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  THE WATER BEAR © 2019 Groucho Jones

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  First printing, 2019.

  Printed in the Binary Republic

  Protected by the Law of large numbers

  Art by Vinny Chong

  www.vincentchong-art.co.uk

  This book uses the gender neutral pronouns ze / hir / hirs for trans people.

  Thanks to the Bibbulmun people of the Noongar country of south-western Australia, custodians of the beautiful land this code was written on.

  Thanks to my readers: Lindsay Keelan, Nick Asher, Rob Graham, Geoff Flowers and Bruce Knight. Thanks to Rob Laidlaw, for improving my neurosurgery.

  For my son, Nick.

  facebook.com/thewaterbear

  thewaterbear.info

  It's five minutes to midnight. Our leaders are asleep at the wheel. Wake them up.

  rebellion.earth

  This race

  And this world

  This feeling

  And this girl

  This revolver

  This fire

  This I'll hold it up higher, higher, high.

  Brian Eno - This

  Prelude

  2068

  In the shadow of Lhotse, on Fluxor, in the Orion Molecular Cloud, the primal forests burned. Years of unrelenting heat had turned the once-lush canopy to fuel, and fire now leapt from crown to crown, in diaphanous folds, consuming everything in its path.

  In a high mountain glade, cut from stands of sassafras and Huon pine, where the mosses and ferns had been stripped away to reveal the black earth beneath, a young girl rocked on her heels, and began to feel real fear, as she watched the embers fly in the valley below, starting new fires faster than a Pursang girl could run.

  The girl understood the bioscience of fire perfectly well. Each year the wildfires burned the vast eucalyptus forests that girdled the world, regenerating them, but these high montane rainforests, once lost, were gone forever, so the people made their defenses.

  The forest occupied a mile-high tooth of rock, with its head in the clouds above, where the mountain continued its long march to heaven alone. It was called Atwusk’niges, in the old song, which simply meant vertical forest. Into its tortuous couloirs, the Pursang had made firebreaks, and cut trails deep into its living heart. To preserve the forest, we must first destroy it, her father had said, as they slashed and burned.

  Higher, in the limpid airlessness of low orbit, the vast triangularity of Fluxor Station loomed like a massif in space, busied by tenders and by the complexly polyhedral warships of the Horu fleet. By day, from the forest below, these ships had a strange, translucent appearance, like floating cities of the dead. The girl watched an incoming tender deploy its geometry drive, and a sphere of space unfolded into an impossible shape, and another city-sized rock began its descent to the surface.

  It disappeared in flames over the horizon.

  She hoped the Horu wouldn’t target her this day.

  When it finally came, the fire flew up the rock with a sibilant roar, fueled by volatile organic aerosols already in the air. It was on the girl in a flash, then gone, leaving dozens of spot fires to fight.

  She marveled at the suddenness of it, slow then fast.

  There was no time to lose. Their primary defense was a dam cut into the highest ledge of the forest. This had been filled by truckloads of snow thrown down from the mountain above, a vertical drop of a thousand meters or more. More than one worker had made the same long fall, when scree gave way beneath their scrabbling wheels, and they tumbled into the abyss. Beneath the dam ran a network of microprocessor-controlled flow junctions, and below those a network of fireproof pipes, and below those, the people with their hoses and tools.

  The main killer of humans in a forest fire is radiant heat. The girl was well-enough protected by a long-sleeved shirt, and goggles, and a wide-brimmed hat, when she remembered to wear it. She jammed it on, and struggled with her hose towards the flames. There was a hoary debate, among old Pursang firefighters, about the best way to use water to fight a fire. At an early stage in a fire’s development it was generally said that the water should be used to directly douse the flames. Later, when the fire came in sheets, some believed the water should be sprayed at the air in the trees to remove the greatest amount of energy from the system. She was in the air mist camp, because that was what her father believed, and he, a Pursang holy warrior, who had journeyed among the stars, knew everything.

  It was filthy work. Her hose had to be worked through dense and prickly underbrush, once lush but now bone-dry, that crackled and stung through her clothes.

  But it must be done.

  Ash and dust filled the sweltering air.

  She was hungry, and tired.

  She was finally at rest, perched on the lip of a narrow arête, exhausted, but exhilarated by the day’s extraordinary events, and was unfolding her afternoon’s food from a waxed paper bag, when the next great gout of fire flew up from below, at impossible speed, like a volcano’s pyroclastic flow, and engulfed her in flames.

  The heat was unbearable, but she was alive.

  Her whole world slowed.

  She knew she had two options: go in or go down. Down was generally the right move in a high mountain fire, since it leads below the suffocating pall of smoke that rises from the flames, but that would mean a drop of twenty meters or more to the level below. The alternative was to delve into the rock face, which was riddled with fissures and cracks. She had no time to think. She ran towards the first gap she could see. This meant a ten-meter sprint through swirling flames. As though in a dream, she saw other Pursang make similar binary choices around her.

  Time slowed again, and she was fast.

  She found a crack, but it proved to be an unlucky choice: A shallow notch, with the bone-dry undergrowth inside it already smoldering, ready to ignite. She scrambled in and up, for just a few meters, until she reached a dead end.

  And gamely turned to meet her fate.

  When a strong hand reached down and pulled her to safety.

  Book One Ω Spacetime

  1 ∞ A Lightship to Aldebaran

  2075

  The human historian Ophelia Box rode a lightship to Aldebaran, and so became the first of her kind to travel between the stars.

  The lightship was all she could hope for, and more, although the journey to reach it was less convincing. She had boarded a civilian space shuttle at Kennedy Center, amidst the rusting gantries of the old American space program, after only a few hours’ tuition.

  Everything seemed both horribly over- and under-engineered. Rust was everywhere. Rust and graffiti.

  Like the set of a film that was never completed.

  You’re payload, they said, grinning. Hold on tight and enjoy the ride.

  She held on very tight indeed.

  The solid rocket boosters separating after two minutes had terrified her. First it felt like she’d stopped accelerating, and then a bright orange flash. She was sure the engines had failed, and they were at the start of a long fall to Earth, fifty kilometers below.

  The calm demeanor of the pilots, and the mission controller’s slow Texas drawl, brought her back to her senses.

  She was no astronaut, that was for sure.

  Inside the shuttle was old. It looked like a ham radio set had been strewn round inside an American school bus. The array of blue screens below the letterbox windscreen was quaintly futuristic, like experimental satnav installed in a 1950s A
merican car.

  Her watch had more processing power.

  Under acceleration it boomed and shook like all its surfaces were made of tinfoil, while she was pushed down towards unconsciousness by an invisible hand. It was what it was: a mothballed machine, called back into service, like an old trooper drafted for a new kind of war.

  But it got her there.

  Box had watched the first lightships arrive, twenty years before, as a skinny wee bairn, sweating in the warm night air outside her home on the wrong side of Aberdeen, when they filled the sky with their majestic aurorae. Aurora Galactinus the BBC called it. The promise of hope for a future. There were rapturous street parties, with techno doing rambunctious battle with the Proclaimers.

  That was before the troubles, when the 6, Wu and Po were still being fêted as the saviors of humanity.

  Box still thought they were.

  That they saved us was indisputable.

  It was what came after that alienated so many.

  Paris, the abiding city of resistance. Libertê, êgalitê, humanitê. She liked that slogan. It was the rallying call of the Parisian intellectuals. Avec les sondes! She liked that much less. Out with the probes! That was the cry of the mob. Probes was trash talk for the otherworldly Wu. Avec les sondes! Tuer les dêmons! She could still hear the ululating howl, like wild animals in the streets. Thankfully the mob had no idea who she was.

  Un collaborateur.

  There were riots the day she closed her rooms at the University. Effigies were burned. People were dragged from their cars and beaten on suspicion. The 6 defused it in their usual way. The violent few found themselves repositioned, sans Molotov and AK-47, to their homes, or less convenient places. There would have been a few disgruntled would-be insurgents traveling home on the Channel tube that night, costumed for anarchy, jeered by the England football supporters.

  The peaceable majority were left to protest unhindered.

  It was a lesson in effortless power.

  Now she was strapped in an American shuttle, approaching an alien starship, bound for Aldebaran.

  You don’t say that every day.

  The lightship was small, compared with the original leviathans that had first delivered the climate factories now in geostationary orbit. It consisted of two unattached discs, about a hundred meters across, about a hundred meters apart. One of the discs was covered in circuitry. Lines of multicolored light crawled over its surface like random ideas, precursors of what was to come. Box mused that you could see it thinking. It was in that disc that the mathematical problem of the ship’s spatial relocation was solved. The second disc was covered by vivid fractal designs. Up close, these resolved to ever-smaller fractals, Box guessed down to the molecular level. Maybe they went on forever. You could rely on the Wu to be thorough.

  Her fellow shuttle passengers were mundane by comparison with the exquisite starship. In repose, they looked like any other humans. They looked like civil servants, which she guessed they probably were.

  They had luggage. This detail fascinated her. Ordinary suitcases, strapped down with webbing in the shuttle’s cargo bay. One of them had a multi-pocketed backpack, made by a popular American sportswear manufacturer. Its sunburnt and bushy-bearded owner saw her looking, and bared his white teeth.

  Is he going to eat me?

  She smiled neutrally back, and reminded herself to lose the comedy shtick, in case some of it came out her mouth. She didn’t want to be exposed as a rube, away from home for the first time.

  Or worse, a racist.

  The real problem was that Sixes looked like any other human until they moved. Then they displayed an insectile suddenness that didn’t quite scan as Earth-normal.

  Avec les sondes.

  This 6 didn’t have that insectile quality. He smiled and introduced himself. He was called Ito, he said, and he was the amanuensis of her employer, the Regular of Threnody.

  He used that word, amanuensis.

  His secretary? she asked.

  He was a compactly athletic man, in his mid-thirties by Earthly appearance. He looked like he could climb a mountain, or just had. Maybe his adventure backpack had been put to good use.

  More like a journalist, he said in an easy mid-Atlantic drawl. I observe and interpret events.

  Oh, she said. Like a spy?

  He laughed. Something like that, he said.

  She cursed herself as a fool. Of course, this healthy-looking outdoorsman was something to do with her mission. Probably someone important.

  He smiled again and showed her how to propel her soft bags in the weightless conditions.

  She’d first met Alois Buss, her new employer, a week before, in the Bistro Bofinger, an elegantly faded brasserie on the Rue de la Bastille.

  “You have a French name,” she began, idiotically.

  “You couldn’t possibly pronounce my real one,” he replied with a Gallic shrug.

  He was larger than life, almost two meters tall, and theatrically charming to go with it. In his crumpled brown suit, and unfashionable spectacles, and his courtly manner, he was quintessentially Parisian. All he needed was a pack of Gauloises to complete the ensemble.

  He had that insectile tic going on.

  He told her he was the Regular of Threnody, which he said was a minor functionary role, like being the ambassador of a small principality.

  “Like the Mayor of Vaduz,” he said, rolling his eyes disconcertingly, before fixing them on her. “But remoter.”

  He said, “I’m aware of your work.”

  She experienced a frisson of concern. She was researching the Po, the secretive military third of the alien troika. Was this the thought police? Was she about to be warned off?

  He said he could arrange access, if she wanted. He had a project, if she was interested, as a working historian, in his personal employ.

  Offworld.

  “It could be hazardous,” he said.

  She was never any good at factoring risk.

  “I accept,” she said.

  Now she was falling headlong towards a translucent surface, like a ceiling made of soft crystal, on which a crowd of people were gathered to meet the new arrivals. An invisible hand reached out and turned her, so her feet touched first. She landed halfway gracefully. For the first time since leaving Earth’s gravity, her vestibular system pointed down.

  Some of her fellow travelers were greeted warmly. Ito was hugged fiercely by a teenage girl, who leaped with balletic grace from local gravity to catch him in mid-air as he debarked.

  So, they have family.

  Good.

  What was she expecting? Endless lines of birthing pods, stretching towards an apocalyptic horizon? She cursed herself for having read too much sci-fi.

  O brave new world, that has such people in it.

  Her bags landed softly beside her.

  “Welcome to Pnyx.”

  This from an androgynous person, a Wu.

  The Wu was like all hir kind: eldritch and fair, with a slightly oversized head, like an elf, or a beautiful child.

  “Please follow,” ze said. “I’m Charh. Ship will assist you.”

  Ze beckoned Box towards a vertiginous space. She didn’t decide to follow, being frightened of heights, but a pulse in her back gave her no choice. Inside the disc was like inside a geode. Crystals crossed the open space like spearheads thrust through the side of the ship. The outer skin, which she knew to be covered with fractal designs, was transparent. Overhead, the battered American shuttle spun in graceful lockstep with the disc. It looked rather magnificent. Off to one side spun a more modern design: a Chinese x-wing lifter. A hundred meters below her feet, across an intervening gap, she could see the pulsing circuitry of the drive disk, rehearsing its Aurora Galactinus. Below that, the Earth shone like a jewel in space, and beyond it the stars, her destination.

  Sixes floated in the open space, and gathered on convenient surfaces. This ship was crowded. And it was busy.

  No one paid her any attention
.

  She followed Charh, without trying to.

  This was like cycling on trainer wheels.

  Like flying.

  This was flying.

  Her stateroom was the size of her entire Rue Pigalle apartment, embedded within a crystal encrustation in the disc’s outer rim, with a startling view of the Earth. Box spent her first hour admiring it, still wired with adrenaline, unable to let go. There was gravity, to her relief, and a glow that seemed to emanate from nowhere. After a long, restive comedown, during which she tried to make sense of the day’s events, there was a chime, and she reached out with her mind to open the door.

  The compulsory 6 brainware had its uses.

  Standing there was the teenager who’d hugged Ito.

  “May I come in?” she asked.

  Box beckoned her in.

  “I’m Kitou,” she said.

  “Ophelia. But please call me Box.”

  “I’m instructed to call you Dr Box.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “You have fiery red hair,” said the girl, after a few seconds of industrial-grade staring, for more seconds, and more industrially, than would have been proper for strangers on Earth.

  “That’s a rare mutation,” she said brightly. “I’m told you’re a fierce warrior.”

  “I’m a kickboxer,” admitted Box.

  “The Scottish champion.”

  “A Scottish atomweight champion. I’m only wee.”

  The girl beamed in reply. She was exceptionally attractive, with white-blonde dreadlocks that hinted at bioengineering. Box had never seen dreads so healthy.

  “How old are you?” asked Box.

  “Sixteen.”

  “Earth years?”

  “It’s all the same,” said the girl. “In the adaptive language.”

  “Can you explain that, please?”

  “Our wetware mediates our speech. I hear what you mean.”

  “Wetware being this alien neurocomputer in my head?”

  The girl nodded.