The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  “You have branches?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “As easy as that? I’m off the hook?”

  “We expect your discretion. The rest is up to you. You might help us again in the future. We’d like that.”

  No, you’re not off the hook, and never will be.

  “The Po?”

  “I promise you they won’t be a problem,” he said. He hoped that was true.

  “My work here?”

  “Continues.”

  As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

  Shakespeare. Earth dramatist.

  1605.

  That night, his wetware treated him to a real Tung conversation. A thousand were nested { thinking : sleeping : dreaming } in a disused shipyard module. Some were as small as his hand. Some were like scraps of paper. Their thoughts were like turbulent water in a stream. There were eddies and pools, and chaotic strange attractors. One of the attractors was Macro, and how he related to the other attractors in play.

  First there was the nexus of the Water Bear, and her constellation of humans, complexly orbiting the interests of the Xap, intersecting with the interests of the thousand worlds, like a planetary system orbiting a binary star. Most of the thoughts of the Tung were about how to solve that equation: the Xap and the bank and the small group of humans.

  The strangely attractive humans.

  There were also the Pursang, and the Magellanics. Another nexus. The Magellanics have what Macro wants, which has something to do with the Pursang. The subtext was obvious. Macro was going to the Magellanic clouds to raise an army of Pursang.

  He smiled at that idea.

  It was perfect.

  The Tung want Macro to succeed.

  That was what shone through all the ripples and whorls: they were trying to save themselves.

  [They perceive the end of their own civilization,] said his twin.

  He asked his wetware how widespread the Tung were.

  [The galaxy, at least], said his twin.

  [At least?]

  [They’re a transcendental species.]

  [Meaning?]

  [They can ascend to higher levels of consciousness, if they wish.]

  [Like our computers do?]

  [They fear the end of everything.]

  14 ∞ High on the Helix

  314

  “You’ve brought me children?” asked the robot. He was exactly the clanking automaton that Box remembered, from the Great Exhibition, on Earth, in 1851.

  “We have,” said Iris.

  She ushered the three girls to the edge of the fire, in front of their peers, who formed a semicircle behind them. The first was Mae, the smallest of the three. She gave Chance a book.

  “I made this, sir ghost,” she said.

  “Please call me Chance,” he clanked. “But remember,” he winked, “it’s a secret.”

  She nodded, looking serious.

  “What’s in it?” he asked, examining the cover.

  “It’s a story of my house, from the start of time.”

  “Well,” said Chance. “I’ll want to read that. What’s your name?”

  “Mae,” she said.

  “Well Mae, I owe you a story.”

  Each of the children in turn gave Chance a gift: A shaving kit; more books; a ham; a bag of hard candy; a jug of intoxicating tea, given by two boys, Lochlan and Cairn, who said their father had given him the same liquor, twenty years before.

  Chance said, “I remember. Would he be Rob?”

  “Yes,” said the boys.

  “How big is he now?” he asked.

  “As high as the sky,” said one boy.

  “Higher,” said the other.

  Chance clanked, and beckoned the children closer.

  “Can I tell you a story?” he asked.

  They all nodded, vigorously.

  “I can’t hear you,” he boomed.

  “Yes!” they all shouted, and he turned to Kitou and Box, with the surprised attitude Box remembered.

  “And who would these be? Two faces I remember.”

  “It’s me,” said Box. “And Kitou.

  “Mr. Chance, how in the world are you here?”

  “In this wonderful Forest of Dreams?” he laughed, gesturing around the glade. “Now that’s a story. Sit, sit all of you, and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “A long time ago...” he began, and Box could see the children were rapt. They were sat in a semicircle, with the debutantes in front of the fire, and the robot Chance on the other side of it. Somehow, the cold of the night had receded, and they were all sitting comfortably.

  “...in a place called the Real, on a planet called Earth, I fought a mechanical spider.”

  On the word ‘Real’, the children leaned forward. This was what they were waiting for: the rich oral storytelling of their people. Box loved this form of history, and she found herself wanting it too, with a strong sense of expectancy. This could be the foundational myth that explained her own presence.

  On the word ‘spider,’ they blinked. Iris leaned forward, and Box realized this was new; that none of them had heard this before. Chance settled back, and began to recite.

  “Before time itself,” said the ghost, “in the year this world was born, the Red Lady and her shieldmaidens came to visit me, on Earth, with the Tuniit giant.”

  The children gasped. This was more beings of mythos than they’d ever heard in a story before, apart from obvious make-believe.

  “They intended to fight me,” he said.

  The children gasped again. Some laughed, at such obvious nonsense. Who would fight the ghost? Who could fight a Tuniit giant?

  “They brought a mechanical spider.”

  Now there was silence, apart from the crackle of flames.

  “There was to be a great pugilistic contest, fought in a palace of glass. First, I had to fight a creature of pure Mathematics, and I won. It was called the St Austell Slinger, but it had a fatal weakness. I could reach through its heart, and pull out its insides. And then I fought the mechanical spider, and I won again, although it was a close-run thing. I can still feel its titanium sting on my skin.”

  A boy raised his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this a true story, sir?”

  Chance nodded. “It is; we have witnesses here.”

  They all looked at Box and Kitou.

  Box nodded. “It’s true. We were there.”

  Now the audience were Chance’s to do with as he pleased. There’d never been a story like this before, in all the history of the ghost’s stories. Usually it was atomics and warships.

  “After I vanquished the spider, the one-who-can’t-be-defeated decided to try to kill me.”

  The audience gasped.

  “Thankfully, she’s not as smart as she’s fast. She got the wrong man.”

  The audience laughed.

  “But by goodness she was fast. The fastest thing I’ve seen, and I’ve lived for a long time. My companion was a he-devil, a wise-guy, a silver-tongued scoundrel and slick with a knife, who would cut out your eyeballs before you could blink, but Kitou was so fast she got his knife from its sheath, hidden under his clothes, and had the point of it at his throat before he could see what had happened.”

  The children, who understood knives and swordcraft, were skeptical of this.

  “No!” they cried.

  There was a clamor of questions.

  “Did he die?” one asked.

  “No,” said Chance. “The Tuniit giant intervened.”

  There was much consternation.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  The children gleefully shook their heads.

  “A demonstration?”

  “Yes!”

  “Who is the fastest among you?”

  “Iris!” they cried.

  “Iris?”

  Their leader stepped forward. She was Brin’s height: a dark-haired, green-eyed Blue. These were co
nsidered strange and otherworldly, Box had heard, like fairies and folk of the forest.

  Iris didn’t look otherworldly. She looked every inch the unyielding soldier.

  She opened her cloak, with a smile.

  “I have no knives,” she said.

  “Then I’ll set you a test of brains,” said Chance, “that has nothing to do with violence.”

  Chance raised his arms, and in a shower of glitter, he changed into the saturnine Horu that Box also remembered. The children laughed, and applauded.

  “I have a lot to explain,” he whispered to Box, “and in due course, I will. Now it’s showtime.”

  “Then begin,” he shouted.

  Around the house was a circle of grass, where the horses were grazing. Beyond it was the pearly half-light of the Farside morning, and it was cold there, so the snow was like powder. Sat on the snow was a fox made of paper, alert, looking craftily about. It was cheekily drawn, with two pointed ears and ridiculous fangs. As soon as the children spied it, pointing and staring, it began to hop and dance from snowdrift to snowdrift.

  “Catch it,” said Chance.

  Iris was the first to react, but she was quickly mired in the snow. Kitou, lighter and barefoot, did better. Soon she was mired too.

  While the two young women struggled, other cartoon animals began to appear. First were a bear and a moose, then a wolf and her cubs. The children shrieked with delight, as the sky around the cylindrical moon became a rotating rainbow. Box laughed too, unselfconsciously. If the gateway drug to the aspen forest had been an austere psychedelic, this was like a big dose of Psilocybin mushrooms.

  “I’ve learnt a few things,” said Chance.

  The fox sprang over the clearing, straight through the fire, and with a gesture from Chance, the children darted off in pursuit of it.

  “What is this place?” asked Box.

  “It’s our dreams,” said the ghost.

  “Ito says Flipside’s the human unconscious.”

  “Maybe he’s right. Or maybe it’s not that simple.”

  “Why are you here, Mr. Chance, and a so-called ghost?”

  “Not so-called at all. I am a ghost, by any reasonable definition. I didn’t make it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was the first failed download, Dr Box.”

  “Then who is Amelia Chance?”

  “A descendant of my copy. One of my copies. Flux wanted me here. We agreed that if the process failed, we’d keep trying, with me as the subject.”

  “How many times?”

  “Did I die on the way? I have no way of knowing. Maybe a lot. I don’t know. I do seem to be imprinted in this place.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “No, it’s not awful at all. Awe implies fear, and I’m genuinely happy. Time doesn’t pass as you think, and except for the Enemy, this world flourishes. I get to watch it. One day it’ll be a beautiful civilization.”

  Iris, Kitou and the children were still in pursuit of the fox, which had doubled back over the snow, leaving its pursuers stranded. Iris and Kitou were on the far side of the clearing, helping each other, far from the point of the action.

  “It’s a small population,” said Box, “for billions of downloads.”

  “Yes, it didn’t work out as we planned. But they’re all here, in some way, I’m sure of it.”

  “Ghosts in the machine?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And the Enemy?”

  “Yes, I must tell you about Kronus.”

  He began to recite another story, this one with the more somber tone of a lesson.

  “In the first blush of the world,” he said, “when the Reanimated were dying from the conditions, a man came down from the helix. Not from the west, where we are now, but the east.

  “He was a gentle and good-natured soul. Such charisma he had. He said he came from a kinder place, and he could lead the people to safety. Some followed him. They were the people we now call the Grays.

  “He was called Kronus.

  “No one knew where he came from. He didn’t seem to be part of the Möbius machine. And it wasn’t just him. Other strange things sometimes came down. Strange creatures. Scraps of personality. He was a piece of a much larger mystery.

  “Then a madness came over him. First, he had visions. Mystical visions. His mind threw off sparks, and crackled like a generator. His spirituality became religious. His kindness became a polemic.

  “For the Horu, it was seductive rhetoric. It promised forgiveness. All we had to do was give ourselves over to him. We knew he was mad, but we liked the sound of it. Why try, when we can run away? None of it meant anything to the Blue people, because he was describing the Real. But the Horu remembered.

  “I include myself in that. I thought he was a kind of savior, come to lead us to safety. A preposterous idea, now, but I believed it.

  “That was when we started fighting amongst ourselves. Some say Kronus’s derangement was a sympathetic response to the wars. Some say his madness caused them. Personally, I believe an exterior evil smelt the fear, like blood in the water, and Kronus was its odor.”

  “Amelia Chance said that,” said Box. “D’you mean he’s possessed?”

  “Possessed is too strong a word. He became intoxicated.”

  “With what?”

  Chance shrugged. “By power. By the opportunity to see the world burn.”

  “Like a mighty river, desiring the end of its journey.”

  “Yes, that’s apt.”

  “Where did this... exterior evil come from?”

  “Maybe it was always part of us. Maybe Kronus is just a convenient vessel; a vain and grandiose man, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “A narcissist.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that when he became the Enemy?”

  “No, that was later, when he returned with his armies, and started to kill people.”

  The fox was caught by the smallest girl in the party, called Bae. She’d been watching from the clearing’s edge, when it leapt into her arms. Chance told her she could keep it, provided she promised to take care of it, although it’d only be made of paper, when she returned to the world. Iris and Kitou accepted their defeat with grinning good grace, declaring Bae the fastest girl in the forest. Box thought that as a rite of passage, for everyone here, it was literally enchanting.

  The stories she’d tell, when she got back to Paris.

  Then Iris asked if Kitou and Box would fight an exhibition.

  “It’s our tradition,” she said, although her meaning was clear. She wanted to see what the beings of mythos were made of.

  “We should,” said Kitou.

  “I don’t know,” said Box, fearing the inevitable.

  “We’re both about the same size,” said Kitou. “Atomweights.”

  The children latched onto the word, and began to repeat it. “Atomweights, atomweights.”

  That settled it. They began to lay out a ring, using spare pieces of clothing: gloves, scarves and hats.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Box. “I’m no match for Kitou.”

  “I can fight to your level, and still give a good account of myself. We’ll do the moves you know.”

  “Kickboxing?”

  “We don’t have gloves.”

  “Wait,” said Chance, and disappeared into his house.

  “Kickboxing is the martial art of Earth,” said Kitou. “And Dr Box is the atomweight champion.”

  Box rolled her eyes, but stayed silent. Chance reappeared with two pairs of gloves: Yokohama Slim’s red pair, and the brown ones that Chance wore in London. They had the patina of old leather.

  At first it went as expected. Kitou was too fast and too skilled. Box was a kuruttsu. She envied Kitou her ability to glide, like a surreal hovercraft over the ground. Then, for the first time in her life, Box began to fight in the moment. All sense of parry and riposte disappeared. Instead, there was one fluid movement. At first, she was in the glade
, and then she was the glade. It was an extraordinary sensation.

  It wasn’t just Box fighting now. Her adamantine friend had returned. She surprised Kitou with a fast punch-kick combination she didn’t know she possessed. She landed a blow, and with a complicit smile, they assumed the starting position.

  Now they were equals. Box pressed the attack, again and again. Kitou danced away, their strengths overlapping. At first it was a mixture of Box’s Muay Thai and Po, except that now she knew all the moves. They found themselves on the ground, and somehow Box knew Brazilian jiu-jitsu. She could feel Kitou’s worldspirit, an ecstatic presence, reveling in the contest, but in this place, her place, she had its measure. She felt the world open to her. She was here, and it sang with her presence.

  This went on for at least half an hour. Longer than she would’ve thought possible. Longer than she could’ve fought unassisted. Then they collapsed, clinging onto each other, exhausted.

  Iris stood up, and said, simply, “That’s the best fighting I’ve ever seen.

  “I’ll follow you two, if you’ll have me.”

  It was time to leave. There were plaintive farewells from the children. Chance had resumed his clanking robot appearance.

  “Do you know I’m the only thing made of metal in this whole universe?” he said. “Perhaps it’s because I’m only imaginary.”

  Box remembered Brin saying a similar thing.

  “Maybe you’re part of the operating system,” she said.

  [A member of the set of all sets that aren’t members of themselves,] said the Water Bear.

  [Ship,] said Box. [You’re here?]

  [Only just,] said the ship.

  [What happened back there, in the clearing?] Box was still wired with adrenaline, and her alter ego’s lingering presence. [Whoever she is, she can fight.]

  [She’s you, Dr Box. Don’t you see? You’re coming into your powers.]

  [Ship, are you alright?] asked Kitou.

  [No, I’m dying.]

  Iris led them into the forest, to the field where Kitou and Box had entered the dream, where the shapes of the snow reminded Box of another dream.

  “I won’t leave you here,” said Iris. “You might freeze to death, and I’ve no wish to find out what happens when people die in this place. Come to the Eagle. From there, we’ll take the centerline train.”