The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  And now the Hindenburg floated over one of the great laputas, an island in the sky of mankind’s new home.

  New Sigiriya was supported by sacs of heated hydrogen-helium air, like the medusae of Jupiter, like every human vessel that had ventured into the gas giants’ atmospheres since Falcon’s own Kon-Tiki. But this laputa, a flying raft more than ten kilometres in diameter, would have dwarfed even the greatest of Jupiter’s medusae. And despite the strangeness of its setting—despite the fact that it rested not on a solid surface but over thousands of kilometres of air, despite its clusters of domes brilliantly illuminated by artificial light—as seen from above this was a very human city, of roads, buildings, parkland, even what looked like nature reserves on the periphery.

  “It’s beautiful,” Dhoni said. “Strange—out of place here—but beautiful. And a laputa like this will be my home from now on, I guess.”

  Falcon said, “But this is only the beginning of Project Silenus. Look further . . .” He took her hand and led her closer to the window.

  Beyond New Sigiriya, the sky was full of flying islands. They drifted at all altitudes, from the thick lower cloud decks to the sparse stratosphere. Some were dark shadows, some brilliantly illuminated; while some stood still in the air under their immense flotation bags, others surged purposefully forward, like ocean liners. Lesser craft too threaded their way between the laputas. Lights shone bright everywhere, the smeared city glow of the islands, the sparking buoys and pilot lamps of the ships. The vision was like one of Falcon’s own childhood fantasies of ballooning.

  “All this is very recent, ma’am,” Jane Springer-Soames said to Dhoni. “Most of the refugees from Earth have come up here only in the last few decades. In fact most people here at Saturn right now are sleepers, stacked up in the big orbiting hibernacula vessels, and there are more still waiting to be shipped from Earth. They will be restored as soon as possible.”

  “That was always expected,” Falcon put in. “The late rush.”

  Hope smiled. “For me it was the calendar. When the date finally clicked around to 2700, and I realised that for Earth there would be no 2800—that somehow made it real. ‘Project Silenus,’ though?”

  “The laputa construction projects are run out of Oasis City on Titan, but for the resources they’re mining one of the inner moons, Enceladus. And, according to Euripides, Silenus was a drunken companion of the gods who boasted of killing Enceladus with a spear.”

  “How apt.”

  “I did have to look it up.”

  Springer-Soames said, “More laputas are coming into service as fast as they can be built. And that’s only the beginning,” she went on with enthusiasm. “There are grand plans to link up individual laputas to make flying continents, enormous structures—well, there’s room on Saturn. And beyond that we may be able to join it all up into one vast shell enclosing the whole of Saturn, all at one gravity, with a thick layer of breathable air above. Like a planet with a hundred times Earth’s surface area . . .” She seemed to remember herself, and stalled.

  Falcon smiled at her. “I like your dreams.”

  “You would,” Dhoni said. “The enthusiasm of the young. That’s what will save us in the end, Howard.”

  Falcon said, “Maybe. But we have to get through Ultimatum Day first.” He faced Springer-Soames. “You said there is a problem?”

  “Yes, sir.” Jane glanced uneasily at Dhoni, then turned back to Falcon. “I’m afraid I have to ask you to come back to Earth. Have you heard of the ‘Peace Hostages’?”

  “No, but I don’t like the sound of it.”

  “It’s my grandmother’s last-ditch effort to save the planet—so she says. But to do it she’s put twelve thousand lives at risk.”

  Falcon frowned. “Twelve thousand? Who asked for my help? The President herself?”

  “No, sir,” Springer-Soames said simply. “Adam.”

  The name took Falcon aback.

  Dhoni, too, seemed shocked. “It’s so peaceful here. As if we’re drifting in a bubble of the past. But there’s always trouble. Oh—” She grabbed Falcon’s arm. “Don’t go. Not again. You’ve done your job, Howard. You—we are too old. Have some iced tea! Oh, Howard, stay with me, and let me look after you.”

  But, of course, he had no choice.

  He bent stiffly, and with great care kissed Dhoni on the cheek. Her ancient flesh was surprisingly warm. “Wait for me.”

  “I will,” she said softly.

  He straightened with a whir and turned away.

  But Springer-Soames called sharply, “Commander—careful.”

  He froze, and looked down. At his feet was a toy, a ball, which had rolled across the carpet to bump, unnoticed, against his undercarriage. It was a simple inflatable thing, like a grounded balloon—but it was a globe of Earth, battered, scuffed, evidently much cherished. Falcon imagined this thing deflated and tucked into a pocket, a souvenir of a lost home. He had nearly run it over.

  A little girl approached him. Perhaps five years old, she had short blonde hair, and a face that would one day look strong rather than beautiful, he thought, with a good chin and cheekbones. But right now she was staring at the toy uncertainly.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Please,” the kid said shyly. “Can I get my globe?”

  “Allow me.” Falcon bent, servomotors whirring, and with infinite care picked up the fragile toy with one hand, and held it out to the girl.

  She watched the toy, not Falcon; she reached out and grabbed it from him.

  A woman behind her murmured, “Be polite, Lorna.”

  Hugging the toy, she said, formally, “I’m Lorna Tem. Thank you very much.” And then she looked up at the gleaming pillar of Falcon’s body—he had the feeling she had thought he was some robot, a servomechanism, a mechanical steward serving drinks, perhaps—but then she looked into the leathery remnant of his face, peering out from the machinery, and her eyes widened.

  The woman put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s enough. Come away now . . .”

  Falcon grunted. “And that’s how the children of the human race react to me.”

  Dhoni was here. She rested her head on his upper arm. “Go save mankind once again, Howard.”

  Outside the windows of the Hindenburg II, a ferocious ammonia blizzard began to lash at the drifting laputas.

  41

  After being escorted by Lieutenant Jane Springer-Soames on a high-­acceleration dash across the solar system—and despite the urgency, there were only days left before the Ultimatum expired—Falcon knew he needed rest. Before descending to Earth he had the liner from Saturn stop at the venerable Port Van Allen.

  Falcon tried to remember when he had first come here, to a station that predated his own first flight into space, and how many times he had visited since. He knew there would be no attempt to save or salvage Van Allen when the Machines came. Instead, like the other stations which still studded near-Earth space—and indeed the great equatorial space elevators that had become fountains of fleeing refugees—in the final days Van Allen would be used by a corps of Witnesses. And then it would be abandoned, to the whim of the Machines.

  For now, as he relaxed in the care of the great wheel’s primitive but sufficient facilities, within the scuffed aluminium walls of his favourite room, Falcon sat before the window and looked out at Earth and Moon.

  The Moon was no longer the Moon, the human Moon of antiquity. Since the Machines had moved in on the satellite at the time of the Jupiter Ultimatum, Falcon, like much of the rest of mankind, had watched with reluctant fascination as human relics had been dismantled or simply ploughed into the dust, from the famous old Federation of Planets building to the fragile remains of Borman’s pioneering Apollo lander. Then the work had gone much further. The regolith had been strip-mined, leaving great rectangular scars; the inner heat of the Moon had been released to flood th
e great old craters and the dark maria with fresh lava. All this was visible from Earth, from where the face of the Moon came to look like a lurid industrial landscape—or like Mordor, and Falcon wondered if anybody else alive would pick up that reference.

  But, of course, the Moon had not been the Machines’ true target. Now, reluctantly, Falcon looked down on the turning Earth.

  The world had been transformed since his own first youthful forays into space. The ice now encroached far from the poles, north and south, even though it was northern midsummer. Still, the environmental recovery overseen by the WG in earlier generations had largely survived. The northern continents were still swathed in oak woods, the forests had recovered in South America and Africa too, and grasslands washed over much of what had once been the great deserts, the Sahara, in central Asia. Falcon knew that those forests and plains still swarmed with wildlife. As Ultimatum Day approached, every effort had been made to sample and preserve offworld all the planet’s ecosystems. But Falcon knew that all the living things down there on Earth itself, the animals, the vegetation—the elephants and the oak trees—all of them were doomed to be casualties of a war of which none of them could have any understanding. Now the old station passed over Earth’s night side, much of which had already fallen largely dark. In the end, with whole nations abandoned, a diminished mankind had huddled in a few centres. But even now some cities still blazed with defiant light—and some, sadly, burned in the night, immense bonfires of culture.

  Just as it had only been in the last few decades that the great refugee flows off the planet had begun, so it had been only at the end that the most concerted conservation efforts had been made. Physical records and treasures—even whole buildings, wrapped in shells of quasicarbon, itself once mined from the depths of Jupiter—had been transported offworld. Those treasures that could not be saved had been mapped and sampled and imaged. Thus dreamers in the clouds of Saturn could roam across “Earth II,” a crowd-sourced virtual copy. Falcon had tried it; in some options you could watch the people who had happened to be there on the day the recordings were made, and they would look into the camera and smile.

  Once or twice Falcon had cautiously ventured down to Earth himself. He had found an age of tragic glamour. Falcon would always remember wandering around a mostly abandoned London, when, rolling up from the flooded, reforested valley of the Thames, he had come upon the great Victorian museums of South Kensington, looming above the green—and he had been reminded of a similar antique palace surviving in a greened, abandoned England, discovered, in the pages of Wells’s much-loved book, by a Traveller who had gone much further in Time than even Falcon had, to the year 802,701 AD . . . In the end Falcon had found London, like Earth itself, hard to bear: a great city stilled and silent save for the cries of birds and animals, and he had retreated to his orbiting refuge.

  In the last years, there had been gestures of despair. Mass-suicidal “games.” Religions that flourished and died like mushrooms. Some even affected to worship the Machines themselves; people dressed up, or altered themselves, to become faux cyborgs. There had been a decade when Falcon himself, reluctantly, became a kind of fashion icon to such people—before the mood shifted again, and he came to be hated once more as a relic of an age of blame.

  And yet there had been nobility too. Consider the Witnesses, volunteers who were preparing to sacrifice their lives to provide a final human account of the fate of the planet—and to gather evidence against the day when the Machines stood in the dock to account for this tremendous crime.

  But, whatever the complexity and tragedy of the response to the coming deadline, the end was approaching now, at last.

  In the final few days, above these scenes of desperation and sacrifice—and visible from Port Van Allen itself—the great ships of the Machines at last arrived, lenticular forms kilometres across, driven across space by a physics no human understood, and now were suspended like silver clouds above the cities of Earth . . .

  * * * *

  Jane Springer-Soames burst into the cabin.

  “Sir—Commander Falcon! I’m sorry to disturb you—”

  Falcon stood stiffly. “Jane, it’s fine. What’s happening?”

  “We’ve had a message from my grandmother—from the President. An offer.”

  “Of what?”

  Jane, panting, swallowed hard. “A hostage exchange, sir.”

  “You mean the Peace Hostages . . . ?”

  As he had travelled to Earth, Springer-Soames’s stratagem had become brutally clear. Two of the last sleeper ships—cargo scows with crowded hibernacula in their holds—had been diverted to Unity City and forced to land under the watchful eye of armed security guards. And there they had been kept, with twelve thousand people crammed helplessly in their cold hives.

  “If Springer-Soames ever thought that holding a human shield like that would persuade the Machines to spare Unity City, let alone Earth, she’s a fool, Jane—”

  “I don’t know what she was thinking, sir,” Jane said. “Honestly. I can only tell you what she’s offering now.”

  “You said an exchange.”

  “She will release the twelve thousand—in exchange for you.”

  Falcon took that in. “Ah. Of course. That’s what this has been all about. She wants to lure me down to Earth, in the hope, probably, of luring a Machine ambassador there too—Adam himself, no doubt.”

  “What for? A final negotiation?”

  Falcon looked at the planet below. “She must know that’s futile. More a photo opportunity, I think.”

  “Sir?”

  “Sorry. An antiquated reference. Well, it will do no harm. You’re sure she will release the twelve thousand if I go down?”

  “She is my grandmother, sir. I trust her that far.”

  He smiled. “And I trust you, Lieutenant. Let’s make the descent.”

  42

  Unity City had been the greatest city on Earth—and even after it had been systematically plundered of its greatest treasures, even after the surgical removal of some of its keynote buildings to refuges elsewhere, it still was, Falcon judged, as Jane Springer-Soames piloted an orbital shuttle down to a small presidential landing facility.

  Unity had, after all, been the capital city of a World Government since its founding in the mid twenty-first century. Perhaps it had reached its zenith in the twenty-fourth century, when the confidence of Earthbound mankind was high, despite the reality of the Jupiter Ultimatum. In those days the islands of Bermuda had been massively reworked, the dry land elevated and extended, and stunning, soaring buildings erected. The greatest of all had been the Ares Tower, the last headquarters of the Federation of Planets. This had been a skyscraper made of wood, its frame built with the trunks of unfeasibly tall Martian oaks, imported at equally infeasible expense. Unity was a new Constantinople, the historians would say.

  But as early as the twenty-fifth century the failure of the WG to avert the disastrous Little Ice Age had fatally eroded its authority. Then, in the twenty-seventh century, with the deadline only a few generations away, there had been resistance, protest, civil unrest, and even attempts to sabotage the great rescue projects like the space elevators. The WG, in response, had become harsher, more authoritarian—and the Springer-Soames had used the emergency to justify the capture of a presidency turned into a militant dynastic monarchy. The assassination of a World President in the early years of the twenty-eighth century—a truly shocking event for any veteran of more idealistic days, like Falcon—had ended the facade of democracy for good.

  Towards the end, a once-utopian world state had been reduced to a rump organisation managing little more than basic policing, security of food and power supplies, and mass evacuations. The tensions of those later years showed in the tremendous wall that now surrounded the capi­tal city, hundreds of metres tall and almost as thick, and the weapons emplacements that studded every tall bui
lding.

  And yet, Falcon thought, for all its flaws the government had fulfilled its last function. Through tough population-reduction measures and massive evacuation programmes, the World Government had emptied the Earth. By now, the only people left on the Earth were those who had chosen to stay.

  * * * *

  Falcon and Jane were met off their shuttle by guards in armour that looked bulkier than Falcon’s own exoskeleton. Though the carriers with their thousands of sleeping hostages had already been allowed to leave, the President evidently wasn’t alone here.

  This was midsummer on Bermuda, but, post the Little Ice Age, the outdoor air was remarkably cool. Jane, Earthborn but a native of Scandinavia, seemed comfortable, but Falcon sensed his own heating systems whirring into life to compensate.

  The halls of the Presidential Palace—once known as the New White House—were pleasantly warm by comparison. But Jane and Falcon had to cross what seemed like square kilometres of marble, passing under the gaze of immense laser-carved statues of the current incumbent’s glorious ancestors, before reaching the ruler herself. And as they walked music howled. Falcon recognised the venerable anthem of the World Government—everybody in the solar system probably knew that—but he wondered how many recognised the instrument it was played on: an electric guitar, loud and massively distorted, perhaps a recording of the very first time the anthem had been played anywhere, when the Earth had faced another kind of threat from the sky . . .

  Amanda Springer-Soames IV, President for Life of the World Govern­ment, seemed dwarfed by the famous Quasicarbon Throne on which she sat, and even more by the tremendous sculptures of springboks that were poised in mid-leap over the throne, making a kind of muscular arch. Short of stature and silver-haired—though she was over eighty years old, that tint was surely artifice—the President looked like a grandmother, Falcon thought.

  But as Springer-Soames stood to meet her visitors, Jane didn’t respond like a granddaughter. She snapped to attention, saluted, then took one step back.