“A proxy war?”
“Well...”
“But?”
“The best course of action would be to leave the Horu alone. Let them get away with their genocide.”
“Won’t they just do it again?”
“Why would they, if the intention was to provoke us?”
“Then why are you fighting?”
“We’re not. The Pursang are fighting, and to stop them would be unjust.”
“So you let them fight a proxy war you don’t want to be in?”
“Yes.”
“How are they doing?”
“The Pursang holy warriors are clinical. Their plan appears to be to slice the Horu up, a ship at a time, so some larger predator can destroy them later. It seems to be working.”
“And if you’re that predator?”
“Then, I suspect, the larger trap is sprung, and we learn the real extent of it.”
“Alois, I need to learn about your politics.”
“You do.”
“And Kitou?”
“Kitou’s a Pursang.”
“I thought she was a Po.”
“She’s a Po now. Ito saved her from a fire.”
“What happened?”
“Ito and Pax were young soldiers on the Water Bear. In an act of conspicuous valor, Ito, Pax and their First, Idira Law, jumped down to the burning surface of Fluxor, hundreds of times, bringing out people.”
“Why didn’t the Water Bear lift them all at once? With one of those petatonne gravity sources?”
“Horu suppressor fields. That was the nature of the siege. The Po broke through it by launching themselves at the planet, daring the Horu to interfere. The Po soldiers jumped down to the planet with no sure means of return, challenging the Horu to trap them there.”
“Did they?”
“Ito and Pax are still here.”
“Brinkmanship.”
“I call it game theory. The Horu weren’t ready to make war with the Po. If they were, the Po needed to know about it.”
“Are they ready now? To make war?”
“We hope not.”
They were passing through an empty residential district, past deserted parks and along empty boulevards.
“This used to be teeming with people,” sighed Buss.
“What happened?”
“Bad dreams.”
They reached a heavy-industrial zone. The number of Fa:ing individuals around them increased exponentially. They stopped outside a hatch, which Buss reached out to unlock.
“Dr Box, don’t be alarmed by what you see here.”
He opened the hatch. There was a sulfurous glow. Layers of Fa:ing crawled over a house-sized container: the source of the ghastly light. To one side, Box saw a spent waste storage pool. Her inner display lit up like a Christmas tree.
Having grown up in a country scattered with the hulks of abandoned nuclear facilities, she knew exactly what this was.
“Alois, is that an unshielded fission reactor?”
“Yes. But you’re immune. Nanomachines in your travel shots.”
“Alois, I’m not happy with this.”
“I understand.”
Ito turned to look at them. He was sitting, relaxed, on a bench, gazing into the poisonous light.
“Ah, Dr Box, you’ve discovered our guilty secret.”
“This is weird.”
Buss bustled her onto a catwalk, cantilevered over open space, into clean air, out of sight of the reactor. The forest flew by, only meters below. Thousands of Fa:ing, some twice the size of humans, were clinging to the city’s ventral surfaces, changing position to minutely vector the thrust. The polyphonic thrum was deafening.
Buss beckoned her inside, where they could talk.
“Lifting bodies,” he said.
“The city’s propulsion system?”
“Yes. The Fa:ing convert energy from the unshielded gamma radiation into thrust for the city, by consuming it and beating their wings. More poetically, they convert gamma rays into mathematics.”
“It’s hypnotic,” Buss said. “And addictive. We all experience it. We don’t let the girls down here, although they once mounted an effective reconnaissance raid.”
Box shivered. “Take me upstairs,” she said.
That night, Box had a dream.
She was riding over a ruined battlefield, on a pale horse. The horse had its tail in the air, and was picking its way between steaming human remains, heaped ribcages and spines, that looked freshly dead, but with no flesh on them.
They’d been broiled clean.
Her armor was bone. Voluptuously carved, translucent bone, like mother-of-pearl. There were bone beads in her braided red hair. On her shield was a red right hand.
Across the battlefield was Kitou. She was on foot, also picking her way between the steaming remains, wearing her Po training gear. Her right hand was red, dripping with what Box understood was alien blood.
Behind the sky was the Enemy. He had modern beam weapons, powering up with a distant whine. Spaceships. A circling fleet. A galaxy, in flames.
She wanted to cry out, to warn Kitou of the terrible risk, but she couldn’t. Instead she looked up, and saw herself, looking down.
She said, Ophelia.
She woke, with a whimper.
Box asked Ito about his Fa:ing addiction.
“We call it the basement,” he said.
“It felt weird.”
He nodded.
“We get it in the end,” he said. “All of us. The dreams. The addiction. It drove the Station staff away. We believe deliberately.”
“Why?”
“Clearing the decks.”
“Except for you people?”
He nodded.
“Have you had the dream yet?” he asked.
“A field made of bones?”
“Yes, we were all anxious to see what you looked like.”
“You’ve had the same dream?”
“All of us have. We call her the Red Lady.”
“His red right hand.”
“The device on the shield?”
“It’s a poetic symbol, in Earth literature, for the vengeful hand of God.
‘Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us?’
“What it means is, how can a benign God allow so much suffering? The answer is, we don’t understand his ways.”
“Or he’s not benign,” said Ito.
Box nodded.
“Also in the basement is a spacetime anomaly,” he said. “Created by the Fa:ing processor. We call it the Fa:ing rip. One theory is, when the end-time war begins, the Fa:ing will leave through it.”
“End-time war?”
Ito shrugged. “It’s a theory.”
“And if they leave?”
“We follow.”
That night, in the piazza, Brin showed Box a new move. “This is called the wind shadow,” she said. “It’s about exteroception.”
Box watched the two young women copy each other’s movements, back to back, without looking. It was an uncanny skill. At the sound of Brin’s voice, Kitou launched a taekwondo back kick Box had taught her, which Brin allowed to pass by the side of her head.
Ito joined them in the piazza.
“What’s this?” he said.
“We’re training Dr Box,” said Kitou.
“For what?”
“To be a Po fighter,” said Brin.
Ito raised an eyebrow.
“And how is that enterprise going?”
Box’s training gear was slick with sweat. She was out of breath, and nursing a livid bruise on her arm.
“She has ability,” said Brin.
“Praise,” said Ito.
Brin nodded.
“Does master Pax know about this?”
“He will,” said Kitou.
Ito nodded acknowledgement.
“Keep at it.”
The following morning, Buss unfolded his blackboard again, while Kitou fussed over breakfast. The hall filled with the aroma of scorched milk. With a sigh, Brin rose to help her.
“Who are the Fa:ing?” Buss scrawled on his board.
“Ito?”
“They come from the future,” said Ito.
“Wait,” said Box, arching her eyebrows. “Time travel? Is that a thing here?”
“It is,” said Buss. “I know, because I also come from the future.”
Box stared.
“Alois speaks truly,” said Ito.
“Okay,” said Box. “You have my attention.”
“How far in the future?” wrote Alois.
“Anyone?” he asked.
“The math suggests 10^10^3 years,” said Brin.
“But?”
“But it could also be 10^10^10^56 years, depending on how you read the Fa:ing algorithms.”
“Wait,” said Box. “I’m no mathmo, but that’s a big number.”
Brin nodded. “It’s a very big number. 10^10^3 years is about the time to heat death, when the universe can no longer sustain processes that increase entropy. 10^10^10^56 is such a large number that there aren’t enough photons in the universe for Alois to write it here.”
“Why those numbers?” asked Box.
Brin shrugged. “We can hypothesize,” she said. “10^10^10^56 is about the time required for all the elementary particles to cycle through all their possible states, which is the longest time required for a quantum-tunneled big bang to produce a new universe identical to our own. In a sense, the most time possible.”
Box paused to take that in, then shook her head in annoyance.
“You’re seriously telling me the Fa:ing come from the end of time?”
“Maybe. It’s one of the possibilities.”
“Why are they here?” Buss wrote with a signature flourish.
“Kitou?”
“To change our past,” said Kitou.
“Very good,” said Alois. “To change our past. Their future. The Fa:ing individuals experience time like we do. The Fa:ing consciousness appears to experience it backwards.
“Dr Box, yours isn’t the only Hopf number in the Fa:ing corpus.” He conjured up a green-white planet, floating above the breakfast table. “Fluxor,” he said. “Before the genocide. A beautiful world. Not unlike Earth, but wetter and cooler.”
The view zoomed out, until Fluxor became a pulsing green point at the edge of a starfield, that spanned an arm of the milky way galaxy. An orange point appeared, with a curved line between them. A glyph said [1,527 light-years].
“Threnody.
“I first began to study the Fa:ing in your year 2135, seventy years from now, as a young computational linguist, when Threnody was a thriving scientific adventure. In my timeline, the thousand worlds are at war with the Horu. A shooting war, but manageable. Then, someone fires a doomsday device.”
“That sounds bad,” said Box.
“A sphere of annihilation, spreading at lightspeed across the galaxy. So yes, bad. An enduring hypothesis of experimental physics is that one day, supercolliders will inadvertently destroy the universe. A myth. It can’t happen. Unfortunately, weapons manufacturers stepped into the breach, so it has.”
“Shit.”
“Indeed. Hopefully someone can stop it.”
“Stop it from what, exactly?”
“From destroying everything, Dr Box. Our civilization, to start with. Then everything else, in a slowly expanding bubble of annihilation. Or maybe not so slow. We don’t know. Space can move faster than light. Hence the need for secrecy. There are species that would destroy us instantly, if they knew.”
“You really don’t know how it ends?”
“No, the Fa:ing carried me away before I could find out.”
“Carried you where?”
“Here, ninety years ago.”
“Alois, you’re older than you look.”
He shrugged. “My people practice germline ageing modification. I appear as old as I wish to be.”
“That’s quite a story,” she ventured.
“It gets better,” said Alois.
Kitou and Brin had joined them beneath the blackboard, food now forgotten. “I already told you the story of Ito and Pax at Fluxor,” he said. “The point is, why were they there? Consider this your briefing, Dr Box. What was the Water Bear doing at Fluxor? Why was Ito present at the precise place and time to save Kitou from the fire?
“The answer is Kitou’s Hopf number.”
“The place of her birth?”
“No,” said Alois. “Her death.”
“Ito saved her?”
“Yes.”
“And changed the past?”
“You have it.”
“Our mission,” said Ito, “is to prevent an historical genocide. We can think through the wider implications later. We’re peacekeepers, Dr Box, working with dangerous knowledge, in secret.”
“The question,” said Alois Buss, “is are you with us? We’re not the conquerors you may have once thought we were. You already know that. Nor are we railroading you, or your people, into anything. We’re trying to save another world, and perhaps everything else, with the help of these strange creatures from the end of time, who have asked for you personally.
“Now we’ve found you.
“What do you say? Will you help us?”
The physics weapon began as a package of ice: a comet’s nucleus, in the system’s Oort cloud, a light-year from its F-type main-sequence star. It was accelerated to near-lightspeed using a bootstrap drive, in which a gravity source is projected ahead of the object. The gravitational field was a mere 10 m/s^2, or just slightly more than one Earth-normal gravity. Time did the rest. It fell for twenty-nine million seconds, which is slightly less than an Earth year. Then it went dark: just a comet, among millions.
The five Horu ships unfolded space at equidistant points in an ellipsoid around the system’s ecliptic. The nearest was 599 light-seconds from Threnody. Seeing this, the Po warship floating above the planet’s surface launched a flurry of messages.