The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “Meanwhile,” he said, “Security is pressing for more extreme solutions.”

  “Like the hibernacula?”

  “That’s one possibility. If we run out of refuges we may have to store whole populations.” The technology that Hope Dhoni was using to sleep-stalk Falcon across the centuries was in fact a spin-off of such last-resort studies. “Or a drastic reduction of numbers. If the population is virtually zero by Ultimatum Day, you see—”

  “Those unborn can’t be harmed. We have a high birth rate. We’re trying to fill up an empty world. How strange that must be, culturally.”

  “The steady pressure of the Ultimatum is making us a less human society, Jeffrey. Distorting us. Was Earth under the World Government ever a utopia? Well, the shadows are closing in. And it’s going to get a lot worse before the Machines’ work is done.”

  Pandit, staring into the dying sun, seemed troubled. He was a thoughtful young human being, Falcon thought, Martian or not. Very carefully—a cybernetic limb and a delicate pressure suit made for a risky ­combination—Falcon patted Pandit’s back. “Come on. Let’s get back to the trailer. Time I took some more of your salary off you in the poker school . . .”

  39

  The final day was much as the first two had been, a patient, steady slog. But as they slowly approached their goal, Falcon’s curiosity about what might be found on the summit of Olympus sharpened.

  When they did breast the final rocky slope, Pandit, in his pressure suit, emerged to join Falcon, and they looked out in silence.

  The caldera of Olympus Mons was a pit eighty kilometres across, a plain of nested volcanic vents: craters so huge that individually they would have been striking features, even if they had not been crammed together and lifted into the sky atop the solar system’s largest mountain. Falcon, standing beside the rover, could see all the way to the caldera’s far rim. The air was clear, the sky above a deep blue. This was as close to the pre-Eos Martian environment as still existed. Inevitably there were some conservatives who argued for erecting a dome over this tremendous basin and preserving it as an environmental museum of the old Mars, and standing here Falcon wasn’t sure he disagreed.

  But all of this was a mere backdrop to the human affairs of the day.

  Falcon wasn’t surprised to see a rover driving up the slope to meet them, unmarked, a clone of Pandit’s. And as he followed the rover’s trail back into the caldera, Falcon made out a small settlement, evidently temporary: a handful of domes, a couple more rovers, a surface widely scuffed by tyres and boots—and, there, cupped in the craters, gantries, workshops, fuel stores, and the slim forms of rockets.

  “Good grief,” Falcon said. “Just as the surveillance missions reported. They really did build Cape Canaveral on top of Olympus Mons.”

  Pandit laughed. “More like Peenemunde, sir, if you want an even older reference. They’re very much experimental here.”

  The rover drew to a halt, and a figure in a pressure suit—a young woman, Falcon could see her face behind her visor—and a handful of others clambered out. Falcon didn’t think these people were carrying weapons, but he felt uncomfortable having to bet his life on it.

  “Welcome, Commander Falcon.”

  “You’re Melanie Springer-Soames, of course.”

  “You recognise me from the mug shots Security no doubt hold on me.”

  “Also from the leaping-gazelle logo on your helmet. And your reputation . . .” Springer-Soames was the product of two mighty dynasties, the heroic-explorer Springers and the presidential Churchill-Soames. Falcon had no doubt she would turn out to be the tough operator Planetary Security reported her to be. “You knew I was coming?”

  She shrugged. “We do have spies.” She glanced at Pandit, who seemed uneasy—and Falcon immediately began to speculate who of the friendly poker school was the traitor. She said, “And I happen to know you were given a souvenir, the gift of an acorn, by your naive young friend here. Let me repeat the gesture.”

  From a pocket on her outer suit layer, she produced a silver sphere the size of an apple, and handed it to Falcon. He hefted it; it felt heavy even in Mars’s low gravity.

  She said, “We call it an Acorn, too—and it’s what this project is all about.”

  Pandit said now, edgily, “Naive, am I? You must know that the Lowell administration has an embargo on weapons development—”

  “Officially.”

  Falcon said, “He’s right, though. And now here you kids are, building a missile base one planet in from Jupiter itself.”

  Springer-Soames stiffened. That word “kids” seemed to provoke her, as Falcon had hoped; to be contemptuous to the arrogant and ambitious was one way to make them open up.

  “This is not a missile base,” she said now. “And we are not manufacturing weapons. Or at least, not weapons to be used to kill.” She indicated the metal sphere he held. “That is a weapon of a metaphorical kind that will win mankind—not the worlds of the solar system—the stars.”

  And Falcon looked down at the “Acorn” with new respect.

  * * * *

  Melanie Springer-Soames walked the visitors around the launch site. Falcon, always a technology buff, was fascinated.

  The scheme was simple in principle, challenging technically.

  “Those slim ships are fusion rockets, Commander. They’re sufficient to get off Mars and out to the Oort Cloud, at high speed. The Machines may try to stop us; we’re confident they won’t get them all. Out in the Cloud we’ve already established a resource extraction operation; the ships will be refuelled with big, flimsy bags of comet ice and fusion fuel—”

  “You’re making starships,” Falcon guessed wildly.

  “It will take centuries, but that’s where we’re going. We aim to hit every remotely habitable exoplanet within reach, as long as we’re capable of continuing the programme. And the payload . . .” She gestured. “You’re holding it. One Acorn per world would be sufficient, theoretically. We’ll send two or three to each target for redundancy. Acorns planted on new worlds.”

  Falcon started to see it. “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

  “That’s the idea. An oak tree, you see, is a machine created by acorns for the purpose of making more acorns, constructed from local resources, the soil, the air. Commander, each of our Acorns is crammed with data. The heart of it is a nugget of engineered carbon: a bit of stolen Machine technology actually, a product of their deep mining of Jupiter. The information density is somewhere between that of human DNA and nano-engraved diamond. One gram of it would be enough to store all of human culture. A lot less than one gram is enough to store the DNA definition of a human.”

  “So that’s it,” Pandit said. “You could ‘store’ the blueprints for millions of people in there. And I guess these little Acorns are like Machine assemblers. You will grow humans, manufacture their bodies and whatever support systems they need from the resources of the target planet.” He grinned, despite himself. “That’s outrageous.”

  Springer-Soames grinned back. “It takes twenty years for an acorn to grow an oak tree mature enough to make more acorns. We figure we can match that: from an Acorn landing to a baby’s wail, in twenty years or less. You see, Commander? Maybe we’re going to lose the solar system. But we aren’t prepared to concede the stars—and this is a way of blindsiding the Machines. When they do get out there eventually, they’ll find humans, ready and waiting for them.”

  “Your ancestors would be impressed,” Falcon said. “All the Springers, even the ones I never got to argue with.”

  “Maybe so,” she said more coldly. “The immediate issue is, what are you going to do about it? You, an agent of Planetary Security.”

  Falcon winced at that, but he couldn’t deny it was de facto true. “I take it you want a resolution to the legal challenges you face. If not, you wouldn’t have allowed me up here.”
>
  She nodded grudgingly. “That’s true. We don’t need any help, but we’d rather proceed without threat of interference. My family has known you a long time, Commander. You have your limitations, but you do have integrity.”

  “Thanks,” he said dryly. “But why be so secretive in the first place? Why didn’t you work through the authorities?”

  She laughed. “Why do you think? Because the World Government, under the pressure of the Machine Ultimatum, is slowly but surely turning into one of the most repressive regimes in human history. Security would have quietly spoken to Port Lowell, and we would have been stopped, simple as that. That’s why we went dark.”

  “But you can’t be stopped now, can you?” Falcon said, almost sadly. “Not if you’ve already fired your first few missions.”

  “Exactly. So we’ve won already.”

  “It’s not a game,” he said sternly. “And while the World Government isn’t perfect, it’s not evil either.” He made to rub his cheek, a gesture that was a vestige of his more human days; the young people around him watched curiously, and, self-conscious, he dropped his hand. He said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if some think tank somewhere inside the administration hadn’t already proposed doing exactly what you’re undertaking. As you say it does achieve long-term goals—it could secure the future of humanity.”

  “Then why haven’t they done it already?”

  He sighed. “For ethical reasons alone, I should think. You speak of using local resources on those remote planets to make humans. What about any creatures who are already dependent on those resources? We like to think it’s a long time since humans were prepared to despoil living worlds for our own benefit.”

  “These are desperate times—”

  “Not that desperate.” He hefted the silver sphere in his hand. “Look, I’m not going to stop you. I don’t suppose I could, and the cat is out of the bag already. But I want you to come with me and report what you’ve done—talk it through with the Extraplanetary Ethics Bureau.”

  “A Terran hot-air factory,” Springer-Soames grumbled. “I prefer action.”

  “I know you do,” Falcon said with a smile. “All you Springers are the same. I met Matt, remember?”

  “But that’s the deal?”

  “That’s the deal.”

  She looked up at the sky. “This is all about what they used to call the First Contact directives, isn’t it? That some day we will be judged by a higher intelligence. Do you really take that seriously, Commander?”

  “Well, I knew the philosopher who drafted those directives. And . . .”

  And he thought of Howard Falcon Junior. There had been more of those enigmatic entities, replicas of the Orpheus that had been lost in the heart of Jupiter—and yet, over the decades, glimpsed in the scattered ruins of Mercury, on the churned-up Machine-held Moon, in the depths of space . . . Even Machines had made such sightings—so he had learned from a leaky section of Planetary Security, who had ways of knowing such things. No human knew what this could mean, how it could be happening, and nor could any Machine, Falcon was prepared to bet. One had even been observed from Port Van Allen, hanging in space above the planet Earth with all its peoples, like a glittering toy . . .

  “Yes, I do take the First Contact directives seriously,” Falcon said simply. “Okay, enough business. Are you going to show me your rocket ships?”

  Talking, gesturing, they walked down the shallowing slope towards the brilliantly lit domes clustered deep in the caldera.

  * * * *

  When Howard Falcon visited Mars, it was little more than halfway between the delivery of Adam’s Jupiter Ultimatum and its completion date. His mission completed, once more he returned to his orbital shell of isolation, contemplation and communication.

  And as the Ultimatum date approached, when he looked back, Falcon was astonished how quickly the remaining time had fallen away. Five hundred years, gone like a fleeting dream. You really are getting old, Falcon.

  40

  With Hope Dhoni on his arm, Falcon strolled through the gondola of the great airship. Strolled: he was a clanking half-cyborg, she a wispy relic of obviously great age. But in this expensive environment nobody was rude enough to stare.

  “Even the corridors are plush,” Dhoni murmured. “The carpets, the paintings, the busts on their pedestals—who were those people anyhow? I suppose they’re all images of the terrible old Nazis who paid for the origi­nal tub.”

  Falcon smiled. “And no doubt the detail is accurate down to the cut of their toothbrush moustaches.”

  “Well, it would be,” Dhoni said, with a sigh. “The Martians and the Medes would probably say this is all Terrans have done for the last century or so, clung to the past, to the most irrelevant detail . . . A psychologist, which I’m not, would say this whole ship is a symptom of a mass psychosis.”

  “And the Mnemosynes might have agreed with you,” Falcon said grimly. “But what would you have people do, Hope? We’re losing our home to the fire. Isn’t it rational to save as much of the family treasure as we can? Anyhow there’s only ten more days left now. For better or worse it will all soon be over, the Ultimatum fulfilled—”

  “What’s that, for instance?” Hope pointed to a gadget on the wall.

  A young officer, smartly uniformed, approached them. She had a small, intricate tattoo on her right cheek, of a leaping animal. “That’s a cigarette lighter, ma’am,” she said, smiling. “Yes, the original designers really did allow smoking aboard an airship filled with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen—but they insisted on the use of these safety gadgets. However I think the placement is wrong. On the LZ 129—the original Hindenburg—smoking was only allowed on the B Deck, the lower deck . . .”

  They walked on, and the officer politely accompanied them.

  Falcon knew that much of the traffic between the great laputas of Saturn was conveyed in vehicles much more basic than this. Why not travel in style, however? Mankind was doomed to exile, it seemed, but was nothing if not rich in energy and materials; a re-creation of the most famous airship in history, nearly eight and a half centuries after its spectacular destruction, was a trivial cost. Falcon however had refused to endorse a proposed project to re-create Earth’s second most famous crashed airship, the Queen Elizabeth IV, a ship now buried almost as deeply in time.

  “Those busts, though,” Dhoni said, musing. “All of forgotten monsters. Whereas—”

  “Hope.” Falcon thought he knew where this conversation was going.

  But Dhoni always had been unstoppable once she was set in motion. “Whereas if our glorious leader had her way, all the statues and paintings would no doubt be of Amanda Springer-Soames IV, Life President of what’s left of Earth—”

  “Hope. You’re making the Lieutenant here blush. Didn’t you spot the springbok tattoo?”

  Dhoni peered down at the officer’s name-tag. Her face, itself an antique some centuries old, was still capable of showing shock and embarrassment. “Lieutenant Jane Springer-Soames. Oh, my. I do apologise.”

  “It’s not a problem,” said the young officer graciously. “To tell the truth I’m used to people quizzing me about my grandmother.”

  Falcon was interested. “How do you respond?”

  Jane shrugged. “I say that she believes she’s doing the right thing for Earth and humanity, the best way she knows how.”

  Falcon nodded. “That seems a fair assessment, whatever your politics.”

  She responded with a frown. “It’s probably a good thing you feel that way, sir. Because, I’m afraid, I need to talk to you about my grandmother. First, please, let me show you to the lounge. We’ll soon be arriving at New Sigiriya, and it’s quite a view . . .”

  As they followed her, Falcon felt a spark of concern. So much for the holiday.

  * * * *

  Of the two great passenger chambers of
the gondola’s A Deck, Falcon actually preferred the dining room, with its stylish red-leather furniture and walls panelled with images of the great zeppelin in flight over 1930s Earth cities. But the lounge was impressive too, with one wall dominated by a large stylised map of the world—of the world, Falcon reminded himself, the old world, Earth. Today the lounge was crowded with people in a variety of garbs sitting or standing close to the downward-slanting windows. Children ran and wriggled and played too, in the golden, misty light that seeped into the room.

  The light of the clouds of Saturn.

  To Falcon, whose first venture to a gas giant had been to mighty Jupiter, Saturn had always been something of a disappointment. Though not much smaller than Jupiter in diameter, Saturn was significantly less massive, and twice as far from the sun. So the upper atmosphere, where the Hindenburg sailed and which humanity was now colonising in numbers, was a realm with significantly less free energy than its equivalent on Jupiter: less solar radiation, less inner heat. And with a scarcity of energy, life was sparse too. There was a scattered native biota, but it only amounted to what would have been counted as mere aerial plankton on Jupiter; there was none of the great higher food chain of mantas and medusae that Falcon had first encountered on Jupiter.

  If Saturn was a relative disappointment as a spectacle, it had given mankind a comparatively gentle welcome. The Jupiter Ultimatum had brought an immediate need to ramp up Saturn’s production of helium-3 for mankind’s energy-hungry civilisation. And, unlike Jupiter, Saturn’s gravity in the clouds was no higher than Earth’s. Thus, with the slow but relentless approach of Ultimatum Day, the human colonisation of the clouds of Saturn in large numbers had begun. Whatever the willingness or otherwise of the surviving colony worlds, Mars, Titan and Triton, none of them had the capacity to cope with a refugee exodus from Earth. But Saturn was roomy enough to make the refugees welcome, many times over.

  Nobody knew how safe this new refuge would prove. But all those people had to be put somewhere.