The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  Seth was glad to have the family here with him. The boys knew nothing of the truth of his mission, and Seth and Pat were determined to keep it that way as long as possible. Their quarters were like a decent hotel crossed with a liberal monastery, with maids and a dedicated cook who proved a dab hand at putting together hamburgers and fries. But the boys predictably got stir crazy being stuck indoors all day, and Pat was allowed, under a heavy marine guard, to let them play outside, even take them to the Florida beaches.

  The pressure of preparation and training didn’t let up. Seth even had to approve a mission patch for his flight-that-would-never-be. The least foolish design was a fragile blue Earth cradled in cupped human hands.

  He did have some social life, aside from Pat and the boys. There were visits from other family, including his parents and kid sister, and buddies from school days through the Air Force and NASA. Everybody smiled the whole time and insisted it was so long, not goodbye. Seth felt like a patient stricken with some terminal disease.

  In the end, as he soaked up all the pressure, he seemed to enter a new stage of consciousness, drifting above it all, as if he’d relinquished control. “My life has become one long checklist,” he said to Pat.

  “It’s more like our wedding day,” she replied, tired herself, trying to smile. “Even this isn’t as stressful as that was. In the end you just—”

  “Float.”

  But this interval of floating had to come to an end.

  Icarus was due to strike Earth on Wednesday June 19. On the evening of Wednesday, June 12, one week ahead, George Sheridan showed up with a bottle of bourbon.

  * * * *

  “The medics won’t approve,” Seth said, as he was poured a healthy measure.

  “Screw them,” Sheridan said. “I’m their boss. Mud in your eye. So. You been following the news, while they’ve been pampering you in this health club?”

  “Saw that Humphrey got shot on the campaign trail.” Hubert Humphrey was LBJ’s vice president.

  “Hell of a note, and just what we needed.”

  “And I saw the images of Icarus taken from Palomar, in the papers.”

  “Needless to say, that started the panic buying and everybody driving for the Appalachians. Not that everybody’s running. Bermuda’s the nearest significant land mass to the impact point, and they’re holding some kind of rock concert there. Hippies and flower power. Ought to cut their damn hair, by law.”

  “That would make all the difference when Icarus falls, sir.”

  Sheridan eyed him. “Well, we got the results in. You know, all three nukes that arrived so far were delivered with total precision, the detonations went off like a dream, and the Monitors saw it all, flying through the debris cloud, and the nukes pushed that rock. But, damn it, just not hard enough. Now the astronomers are saying maybe the rock isn’t a rock at all; maybe it’s a bunch of little rocks all jammed up together, like a rubble pile, and the bombs are just kind of compressing the mass—”

  “George, what about Pat and the boys?”

  Sheridan looked into his eyes. “RFK himself is going to take care of it. Right after the launch he’ll take your family to Hickory Hill—the house he has in McLean, Virginia. Bought it from his big brother, in fact. And on Icarus day, when LBJ will be in Air Force One, RFK will personally take your family with him to NORAD in Colorado, and wait it out under a damn mountain, where they’ll be no more than fifty feet from Kennedy’s own family until it’s over.”

  “The boys will be terrified.”

  “We can’t help that. But they’ll be safe, right?” Sheridan eyed him. “You know, I can’t order you to do this thing, son, even now. How are you feeling?”

  “Scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of screwing up with the whole world watching. Jesus. You saving that bourbon for another occasion, George . . . ?”

  * * * *

  On the Thursday they let Seth and Pat and the boys out of the cage, and, under a heavy but discreet guard, the family spent the day on the beach. Seth concentrated on nothing but the vivid sensations of that summer day, the sun, the sand, the crisp briny tang of the water—the laughter of the boys, for whom this was a day like any other, in a long chain of happy days with Mom and Dad.

  Back in the crew quarters that night, they ate, played a little, watched TV in their pyjamas. Then the two of them put the boys to bed. There were no goodbyes, just a day ending.

  Pat couldn’t bear to stay the night with Seth.

  Somewhat to his own surprise, Seth slept pretty well that night. Maybe it was all the sea air.

  And when Charlie Duke’s discreet knock on the door woke him up, at six a.m., it was Friday, June 14.

  Launch day.

  FIVE

  * * *

  PEACE ENVOY

  2850

  44

  When the moment of contact came, Falcon paused his work with the trowel and fell into a condition of perfect mechanical stillness.

  It had not been a sound that alerted him, but rather a barely perceptible jolt, communicated through the fabric of this little world—through rock and soil, through his balloon wheels and hydraulic undercarriage, into the core of his being. The feeling of a footfall in an otherwise empty house.

  An uninvited presence.

  Falcon set the trowel down next to the hopper of fertiliser and rose to his full height. He looked down at the rockery, the border where he had been working. Howard Falcon was a machine riddled with clocks and timers—too many to disregard, too many for him to be able to ignore the passage of time. He knew very well that decades had worn away in this enclosing shelter. Decades since the end of the world. Well, evidently his long isolation was coming to an end.

  Leaving his tools, he set off through the Memory Garden, passing along indulgently winding paths, over little stone bridges and under arched tunnels shaded beneath canopies of interlaced willow. Most of the rockeries were surmounted by black slabs that glowed into life as they detected his passage, and images of Hope Dhoni appeared in the slabs, her face turning to meet his. Had he lingered, the images would have invited him to listen as they recounted events and anecdotes from her life, accompanied by recordings and third-party testimonies. A stranger wandering these paths would have quickly built up a picture of Hope and her life. The longer they stayed—the more they explored the byways and corners of the Memory Garden—the more detailed that picture would have become.

  Hope Dhoni had died not long after the destruction of the planet on which she had been born; in fact there had been a wave of such deaths in those first years. And Falcon had spent five decades since then constructing this place in her honour.

  Falcon stopped at an intersection in the pathways, where a thick-walled window had been set into the floor—a window that looked out of this small body entirely, out into the star-littered sky of the outer solar system. From this angle he could make out the docking complex, just visible around the curvature of the worldlet. It was a long time since there had been any ships attached to that dock. When he arrived, Falcon’s first act had been to send his own ship back into space with a self-destruct command, so that he had no means of leaving the Garden. No matter the calls made on him, no matter the desire he might feel to return to the worlds of people or Machines, he would be a prisoner of his own making.

  But now there was a ship.

  He studied the belligerent lines of its shark-shaped hull, noting the smooth bulges that almost certainly marked the presence of long-range sensors, weapons systems, defensive countermeasures. Probably one of the new asymptotic-drive cruisers—human weaponry built around techno­logical insights stolen from the Machines. The ship was night-black, save for a silver marking on one of its fins; the jumping springbok was impossible to mistake.

  Another jolt reached Falcon—heavier now. A moment later he picked up the tiny shift in air pre
ssure that meant a lock had been opened.

  Falcon moved on from the window. He quickened his progress, his undercarriage whining. The winding paths climbed up through a succession of rockeries and screens, tightening as the diameter of the roughly spheri­cal hollowed-out worldlet narrowed nearer the pole, and Falcon’s weight diminished as the effect of centripetal gravity was lessened. Sounds were reaching him now—heavy mechanical noises. People with equipment, on the move.

  He took one last look back at the enclosed bubble of the garden, the rockeries wrapping around the worldlet’s interior, the glowing yellow shaft of the artificial sun along its axis. Whole acres were still unfinished, the paths winding through areas of rubble and soil that had yet to be landscaped and cultivated. There was so much that he had still meant to do.

  He turned away.

  * * * *

  In the stony chamber of the reception area, the gravity was down to a tenth of a gee.

  Here his visitors waited in a group. Two of them, wearing standard pressure suits of a lightweight, modern design, consulted a spread-out scroll, its translucent membrane displaying a cross-sectional map of the Memory Garden. Behind this pair stood three much more heavily armoured figures; their bulky, visorless, power-assisted suits were festooned with tools and weapons, in addition to the hand-held cannons they carried. Falcon instinctively slowed his approach, but even so the guards were still bringing their guns to bear on him, lining up the fist-sized barrels with his artificial head.

  “Stand down,” said one of the map-holders, barely glancing up. “He’s harmless.”

  With visible reluctance the big guns were lowered, but autonomous weapons mounted on the guards’ suits still had him targeted. Peering out from the suits on little swivelling necks, they reminded Falcon of snakes’ heads.

  “Harmless? You’re sure of that?” he asked, his own voice sounding unfamiliar through long disuse. “I’ve been here a while. Maybe long enough to go a little stir crazy—”

  “Do you know how long it’s been?” said the first map-holder—a woman’s voice. She let go of the scroll so that it snapped shut into a tube.

  “I haven’t been keeping score.”

  “Fifty-six years. Which would be long enough to test any normal person’s sanity—but not Howard Falcon’s. If becoming the thing you are didn’t drive you mad, nothing else stands a chance.”

  “Said with all the tact and diplomacy of a true Springer.”

  The figure jammed the scroll into the utility pouch, then reached up to lift off her helmet to reveal blue eyes and tied-back dark hair, her ­partner—a man—following suit a moment later. The woman snapped, “Who else would go to the trouble of finding you?”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t easy.”

  “My name is Valentina Atlanta Springer-Soames. This is my brother, Bodan Severyn.”

  “Children of President Amanda IV? The rightful heirs to the Quasi­carbon Throne, no doubt?”

  “Grandchildren,” she corrected. “We are two of that generation . . . You knew one of us, didn’t you? Jane.”

  “Yes. Good kid. What became of her?”

  Valentina said dismissively, “Died in a futile battle amid the ruins of the Earth.”

  “Ah.” And that was the sort of news that still, it seemed, had the capacity to hurt. But I no longer have a heart to break, he’d once complained to Hope. Don’t worry, Howard, she’d said. A heart will be provided . . .

  The Springer-Soames seemed quite unaware of his reaction. The advantage of having a face like a piece of old shoe leather.

  Valentina Atlanta spoke on relentlessly. “And no, finding you hasn’t been easy at all. You did a spectacular job of dropping off the map, Howard. But don’t you remember your own grand words, as Earth died? One way or another the Machines are going to pay for what they’ve done today. What happened to all that fire, that righteousness? Before the rubble of Earth had time to cool, you vanished from human affairs. Turned hermit. You didn’t even have the decency to come back to Saturn for Hope’s funeral.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Valentina Atlanta reached up and undid a clip at the back of her scalp, allowing her hair to loosen and spill down over her neck-ring. Bodan Severyn did likewise. They were facially similar, especially framed with those long, lavish locks of black hair. Falcon retained enough human sensibility to recognise an icy, imperious beauty in both sister and brother—no doubt the product of generations of the best genetic selection and engineering.

  “What changed your mind?” Bodan Severyn asked. “About revenge on the Machines. Tell us.”

  “I suppose I had what you might call a moment of clarity.”

  “Clarity?” Valentina said.

  “I realised that there were better things to be doing than planning the next level of retaliation. So we strike back at the Machines for destroying Earth. All we’d be doing is inviting further escalation. Asymmetric response after asymmetric response—an endless game of one-upmanship. Where would it end? When one of us takes apart the sun to prove a point?”

  “It would end with justice,” Valentina said.

  “Good luck with that.” Falcon made to turn. “Now, do you mind? I’ve gardening to do.”

  “The outside world hasn’t gone away,” Bodan said. His voice was pitched fractionally deeper than his sister’s, his clipped intonation identical. “We’re still at war.”

  “I know. I watch the fireworks. It’s very pretty. You could map the ecliptic plane, just by following those megaton sparks.”

  Valentina smiled. “The war’s turned Darwinian—it’s a question of pure survival. Lately we’ve become very concerned about Machine activity in Jupiter. Things have entered a new and troubling phase . . . Have you been keeping abreast?”

  And Falcon could not deny that he had.

  45

  Although Falcon had hidden away since Ultimatum Day, he had watched history unfold.

  In the decades of ragged interplanetary warfare that had followed the loss of Earth—and building on the legacy of President Amanda IV, the last legitimate ruler of the crumbling world state—the hereditary Springer-Soames administration, far from collapsing in the wake of the loss of Earth itself, had presented itself as the last-ditch saviour of humanity, the final bastion against the Machines: a necessary good, the harshness of its regime mandated by the exigency of the situation. Military law was now dominant. The news channels were full of propaganda, reports of human victories, human technical achievements, human scientific breakthroughs. There was a pattern to it all, Falcon had soon recognised. The end of the war was always just out of reach—just one last push, one last concerted effort away.

  And in the face of this constant state of near-triumph, even minor dissent had become treasonable. The news also carried reports of arrests, detentions, tribunals, executions. Functionaries and bureaucrats were routinely imprisoned and terminated for various failings and ­under-achievements. “Machine-sympathisers” were rooted out and exposed as traitors against the human species.

  A few years back there had even been talk of a “failed overthrow of the government by anti-democratic elements.” Somewhere out there, it was rumoured, was a figure masterminding such coup attempts—a shadowy individual known only as Boss. The name was barely acknowledged, no more than a rumour. The official line was that Boss was a figment, a figurehead without substance. Yet the protest persisted.

  Meanwhile Falcon had watched the ghastly transformation of Earth. The planet, once a blue pearl, now glowed red—like Venus, like the Moon, worlds that the Machines had also taken. Falcon imagined experiments in tectonic engineering, in mining the worlds’ deep cores; Earth had become an infernal factory surrounded by clouds of Machine ships. Nothing living could have survived, not so much as a single extremophile cell.

  But more recently, even if distracted by the anguish of Earth, no
one could escape noticing the ominous alterations to Jupiter.

  Despite the Host around the sun, despite their occupation of Earth and Moon, the giant planet with its tremendous resources was still where most of the Machines were concentrated. But for a long time no one could tell what the Machines were up to down there. There had been little reliable data. Probes were repelled or destroyed, and sensors could only probe so deep now; they were rebuffed by an artificial scattering surface, like a radio mirror a few hundred kilometres down. Clearly the Machines were engaged in deep-level engineering of the Jovian interior. There was some evidence of that visible from space—odd anomalies in the cloud patterns and their chemistry—but no one could be sure what it entailed.

  On one level, Falcon thought, I wouldn’t mind seeing what it’s like down there now—and what, if anything, has become of the daughters of Ceto . . . But on another, the idea of returning to a Machine-held Jupiter sent a stab of pure terror through his soul.

  Sometimes he thought of the revenants, as he considered them, the mysterious avatars of Orpheus—Howard Falcon Junior—that had been glimpsed throughout the war, this age of the anguish of worlds, one glimpsed even by himself. Were they still watching? What did the eyes behind those enigmatic witnesses make of the tyrannical worlds, the endless conflict? But if they were still observed, Falcon saw no reports of it.

  And he feared for mankind, caught between the Machines and the likes of the Springer-Soames, who were empowered by the unending war.

  * * * *

  They walked back into the main chamber of the Memory Garden, Valentina leading Falcon, her brother following and the guards bringing up the rear, their armour grotesque, out-of-place intrusions in the memorial.