The Water Bear Read online

  “Like some kind of universal translator?”

  “More than that,” said the girl. “It works at the fundamental level of language. Your Broca area interacts with mine.”

  “Broca area. That’s impressive.”

  The girl laughed. “I come from an advanced alien civilization.”

  Box had to laugh too.

  The girl stood up.

  “We’re about the same size, Dr Box. Atomweights. Can we fight now?”

  A few minutes later, they were warming up in a gymnasium, that the ship had conjured up on Kitou’s request, to Box’s visualized design. It was like her first gym in Glasgow. There were canvas mats, a battered Muay Thai bag, and a full-sized ring. It even smelt right.

  Box showed Kitou how to use the kickboxing head gear, mouth guard and gloves. The girl was a quick study, and startlingly athletic. Box had fought Olympians who were slower. Soon they were sparring. Box soon struggled to keep up.

  “You’re fitter than me,” she said, breathing hard. “Let’s slow down and I’ll teach you to kick.”

  The girl nodded. “There’s no kicking in my art. I’m eager to learn it.”

  Kitou proved equally adept at that, and after a few tries delivered a roundhouse kick that shivered the bag in its stirrups, and would have knocked an Earthly opponent flat had it connected.

  “Okay,” said Box. “You’re definitely an alien.”

  The girl laughed.

  “Now show me yours,” said Box.

  The boxing equipment disappeared and was replaced by a soft, crystalline floor.

  “My fighting art is called Po,” said the girl. “Just as my people are called Po. The first form of our art is called the Geometry Game.”

  Kitou stood in front of her, relaxed.

  “The point of this game is to move to an irresistible position. It is based on Fibonacci spirals. The Earth art it resembles most is Aikido.”

  The girl took a step to the side and spun, and before Box could begin to process what had happened, Kitou was behind her, breathing lightly on her neck.

  “From here I could kill you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Box grimaced.

  How can we war against that?

  “Teach me that trick.”

  Half an hour later, with the help of her wetware drawing rosy patterns in the floor, Box was dancing Fibonacci spirals. She learned that Po consisted of interconnected moves, like a board game, but liquid and dynamic. Moves were related to moves, like pieces to squares. Fibonacci spirals were countered by opposing Fibonacci spirals, always with the objective of outthinking your opponent.

  “This is excellent,” she said.

  “Your long-term training goal,” said Kitou, “is to be able to do this instinctively, without wetware.”

  “You remember all this?” she asked.

  “Repetition trains the animal brain. Over time, it becomes programmed.”

  “You mean you practice a lot?”

  Kitou nodded. “Five hours a day, since I was nine.”

  “You guys must be tasty in bar fights.”

  “It has been known.”

  The next three days were spent by the lightship transitioning to its departure location, with the sumptuous disc of Earth slowly receding, and the silvery orb of Luna looming shockingly close, then falling behind. Box spent her time exploring the ship. Nothing seemed to be off limits. Her solicitous guide, who seemed to be the ship’s only crew, was only a thought process away.

  When Box asked why they were moving so far before leaving, Charh said that it was to be considerate neighbors. “The light of my drive is as bright as a star,” ze said. “Better shone from a few light seconds away, with your moon in between.”

  The internal fit and finish of the ship was superb, like a boutique hotel, and it was produced on demand. After Kitou showed her how, Box magicked up a pair of red Dali sofa lips, and fresh flowers, and a bookcase piled with books, for her stateroom. These began as grids of light, that interacted complexly, until the finished objects appeared, like in a wireframe simulation.

  She picked up a Gutenberg Bible. It was perfect. This was better than a post-scarcity society, she mused. Here you could have anything.

  How can we war against that?

  There was something puzzlingly non-Euclidian about the interior geometry of the ship. The geode was simple enough, although it sometimes seemed larger than it should, but the edges of the disc were askew, with corridors that curved farther than they should. Box estimated that the space enclosed by her corridor could hold only two of her rooms, and yet there were five stateroom doors.

  When asked about this, Charh shrugged.

  “Pnyx’s topology is mysterious,” ze said.

  Charh showed her the drive disk. They reached it through an irising door in the base of the habitat disc. Once inside the door, there was no space between the discs, although a hundred meters of separation was clearly visible through the skin on each side. The drive consisted of thousands of primary-colored geometric solids, floating in the cylindrical space, with lines of energy arcing between them.

  “This system works by recalculating the positional attribute of all of the fundamental particles within its domain,” explained Charh. “Location in physical space is a variable, just one of many possible solutions of the quantum wavefunction. Pnyx remembers where we wish to be, and then we are there.”

  She felt humbled – awestruck - by the power of a machine that could think its way between the stars. It crackled and hummed like God’s server farm. She imagined the quantum foam, flowing like blood in its veins.

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  “Pnyx is the most advanced technology,” said Charh, discerning her mood. “Given to us by a civilization called the Xap, who it is said can move through n-dimensional spacetime using only their natural minds.”

  Box had no reason to doubt it. Any of it. She felt her ingrained cynicism draining away. Why would a society that can do such things, lie to us?

  We’re primitives, worshiping effigies of cargo planes.

  We don’t matter at all.

  Charh showed Box hir personal space, which consisted of a contoured bed, and a model of the ship, like a cherished family heirloom, and soft crystal walls covered with celestial maps, with long arcs showing their path through the heavens.

  Charh sat on the bed, and smiled, and seemed perfectly happy with hir life.

  As well you might be, thought Box.

  She tried not to cry.

  On the third day, Box was invited to join Alois Buss, her employer and sponsor, and his travelling companions, to observe lightfall, and celebrate their departure from Earth space. With Buss was Ito, now clean-shaven, but still sunburnt, and a skittish Kitou, who seemed unsure of who she was showing off to who.

  Buss had brought champagne.

  “Dr Ophelia Box, meet Ito Nadolo,” said Buss with a flourish, popping a cork. “And Kitou Gorgonza. My court magician, and his lovely assistant.”

  “We’ve met,” said Box.

  “You really caught the sun,” she said to Ito.

  He stared back at her, then laughed.

  “Utah,” he said cryptically.

  The shipboard sixes seemed to have all lost their insectile expressions. Perhaps she was getting used to it. Perhaps it was an affectation, for Earthly consumption. The Po, by contrast, based on a sample of two, had an otherworldly quality, as though they were only occasionally tuned in to their local surroundings.

  She found it rather delightful.

  Buss was dressed in his best Parisian costume, an oyster-grey suit with a lemon boutonniere.

  “Still playing the Frenchman, Alois?” she said with a smile. Buss bowed, clicking his elegant heels. Ito was wearing a military-style uniform in plain black, elegantly cut. Pinned to his lapels were two carbon starbursts. Kitou was barefoot, in emerald-green silk pajamas. The
crowd gathered around them was dressed in a dazzling array of styles. Box watched a woman in a gown of floating hoops float past.

  An unseen band played Earthly bossa nova.

  Box felt like a frump in her shapeless coveralls.

  Kitou must have seen her slight embarrassment, and took her aside, and then to her cabin, which was a fraction the size of Box’s stateroom, where she produced a small velvet package, from which sprang a baroque judo suit, calendared with curlicues of caramel and cream.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Box.

  “It’s yours,” said Kitou. “Please take it.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Please. I’ll feel pleasure each time I see you in it.”

  The luxurious suit was made from fibrous, opalescent cloth, softly yielding to the touch, as light as spider silk.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “On Earth.”

  “You’ve been to Earth?”

  “I went with Ito to London, to see a strange man.”

  “Plenty of those in London,” said Box with a wry smile.

  “This one seemed to know you.”

  “Me?”

  “He said, take care of the Scottish woman.”

  “Really? What was his name?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Secrets?”

  Kitou nodded.

  “He said something else. A message for you. I parsed it as friendly. He said to tell you you’re a feisty wee shite. I hope you aren’t offended.”

  Box just laughed.

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “I might.”

  From a hundred meters, the Pnyx’s Aurora Galactinus was nothing like the delicate lightshow visible from Earth. It began with swells and pools and gobbets of color, welling up through the drive disc’s circuitry, like a stormy sea of artist’s paint. The colors became a vortex, which flowed around the habitat disc, until they were enclosed in a whirlpool of light. Inside the disc, floating balls of static energy appeared, and people’s hair stood on end. Kitou, girlishly delighted, played with the balls on her fingertips. Box, a flute of French champagne in her hand, looked on in astonishment.

  The ship was quiet as a church. This was clearly a cherished event, even for jaded space travelers. Then the colors exploded, and drifted away, leaving only the inky blackness of space, and new stars.

  And a deep orange sun.

  Aldebaran.

  Between the ship and the star were a red planet, and a lustrous white cube. Box knew from her assigned reading that Aldebaran was 44 times the size of the Sun, and 425 times as luminous, so the skin of the Pnyx was not nearly as transparent as it seemed. She knew that the red planet was the gas giant Aldebaran B, and that she was the first of her people to directly observe it.

  She shivered, with the enormity of the idea.

  How can I even think about this?

  She christened it Ophelia.

  “Behold the Aldebaran Orbiter,” said Alois Buss with his signature flourish, encompassing the translucent cube, like a magician conjuring a rabbit. “The main travel hub in this busy region of space.”

  As if to punctuate his words, another Aurora Galactinus flowered in the space between the Pnyx and the red planet, and where was empty space, now floated a second lightship.

  The party was soon back in full swing. Kitou danced an energetic Salsa with a brown-skinned boy of her own age, leading all the way, and doing so in great style, their deft feet skipping over the inky backdrop of space. Box was starting to discern more types of human here. Her initial assumption that they were all Sixes might be misguided.

  She asked the ship about this.

  [The “thousand worlds” is a metaphor,] said the Pnyx in her wetware. [There are about three thousand worlds in this local civilization, give or take a few hundred in various states of transition.

  [Of those, about five hundred are of the cultural alignment called the 6, and those include many ethnicities, some you might not immediately recognize as human.]

  [How many here are Sixes?] she asked.

  [Most of them are, because Earth is a 6 world.]

  [We’ll see about that.]

  Ito asked her to dance, and he proved to be as skillful as Kitou. Dancing across the emptiness of space, with the red planet beneath her, at first proved too much for Box, and she was forced to ask the ship to show her a personal dancefloor instead. Then she lost herself in the smoky rhythms of the music, and asked for the heavens to be restored. Later, during a slower Puerto Rican number, with the cosmos spread out beneath her feet, she asked Ito, “What are you going to call us?”

  “Call who?”

  “Earth’s people.”

  “Sixes.”

  “You know that won’t fly.”

  He nodded.

  “In your space fiction, you’re called Earthlings.”

  Box made a face.

  “Can I be a Po?”

  He laughed.

  “You mean, you honestly want to be a Po?”

  “Yes. It’s a serious question. Are you a closed society or an open one?”

  “We are inclusive. Our custom is that anyone who can breed with us can be a Po by marriage.”

  “Can I breed with you?”

  “Is that a request, or a technical enquiry?”

  Box snorted.

  “It’s a technical question.”

  “No, we’re incompatible.”

  “What, we’re different species?”

  “No one uses that meaning of speciation.”

  “I can’t be a Po?”

  “Sadly not.

  “You could be a Lo,” he said, after they’d finished dancing, and were sharing an Aldebaran-themed alcoholic drink, with gobbets of sweet orange, and foaming white cubes, floating in a bitter smoky liquid.

  “Who are they?”

  “Our symbiont culture.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They fly our ships, and fight beside us in battle. They’re our brothers and sisters.”

  “Are they like you?”

  Ito laughed. “They’re... different.”

  After a turn spent dancing with Kitou’s young partner, who proved to be a divine dancer, and a turn with Kitou, who allowed Box to lead, she reclaimed Ito.

  “Ito,” she said. “One last thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Please, don’t treat me like a fool.”

  He said, “I won’t.”

  The Orbiter grew, until a side of it filled her horizons, a gleaming white plain, tens of kilometers across. Their companion lightship grew with it, until it occupied most of the space between them and the Orbiter. It was an open-ended cylindrical design, massively larger than the Pnyx.

  “A military design,” said Buss, joining Box near the Pnyx’s exit vestibule.

  “The Wu have warships?”

  “Everyone has warships,” said Buss with a shrug. He pointed out the circuitry exposed in the otherwise hollow cylinder, crawling with strange energies.

  “Their drive is their weapon,” he said.

  She shuddered.

  In the final moments before debarking, as the Pnyx slid into an irising void in the Orbiter’s side, and her fellow travelers milled around the exit, she sought out Charh.

  “Dr Box,” said the Wu.

  “Charh, thank you and ship. This has been a beautiful experience.”

  “Thank you, Ophelia. It was a great honor, carrying the first of your people through space.”

  “Charh?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is ship your lover?”

  Charh looked at her and smiled.

  “Of course, isn’t he the most beautiful lover?”

  “He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.”

  Charh inclined hir head.

  “Dr Box?”

  “Yes, Charh?”

  “We Wu, we see things.”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful.”

  Ah.

&nbs
p; “Remember us here. When the time comes, we’ll remember you.”

  She looked back into the cathedral space, now empty of travelers, with its crystal buttresses, and the Orbiter’s docking machinery visible through its transparent skin.

  “I will,” she said.

  And then she crossed over.

  2 ∞ The Water Bear

  2075

  [Welcome to Aldebaran,] chimed a voice in her head.

  [Who are you?] she asked.

  [The City of Praxis.]

  She felt heavy.

  She opened her eyes.

  “No floating here,” complained Alois Buss, pulling his wheeled luggage towards her. Then he looked up, and Box followed his gaze. Suspended over them was an upended city, a ceiling of spires, a thousand Manhattans. Towers hung like stalactites, ending a kilometer above their heads. The air between Box and the towers was swarming with traffic, from small flying taxis like trishaws, to heavy industrial lifters.

  She could hardly take it in. It was like looking into a kaleidoscope.

  It appeared to be dawn. The lights in the nearest towers started to flicker and fade, and the sky, or what passed for a sky, at the far periphery of the bewildering space, became powdery blue.

  She could hear city sounds.

  Engines, horns, snatches of music.

  She could see clouds, drifting between the towers.

  Rain started to fall, heavy drops, splashing in the oily grime beneath her feet. It occurred to her that she was in an airport. She saw hoses and pipes connected by scuttling machines to waiting orifices, presumably leading down to the Pnyx.

  A spaceport, not an airport.

  A distinctly cool breeze lifted her hair.

  Time to get off the tarmac.

  She followed Alois to what resembled an arrivals lounge, with impersonal rubber seating, and snaking baggage conveyors, where they waited for the others to arrive.

  “This is all very utilitarian,” she said.

  “Transit is industry,” said Buss with a shrug.

  The lounge enclosed a bank of cylindrical elevators, that Box was dreading to use, in case they whisked her into the abyss above. She cursed her fear of heights. Some space traveler she was. The destination list for each car was displayed in her head, a spatter of visual noise. Travelers bustled around, collecting their bags and leaving.