The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  TWO

  * * *

  ADAM

  2107–2199

  8

  There was a game he liked to play, every time the medics brought him back to consciousness. Could he tell where he was, just from the nerve signals reaching his brain?

  Earth was easy. If he woke up sensing a one-gravity pull, it could only be one place in the solar system. There were other places with close-enough gravitational pulls—the surface of Venus, the outer atmospheric layers of Saturn—but there were certainly no cybernetic surgical clinics there. Of course, he had rarely been back to Earth itself since that decades-ago drama on the Sam Shore. Times had changed; the public mood now tended to regard him as a disturbing relic from the past, and when he was in the vicinity of his home world he felt a lot more comfortable staying in the elderly elegance of Port Van Allen, a thousand kilometres out in space. And, with time, Hope Dhoni had acknowledged the growing prejudice and transferred the supervision of Falcon’s treatment and recovery to a medical facility at Aristarchus Base, on the surface of the Moon. But even that had not lasted long before Hope felt obliged to move her entire clinic and team out to the burgeoning human settlement on Ceres.

  So, was he on the asteroid now? The gravitational pull was certainly too low for Earth or Moon, but not weak enough for Ceres. Titan, perhaps? There were settlements on Saturn’s moon, certainly, but that chill satellite was an unnecessarily cumbersome setting for a clinic. Callisto, moon of Jupiter? A moon with a significant and permanent human presence—the largest in Jovian space aside from Ganymede—lying safely outside the giant planet’s radiation belts. There was a scientific facility there, at Tomarsuk Station; Hope had mentioned it, for her daughter was there, studying the biochemistry of the subsurface ocean. But no, this felt weaker even than Callisto. Somewhere else again—further out still . . . ?

  “Howard? Can you hear me? It’s Hope. I’ve just reconnected your auditory and vocal circuits. See if you can respond.”

  “You’re coming through loud and clear.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Confused. Adrift. In other words, same as usual.”

  “That’s helpful. Were you dreaming?”

  He had been, he realised. “Just remembering a day I made a snowman. Or tried to.”

  Falcon heard the clatter of a keyboard, the beep of a stylus. “I’m going to switch on your vision in a moment. If you’re able, lock onto my face.”

  “You make me sound like a weapons system.”

  There was an intrusion of brightness, formless and white. Soon shapes and colours coalesced, and Falcon heard the whirr of focusing elements and the click of filters as his vision optimised to the environment.

  A room took shape around him, all clean geometries, walls and ceilings a grid of white tiles. A window was off to one side, just a rectangle of darkness. Around him were various surgical devices, robots sheathed in sterile transparent covers, looking as if they were fresh from the showroom. Doctor Hope Dhoni stood a little closer than the machines, dressed in a green surgical smock, a sterile cap on her head, mask hanging limply from the straps around her neck, her gloved hands clasped before her. She was “standing,” but he was sure now that the ambient gravity was much less than a tenth of a gee. The young nurse who had cared for him at Luke Air Force Base was in her sixties now, and any cosmetic intervention had been graceful; her expression seemed as gentle as it had ever been.

  “I see you, Hope. You look well. Not a day older.”

  “If that’s not flattery your imaging system needs adjusting.”

  “How long did you keep me under this time?”

  He didn’t spend much time around humans these days, but he was still capable of recognising her smile. “How long do you think?”

  He still had no firm idea of where he was, nor of the immediate circum­stances leading up to the surgery. “Feels longer than last time. Months, rather than days or weeks.”

  “Make it a couple of years.”

  “Years!”

  “It sounds worse than it was. We ran into some complications, it’s true. In doubt, we always prefer to back off and consider our options. You’re too valuable to risk a mistake.”

  “So I just lie there on the slab while you organise an academic conference to decide where to cut next?”

  “If I told you that was alarmingly close to the truth, would it upset you? There were some good papers, actually. Better safe than sorry, Howard—that’s always the motto. And besides, there have been some political problems. The risk was low. We kept you cool, slowed your cellular metabolism down as far as it would go.”

  Cautiously he shifted his point of view to take in as much of himself as his position allowed. He found he was speaking to her from an angled position, like a patient raised up in a bed. But there was no bed. He had come around—been switched back on, to be precise about it—in a heavy-duty cradle, a metal framework supporting his mechanical anatomy. A cradle that might have been used to move spacecraft parts around a clean-room. Looking down, he surveyed the armoured cylinder that now sufficed for his life-support system: a bronze cylinder, replacing the old golden-­statuette edition, narrower from front to back, and somewhat sleeker in design, with a definite taper from the top to the bottom.

  Things were coming back to him, at last. Memories of pre-operative briefings, long discussions with Hope and her team. Falcon had sat through hours of it, watching the doctors argue over images and schematics of his insides. Falcon was no physician, he did not pretend to understand the planned medical work, but the machinery was more his field. His support systems had been subjected to a complete redesign, improving not only their reliability but also expanding the range of conditions that Falcon could easily tolerate. The new cylinder, being more compact, would allow Falcon to squeeze into the smaller, nimbler spacecraft of the mid twenty-­second century. Its internal fusor was of the latest design, and would not need replacing for many decades. And so on. Along with that overhaul, some of the living parts that he still carried with him had been eliminated, their functions supplanted by smaller, more robust and efficient machines.

  His wheeled undercarriage had yet to be reattached to the base of the cylinder, and he knew a range of new ambulatory systems had been designed too, to be swapped in as desired. But, he saw, his new arms were already in place—more powerful, more dextrous than those they replaced.

  “May I?” he asked, flexing a hand experimentally.

  “Go ahead.”

  He swept his hand before his face, marvelling at the complexity and precision of joints and actuators. “I used to impress Geoff Webster with card tricks. I almost wish there were a fly in here. I could impress you by snatching it out of the air.”

  “No flies on Makemake, Howard.”

  He looked at her for a moment, wondering if he had heard correctly. “Makemake!” A dwarf planet: a ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt, far from the sun. “Well, that explains the gravity. Let me guess: about one thirtieth Earth normal?”

  “One twenty-eighth, so they tell me, not that I’d ever know the difference. That ability of yours is starting to worry me—no one should be that good at proprioception.”

  “I have no recollection of coming here.”

  “You were already under. There was no point waking you. But Make­make wasn’t where we meant to operate. Ceres was the original suggestion, remember?”

  His memories were becoming clearer by the second. “I even remember the approach and docking. So what happened?”

  “There’ve been more political changes since you went under, starting on Earth, but spreading out into the wider solar system. There’s a new . . .” She searched for the right words. “Social conservatism. A deepening backlash against certain trends in advanced cybernetics.”

  “By which you mean me. Well, they’ve been suspicious of me for decades.”

  �
��It’s a lot more extreme than before. You know we’d already had to move your care to Ceres. There were moves to block further surgery on you altogether: petitions to the World Government, vetoes in the Security Council. Not long after we put you under, Ceres started to come under pressure to suspend our surgical foundation. They’ve trade links to Mars, and Mars is one of the greatest strongholds of the new conservatism, aside from Earth itself. The psychology is interesting, actually, and complex.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I think perhaps Earth folk are clinging to an indigenous nature that they nearly lost, while the Martians are hanging on to their own humanity in an utterly inhuman environment . . . Fortunately for us, Makemake stepped in. They were willing to provide an alternative facility here at Trujillo Base.”

  “Nice of them.”

  “This lab is brand new—even the best facilities on Ceres can’t compare to what they’ve got here. There’s a lot in it for the colonists here as well. You’re exactly the prestige commission they needed to prove their competence. And as it happens, Makemake has turned out to be a good choice for an entirely different reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’re on the edge of the Kuiper Belt, Howard. Apparently there’s a problem out there which the various government agencies would like you to look into.”

  “Government agencies that, given the public mood, would no doubt prefer to see the back of me?”

  “Just because you’re a headache to them in some ways, doesn’t mean you aren’t useful in others.”

  “And they wonder why people are cynical about politicians. All right. Give it to me straight. Who’s got themselves into trouble they can’t get out of? One of those bloody Springers again?”

  “Not them. And not who. What. It’s something to do with the Machines. The robots. The brave new children of Conseil. You ought to remember. You played your part in bringing them into being.”

  “Nice to feel appreciated,” Falcon said.

  Hope nodded. “Isn’t it? Now then—does it hurt when I do this?”

  9

  An ice ball under a black sky: a playground for Howard Falcon, post-human.

  He rolled forward with ease. The three main camps on Makemake—Trujillo, Brown and Rabinowitz—were linked by graded roads carved into the ice, so he had no difficulty picking a smooth path away from the airlock. Quickly, Trujillo’s huddle of domes, antennae and landing pads fell away behind him. The sun was almost directly overhead, but at a distance of 39 AU—astronomical units; Makemake was thirty-nine times as far from the sun as Earth—the sun was fifteen hundred times fainter than on Earth, no more than a bright star. For a moment Falcon felt a sort of pity for the sun, that its life-giving brightness could be so easily diminished. He remembered how the sunlight had felt on the back of his neck on the observation deck of the Queen Elizabeth, with the baked and cracked landscape of the Grand Canyon below . . .

  And when he looked away from the sun a vault of stars towered over him, awesome in their silence and stillness.

  He had seldom been this far from home. Yet, he knew, on the true, ­chilling scale of the wider solar system—as defined by the Kuiper Belt, and the still more remote Oort Cloud—he had barely taken a step from Earth. And none of those stars he could see lay nearer than four light-years; most were vastly more distant than that, hundreds, thousands of times further away. The scale of things never ceased to stir his soul.

  * * * *

  Falcon had promised Hope that he would not stay outside for more than a few hours on this test jaunt, so at length he turned back towards Trujillo. The day here was a mere eight hours long—the sun was moving towards the horizon with almost indecent haste—and the weak shadows were already lengthening when the friendly lights of the base began to rise into view.

  But now there was another light, falling from the sky: the spark of an arriving spacecraft. It settled down onto one of the landing pads in vacuum silence, using only brief bursts of thrust to control its descent. Falcon stared at it—and after a second the descending ship swelled in his vision. It would be a while before his upgraded zoom function became effortless. The pilot was doing a good enough job, he could see, although maybe a little heavy on those thruster inputs. He muttered, “Easy on the throttle, you fool . . .”

  And when he looked more closely what concerned him more than indifferent piloting was the cradled-Earth logo of the World Government on the side of the spacecraft. Technically, the WG’s jurisdiction encompassed the whole solar system; in reality, it had little day-to-day need to reinforce its influence beyond Saturn. He knew of only one reason for government functionaries to come so far out.

  Howard Falcon, and the Machines.

  His vocation was the opening-up of worlds. Why had he ever allowed himself to get involved in murky government business?

  Flattery. That was why.

  10

  They had come to him, bizarrely, during a music recital back on Earth.

  It was almost the last time he’d allowed himself to be drawn back to the home world. And this was long ago, only six or seven years after the attack on the Shore—but already time enough for the public and politicians to have had second and third thoughts about the whole business of Machine autonomy. Then, as now, Falcon found himself thinking back to the global praise for humble, heroic Conseil: it had been nice to dream, at least for a while . . .

  The event had been the gala opening of the Ice Orchestrion, the newest and strangest musical curiosity of a new and strange century. Along with hundreds of other dignitaries, VIPs, global celebrities and guests—there were even said to be a few simps, including the bluff Ham 2057a, newly elected President of the Independent Pan Nation—Falcon had been invited to Antarctica to witness the opening performance of Kalindy Bhaskar’s much anticipated Neutrino Symphony. Bhaskar was the most celebrated composer of the age, and her pieces had grown increasingly ambitious and conceptual. The Neutrino Symphony promised to be the crowning glory of an already feted career: a piece of music conceived for a unique and awesome musical instrument, around whose sheer, shining flanks the guests were assembling when Falcon had arrived.

  The setting itself had been stunning. Falcon made his way from his own small, solo aircraft towards a great icy amphitheatre, itself several kilometres across. In the middle of the long Antarctic night, it was like looking into some vast open-cast mine, brilliantly lit. And within this pit was a tremendous cube of ice, each of its faces no less than a kilometre tall. The guests had mostly arrived by helicopter and hovercraft, before making their way down a series of zig-zagging ramps—some used small carts or scooters—to the base of the monstrous cube, where they were utterly dwarfed. All this to a terrifying accompaniment of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, piped at shrieking volume.

  Huddled in their furs and layers of electrically-warmed insulation, the guests gathered on viewing platforms, with drinks and canapés served from bars made of solid ice and outlined in neon light. Breath pulsed out in white gouts, and people stomped booted feet and clapped mittened hands against the chill, their talk and laughter echoing back from the amphitheatre’s sides. Bizarrely, Falcon spotted a solitary emperor penguin wandering through the audience as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  But even as he joined the crowd Falcon felt only distantly a part of it all.

  The cold meant nothing to him, and the music from the loudspeakers registered as shrill and alien. Falcon was not short of company—plenty of people wanted to bag an encounter with a legendary figure, and this time there was no Matt Springer to soak up the attention—but he found the guests’ small-talk repetitive and wearying. Even the friendliest did not want to get too deeply into conversation with him, apparently for fear of the grimness of experience to which he might expose them.

  And there was a darker reaction from some others. He heard few direct insults that night, but he could fill in the blanks
: that he was neither human nor machine, but an unnatural mixture. His very movements were strange, even insectile, as if, in his metal shell, he wasn’t a man but a giant upright cockroach. That he was, in short, an obscenity.

  Even then, twenty years after the Grand Canyon, Howard Falcon was used to it.

  Eventually, to Falcon’s relief, the loudspeakers fell silent and Kalindy Bhaskar walked onto a raised podium of carved ice. There was a polite ripple of applause. Falcon couldn’t see much of her face, shielded as it was by a heavy fur hood; her clothing was electric white with neon-blue hems. She looked very small, almost childlike. When she began to speak it was with an uneasy diffidence, as if she had never before addressed a formal gathering.

  Bhaskar told her guests that they were indeed about to experience the first performance of her new work, the Neutrino Symphony—but in another sense every performance would be the first. The symphony would never be quite the same each time, and Bhaskar had made rigorous legal arrangements to forbid any recordings of individual performances.

  She turned her back on the assembly and gestured up at the towering cube.

  “A little less than a century ago, women and men came to this place to lay the groundwork for a great experiment. The ice here was flat then, stretching away for endless windswept kilometres. They dug holes, shafts, into the ice, going down more than a kilometre: hundreds of such shafts, laid out in a precise cubical array. Into the shafts they lowered delicate devices, intricate scientific instruments, sensors designed to respond to the arrival of subatomic particles called neutrinos. They needed the ice to screen out the signals of all the other cosmic particles—only the neutrinos could get through.

  “Neutrinos. They’re all around us, whispering through our bodies as we speak. Countless trillions in an instant. Most come from the heart of the sun, but some are from interstellar and galactic space. Neutrinos of all flavours, all energies. Elusive as ghosts.