The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  Kronus would emerge, and there’d be nothing they could do about it.

  “We might have a solution,” said Pnyx.

  “A partial solution,” said Charh.

  The three machine intelligences emerged from the pagoda. They were disgruntled. There’d been a disagreement. Dull heads, thought Pax, among windy spaces.

  “We can’t do it,” said Samppo.

  “We can’t do it in time,” said the Orbiter.

  “What he means,” said the Water Bear, “is we’re screwed.”

  She was right. Staking everything on a single throw of the dice was a naïve betting strategy.

  “Not so,” said Charh.

  “I remember Ophelia Box,” said Pnyx.

  “We can take you there,” said Charh. “Not the whole city, but a few ships.

  “We can take you to Möbius space.”

  23 ∞ Ex Machina

  314

  Dawn rose windy and cold, the day they rode east. Marius said the seasons would change quickly now. Box smelt snow in the air, channeling her forebears, who’d fought naked in the iron-age forests of Europe. The closest she’d got to fighting naked in forests was raves in the Bois de Boulogne. She should paint herself blue; hang the skulls of small animals from her waist; see what Kronus thought about that.

  Unable to sleep, she’d risen to train, when the wind was moaning and rattling in the Chancery eaves. Brin joined her, then invited her to her bed. It’d been a sensuous, loving experience. Alis brought them breakfast, plates filled with ‘travelling food’: carbohydrates and fats; sweetmeats and cakes and the Horu stimulant drink, which left Box feeling like electricity. She painted her breasts, to show them what a Celt looked like, and they’d put handprints all over her. Then they’d sought out Marius, who was laying in his bath.

  Now she was shivering, in furs and bone armor, in a field outside the Chancery wall. There were 114 of them there: a gran sortie. Alis was grinning, relieved to be included. Marius said it was an auspicious number, because the Horu people were wary of thirteen, it being a prime-digit prime.

  Of her adamantine companion, nothing. Today she was Box, pure and simple.

  Marius was asking Respit if he was certain.

  “Yes, he’s sure,” said Nim.

  The quarrel had waxed and waned for a day. Marius was used to traversing the high spaces. He was worried the tunnel might close. This was about his hand being forced. Marius had to take the risk. He wasn’t happy to have to, and he was taking it out on the boy.

  “Won’t,” said Respit.

  “Blue people are easy to move,” said Nim, making a spiraling gesture with one finger, which Box knew to be an insult.

  In the end, simply because there was no other way, and it was already decided, and because Brin was glaring at him, Marius relented. The byway opened like an arrow into the pearly heart of the world. It was cold inside. Even colder than outside. Condensation froze from pipes. There were industrial symbols on the walls: for electrical power, and danger.

  “Carbon ceramic composites,” said Brin.

  “How do you know?” asked Box.

  Brin pointed to a label, written in a language not unlike Pursang.

  “Backdoor,” said Respit.

  “A joke,” said Nim.

  “A lame, computer programmer’s joke,” said Brin. “They’ve crafted a software backdoor to look like a maintenance corridor.”

  “This was how the Horu armies moved,” said Marius. “In the war against us.”

  “Where does it go?” asked Brin.

  “Wherever we want it to go,” said Respit. It was the most complete sentence Box had heard him say.

  Riding two abreast, the sortie stretched out over a kilometer. The corridor stretched much further than that. Once they were all inside, the entrance blinked shut. Lights flickered on, cascading towards a point in the distance.

  “Is that good?’ asked Marius, unfamiliar with such magic.

  “Yes,” said Respit, and marched forward without him.

  “Watch out for the train,” said Box, stifling a laugh.

  In the end, it was as easy as Nim said it would be. After an uneventful hour they exited onto ice, a thousand kilometers from where they’d started. Box listened for ghostly voices, but heard nothing.

  Once out of the passageway, the sortie spread out like a fan. They needn’t have bothered to be stealthy. The cracking and groaning of the ice were everywhere. It was a cacophony. Box found it malevolent. She watched the ice moving in the distance, not in a straight line but tumbling. The ridges and floes seemed anchored to nothing. She could see why it was considered impassable.

  Marius held up a hand. Their way was blocked by a man. He must’ve been three meters tall. Somehow the sortie had missed him. He was swaddled in furs, so he was as wide as he was tall. He was cradling a spear, like a soldier might cradle his rifle.

  They were at the place of Magda’s Hopf number.

  “Humans.”

  “Ice giant,” said Marius.

  “Do you follow the Goddess?” he asked. His voice was like the grumbling of floes.

  “She came this way?” said Marius.

  “I had the pleasure of her company, and her companions.”

  Box joined them. “Are you a human?” she asked. It seemed a reasonable question. This was a story from her childhood. The creature rumbled, deep in its thorax.

  “No,” he said. “This is my dreaming. The dreamer is not like you.”

  He pulled back his hood, to reveal a nut-brown humanoid face, flat planes and white teeth. He was only a boy; about Kitou’s age. Around his neck was slung a pair of high-performance ski goggles. His spear caught the light, and Box saw the patterns of circuits.

  He turned, and they followed.

  Box had dismounted, and was walking beside the young giant, who was now, inexplicably, not a lot taller than she was. He’d led them into a shaft of ice. It branched, and it branched, and again. From time to time, he seemed to consult his spear. The cracking and groaning were absent. It didn’t feel malevolent in here. She felt safe.

  “I’m Yewi” he said, “of the Ways.”

  “I hear that kind of thing a lot these days,” she said. “Ways, keys, prophecies.”

  It was cold in here. And quiet.

  “That’s because you’re the key,” he said.

  “You heard that too, huh?”

  She asked him the question that’d been on her lips since she first saw him, silhouetted against the Gyre.

  “Do you know a man called Yokohama Slim?” she asked.

  Of course she knew the answer. The story of Yewi and Yowl of the Ways was one of the many he’d told her, although not with those names.

  The Tuniit navigators of the underworld.

  “He’s one of my people,” said Yewi.

  “An ice giant?”

  Yewi laughed. “We go by many names,” he said.

  “The Tuniit people?”

  “Yes, that.”

  The resemblance to Slim was striking, especially now that he’d folded himself down to human size. He could pass for a college basketball player.

  Damn it, he did look like a human basketball player.

  “Slim walks a different way,” he said.

  “You know him?”

  “I know of him,” said Yewi.

  The labyrinth of ice reminded her of the Horu Manifold. It had the same air of being a mathematical abstraction, of traversing great distances; a slipperiness, that had nothing to do with its appearance.

  She wondered what universe she was in now, if she was in any at all.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “A metaphor,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Slim used to talk about the ice spirits,” she said. “He said the Tuniit came east in the time of the ice spirits. What does that mean to you?”

  “Oh, it’s a story,” he said. “Older than me.”

&n
bsp; “Is it true?”

  “The ice spirits were an elder race,” he said. “They imagined the way.”

  “Here? From where?”

  Yewi shrugged. Now the resemblance to Slim seemed remoter. Something about the eyes. But the voice: now that was the same. It was hypnotic.

  “You’ve been to Earth?” she asked.

  Yewi touched his goggles. “Yes,” he said. Many times. It’s in the center of things.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way,” she said. “It used to.”

  “The 6? Discovering a whole human galaxy exists. You the smallest part of it. Your lost freedoms?”

  She nodded.

  “They mean to help you, the 6.”

  “Oh, I get it. So now we have Tuniit too?”

  He laughed. “You’ve always had us,” he said.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. “You, personally. In this glorified icebox?”

  He laughed. “It’s my dream to be here,” he said.

  They reached an ice junction. Fractals. Everywhere she saw fractals. Every identical junction seemed to lead to the same set of identical corridors, all lit by the same, fractal light.

  “Are we headed to a different universe?” she asked.

  “No, the same one you came from.”

  “Why is this maze here?”

  “To prevent the Enemy escaping.”

  “Into our universe?”

  “No, the way to your universe lies open.”

  “Why not bottle him up completely?”

  “It’s not in our gift to do that. Events will decide.”

  “Shit happens?”

  “Shit does happen.”

  “Who’s the Red Lady?”

  Yewi laughed, and the rumble of it echoed down the ice corridor, and for a moment he seemed twice her size again.

  “Ophelia Box, you have so many questions.”

  “I’ve only got started.”

  He stopped walking, and looked down at her.

  “Dr Box,” he said. “I’m glad to have taken your side in this contest of good against evil.”

  “You had a choice?”

  He laughed again. “Yes, I did.”

  He raised his spear, and Box saw the flash of circuitry again. “Blue rider,” he said. “Marius D. Look over there, do you see that green light?”

  In the distance was a disc of chlorophyll green, as though a filter had slid over the end of a tunnel.

  “That’s the way,” he said.

  Yewi unfolded himself to his full height, and she felt the crackle and hum of the Gyre again, with all its menace.

  “I can’t follow you there,” he said.

  “Where will we emerge?” asked Marius.

  “Give me your map,” said Yewi.

  Marius unfolded his map, and two dots appeared: one in the white of the gyre, and one in the black of the helix. Yewi pointed to the first dot. “This is us here, although still not quite in Möbius space. In the dark place is your Enemy.”

  Marius seemed surprised by that.

  “In the vacuum?” he asked. “On Downside?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can we breathe there?”

  “Kronus has built a containment, where he intends to defeat you. His belief is that there’ll be a last battle there. My belief is you’ll want to go there regardless. Between here and there is a dangerous journey. I’ve made you a path. It’s a Tuniit path. Don’t leave it.”

  A new day dawned gray, with freight-train clouds and a ferocious wind. The makeshift skins and tarps of their bivouacs were threatening to be torn away. They were two days out of the Gyre, and the weather reminded her of what she’d seen out of Kitou’s hide, back in the warmth of the Chancery. Then it got worse. Long peals of thunder, low in the pits of their stomachs.

  Box watched Marius ride down from the storm-wracked sky, but she already knew the gist of it. Ito was dead.

  The first Box knew that events had turned out badly was when Kitou invaded her sensorium, wordlessly distraught. First there was a silvery fire in her head, then Kitou, forcing her way in. A distraught Kitou. Worse than distraught. Incandescent with grief. She felt it herself. An absence, where Ito had been.

  Then Kitou was gone, likely with her own emergencies to deal with.

  Marius was in a sour mood that whole morning, half-frozen, and it took some time for him to remember to talk. Box waited, dreading to hear any of it. The Prophet fought bravely, he said, but hopelessly. Kronus had cast off his pose, and just killed him. He hadn’t shown any of his usual histrionics.

  “Killed him easily,” he said, “standing and gloating over his dead body.”

  Brin nodded once, and set to work dismantling the camp.

  Box sat in the saddle, and watched her.

  “Did Ito’s plan work?” asked Box.

  “Who knows,” said Marius.

  Then the rain came. If there was a weather she hated, it was driving rain. This was horizontal, as the wind picked up and drove it sideways over the campsite. Then it was sleet, stinging where it found skin, then a fog so thick she could hardly see her hands in front of her. Every kind of bad weather, in a matter of minutes.

  Seabiscuit hated it too, snorting and rolling his head in irritation, turning his back on it.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Dr Box?” called Brin.

  “I’m coming,” she said, but the truth was, she wasn’t. She wasn’t coming at all.

  For Ophelia Box, bugging out was an act of childlike rebellion. She’d done it since she was small. She couldn’t explain why she did it. It wasn’t to escape. She knew she was powerless to leave here, even if she wanted to. It wasn’t even to get attention. It was more like a scream.

  She turned and kicked her horse into a canter. Of course, she regretted it instantly. She wasn’t a child anymore. This wasn’t a game. But by then it was too late. She knew it would be. There was only the sleet, turning to snow, and an encroaching darkness. She sat in the saddle, and began to feel sorry for herself.

  That’s why she did it: for self-pity.

  Then she began to realize the nature of her predicament. She was in a new forest, in a different thicket of trees. There were no tracks to follow, not even her own. She had no sense of direction. Her inner compass was spinning.

  She reached out with her wetware, and felt nothing.

  More snow fell, and soon the dust on the ground became a blanket, then pillows. She could hear voices. At first, she thought they were in her head, but Seabiscuit seemed to hear them too, pricking his ears when they became more insistent.

  Then she realized she didn’t hear the Fa:ing hum, and she became frightened.

  Brin watched Box turn and ride away, and understood. She’d seen soldiers do this before. It wasn’t deserting. It was the flight response prevailing. It was when she began to feel the shrieking absence of Ophelia Box from the world, that she knew they had problems. The Fa:ing hum went haywire.

  Marius felt it too. Brin whispered in his ear, “I’ll find her.”

  Brin had an inkling of the physics of this place. If the Gyre was the sea, then these were its shallows. Here the membrane that separated the worlds was thin. The Tuniit’d created this bridge, to help them get back to Möbius space.

  Ergo, they weren’t in Möbius space.

  They were in a region of quantum uncertainty.

  The ground beyond the Tuniit path seemed natural enough. With Nim’s and Respit’s psi, like a rope tethering her to reality, she decided to try it.

  “Stay in my head,” she told Nim. “If I begin to be lost, tell me.”

  The girl nodded.

  “Respit, come with me.”

  Box must’ve fallen asleep. That was one of her coping mechanisms, whenever she’d fucked up badly; she went to sleep.

  With a start, like a sleepwalker waking, she realized she was moving. At first it was like a dream of moving, then there were lights through trees, and Seabiscuit was following them. They weren’t th
e Cerulean glow of the Blue people, but stuttering electric lights. She heard salty curses, and the groan of engines. She was shadowing a column of cavalry, escorting light assault vehicles, and mobile artillery; circa 1940s Earth-equivalent technology.

  Nazis. She stifled a laugh. She was shadowing Nazis.

  They were cursing the depth and consistency of the snow. Unlike Seabiscuit, who seemed to be able to float through it like powder, their heavier horses were struggling up to their bellies.

  White diarrhea, they called it, or semen.

  They were speaking Horu.

  Of course these weren’t Nazis, but Grays.

  Box realized she was tuning directly in to the Broca areas of their brains.

  These Grays had wetware.

  Carefully, she reined Seabiscuit in. All it took was a touch, and he faded back into the trees. Now she’d follow these Grays, back to Möbius space, because that was where they were headed. If they were retreating, they’d be hurt, and there were no injured soldiers. While she was congratulating herself on her brilliance, she blundered into a circle of soldiers. They were sat back on their haunches, resting. One was making a fire. Another was unpacking utensils.

  They had knives, made of bone. And handguns: wicked-looking ceramic pistols.

  She knew how she looked, with her braided hair and bone armor. She looked like a Blue rider: a scout or a spy.

  Everything happened at once. They were on their feet in a flash, with the same oily precision as a Blue riding party.

  Seabiscuit reared up, and leapt forward, scattering the makings of the fire. Then he plunged through deep snow, and up onto paths. Tree trunks loomed up, then vanished behind her. Seabiscuit was better at this than she’d ever be. She gave him his head. It was a wild, headlong rush into semidarkness. If she wasn’t lost before, she was now.

  How much time and effort would they spend on hunting her?

  Still, she kept riding.

  A lot, if their goal was be stealthy.

  This went on for half the night. Then she heard shouts, and saw lights in the trees. This was becoming a clusterfuck. She was being encircled. Remembering Pax’s lesson on the mountain, she breathed. The shortest path out of this trap was a straight line.

  With the slightest press of her knees, Seabiscuit sprang into action. Then, without warning, he rose up behind her. She’d ridden him into a cable, strung between trees, that cut into Seabiscuit’s shoulders, and lifted him into the air.