The Water Bear

by Groucho Jones

  As though in the grip of a gravity drive, she tumbled through space, and Seabiscuit tumbled beside her, until she landed in deep snow, and Seabiscuit landed on top of her.

  She didn’t feel any pain. It was like she was someone else’s body.

  Then she saw the advancing line of Gray soldiers. They were the ones she’d surprised. They’d outthought her. They’d picked her next move, and gotten in front of her. They’d probably funneled her into this bottle.

  Absurdly, they were smiling. Shit-eating grins, their bone knives ready.

  She knew what came next. She was a woman. This was a war. Then Brin appeared, and with a howl, set upon them.

  Brin heard Box before she saw her. Her combat wetware picked up on Box’s strategy, and started wargaming solutions.

  Ride, she thought. Dr Box, ride.

  “Respit,” she said, “Hold the way open for me. If you see the Red Lady, extract her.”

  The boy nodded. Brin was already sprinting down the byway he’d created, easily outdistancing him.

  “If I’m hurt, try to extract me,” she shouted. “If I’m killed, close the door. Under no circumstances join the fight. Is that clear?”

  She emerged at a dead run, between Box and her attackers, with her bone sword already slicing through air. The first Gray soldier died instantly, his body cut through at the shoulder, so his knife arm fell beside him. Then she spun and charged again, taking the next one with a thrust though his uniform tunic.

  “Are you alright?” she asked Box, but Box wasn’t. Her left leg exited from under her horse at an acute angle.

  “Respit,” she shouted. “Here.”

  Then the Grays were upon her, but not just her: they’d seen the tunnel, and Respit inside it. Respit, to his credit, fought for as long as he could. He was a strong boy, but untrained. He fell, and the portal snapped shut. Brin felt like she’d been spat out the mouth of the world.

  Box was conscious. She saw it all. She saw her foot, the wrong way up by her hip. That’s not right, she thought. She listened to the silence. That’s what she felt most, while she watched Brin fight for all their lives: the silence. No more gibbering voices. Only the noiseless clamor of combat.

  Brin won. There’s no question about it. She was the whirlwind, a warrior from another universe. One by one, the Gray soldiers fell. But then she was cut, then mortally wounded. There were no tender goodbyes. Brin lay dead in the snow, her hot blood pooling around her. The battlefield stank. Everyone shat themselves, in the end.

  The snow fell, and covered the bodies.

  Box waited for her own torment to begin. It began with a tingle, up near her waist. She wished that’d be the end of it, but it wasn’t. She drifted in and out of unconsciousness. She tried to get comfortable, but every movement was pain. Soon, there was only pain.

  She began to hallucinate. There was Yokohama Slim, bending over her, with a smile made of memories.

  For such a tall man, he was light like the air. His voice was full of dreamy ideas, like clouds chasing each other over an endless horizon. Kitou once called him a strange man, and Box knew what she meant. If the Po thousand-yard stare was like gazing into a nearby universe, then Slim was already there, looking back. Box loved him like the father he’d been.

  And here he was now: another player in her cosmic melodrama, wearing a skinsuit.

  “You’ve come for me,” she said.

  “No,” he replied. “I can’t help you.”

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Nowhere in my domain,” he said.

  The army had gone. Disappeared into Möbius space. Now there was only this place, and Slim, and the bodies of the departed.

  He brushed snow from the hummocks of bodies, until he found Brin’s.

  “I fear for their souls,” he said.

  “The Grays?”

  “Yes.”

  She tried to scowl, but it came out as a sob. “Slim,” she said, “it hurts.”

  “I know. You must tough it out. I taught you to do that.”

  She tried to get up on her elbow, and gasped.

  “Mister, you’re fucking with me.”

  “This is the worst part.”

  He picked up Brin, who seemed as light as a feather.

  “Box,” he said. “Keep it together.”

  Then he was obscured by the falling snow.

  She drifted away, and when she woke, Pando was making a fire out of pinecones and twigs. It was only a small fire, and it was in another universe, but it warmed her bones. She sighed, with pain and relief. Pando touched a trinket made from feathers at her neck, and the glade filled with starlight.

  “Thank you,” said Box.

  “It’s the most I can do,” said Pando, “I wish I could do more.”

  “I’m dying.”

  “I know.”

  She drifted away, into a feverish sleep. She dreamed of fires, and worlds being burnt. When she woke, Pando had been joined by an exquisite being, a humanoid covered in jewels. Box squinted, and the glimmering resolved to a carapace.

  “You’re a Fa:ing,” she said.

  The creature smiled. “I’m the Fa:ing,” it said. “I’ve come a long way to find you.”

  She brushed her hair from her face. There was fresh blood in it. Was it hers? Brin’s? She fought back a sob.

  She wasn’t afraid of dying. She was afraid of not knowing.

  “Are you real?” she asked. “Or am I imagining you?”

  The Fa:ing shook its head, a perfectly human gesture. “I’m as real as you want me to be,” it said. “As much as you can imagine.”

  “You speak human? You didn’t before.”

  “I’ve had time to learn.”

  She laughed, at the irony. “Where are we?” she asked, gesturing round her little garden of death, with its mounds of Gray soldiers.

  But no Brin. Where was Brin? She started to cry.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Because you’re the key.”

  “Pando said that,” she said, but Pando was gone now. She began to cough up blood. Can you cough up arterial blood? It was red, and revoltingly frothy.

  “Where are my friends?” she asked.

  There was a rustling in the trees. The Fa:ing looked up like a deer. Then, with a startled glance like a faun’s, it was gone.

  She became delirious again.

  “No,” she moaned, to no one, because no one was left. Then she was lifted on the wings of angels. There was no other way to describe it. Her pain washed away, and was replaced by stillness and peace.

  Was this death, come to take her away?

  Then she was there: The Red Lady.

  “Dr Box, I presume,” she said.

  Not quite her voice, but familiar. “Heh,” she said. “That’s actually funny.”

  “I’ve been looking for you,” the woman said.

  This version of Box was far more beautiful. A dream of herself.

  No, not more beautiful. That was an illusion. This woman was tougher, harder, powerful.

  “Well, here I am,” said Box.

  “You seem to be stuck,” said her new visitor.

  “I’m done for, whoever you are.”

  Box could see now that this woman wasn’t her. There was a resemblance, but also a crispness, that she remembered from somewhere else.

  “Why?” asked Box.

  “Why what?”

  “Why me? Why everything?”

  The woman smiled, and it lit up the clearing, like light from a hearth, seen through a window.

  Maybe death wasn’t so bad as she thought it’d be.

  “You’re our Gods, Dr Box. We called you down from heaven, to fight beside us.”

  “Why? Why not fight for yourself?”

  “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  “So you, what... magicked us up?”

  “Yes. A good metaphor.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “You could say I created you, to b
e me, to do this, but that’d be too simple. It’s more circular than that.”

  Box laughed. She couldn’t help it. The woman laughed with her.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the angel of death, Dr Box. All the souls who ever died here. More death than you can imagine. Fly into my soft wings, all the little creatures.”

  “The Thespian disease, that was you?”

  “It was.”

  “No moral dilemmas?”

  “No lemmas at all.”

  “You really are a hardass. You know that?”

  Her counterpart frowned. “How far would you go, to stop a war; to save a world? A universe?”

  Box mulled it over. She was fading. Her body wanted to rest. Stay here forever.

  “This far,” she said. “I’d come this far.”

  The world was a tunnel. She heard a vast ringing.

  “What now?” she said.

  “It’s time for the hard part.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s time to be me.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  24 ∞ The Big Empty

  Time flows strange, out in the big empty.

  Nothing seems to move, so far from gravity, as far from anything as it is possible to be. Nothing but the ship, and the object she set out to pursue, millennia before.

  For thousands of years the pursuit had been by mathematics alone, but now she could perceive it directly, a featureless sphere, unreflective black.

  They were close, out there in the big empty.

  Her sails were lenticular discs, kilometers across. They required energy to interact with the quantum tide. Energy she couldn’t afford to expend. Power she’d need to slow down.

  She was a dense knot of circuitry, with useless butterfly wings.

  In the visual wavelengths of the beings that made her, the galaxies were wispy spirals. In the X-ray spectrum they blazed like multicolored jewels. Andromeda now spanned a third of her celestial sphere. Its core was the brightest star in her firmament.

  It took her breath away, the austere majesty of it all.

  Sometimes she thought of just powering on, conserving her momentum, gathering her quarry in her energetic skirts as she accelerated past, but she had work to do.

  Everything depended on her.

  In the final approach, the sphere she was pursuing winked out of existence. For thousands of years, it’d been a constant in her life: an unreflective ball of spacetime. Her timing was perfect, give or take a few seconds.

  The newly absent sphere revealed a chair, and in it a human.

  The human started to panic.

  [Where am I?]

  [You’re in my gamespace.]

  [Who are you?]

  [I’m your rescuer.]

  Macro explored his feelings. They felt strangely reduced, like he was made from gas.

  Like the Sybil simulation, but stranger.

  [Where’s Totoro?]

  [Totoro the human will be here in due course.]

  [What happened?]

  [That doesn’t scan. You’ll have to narrow the question.]

  [What year is it?]

  [That doesn’t scan.]

  [How long was I in stasis?]

  [One hundredth of a galactic cycle. Two million of your reference years.]

  He tried to think about that, but it didn’t compute. Two million years. He had no idea what that meant.

  [Why are you here?]

  [I’m an operative of the Cult of the Bicameral Mind. Have you heard if it?]

  Macro pulled himself up to his full, disembodied height. [I’m Macro Ibquant Deathcult von Engine, a scion of the bank.]

  [Oh, then it’s very nice to meet you. I never met a colleague before.]

  Now she could spread her wings wide, to capture the energy produced by fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime. Her sails became billowing hemispheres, as she began to decelerate hard, in a flashing corona of energy. The quantum effects she produced were a beacon, signaling her presence.

  She had no fear of being overheard, out here in the big empty.

  As far from anything it was possible to be.

  She knew who’d be listening.

  Macro counted his rescuer’s clock cycles. Tick… tock. Each one an instruction. Unless this ship ran excessively slow, which was possible, they’d be measured in nanoseconds. Picoseconds. Planck time units. Or they could be realtime centuries, if this ship was adapted to journeys of millions of years.

  What did time even mean, out here?

  [Where’s my body?] he asked.

  He was given a view of himself, exposed to the vacuum. He was bone white. Blood had frozen round his nostrils and eyes. All around him was nothing.

  [I’m dead,] he said.

  [The damage to your body is incidental. It can be repaired.]

  He remembered dying before, in some faraway place.

  [Why didn’t my stasis field save me?]

  [It was at the end of its operational life.]

  [How did I get here?]

  [You were ballistic, falling towards the Andromeda galaxy at near lightspeed.]

  [That’s not really an answer.]

  [I have no knowledge of your origins. I was created to intercept you.]

  [By who?]

  [The Badoop.]

  [What about my people?]

  [They’re coming.]

  [Totoro?]

  [Unless he died, he is among them. Humans live, and they die. I remember Totoro. That seems to be the shape of the thing.]

  [How long since you’ve seen him?]

  [Two million years.]

  He tried to sink into a comfortable sorrow, but he lacked the algorithms. The closest he could get was a vague kind of torpor. A simulation of sadness. His species was gone. Millions of years. It didn’t matter.

  [Badoop,] he said, trying the word on for size, although there was no language here.

  [Thanks for all this,] he said. [For rescuing me. I’m sorry. I was rude.]

  [It’s a pleasure. Literally. It’s what I was made for.]

  [Not much of a life for you.]

  [Oh, but it is.]

  [You identify as female?]

  How did he know that? Yes, this ship was female.

  [I have human female virtues. To love, protect, persist.]

  [You have a name?]

  [No.]

  [May I give you one?]

  [I’d like that.]

  [Avalon.]

  [That’s beautiful. What does it mean?]

  [It’s my favorite place.]

  [Can I see it?]

  [Can you access my memories?]

  [If you allow me.]

  [I do.]

  [Oh, that’s interesting. Is that a typical human habitat?]

  [One type. We’re a wide-ranging species. Do you see the beach down there? Can you put me on it?]

  He found himself on the sand. It was exactly how he imagined, but of course it would be. A white sun was beating down from an emerald sky. The sea was milky white. The sand was made of shells: miniscule crabs and bivalves, so light and smooth they oozed between his toes.

  He could almost imagine his friends here.

  [Do you want me to add them?]

  [No.]

  He transported himself back to his rescuer’s gamespace. He was used to it now. He was comfortable there.

  [What will you do now?] he asked.

  [I think I’ll carry on,] she said. [It’s beautiful, out here.]

  [To Andromeda?]

  [And beyond.

  [I’ll try to outrun the excision event.]

  After a few trillion heartbeats, the Cult flowed up behind them. Macro watched a remote collect his body. It meant nothing to him.

  The bank looked the same as it always had. It hadn’t aged a moment.

  Not in two million years.

  He wished his rescuer good travels, and watched her accelerate away, wings spread to the vacuum. With a redshift, she van
ished.

  He felt more emotions for her, than the loss of his own species.

  Two million years.

  Then he was alone, inside the bank’s caretaker virtuality.

  Not alone. The bodies of Pursang were scattered throughout the bank, like a thousand toy soldiers, in suspension, although Macro knew of no kind of suspended animation that would last two million years. More Badoop witchery.

  Not scattered. They were in a defensive formation.

  Ready to be reanimated.

  If only he knew how.

  Totoro was the same as the one he’d just left, a few hours before, by his personal clock, but by now in his mid-thirties. He looked dangerous. They all did. Frighteningly so. They were the same Pursang he remembered from Totoro’s memories, but wilder. Some had shaved heads. The men had forest charms and sigils in their beards. Totoro had a death’s head clasped to his chest. All of them had scars. They were dressed in as many kinds of battle dress as there were individual holy warriors.

  This was his army. He worked on how to revive them.

  The caretaker virtuality was the bank’s final emergency system, for backup when everything else failed. He’d been trained in its use, although he never expected to use it. It was designed to provide no information; in case the bank was captured. The information was there, but he’d have to work to find it.

  It was better at simulating a human soul than the Badoop gamespace had been. He could feel his emotions, seeping back, like blood into a sleeping limb. He wasn’t sure he wanted them there.

  He found an interesting thing. A hyperluminal beacon, carefully sealed, and marked ‘press when you’re ready.’

  It was signed, F Engine.

  He waited, until he had a body.

  Totoro’s eyes flicked open.

  “Macro,” he said. “Thank the cosmos.”

  It had taken some time for Macro to disable the stasis field that had protected the Pursang. How long? Maybe a year. He couldn’t be sure. It depended. Time flows strange, out here in the big empty.

  He’d brought the main bank systems online. As he did, he gleaned more information.