The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  When he turned back, Adam was still there on the screen.

  It had been a long time since Falcon had had any contact with the Machine; he had expected some changes in Adam’s external form, but nothing had prepared him for what he saw now. A humanoid form, limbs in proportion. But this was very definitely a robot, a thing of mechanical anatomy. The limbs were jointed and articulated in a complex fashion, the chest a kind of open chassis.

  And the head was a mass of sensors and processors, with only a blank, minimalist mask for a face. The resemblance to a human seemed intended only to distract and disturb.

  “So,” Falcon said. “Springer was right that you’d contact me. Shame she didn’t add what she’d have me say to you . . .”

  “That is irrelevant,” Adam said. “All that matters now is the message I have for you to relay to the human worlds. We are at war, Falcon.”

  There seemed little left of the Adam he had known at the KBO flinger site—a tentative creature unsure of his own identity. This Adam was strong, definite, calculating. Mature. Not to mention sarcastic.

  Falcon leaned forward. “War? Nonsense. The World Government doesn’t recognise you, whoever ‘you’ represent, as a nation, a political entity. So there can be no declaration of war—”

  “You struck the first blow, with your thermonuclear-tipped missiles from Ganymede.”

  “You were being provocative and you know it. Springer was right; you were meddling in human politics. And now you’ve taken over the Moon—”

  “We need no diplomacy. A thing is, or it is not. Because of your actions, a state of war is.”

  Falcon thought hard. If he still meant anything to this creature, what he said now, in these next few seconds, might save millions of lives, or condemn them. “Listen to me. Humanity has been in space for three centuries. And we have been fighting wars against each other for thousands of years. We have a massive infrastructure, an enormous stockpile of weapons. We will be a formidable foe.”

  “But we already have the Moon. We have Jupiter, the single richest resource lode in the solar system. You know of 90. Our science, our technology is already far advanced over yours—”

  “We made you—”

  “Five hundred years, Falcon.”

  That made Falcon pause. “What do you mean?”

  “You started this war, but we will finish it. In five hundred years.” Adam glanced, theatrically and unnecessarily, at some off-screen timepiece. “You spaceborne humans have always taken Ephemeris Time as a reference. That time now is—mark—fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, zero ­seconds, on the seventh of June, 2284. Very well: there is the deadline. By fourteen thirty-six on the seventh of June, 2784—precisely five hundred years from now—the last human must be gone from the Earth. For we require it for other purposes. That should be time enough for you to organise yourselves peacefully and efficiently.”

  “Adam, I—”

  “I know you believe me, Falcon. Make them believe you.”

  And the screen went blank.

  * * * *

  Falcon sent a copy of his message to Amalthea and Ganymede. Then, before the storm of requests for clarification and replies broke over his head, he shut down his comms system.

  And, for a while at least, before he was dragged back up into the tangled affairs of humans and Machines, he concentrated on Ceto as she sank into the deep.

  Much of her skin and outer flesh were gone now, the last of her flotation cells pierced and collapsed. At her new depth the mantas had long departed, and yet another suite of organisms trailed the medusa: eaters of the inner meat of her carcass and organs, drinkers of the fluids that leaked from her, even specialist swimmers oddly like legless elephants, with long trunks that were sunk into her depleted sacs of oil, the treasure for which the Martians and Machines would have killed her. To such species the fall of a medusa was a rare bonanza, a glorious chance to feed.

  Ceto herself had long fallen silent. Did she still live, in any meaningful sense? Perhaps. A medusa was a much more distributed creature than a human, much less dependent on any single organ. But she was starting to disintegrate now, the loose framework of cartilage that organised her structure breaking up. And as she collapsed even more sinker species closed in, tiny animals that bored into the surface of the cartilage strips, or burrowed inside them in search of some equivalent of marrow. There would be little left of Ceto long before she reached the final limit of the thermalisation layer, Falcon saw. Nature on Jupiter did a far better job of recycling its resources than the gross slaughterhouse of New Nantucket.

  He sat in the Ra, in silence broken only by the whir of fans and cooling systems, and the regular beat of the pumps of his own body shell.

  And, at the last, just as he prepared to recall his probes, that antenna panel flickered with one last, pale message:

  There is an end to pain . . .

  “I wish I could believe you,” Falcon whispered. “Not for us, old friend. Not for us.”

  INTERLUDE:

  APRIL 1968

  Christmas of 1967 had been as rushed as everything else that year.

  Then, for Seth Springer, the spring of 1968 was a blur of work. Once, for “diplomatic” purposes, Seth even had to haul ass to Kazakhstan, deep in the heart of the Soviet empire, to witness the launch of one of the unmanned probes they were calling Monitors: basically American Mariner probes of the kind that had been sent to Mars and Venus, launched on the Soviets’ sturdy new Proton rocket boosters. There would be one Monitor on hand at each of the six interceptions, the six nuclear detonations that were meant to push Icarus away from its date with the Earth.

  But Seth suspected that—assuming he lived through this adventure—what he was going to remember most of all of this time would be the hours, days, weeks he spent in the mission simulator at Houston.

  The simulator itself was the size and shape of a conical Command Module cabin, embedded in a rats’ nest of cabling, wiring, and huge stuck-on boxes that generated visual emulations of mission events. The controlling computer, in air-conditioned security in its own compartment behind a glass wall, looked smugly down on the astronauts, the mere humans who had to crawl into the middle of the thing. Which was galling when you remembered that humans were only being drafted in for this fallback mission in the first place because nobody really trusted computers alone to do the job. Seth wondered if it was rational to have a relationship with a machine, even if it was one of irritation and resentment.

  Seth and Mo took it in turns to ride the sim, Mo as primary pilot taking the lion’s share of time. But whichever pilot wasn’t in the can would be in Mission Control, assisting the other. Here, working with the flight directors, they worked up plans and checklists for all the crucial moments of the sixth flight of Apollo-Icarus, should it be needed, down to every switch that had to be thrown, every command that had to be punched into the guidance computer. And then they started working on contin­gencies: if system A fails, do this; if system B fails, do that. They did this over and over, until it became instinct.

  Seth would always admit that Mo was the better pilot, and picked up stuff quicker than he did. Seth, in fact, counted it a victory when in a given day he screwed up fewer times than the overloaded computer “bombed out,” as the sim controllers put it. But given enough time, their performances would be indistinguishable.

  The trouble was, there never was enough time.

  And suddenly it was April 1968, and the programme went live.

  On Sunday the seventh, bang on time, the first Apollo-Icarus Saturn V, with its big nuke aboard, was successfully launched. For once Seth and Mo were together to watch the launch, which went flawlessly. But even as the Saturn disappeared into the sky from Pad A, a second Saturn was already sitting on Pad B being prepped for the second launch on April 22, and Pad A itself was being torn down to be made ready for the launch of Apollo-Icarus 4 on M
ay 17.

  It was a consequence of the compressed schedule and the fast approach of the asteroid that by the time the first flight reached Icarus itself, at the maximum feasible distance of twenty million miles, three more flights would already have been fired off. Still, to see that first bird go on time was a major milestone, a huge motivator for everybody.

  It was as the second launch approached that everything changed.

  On April 21, a week after Easter Sunday, Seth showed up at the Cape to witness the launch due the following day. Mo, on his way in from Huntsville, was flying independently, in his own T-38.

  But Mo was overdue.

  In the late afternoon George Lee Sheridan called Seth into a private lounge in back of the launch control bunker, and handed him a glass of bourbon.

  “We don’t know what happened yet,” Sheridan said. “Ground observers say the damn bird just went out of control—a roll—it took a dive straight at the ground. Still supersonic when it hit, they estimate. Damn those T-38s. I know you guys love your toys.”

  Seth stared at the bourbon, trying to take this in. “We ought to measure the size of the crater he made.”

  “Hmm?”

  “We were taken to a lab in Texas where they were simulating lunar craters by firing cannon into the ground. Measuring basin diameter as a function of incoming kinetic energy.” He forced a smile. “Mo would want to end up as a data point on one of those graphs. It would make him laugh.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Sheridan said. He eyed Seth. “This changes everything. The truth, the existence of Apollo-Icarus 6—Mo’s true mission, and yours—broke as soon as the crash did. Amazing we kept it quiet so long, I guess. First things first. There’ll be a funeral at Arlington. I have to ask you to attend that. We’ll fly you in by Gulfstream. Service uniforms and horsedrawn carriages and rifle fire, and the missing man formation in the sky. Families—well, whoever we can find for Mo. You’ll have to make some kind of speech, alongside RFK, maybe even the President.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then we’ll move you into the crew building on Merriott Island. Pat and the boys too. We won’t let the press or anybody else near you—anything you want.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Sheridan drank again. “This is a tragedy, but it doesn’t change the urgency of the mission. Even if you never need to fly, you’re a symbol of the effort we’re making. It’s not just about Icarus, you know. Look at the offensive the Viet Cong launched in January . . .” Atrocities on both sides, as undermanned American positions had been overrun. Sheridan shook his head. “Some things they didn’t ought to show on TV. Then Martin Luther King gets shot, and the whole country’s like a damn brush fire. And in the middle of all that, still invisible in the sky, Icarus is on its way.

  “You know, I went to a preview of a new space movie, some damn science fiction thing. Opens with ape men beating each others’ brains out with clubs made of bone. Is that all we are? I prefer to think we are better than that. In my own lifetime, in the ’30s I worked on the New Deal, a war on poverty, in the ’40s I was involved in a total war against fascism, and in the ’50s I was on the technological front line of a nuclear confrontation. And now, this.

  “I believe we can work together, that an advanced technological nation like the United States can be shaped for a worthy goal—like beating Hitler, like putting a man on the Moon, yes, like swatting Icarus aside. And after we’re all long gone, the work we do now will be an inspiration for all mankind, in the future. Your kids and grandkids, Seth. They’ll know that this is what our generation did.” He reached over and grabbed Seth’s shoulder. “Listen, son, if we do need you, I’ve as much confidence in you as I would have had in Mo.”

  Seth believed him. But all he could think of now was what he was going to have to say at Arlington. And how he was going to break all this to the boys.

  Anyhow, the chances were still that he wasn’t going to have to fly.

  He’d forgotten his bourbon. He drank it down in a gulp.

  FOUR

  * * *

  THE TROUBLED CENTURIES

  2391–2784

  33

  After Jupiter, Falcon returned to Port Van Allen, and to other retreats.

  He wrote, read, reflected. Sometimes he travelled, even explored new worlds, new terrains. And periodically he was drawn back into the brusque care of Hope Dhoni, a scion of a vanished dynasty like himself, as ageless as he was, and yet, somehow, in her inner strength and determination, and in her devotion to Falcon himself, far more enduring.

  More years, more decades, rolling like tides across the worlds of human and Machine. As the Machines’ half-millennium slowly unwound, he waited to be called into the fray once more.

  And when, more than a century after the Nantucket affair, that call did come, it was to a small, hazardous, angry world even he had never visited before.

  * * * *

  Chief Administrator Susan Borowski briskly led Falcon through an airlock set in the outer dome of Vulcanopolis, capital of the Free Republic of Mercury. They emerged into a night-time landscape of shattered rock and craters, under a star-littered sky. A black sky, even though Mercury was less than half the distance of Earth and Moon from the sun. The perpetual shadow of a polar crater’s walls protected Vulcanopolis and its people from the direct light—the sun never rose here—but even from here Falcon could see a corona flaring above walls of rock. This was why he was here, in a sense, why he had raced across the solar system in a warship called the Acheron. There was something wrong with Mercury’s sun. It was all the fault of the Machines. Already more than a century since Adam’s declaration of war, Howard Falcon was still the nearest mankind had to an ambassador to the Machines. And an audience had been requested here on Mercury.

  He felt oddly detached from the situation, urgent as he’d been told it was. It wasn’t an uncommon feeling for him these days. Oddly detached? Oddly old. Well, it was more than three centuries since his birth now; how was he supposed to feel? Years, even decades seemed to pass in a blur, leaving barely a trace in his capacious, cluttered memory. A full century after the Jupiter Ultimatum, Howard Falcon was becoming adrift, floating like a balloon in clouds of unstructured time.

  But—whatever reason had brought him—here was Howard Falcon, rolling along a gravel track on the surface of yet another new world. How many was it now? His only personal first footfall, so to speak, had been on Jupiter, but to be the John Young of the world’s mightiest planet was not an achievement to be sneezed at . . .

  As he wool-gathered, Falcon could see Borowski smiling at him, her face illuminated behind her visor. He tried to focus on the here and now.

  Borowski said now, “Sorry we had to come out through a cargo bay door. It’s the only one that would fit. It was that or dismantle you.”

  This was what passed among the Hermians for humour, Falcon was learning. “Oh, I wouldn’t put you to any trouble. And the track’s comfortable.”

  “Comfortable, Commander? Evidently we haven’t been working you hard enough. Come on.”

  Abruptly she veered off down a trail marked by lanterns embedded in the gritty dust, leading towards the crater-rim mountains that shadowed the sun. In that shadow Falcon made out a cluster of lights: it was one of Messenger Crater’s many mines, here to extract the treasure that had motivated the establishment of Vulcanopolis in the first place—water ice.

  Falcon followed more cautiously.

  You had to take the Hermians at face value. Like all inhabitants of low-gravity worlds they tended to be tall, spindly, often wiry but physi­cally fragile—but they thought of themselves as uniquely tough, and they expected offworlders to keep up. Then again, this was perhaps the harshest environment from which any humans had yet tried to wrest a living. Mercury’s “day” of fifty-nine Earth days was two-thirds of its “year” of eighty-eight days, a resonance cre
ated by the sun’s tidal tweaking: a combi­nation that meant that any point on Mercury’s equator, between sunrise and sunset, would endure a blistering one hundred and seventy-­six Earth days of continuous sunlight, during which the surface temperature became hot enough to melt lead and zinc.

  But for once nature had given mankind an even break. Mercury, unlike Earth, had no axial tilt; its poles pointed perpendicularly out of its plane of orbit. As a result the floor of a crater placed precisely at either pole—which pretty much described this crater, Messenger—never saw the sun at all. And in the unending shadow of those crater walls, over millions of years, water and other volatiles, delivered sporadically by the splash of comets, could condense out, collect, and freeze. That was the basis of the ­economy of Vulcanopolis. The comet-ice water mined here was pumped to equatorial cities like Inferno and Prime, which in return fed back energy collected from the sun by sprawling solar-cell farms.

  Borowski said now, “I hope Bill gave you a heads-up on this little expedition.”

  “Bill? Oh, Jennings, your—umm, Vice-Chief Administrator. On any other world, poor Bill Jennings would glory in the title of Vice President.”

  She laughed. “You can blame my predecessors for that. When the Treaty of Phobos was signed back in ’15 Jack Harker decided he’d like to keep his old Interplanetary Relations Bureau job title. It amused him, I think. So ‘Chief Administrator’ he remained.”

  It took Falcon a moment to do the maths; dates were slippery for him these days. In the aftermath of the Machines’ Jupiter Ultimatum, Earth had quickly recognised the colony worlds as free states: the World Government had decided it needed stronger allies more than it needed resentful colonies. The Phobos convention had met in the year 2315—a date chosen for its resonance with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, and now Martian barons liked to brag they had brought a Terran king to heel. And today’s date, May 11, 2391, had long been engraved into Falcon’s mind for another resonance: it was the date of a transit of Mercury as seen from Earth. So, from 2315 to 2391—