The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  “Hail fellow,” said the Water Bear.

  “Fuck off,” said the bank.

  The headquarters of the Cult was generally as she remembered it. Accreted layers of junk; concealed weapons; an obfuscatory cloud of obnoxiousness. The symbol of a skeleton, with male genitalia, had been replaced by a child’s drawing of a leering face, and coarse graffiti in a dozen languages.

  “Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way,” said Samppo, “how may I assist you?”

  “We’re in difficulties,” said the ship.

  “I see that.”

  “I have two humans,” she said.

  “Dead?”

  “No, they need saving.”

  [Samppo,] said Pax.

  “Aha, Pax Lo, the quintessential Navigator.”

  [Samppo, we need your help.]

  “Then ask.”

  [Will you visit our gamespace?]

  [Well, if it’s not my old foil, Jaasper Huw d Stratego,] said Samppo. His avatar was like his physical persona: an avuncular man, like everyone’s uncle. He wore a monk’s robe, and his shock of white hair in a monk’s tonsure.

  [I wish I could say it was a pleasure,] said Jaasper.

  Samppo shrugged. [It’s a shame, Jaasper Huw, that our interests haven’t always aligned. But we play for the same side, so they must, eventually.]

  The Water Bear and the headquarters of the Cult of the Bicameral Mind floated side by side in the poisonous light of the galactic core, five light-minutes from the supermassive singularity at its center. When the Water Bear randomly jumped, the bank jumped with her.

  [We have a problem,] said Pax.

  [Problem, singular?] replied Samppo.

  [I had planned to call you, when we got home.]

  [That’s what they all say,] said Samppo.

  [But now you’re here.]

  [As if my magic.]

  [Yes. I find that an unlikely coincidence.]

  [You know what they say. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.]

  [I’m not familiar with the expression.]

  [It’s wrong anyway. The first thing you should do is look a gift horse in the mouth, else an adversary could game your ritualistic behaviors.]

  [Samppo, why are you here?]

  [You called me.]

  [We called the Po network.]

  [I was listening in.]

  [Why?]

  [That’d be telling.]

  [Then tell it to us, please. This is a military gamespace. We have entire microseconds.]

  Five light-minutes, thought Pax, was not a great distance from the Horu necropolii, and all the ships of the unexplained fleet. This was a dangerous place to be talking. However, this was the crux of the matter. What did the bank know? Why was it here? Who was being used, for what purpose?

  Wheels within wheels, with his team in the innermost wheel.

  He could afford some microseconds.

  [First you tell me why you’re here,] said Samppo. [Then I’ll tell you why I was listening. How does that sound?]

  Pax nodded. [We came in hot pursuit of a Horu ship,] he said. [After an action at Horax.]

  [The action at Horax,] said Samppo. [A famous engagement already, in some circles. A Horu necropolis lost.]

  [We found the Möbius machine.]

  [I thought you might.]

  Pax brought up an image of space split in two. Above them was the shield, sheltering them from the particle rain that fell from above. To the sides space was distorted. Stars span in and out of view, like electrons crazily circling a nucleus. Below them was a partially cannibalized machine, and beyond it, a featureless blackness.

  Not quite a featureless blackness.

  [Do you recognize this?]

  [It resembles the event horizon at the galaxy’s core. And that’s the Möbius machine, or what’s left of it.]

  [Resembles?]

  [Well, it can’t be, can it? I perceive information in the event horizon. That’s not possible.]

  [Doesn’t an event horizon encode everything that falls through it?]

  [Not like this.]

  [But there it is.]

  [Unarguably.]

  [Can you decode it?]

  [You think it’s encrypted?]

  [It looks like it is.]

  [Why can’t your clever ship do it?]

  [It’s beyond my abilities,] said the Water Bear.

  [Why not use your own people? Po intelligence? They have supercomputers.]

  [They’re not here,] said Jasper Huw.

  [Now your turn,] said Pax.

  Samppo paused for a while, as though pretending to think. [Where to begin?] he said.

  [Pax Lo, did you think that the most brilliant First of his generation was thrown together with the most righteous Navigator, by accident? Or that Brin Lot, Ophelia Box and the Pursang child happened to fall in your orbit? No, there was always a plan. You were part of that plan. You’re our A-team, and you’ve done well. You infiltrated Möbius space. You’ve found its physical embodiment. Because that’s what your data is. I can tell you that without even looking. It’s not encrypted: it’s complex. It’s an implementation of spacetime in which every particle is in every state possible. It’s the Möbius universe, imprinted on a black hole’s event horizon. How clever of the Horu to put it here.]

  [A-team for what?] asked Pax.

  [For saving the multiverse, of course.]

  [How is that going?]

  Samppo sighed. [Pax Lo, I have bad news. The war is already lost.]

  The Water Bear propelled Jaasper’s and Pax’s bodies across the space between the two ships, in a pair of bismuth-antimony sarcophagi, surrounded by electrostatic fields. They were the hardest containers she could make, and they were up to the job. Once in the bank, the bodies were repaired.

  “Why do you have this amount of shielding, Samppo?” asked Jaasper, stretching. His body and face wore the new scars of his most recent ordeal, alongside the scars from his older battles.

  “Ever the suspicious one,” said Samppo. “Jasper Huw, it’s so I can go anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. I’d struggle inside a main sequence star.”

  “The data,” said Pax, handing Samppo a drive.

  “You chose not to transmit it,” said Samppo. It wasn’t a question.

  “An excess of caution,” Pax said.

  Samppo nodded in reply. “We’ll get along fine.”

  “Now,” said Pax. “Tell me exactly what’s happening.”

  “What do you know about the Thespian disease?” Samppo asked.

  “I’ve seen it,” said Pax.

  “Did you know it’s a strike weapon of the Enemy?”

  “You mean the Möbius adversary? Assuming the Horu story is true?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Then yes, we’ve considered the theory.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that it might be his real means of attack, his main weapon, and that the genocide at Fluxor was a diversion, and you’ve been led on a merry chase around the galaxy?”

  “Yes, we’ve also considered that possibility.”

  “Well, it’s all true. And however bad you may think it is, it’s worse.”

  “Someone please tell me what this is about,” said Jaasper.

  “There’s a neurological disease,” said Pax. “A mathematical artefact found on Avalon Station. It resembles the Fa:ing number.”

  “It is the Fa:ing number,” said Samppo. “But more on that later.

  “Do you know the Magellanics have quarantined Avalon Station?” he said.

  “No” said Pax. “How? When did they do this?”

  “A stasis field. The biggest one in history. The world and its Station. Nine days ago.”

  “How long?”

  “They didn’t fuck around. Ten thousand years.”

  “That’s... interesting information.”

  “Do you know why they did it?”

  “I begin to.”

  “Someone please tell me,” said Jaasp
er.

  “Jaasper,” said Samppo. “Are you familiar with supercooled water?”

  “Yes. I come from an icy world.”

  “Disturb it, and it freezes.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what our society is like now. A supercooled lake, awaiting the slightest disturbance.”

  Samppo led them into the recesses of the bank, to a floor where people were poring over vectors and hypercubes, and higher dimensions of information, visualized in a series of interlocking holodisplays.

  “We’re analyzing your data,” he said. “I’ll explain how things work around here.

  “I’m a cyborg, as you already know. One of a long line of Samppos. I’m the front end of a much larger computer, called the Finance Engine. The Engine is a system continuously on the edge of madness. That’s like being on the edge of chaos, but better. Amazing things can be achieved, on the edge of madness.”

  “Like hosting the economy,” said Pax.

  “Yes,” said Samppo. “A problem of substantial nonlinear complexity.

  “But here’s the problem,” he said. “No one except me understands what he says. Think of it as an oracular cult. Literally, the Cult of the Bicameral Mind. He’s the source; I’m his diviner. The bottom line is this: he doesn’t think like we do. Even I can’t make immediate use of the information. I’m just a mystic. A god whisperer. A blathering fool. I get the data. I need powerful computers, and smart humans, to make sense of it for me.

  “These are my humans,” he said, gesturing around the room, where men - only men - were poring over their screens. “Natural brains are surprisingly good at this kind of problem. They see connections machines don’t. They can pick out faces in a crowd, and patterns in tea leaves, better than machines do. These are my engineers, my quants and my data scientists. All of them clones of... me.

  “I also have a trading floor, where my more belligerent children trade the derivatives we create here; who play on risk like virtuosos play on their instruments. But you don’t want to meet them. They’re assholes.”

  “How does that work out, socially?” asked Jaasper.

  “It’s a bore, but hey,” said Samppo.

  “What do they make of our data?” asked Pax.

  “We see patterns. Generalities. A partial solution.”

  “Which is?”

  “We see events, leading towards a conclusion. We see chaotic attractors. We see a great river, desiring the end of its journey.”

  “What do you see that’s not a poetic metaphor?”

  “We see a place and a time. A Hopf number.”

  “When is it?

  “Soon.”

  “When exactly, for heaven’s sake?” said Jaasper.

  “Möbius space. The one you just found. About three days from now.”

  “Inside Möbius space?” asked Pax.

  “Yes. On the event horizon. Or whatever’s encoded on the event horizon.”

  “Can you get us there?”

  “No. I have no idea how to get there.”

  “Then what?” asked Jaasper.

  “How do you consume an elephant?”

  “What’s an elephant?”

  “A slice at a time, my Pursang amigo. The Horu invasion fleet. We could start there.”

  “Destroy it?” asked Jaasper.

  “Yes, that’s a good idea, destroy it. But how?”

  “We could call the thousand worlds,” said Jaasper.

  “They’d send a Po strike force,” said Pax.

  “That’d be unwise,” said Samppo. “Remember the lake. We don’t want to disturb it.”

  “Are you saying our leaders have the disease?” asked Pax.

  “I’m not saying all, but maybe a fifth of them do. Enough to prevent any large-scale military action. We must do it ourselves. And someone must also defeat Kronus, inside Möbius space. His release is the trigger. That’s when the lake freezes over.”

  “My away team,” said Pax.

  “Yes.”

  “Can it be cured, this disease?” asked Jaasper.

  “I believe so,” said Samppo. “You’re the solution.”

  “Me?”

  “Not you personally. But Pursang are immune.”

  Jaasper grunted. “Is that why you’re so keen to save us?”

  “It’s why we didn’t save you. By 2068, in Pax’s timeline, our civilization had already lost the ability to defend itself. Instead it was the disease defending itself, by paralyzing our institutions.”

  “That’s three years from now,” said Pax.

  “Yes.”

  “Which means we failed,” said Jaasper.

  “In Pax’s timeline, we failed. In this one we should try not to.”

  “But the war is already lost.”

  “The war in the Real is lost. The war for Möbius space, not so much. We can still turn the tables.”

  “We could ask the Magellanics for help,” said Pax.

  “They have their own problems to deal with. I have a better solution. I’ve been cultivating an escape route. A ship that can literally go anywhere, and its armed to the gizzards. And I’ve made sure it’s uninfected by the disease.”

  “Made sure, how?” asked Jaasper.

  “By a long process of diligent quarantine, and economic pressure.”

  “Can it take on a Horu warfleet?” asked Pax.

  “I believe it can.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s the city of Praxis.”

  They ghosted past a line of ships, stretching for hundreds of kilometers, all waiting to dock. Some of them were warships. Pax saw the ugly snout of a battlefield suppressor, and the sandpaper lozenges of Magellanic ships without their shields. The rest were freighters: from small haulers to vast manufactories; container ships with starships for containers; the end of a supply chain that stretched halfway across the galaxy.

  The Water Bear’s remote was cradling her own processor core. Her still-capable chassis was 24,810 light-years away.

  “This feels like holding my own brain,” she said.

  “Take care of it,” said Pax.

  “I know,” she said.

  The swirling red planet Aldebaran B filled a third of their field of view, closer than Pax had ever seen it before. For the first time in his experience, the Orbiter was physically in orbit. Usually, it floated in a geostationary gravity field, feeding on the planet’s magnetic grid.

  “A low orbit,” said Jaasper. “Fast and close to the surface, to reduce the possible lines of attack.”

  “Ready for war,” said Samppo.

  Scattered around the cube were deep-space Interdictors: psychotic machines, like the ones Pax last saw from a taxi. He knew there’d be more, maybe thousands, spread throughout nearspace and further. His wetware showed swarms of smaller defenders, ranging from hand-sized superiority fighters, to gnat-sized interceptors, to clouds of nano.

  “Grey goo,” said Pax.

  “That’s illegal,” said Jaasper

  “We live in interesting times,” said Samppo.

  “How does this place avoid being hit by kinetic weapons?” asked Pax.

  “By the biggest gravity drives you can imagine,” said Samppo. “Able to stop anything short of a relativistic asteroid from close quarters.”

  “Can the Horu fire such objects?” asked Jaasper.

  “Not yet,” said Samppo.

  “We hope,” said Pax.

  They slid into a dock, and were met by a network of tubes.

  “There’s one final thing,” said Samppo. “I’m just the money. We need a leader.”

  “Jaasper,” said Pax.

  “No, not me,” said Jaasper. “No one knows me from soap. You’re the Lo Navigator.”

  “Their argument is correct,” said the ship. “We may have to apply social and political pressure. They’ll most likely defer to a respected establishment figure.”

  Pax nodded. “Accepted.”

  “You understand our negotiating strategy
?” asked Samppo.

  “Well enough.”

  “I’ll play the good cop.”

  Pax nodded again. “Understood.”

  They were met by a man in a business suit. A light rain was starting to fall, as it often did, in the outermost rungs of the Orbiter. Pax saw Jaasper look up and stare. The inverted metropolis loomed like a local disproof of gravity. It must be daunting, Pax thought, for a man used to a natural landscape.

  “Navigator Pax Lo,” said the city. “What a pleasant surprise. I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.”

  “Praxis,” said Pax.

  “And Mr. Samppo as well. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  Samppo had donned the formal vestments of his station: a scapular and cowl, in blood red, and a shepherd’s crook. In Pax’s combat wetware, the crook displayed as a high-capability weapons system.

  “We’ve come for a council of war,” he said.

  “Oh, there’s a war?” said the city.

  Samppo gestured around the spaceport, patrolled by lethal machines.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Praxis,” he growled.

  [I wouldn’t like to see his bad cop,] said the ship, from inside her processor cube.

  [Nor me,] said the Orbiter.

  “I’m in charge here,” said Pax.

  The city thought about that, then smiled. Pax understood the nuances of the perceptible wait. The city didn’t need more than picoseconds to think.

  Nor did the Orbiter. [What you mean, Navigator, is you’re in charge of your own people.]

  [This isn’t going to be easy,] said the Water Bear.

  They were led towards an elevator car. This wasn’t a public conveyance, but one daubed with gaudy hazard stripes, that fell straight from the air. It showed in Pax’s wetware as a military system.

  “I’m sorry, it’s a maintenance pod,” said the city.

  “I’ve been in worse,” said Jaasper.

  “Do I know you?”

  “I had a different face, the last time we met.”

  “Different chromosomes?”

  “Them too.”

  “And Water Bear, what’s that you carry?”

  “You can see what it is.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “No.”

  The elevator carried them up into the night, through streams of traffic surging along crowded avenues. The human galaxy might be on the verge of war, but this didn’t seem to be affecting the people here, who spilled out of countless bars and restaurants, onto a thousand shining boulevards. The car ascended though row after row of the vast metropolis. Finally, they reached a burnished ceiling, and stepped onto a crowded escalator.