The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “At ease,” Springer-Soames said, stepping down from the throne. “So, Jane, how’s your mother?”

  “Getting herself settled in New Oslo—that is, on Laputa 47, South Temperate Zone. She sends her regards, Madam President.”

  “Well, return my best wishes—oh, go sit down, child, standing there like a toy soldier you’re neither use nor ornament. There are drinks on the table at the back of the room.” As Jane gratefully retreated, Springer-Soames faced Falcon. “So, Commander—it is correct to call you by your old rank, I hope?”

  He shrugged with a whir of artificial muscles. “You tell me. I was never told I was no longer an officer of the old World Navy, ma’am, so it’s a title I prefer to keep.”

  “Understandable enough. I take it you have no need of food or rest—”

  “And nor do I.”

  That new voice plugged directly into Falcon’s deepest reflexes. He stiffened and pivoted.

  Adam.

  Suddenly the Machine was here, standing not a metre from Springer-Soames. His manifestation this time was a humaniform silver statue whose flesh returned highlights from the room’s brilliant lights. But his head was a disconcertingly empty box of sensors, just as it had been before.

  President Springer-Soames did not flinch but faced the intruder calmly, and for a brief moment Falcon was proud of the old tyrant. And she waved down Jane, who was on her feet at the back of the room. “At ease, Lieutenant.”

  Falcon rolled towards Adam. “Are you really here?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Falcon tapped Adam’s chest, metal finger on a hard carapace. “You feel as if you’re here.”

  “We have powers beyond your comprehension, Falcon.”

  “So,” Springer-Soames said. “You dare to show yourself. Or at least this—avatar.”

  “As you wished,” Adam said calmly. “As you manipulated twelve thousand lives to achieve, as Falcon evidently understood very well.”

  “And now you are going to justify to me your aggression against the home planet of—”

  Adam calmly raised a hand and touched her forehead with one finger.

  Springer-Soames froze, her mouth open in mid-sentence, her face twisted into a kind of snarl.

  Adam said gently, “Madame President, you have your moment in the cameras’ glare—you have your confrontation with your Grendel, for all of humanity to see, evermore. You have what you wanted. But I don’t feel I need to listen to anything you have to say. You are a posturing fool. Well, that’s hereditary monarchy for you.”

  Jane had started forward again, and Falcon feared she was drawing a weapon. He held his hand up. “It’s all right, Jane—I think. Adam?”

  “You are correct, Falcon. I did not come here to inflict harm. She will wake with no memory, no after-effect of this pausing.”

  “Pausing? What have you done to her? Some kind of paralysing drug?”

  “Nothing so crude,” he said simply.

  “If you won’t speak to the President, why did you come here?”

  “I came for you, Falcon. You travelled across the solar system to see me, at great personal discomfort. It would have been discourteous to ignore you.”

  “Should I be flattered?”

  Adam looked around, his motions liquid and supple. “I admit I did have a hankering to see the old place once more, before the end. After all I was ‘born’ here on Earth. Perhaps I will pop into the old Minsky-Good plant in Urbana, just for old times’ sake—”

  “Why has it come to this, Adam?”

  Adam sneered. “May I serve you? You should have made us stupid, stunted, like your pathetic simps. Then you could have controlled us. But you could not even control the simps, could you?”

  Falcon frowned. “The simps are extinct . . .”

  Adam ignored that. “You created us. In your greed you made us too strong, too vital—and you, Falcon, allowed us to keep our minds, where your fellows would have destroyed us. That is your triumph and your tragedy, Falcon. The consequences are certainly not our fault. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?”

  “Milton,” Jane called from the back of the room.

  Falcon said, “It was also the epigraph to Frankenstein, and maybe that’s more appropriate.”

  Adam smiled. “Now you pay the price.”

  “The price? You wage war on us?”

  “Falcon, this is not a war—it never was—any more than spring wages war on winter. And we will replace you, as spring replaces winter.”

  “But it does not end here. You are still vulnerable. Despite the Host, despite what you do to Earth, your centre of gravity is still concentrated at Jupiter. That’s well known, and a vulnerability. And beyond that, if you go to the stars—you will find us already there.”

  “You refer to the Acorns. A wistful project. If we find your wretched orphans we will spare them,” Adam said dismissively. “After all, none of this is their fault either.”

  “And the Earth? What do you intend to do?”

  “Well, we have been practising on Venus . . . The Earth is just another acorn, Falcon, whose nutrients will sustain us as we grow.” He paused. “Time is short. The Ultimatum I delivered all those centuries ago is about to be fulfilled—and to your credit, you were one of the few humans, in the beginning, who believed it would come to this. Will you return to Saturn?”

  Impulsively Falcon said, “No, I will not. The Witnesses are staying, and I’ll be among them.”

  “Then perhaps this is goodbye.” Adam held his gaze for a long moment—then disappeared.

  The President jerked back to animation, gasped, and crumpled to the floor.

  Jane Springer-Soames ran forward. “Grandmother! Let me help . . .”

  43

  “My name is Commander Howard Falcon, formerly of the World Navy. I was born in the year 2044. My service number was—well, I guess that isn’t much help in establishing my identity, since most records relating to my early years were lost in the Mnemosyne EMP bomb.

  “Think of me as the medusa guy. I hope that whoever’s listening to this will accept my credentials as an authentic Witness.

  “The date is June 7, 2784. Ultimatum Day.

  “Strange to think now that I was the first human, probably, ever to hear that date uttered aloud, all those years ago, and certainly the first to understand its significance for all mankind—and now here it is, upon us.

  “The time is, umm, a little after eleven hours Ephemeris Time—which is the time frame Adam used when he set this deadline five centuries back. Three and a half hours to go—but I’m going to try to avoid watching the clock. Today of all days I don’t feel like listening to a countdown . . .

  “Doctor Dhoni, Hope, this message is particularly for you, if you ever receive it. Strange to think that you won’t get to hear these words in your laputa on distant Saturn for a good eighty minutes after I speak. And in the end my voice will just be one among a babel of shouts fleeing just ahead of the dreadful images that will surely follow. But, Hope, I chose the location where I will perform this last duty with you in mind.

  “What location, you ask? I’m in an airship, flying over the Grand Canyon.

  “I know, I know! You always told me not to return to the scene of my accident, that the flood of associations and so forth would do more harm than good. Maybe you’re right—but if not today I won’t get another chance, will I? And what a place to Witness . . .

  “As for my ship, I’ve got a brand-new envelope, under which is slung—wait for it—the gondola from my first Jupiter ship, the Kon-Tiki. The original. Would you believe I retrieved it from the Lagrange-point Smith­sonian? I wonder what will become of all those beautiful old ships once Earth is taken . . . I hope Adam and his kind treat them with respect.

  “I
admit I couldn’t resist the name I’ve given this lash-up—God bless the Queen Elizabeth V and all who sail in her—and I hope any nit­picking historians listening to this will note that the ship, like my doomed ­dirigible, and like the ocean liners that preceded her, is numbered as the fifth of its line, and not named for a non-existent monarch . . .

  “And here I am over the old Canyon, this tremendous wound in the face of the Earth. I’ve chosen to label my Witnessing record as Ongtupqa, which is the Hopi language name for the Canyon. I’m hanging over the Mojave Point just now, and can see the Colorado twisting through the steep-sided valley it has carved through those deep old plateau rocks, leaving the strata exposed in the walls. All this in brilliant morning sunshine, sharp-shadowed, like some immense diorama. I know the Canyon would be dwarfed by features on other worlds—it would be lost in the Caloris Basin on Mercury, a mere tributary to the Valles Marineris on Mars—but that’s not the point. The Canyon exists on a human world, and was accessible to humans equipped with nothing more than strong legs, good lungs and a bit of courage. Of course, as my choice of name implies, the Canyon has a human history that goes back millennia before the first European discovery, which was itself, oh, more than a thousand years ago, I suppose. The Pueblo Indians considered it a holy place, a site for pilgrimages—and who can blame them?

  “Well, the Canyon itself is much older than that. Perhaps ten times older than humanity. But it will not outlive us.”

  * * * *

  “Something is happening . . .

  “If you want the time, look at the record key.

  “I can see the Machines’ ships, beyond the sky.

  “They are like silver-grey clouds, smooth lens shapes up beyond the blue. Moving silently. I shudder to think how much energy that effortless motion represents. I have never forgotten what Adam told me of 90, the Machine Einstein—and he lived, and died, six centuries ago. The Machines seem to be reaching for a mastery of space and time beyond our technology—and perhaps forever beyond our understanding too . . .

  “Fire in the sky!

  “My word. I’m grateful for the layers of protection between my artificial eyes and those tremendous flashes. And also for the hardening of the systems of this gondola, which was built to withstand Jupiter’s ferocious magnetosphere—surely a more energetic environment even than the war that’s unfolding up there.

  “War, yes—that’s what I believe I’m seeing. You will know better than me. I thought I saw ships, darts of light, lacing their way through that great Machine armada—remarkably manoeuvrable, much more so than the Acheron I saw fall on Mercury. Our ships against theirs. Have humans managed to master the Machines’ asymptotic drive? If so it’s taken us long enough. Ah, and now light pulses, surely the result of nuclear weapons. Are we still using X-ray lasers? I was privy to no knowledge of a last-ditch military defence of the Earth. Whether our fiercest weapons will be any use against ships of such size . . .

  “The battle seems to be over already. The human ships are nowhere to be seen, not from here. The silver clouds of the Machines appear untouched.

  “At least we tried.

  “And now they are descending.”

  * * * *

  “From my elevation I see three, four, five of the ships, hanging there, off in the distance. If I count five from this one location, how many of them have come to Earth? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

  “They are not like clouds, not now they are beneath the sky. They look heavy, tangible, solid. Ugly, actually, for all their smooth elegance. They don’t belong here. That’s very visible. And I—

  “Oof . . .

  “I apologise. Something happened, something new. I was watching one of the ships. I saw—a kind of rainbow, perhaps—wash out of the heart of the ship. A wavefront? It passed through the air and into the ground, and when it reached my position the QE V rocked under its envelope, and I felt a kind of twisting, deep in my artificial gut. I’m uploading medical data. Peruse that at your leisure. I’ll continue to record my human impressions as long as I can—

  “Another pulse. I’m going to count until—

  “Another.

  “They are disturbing the landscape. I see what look like dust devils tracking the Canyon rim. A flock of birds—or are they bats?—rising, alarmed. Disturbances in the air, too. Clouds are bubbling overhead, and I heard a distinct crack of thunder. I have an impression of huge energies being released.

  “Another pulse, and another . . .

  “Is this another aspect of the Machines’ advanced physics? We’ve long theorised that you could create a designer spacetime, perhaps using some kind of coherent graviton engine, shaping mass-energy and gravity the way you wanted—such as to build a wormhole, or achieve such feats as faster-than-light travel by causing spacetime to ripple and surfing the resulting wave . . . The fact that the warping induced by a mass-energy the size of the sun’s deflects a ray of starlight through no more than a thousandth of a degree is a mere engineering detail.

  “Is that what the Machines are doing here? Using a designer-spacetime weapon to disturb the deep geology of the Earth itself? Adam did say they’d had plenty of time to practice on Venus—

  “Can you see that?

  “I’m trying to turn the ship so all my cameras and other sensors are pointing towards the eruption. But the air is growing turbulent now, and I’m expecting a shock wave to hit me any time—

  “It passed. I’m still here.

  “Yes, eruption—but that is not like any volcanic eruption I ever saw in my life, not even on long-suffering Io. Can you see it? It’s like a column of liquid rock, hundreds of metres wide perhaps, simply bursting from the ground, heading straight up. A white-hot pillar. I’m trying to measure the temperature, remotely . . .

  “The temperatures are characteristic of the outer core of the Earth. Incredible. The Machines have inflicted deep wounds already.

  “As the column rises up into the air—I can’t tell how high—it’s beginning to lose its coherence, to flare. Some of the material is falling back to the ground—and immediately setting light to anything that’s available to burn.

  “I’m getting out of here.

  “Rising fast now. I don’t want to get caught under that rock hail.

  “As I rise my view is opening out. And I can see more of those fantastic columns, standing up all over the landscape, across tens, hundreds of kilometres. The fires are spreading, where they can, in the forest scraps. Below me, the village and the other buildings along the Canyon’s South Rim are going up like torches. The ground seems tormented. I can see dust rising from tremors, and what look like tremendous cracks in the earth. The air is very turbulent now, and growing opaque, from hot ash, smoke . . .

  “I know I’m supposed to report what I see myself, not comment on what’s going on elsewhere. But I have monitors tied into global feeds. Well, wouldn’t you? Those fountains of molten—whatever it is, core material?—are rising across the planet. The fires are spreading, the forests burning across the planet. I see great cauldrons of steam rising over hotspots in the oceans too—the waters are no more spared than the land, then. The cities are ablaze, what’s left of them—what a spectacle—one feed shows a fire pillar rising up through the heart of Unity City itself, like a skewer. I wonder if that was intentional? Do you still notice us enough to make such gestures, Adam? The pyramids! A monument we were unable to save, shattered and melting. A remarkable sight . . . remarkable, and heartbreaking.

  “Below me, the Grand Canyon is filling up with a new river, of lava this time—as if the Colorado has cut all the way through the skin of the Earth.

  “But the seeing is becoming impossible. I can barely control the QE V. It’s a miracle the envelope hasn’t been destroyed yet—even though I’m shipping helium, not hydrogen like the poor doomed Hindenburg.

  “I think I’ve Witnessed enough—whethe
r this is the destruction of Earth, or its transformation. Enough to know that I want to participate in whatever comes next in this conflict between Machine and mankind.

  “For it’s not over yet.

  “I’m starting the ignition sequencer. This gondola is a tough old boat. It’s equipped with the same beat-up old tritium-deuterium fusion engine that got me out of the atmosphere of Jupiter, and ought to be enough to get me out of here—with luck.

  “And if not, Doctor Dhoni, make sure you pass on a message to Adam. One way or another the Machines are going to pay for what they’ve done today.

  “There’s the crack as the fusion plant comes on line . . .”

  * * * *

  There was one observation he made that day that Falcon never recorded, never spoke of to anybody.

  In the instant between the fusor powering up and the ignition of the fuel—it lasted just a split-second—he was not alone in the Kon-Tiki gondola. A black cube, a metre across, smooth and featureless save for a handwritten scrawl.

  Hanging in the air. Inside the cabin.

  There and gone.

  * * * *

  “. . . Ignition! My name is Howard Falcon. Queen Elizabeth V, over and out.”

  INTERLUDE:

  JUNE 1968

  Even if everybody said it was monumentally unlikely that Seth Springer would ever leave the ground, the preparations for Apollo-Icarus 6, scheduled for launch on June 14, had to go ahead. As not one of the early shots would even have reached its target before June, let alone deflected Icarus, nobody would know if the plan had worked or not. And the manned-­fallback Apollo had to be made ready, just in case.

  So as early as mid-May, NASA’s bureaucracy ground into action. A Flight Readiness Board formally approved the launch. Seth was assigned his own backup now, and it was poor Charlie Duke’s turn to be locked in the simulator, frantically trying to bone up on the mission plan.

  As Sheridan had promised, Seth and his family were moved into NASA’s crew quarters on Merritt Island, at the Cape. Here he would live from now on, endure the final training and medical checks, be kept insulated from the bugs carried by the mass of mankind he would be trying to save—and be protected from the press attention that began to seem overwhelming.