The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “I remember it well. Nicola was a worthy opponent.”

  “You know, acorns on Mars are still pretty precious. The dip in sunlight hurt us too, as we tried to progress the terraforming. We plant acorns, we don’t waste them. But those of us on Mars who want nothing but a peaceful future—and a flourishing planet when the Eos Programme is done—would like you to have this, sir. As a token of our good wishes for this mission.”

  Falcon took the acorn carefully, in a claw of a hand that could have crushed it in a microsecond. “I’ll treasure it.”

  Pandit glanced at a chronometer. “Let’s make the best of what’s left of the day.” He looked back at the rover that had brought Falcon’s party here from Port Lowell over in Aurorae Sinus, still Mars’s greatest city. Dhoni had made her own way across Mars, having come down at Port Schiaparelli in Trivium Charontis. “Sir, I’ll be tracking you all the way in the rover, with my crew.”

  “Well, I hope you have a repair kit on board,” Dhoni said.

  “Hope—”

  “And for the first few hours at least, Howard, you will walk at a reasonably sedate pace. Because I will be walking with you.” She held up a small case. “Time for your five-yearly check over, Commander Falcon. And if you think you can escape that by climbing the biggest volcano there is, you’ve another think coming.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Falcon said, resigned.

  37

  As they began the climb they followed a trail of sorts, not much more than a braid of rover tyre-marks and boot prints, but proof that others had driven this way before, and many had hiked it too.

  Hope walked steadily, her thin frame looking oddly sturdy. “I bet Matt Springer did this. And for the same reason he claimed he went to Pluto. Do you remember? ‘Because it’s there!’”

  “Well, he stole that line. And are you going to talk the whole damn way up?”

  “Would you like me to?”

  “I’d like you to do your Sleeping Beauty act and fall asleep for another hundred years.”

  She waggled a gloved finger at him. “Now, Howard, that’s a cheap shot. The hibernacula are a perfectly respectable option these days. Clinically it’s just a mixture of deep freeze, targeted drugs and electronarcosis, which is nothing but a mature version of the sleep inducers you have been using for five hundred years. And it was an option I was happy to take up. After all, some of my implants are older than most people alive today . . . I intend to husband my remaining days so I can accompany you a little further on your own journey through time. Besides, how well do you sleep these days?” She let that hang. “Come on, let me do my tests. You won’t feel a thing.” And as they walked on, she fixed sensors to his exposed flesh and peered into monitors.

  He endured this, glowering, as he walked. As he had from the first days after the crash, he preferred to keep his physical condition to himself.

  But he was, astonishingly, over five hundred years old. His mechanical shell had undergone multiple upgrades, and the surviving core of his nervous system was much patched by rejuvenation and regeneration treatments, all paid for by slow-maturing trust funds and such components of the World Government as occasionally found Falcon useful, or perhaps amusing. But he was capable of feeling discomfort, and weariness, and yes, pain—low level, a deep intrinsic ache. At times he used painkillers, but despite Dhoni’s occasional urging he would never have considered finding a way to detach this sensation altogether. He regarded the pain as a relic of his humanity.

  “So,” she said as she worked, “you’re playing the peacemaker again.”

  “Or trying to. Much good I did on Mercury, the last time I ventured out of my hermit’s cave.”

  “It’s all your fault. Is that what you feel?”

  “Isn’t that logical?”

  “Not really. You and I do come from a unique cadre, Howard. The first undying generation in human history. And that’s the point—if we had died after a normal lifespan, then we’d never even have seen how history unfolded. But whole generations have passed since our day, and have had a chance to make their own choices. You can’t feel responsible—”

  “Thom Bittorn did.”

  “Bittorn? Oh—the geneticist responsible for the uplift of the simps. I read about his suicide. I hadn’t even realised he was still alive.”

  “He went into hiding long ago, when the Pan’s rights were recognised. He would have faced lawsuits otherwise.”

  She folded up her sensor pack. “Medically you’re doing as well as I expected—or as badly, depending how you look at it. But before I go back into the hibernaculum you will let me put you through a proper evaluation at Pasteur. And, Howard . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “You can’t carry mankind on your shoulders, not forever.” She rapped her knuckles on his steel chest plate. “Even you aren’t strong enough.”

  “The ground’s a little rougher here.” He reached out. “Take my hand.”

  * * * *

  Once Hope had turned back, Falcon kept his counsel for much of the rest of that day’s “walk.” The rover’s occupants said little either, as if they were in awe of the man-engine making this remarkable trek. Pandit did steer him away from obvious obstacles, such as particularly deep craters punched into the flank of the volcano, but Falcon preferred to make his own decisions. It wasn’t just pride; if the rover failed he might need to retrace this journey without support.

  The unworthy resentment he so often felt in Hope’s company soon wore off. And as Falcon ascended in silence, up into the thinning air and deepening blue of the Martian sky, he found his soul opening up to the calm experience.

  Despite Hope’s company for those first few hours, they had travelled almost a hundred kilometres when Pandit called a halt for the night.

  At the rest stop, Falcon glanced around. Here he was a third of the way up this greatest of all volcanoes, but the scale was simply too vast for him to be able to see anything more than a fraction of Olympus’s own great flank. Even the ground’s gentle slope wasn’t apparent. And as the western sky displayed a convincing sunset through thickening cloud, it was as if he was in a high desert somewhere—the altiplano of South America, perhaps.

  “I see we left the oak trees behind.”

  “And the pines and the grasses, yes, sir,” Jeffrey called from the rover. “We’re already pretty high—ten kilometres above the planetary mean—the atmosphere’s scale height is around eleven klicks, so the air pressure is already less than half what it was at ground level. You’ll find some lichen and mosses up here, but little else, not yet.”

  Olympus, with the group of mighty volcanoes of which it was a part, sat in Tharsis Province, an immense bulge in the Martian crust that would always push out of the atmosphere, no matter how thick the air became in the future. How strange a fully terraformed Mars would look, Falcon thought: a Moon-like landscape of craters and canyons and volcanoes that stuck out into space, in an eye-blink of geological time studded with blue lakes and scraps of green forest . . .

  “Any reason we stopped just here?”

  “Actually, yes, sir. If you look to your right, a little way off the trail . . .”

  It was a monument, a chunk of basalt evidently carved from the deep flank of Olympus and neatly etched, presumably by laser. It was little more than a metre high.

  Falcon had to lean over to read it. “I’m not too good at bending down,” he told Jeffrey. “Miracle of Victorian engineering that I am. Couldn’t they have made this a little taller?”

  “Ah, but it’s not intended for you, sir. The government committee who set this up expressed the hope that more of his kind would some day come this way: a new generation, so to speak. It’s meant for them.”

  “His kind?”

  “See for yourself, sir.”

  And Falcon saw the inscription. This was a gravestone. Buried here was Eshu 2512a, born Hell
as AFF 526, AD 2512; died Port Lowell AFF 555, AD 2541.

  “A superchimp.”

  “I thought you’d like to see this, given your own connection with the Pans. It’s all part of your legend. I mean—”

  “It’s okay, Jeffrey. I’m a crumbling monument too, I know. So he was the last of them.”

  “Yes, sir . . .”

  Falcon had looked up the story of the simps when he’d learned of the death of Bittorn. In retrospect the establishment of an independent simp nation in the African forest, one of the first actions of the new World Government back in the twenty-first century, had been the high water mark in the saga of the Pan. After only a few generations, they had started to decline in numbers. The causes were believed to be genetic: relics of clumsy meddling by Bittorn and others that had been intended to make the simps less vulnerable to the effects of low or zero gravity—or even high gravity—such as bone mass loss and fluid balance problems. The simps, agile, strong and good climbers, had been found to be useful ­workers offworld, and such improvements had seemed commercially astute at the time. More devastating had been the fragmenting of the intellectual capacity of successive generations, as Bittorn’s hasty neural ­rewiring had unravelled.

  In their last days there had been a generous gesture by the Martian government to offer to host as many of the surviving simps as chose to come in a specially constructed independent compound in the Hellas basin, the lowest point on Mars; perhaps Mars’s one-third gravity would be more conducive to the simps’ clumsily modified anatomies than either of the extremes of Earth’s full gravity or the microgravity of space. The colony had never exactly flourished, but it had survived for a few generations.

  “But now it’s all over,” Falcon said.

  “My mother brought me up here to see this, sir. She remembered Eshu before he died.”

  “So why a monument on Olympus?”

  “Eshu was alone in the last few years. The last of the Pan. And he tried to do things no other Pan had ever achieved, just to say his species had made it. Walking up Olympus was one of them. Hence this marker.”

  “That’s a classy touch: a bucket list for a whole race.”

  “I just hope that humans behave as well as the Pan, if the Jupiter Ulti­matum is fulfilled.”

  Falcon had nothing to say to that.

  “One more thing, Commander. The simp monument contains some individual messages. Particular individuals to whom the simps felt they owed a debt. Might be worth checking, sir. For you, I mean.”

  “Hmm.” Falcon thought back to the crash of the Queen Elizabeth IV, a grace note that had itself passed into legend—and which, sometimes, he barely remembered himself, or, like a story told and retold, it was as if it had happened to someone else—but he had saved the life of one simp worker, at least. “An individual message?”

  “You just have to touch the monument—it will sense the contact from your . . .”

  “Hand,” Falcon said. He touched the chimp-height gravestone, his mechanical fingers resting on Olympus basalt. Details of cold and texture whispered through to him via the fingers’ tactile receptors.

  And the head and shoulders of a simp appeared in the Martian air, the hint of some kind of tunic below the neck. After all these years—these centuries—the face was unmistakeable to Falcon. This was Ham 2057a, once President of the Independent Pan Nation—and, it was said, having responded well to anti-senescence experiments, one of the longest-lived simps. “Commander Falcon.” His voice sounded clearly, inside Falcon’s head, and Falcon wondered what technology was being used to project this illusion. Now Ham grinned. “Boss—boss—go!” And he winked.

  With that, the projection was over. Falcon knew those words; they were the brusque command he had given that simp on the doomed QE IV. But . . .

  “Since when the hell did simps wink?”

  “Sir? Are you all right? . . . The sun’s nearly gone. Will you be joining us in the rover for the night?”

  Falcon straightened up stiffly, trying to focus on the here and now. “Listen, how many of you are there in there? Have you Mars boys ever heard of a game called poker . . . ?”

  * * * *

  Later that night, on impulse, using the rover’s facilities, Falcon looked up the name of that last Pan: Eshu. He found it was a Yoruba name for a god of West African myth.

  A trickster god.

  And he thought again of Ham, a message left in a monument to a supposedly extinct species, meant for Falcon personally. And he had winked.

  Sometimes he wondered if anybody in his life had ever told him the straight truth.

  38

  In the morning, the flank of Olympus sparkled with frost.

  “Wow,” Falcon said, rolling back and forth over the thin rime. “Here’s a sight John Young never dreamed of.”

  “Yes, sir. We even get a little snow—I mean, water-ice snow, not the native dry-ice sort—but no rain yet, and no standing water. That will come. One day there will be glaciers in the Valles Marineris for the first time in billions of years . . . Umm, take care with your locomotion just here. There can be ice under the surface, and it can be treacherous.”

  “Noted. So, you guys ready to roll . . . ?”

  The second day of the climb was as dull and featureless as the first had been. The sky was undeniably beautiful, a blue of an exquisite shade Falcon had never seen on Earth, with high, icy clouds catching the light of the remote sun. But the ground was plain as ever, if not more so, with fresh craters more common at this elevation than skims of lichen or moss. It was as if he was climbing from Earth to Moon, Falcon mused.

  As it turned out, the most spectacular sights came at the end of the day.

  When they halted for the evening, Pandit emerged from the rover in what looked to Falcon like a bona fide pressure suit. “Just wanted to make sure you take a proper look at the sunset, Commander . . .”

  The sun, visibly shrunken from its apparent diameter at Earth, seemed to be resting on the western horizon. Its low, reddened light swept across an Olympian flank of craters, gullies and scarred plains that showed precious few signs of the new life that was being laboriously cultivated here.

  But it was not the ground Falcon was supposed to look at but the heavens. Pandit pointed, drawing Falcon’s gaze. Falcon briefly wondered if Pandit wanted to show him the immense solar-collector mirrors that had been hung in orbit around Mars, to drive the terraforming programme—but it was not that.

  There, clearly visible against a sky the colour of a deep bruise, was a great semicircle centred on the sun itself, with half its arc hidden beneath the horizon. Falcon tried to measure its scale against the apparent diameter of the sun: it might have been a hundred times the width. This was not a circle, a hoop, but a perspective of the vast sphere of Machines that enclosed the sun; the faint tracery of scattered sunlight was only really visible at the edge, where the optical thickness was greatest.

  “The Host,” Falcon said grimly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A shell the size of the orbit of Mercury . . . What a spectacle. What an—obscenity. Is Venus visible yet?”

  “It will be later, sir. You know, given the accounts of how the Machines took apart Mercury, many of us are puzzled that they haven’t yet done the same to Venus.”

  “Security have been keeping an eye on Venus. We send the odd daring close-in probe—we’re not allowed to land, but much of the atmosphere is gone, and we can see the exposed surface. The Machines are there, working. Building . . . something. Structures whose purpose we can’t identify. It seems they want to experiment, to see if an intact planetary-mass body could be useful to them after all. We forget sometimes how young they are . . .” Indeed it was less than five centuries since Falcon had stood on the deck of the USS Shore with Conseil, the comic serving-bot that had turned out to be the precursor to all of this. “To them a few centurie
s is as nothing.”

  “But it’s an eternity to us humans, sir. And we’re only a little more than halfway to the Jupiter Ultimatum date.” Pandit stared at the strange vista. He asked hesitantly, “What about people on Earth, sir? Do they, umm, believe the threat? I can tell you that day to day we don’t give it a thought.”

  Falcon smiled. “That’s because you’ve got a world to build. You’ve something to do.” Which Falcon often envied as he rattled around in his cabin, trapped in the endless cycles of the spinning, orbiting Port Van Allen. “Oh, it’s taken seriously on Earth now. It was the Little Ice Age that changed things, I guess. Even the Mercury war had been just a light show in the sky. Then the war came to Earth itself. At last serious long-term programmes were launched. Cultural treasures stashed off-planet—”

  “I know. The Port Skia museum has a pretty impressive Leonardo collection.”

  “But a great deal of digital treasure was lost in the Mnemosyne bombing back in ’34 . . .” The Mnemosynes, taking their name from a goddess of memory, had argued that mankind’s ability to deal with the terminal future of the Ultimatum was hampered by a clinging to the past—and that therefore the past should be sloughed off, abandoned. “You can’t save everything, I guess.”

  Pandit said, “There are rumours there have been negotiations about mass evacuations. Well, look at the Hellas basin, three thousand kilometres wide and nine deep, and predicted to have a breathable atmosphere well before Ultimatum Day. That would make for a pretty big refugee settle­ment.”

  Or, Falcon thought more bleakly, a concentration camp.

  The Martians had already been more than generous, it was generally thought. Hellas was littered with domes containing samples of Earth biomes, from the sub-Arctic tundra to the tropical rainforests. Attempts had even been made to reconstruct Aboriginal songlines in the Martian dust. But in historical terms Mars had barely won its independence from Earth, and unlike the Hermians, swarms of Terran migrants wouldn’t be too welcome.