The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “Toys. The records expunged. For now, we’ve a better use for the technology. What can move an asteroid-sized starship to a quarter of the speed of light can just as easily move a moon. Maybe not as fast or as far—but then again it doesn’t need much of a push.”

  “You see, Howard, when the MP is activated,” Valentina said, “it will alter the orbit of Io. Within a few circuits—much less than a week—the moon’s altered course will bring it down. We will smash Io into Jupiter, destroying the moon utterly, of course, but also disrupting the Jovian atmosphere beyond anything it will have known since the formation of the solar system. The Machines won’t survive. Nor will the medusae, or any other element of the Jovian ecology. But that is a price we will willingly accept.” She smiled. “So that’s our cunning plan, Howard. Brutal but effective, don’t you think?”

  Falcon struggled to grasp the idea, the sheer scale of it—the audacity—the insanity. “Shoemaker-Levy 9,” he said.

  Valentina frowned. “What?”

  “A comet that hit Jupiter, long ago. The medusae still sing of that event. But this . . .”

  “The medusae will sing no songs of Io, Howard. There won’t be any medusae left.”

  “I’ll say this for the two of you. You’re doing a splendid job of turning my sympathies to the Machines.”

  “Your sympathies don’t interest us,” Valentina said. “But you do care about the medusae.” She grinned. “We’ll show you we’re serious. We’ll show you what our engine can do. In the meantime, perhaps we should give you time to think it over. You can do that while we have you . . . checked over.”

  48

  The siblings returned him to Io’s exterior. The security guards escorted Falcon from the ship into a connecting tunnel, through which he was free to roll on his wheeled undercarriage.

  He was led into what he quickly identified as a medical facility, being run under military auspices. The walls were painted an austere grey and stencilled with authoritarian notices and warnings. There were guards and checkpoints at regular intervals, security screens, automatic sentry cannon swinging on their turrets as Falcon rolled by.

  At last they passed down a series of ramps and came to an underground room of blank grey walls. A false window, set high in the wall, showed Jupiter, framed as if the view were natural. The slightly flattened sphere was sunlit on one side, dark on the other. Bands of coloured cloud wrapped the world, familiar enough in their hues—but little else about them looked natural. They forked into twos and threes, splitting along angular separations, or recombined, like conductive traces on a circuit board. Even on the night side some of the bands continued to be visible, glowing like neon banners. All of this, it was believed, was evidence of Machine activity under those clouds, activity on a titanic scale. What the hell are you up to down there?

  Valentina went to a comms panel in the wall—one of the room’s few visible features—and spoke quietly into a grille.

  A few moments later part of the wall slid aside and a tall, thin-faced woman came into the room from an adjoining office. She wore a high-­buttoned tunic in a dark surgical green, trousers, green boots. Her hands were laced together behind her back. She walked around Falcon once, without speaking, without touching him. She had an upright bearing, her back ramrod straight. Her grey-blonde hair was worn in a severe and unflattering style: shaved at the sides, what remained cut short, brushed straight back from her brow and glued down with some kind of blueish gel.

  She stood before Falcon, eyeing him in the way one might study a particularly septic wound. “This was how you found him?”

  It fell to Bodan to answer. “Yes, Surgeon-Commander. We ran some preliminary scans in the Memory Garden, but that’s as far as it went. It didn’t seem likely that he’d die before we got back to Io.”

  “Didn’t seem likely, Mr. Springer-Soames? I would have thought something more concrete than guesswork was warranted. He is, after all, one of our most valued tactical assets. Or so I’m repeatedly informed.”

  “Falcon is in your hands now,” Valentina said. “I’m sure you’ll do all that’s necessary to prepare him for Jupiter, Surgeon-Commander. The strict essentials, of course. Anything more can wait until he returns.”

  “I wouldn’t waste a moment of effort,” the woman answered. “Not when my clinical resources are already stretched to overload.”

  The doctor turned to Falcon, meeting his eyes at last. Falcon stared back. There was no warmth or empathy in that contact, only a cold scrutiny. But Falcon wondered about the peculiar dynamic between the Springer-Soames and the Surgeon-Commander. To all intents, the siblings were at the top of the tree, and a mere Surgeon-Commander must be far down the hierarchy. But brother and sister were now, temporarily at least, guests in her domain rather than theirs . . . He supposed that doctors, given that life and death was in their hands, always had a certain power in any society. Given that, perhaps they preserved a certain independence of mind, even under the most totalitarian of regimes.

  And he had the odd sense that he knew this Surgeon-Commander from somewhere—something in that look, that stare.

  She said coldly, “The living parts wouldn’t fill a small bucket. Half the neocortex is artificial, even. This isn’t a person. This is the end product of a botched experiment from the dawn of cybernetics. But since you insist that his case be prioritised . . .”

  “We do,” Bodan said.

  “I hate to be any trouble,” Falcon said dryly.

  “Oh, you’re no trouble to me,” the Surgeon-Commander answered. “A nuisance, a distraction. I won’t permit you to be more than that.”

  “Good to hear I’m in caring hands.”

  “How long do you need?” Bodan asked.

  “To make sure Jupiter doesn’t kill him quickly? A day, maybe two, to run over his most vital life-support systems. Beyond that, you’ll just have to take your chances. And free up some space in the mortuary for the men and women I won’t be able to save in the meantime, won’t you?”

  For the first time—certainly the first time since he witnessed the destruction of the Memory Garden—Falcon felt some small flicker of empathy for the Springer-Soames. It was one thing to despise them; it was quite another to see them despised by a third party.

  “Hate me if that helps you get on with the job,” Falcon said, addressing the Surgeon-Commander. “But keep one thing in mind: I’m going to Jupiter to try to stop this war, not wage it.”

  “If you hadn’t helped those Machines become what they are, maybe we wouldn’t have a war at all.”

  “They didn’t need any help from me,” Falcon replied, keeping his voice level. “They were on their way to sentience no matter what happened.”

  “I’m glad your conscience is clear.”

  “If I’ve still got one.”

  The Surgeon-Commander raised her eyebrows. “I’ll look for it when I open you up.” She nodded at the Springer-Soames. “You may leave us. I’ll keep you updated. Hurry along.”

  “Thank you,” Valentina said. “Your dedication won’t go unnoticed.”

  Falcon watched as the sister and brother left the room. When the door had closed after them, it was hard to tell where it had been.

  * * * *

  Alone now with the Surgeon-Commander, Falcon kept his silence as she brought her face closer to his, wrinkling her nose with distaste. She walked around him again, rapping a knuckle against the hard casing of his torso. She pulled apart his eyelids, took a little pocket device from her tunic, shone a piercing light into his engineered pupils.

  Falcon felt himself warming to her, just by a degree or so. She was a doctor, being a doctor, in this most ghastly of environments. “I’m Howard to my friends, by the way.”

  “I know your name. I’ve been studying your medical files for weeks, ever since I heard they were going to bring you in.”

  “Do you have a
name, Surgeon-Commander? Or is that what you were called at birth?”

  “I’m Tem. Surgeon-Commander Tem. That’s as much as you need to know.”

  Tem, Tem. Did he know that name? “Did you ever work under Hope Dhoni?”

  “Doctor Dhoni died a long time ago. They told me you’d lost track.”

  “Maybe.” He felt moved to try to reach her. “Out of touch? I feel out of time, sometimes. I grew up in the age of the World Government. It was an idealistic project. Dedicated to freedom, choice—even to a respect for other minds, through the First Contact directives.”

  “You make it sound like a utopia.”

  “Maybe it was for a while . . .”

  “A utopia that lost an existential war. What use was it?”

  “And is the arrangement you have now any better? How about the last coup?”

  “There have been no coups.”

  “Right. And there’s no such figure as Boss, either.”

  “I’d watch your tongue.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m much too useful to be shot.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  She touched an actuation point on his torso and his primary access panel popped open. At once the barely audible sound of pumps and valves became more obvious, and there was a meaty, yeasty smell. She leaned in with her little light. Falcon did not look down. It was one thing to accept the fact of what he had become, quite another to watch someone poking around inside him.

  She murmured, “So you’re here to talk the Machines into a ceasefire, are you. Will they agree to it?”

  “That’s up to them.”

  “Even with the threat of a secret super-weapon turned against them? Oh, you needn’t be coy, Falcon.” He felt a cold touch, a painless but unnerving sense of his innards being prodded and displaced. “It’s impossible to live and work on Io and not have some inkling of our glorious leaders’ plans. We’re all on evacuation readiness—every living soul on this moon. Have you seen what they’ve built?”

  “Is this a test of my ability to keep a secret?”

  “I’ve better ways to waste my time.” She pulled her hand out of him. “Stay still. I want to draw a blood sample. There’s a valve in here somewhere.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She went to the wall and waved a hand, causing an alcove to appear. She drew out a small tray of sterile surgical appliances. A pillar rose from the floor beside Falcon; she set the tray on the pillar and snapped on a pair of milk-coloured gloves.

  “I’m not sure if I need a tune-up. I’ve been back to Jupiter so many times they wave me through customs.”

  She delved back inside him. “Selfless of you to say so, but I have my orders—damn it!”

  As she drew out her hand Falcon saw that she had cut herself on some sharp edge. It had gone right through the glove, drawing a bead of blood on the tip of her thumb. Apparently furious, she snapped off the gloves and threw them down at the floor, where they were absorbed. She prepared a sterile swab and dabbed at the wound on her thumb. “The last thing I need is for your archaic DNA to contaminate me.” She taped up her thumb, tugged on new gloves, and returned to the task of drawing the blood sample. This time she managed to avoid hurting herself.

  Odd thing to have happened, he thought. He was in an advanced medi­cal facility, deep in a moon of Jupiter, in the twenty-ninth century. A cut thumb?

  She said as she continued, “Some would say that the Machines don’t deserve the chance of peace.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh, I’m biased. The Machines murdered my parents. One of their raids on Saturn, the fall of New Sigiriya . . .”

  Again memory tingled; Falcon had visited the laputa with that name.

  “I was lucky to have escaped before then.” She put her equipment back on the tray and closed up his hatch.

  “Escaped?”

  “To medical school. The Life Sciences Institute on Mimas. As far as I’m concerned, the Machines deserve whatever they get.”

  This woman was complex, he thought. Still working as a doctor, still thinking as one, even in the middle of a war—even given her own personal trauma, evidently. Yet even she had a monochrome view of the Machines. “That’s not a very enlightened attitude. You should research Carl Brenner . . .”

  She opened a secondary hatch, just under his right armpit. Here was the access circuitry for his electronic sleep regulation. With the touch of a control, she could put him under as easily as any anaesthetist.

  She said now, “I learned a very powerful lesson, long before my training—long before I came to Mimas. Actually it’s what pushed me into this career. My defining moment. What makes us human isn’t the shape we are. It’s how we show kindness. That’s my problem with the Machines; that’s the gulf between us. The Machines look like us now, don’t they?”

  “If they choose.”

  “It’s just a mask. Peel it back and there’s a void howling back at you.”

  “You’re wrong, Surgeon-Commander Tem. There’s empathy in the Machines. I’ve seen it. One day we’ll realise we’ve been looking into a mirror all along.”

  “You’re a dreamer, Commander Falcon.” She touched one of the inputs under his arm. Falcon felt a cloak of drowsiness begin to descend on him.

  “Then dream,” he heard her say, almost as if she thought he’d already slipped under. “Go to sleep. We can’t keep our masters waiting, can we?”

  49

  As the post-operative confusion lifted, Falcon concluded that he felt no better or worse than he had done before the procedure. That was to be expected, he supposed. Tem had serviced him, taken care of the worst defects, but a more thorough overhaul would have to wait—if he ever got one at all.

  After twenty-four hours, he was summoned for a briefing.

  The Springer-Soames waited for him in the same treatment room where he had been brought to meet the Surgeon-Commander. Falcon was wheeled in, leaning slightly back, propped up in a support chassis. Other than his face and arms he was immobile, clamped to the chassis like a maximum-security prisoner.

  Brother and sister faced him in fold-down chairs. Between them was a low table. Off to Falcon’s right, the Surgeon-Commander was examining a scroll.

  Jupiter was still framed in the wall screen.

  “So,” Falcon asked, “who brought the grapes?”

  The Springer-Soames just stared. “Are you delirious, Falcon?” asked Valentina, taking a sparing sip from a beaker on the table between her and her brother.

  “He’s no less sane than he ever was,” the Surgeon-Commander said. “I’m scanning his frontal and temporal lobes as we speak. Normal neural traffic across all nodes. He’s entirely compos mentis. Aren’t you, Commander Falcon?”

  “If you say so, Surgeon-Commander Tem.”

  “You did well to complete the work in the agreed time,” Valentina Atlanta said. “These days have been taxing for us all. Surgeon-Commander, we thank you for your loyalty and commitment.”

  “I did what needed to be done. Falcon is yours now. Wind him up like a clockwork mouse and send him into Jupiter—”

  “Leave us now,” Bodan said.

  Surgeon-Commander Tem snapped shut the scroll. She gave a curt, oddly disrespectful bow, and exited the room.

  Falcon said, “I like her. The bedside manner could use a little work, but other than that . . .”

  “War will harden the best of us,” Valentina said. “With your help, though, it will soon be behind us.”

  “If this super-weapon of yours actually works.”

  “Oh, it works,” Bodan said. “In fact, you’ll have all the proof you need of that very shortly.” He lifted a wrist to study an elaborate, multi-dialled watch. “As it turns out, the timing couldn’t be better. The engine has just been brought to full power. We sh
ould experience the effects within a few seconds . . .”

  Falcon felt it. A rising tectonic rumble, a shift in the local gravitational field, a tiny but detectable tilt in the acceleration vector . . . Even fresh out of surgery, his old orientation skills had not left him.

  And on the table, the water in the two glasses trembled, their surfaces beginning to shift from the horizontal. It was a small effect, but it was enough to make the point. The moon really was moving.

  Valentina said. “The test is scheduled for thirty seconds. It should be ending about . . .”

  “Now,” Bodan said triumphantly, as the tremors died and the water returned to its former equilibrium.

  “You moved Io,” Falcon said, awed despite himself.

  Valentina seemed unmoved. “Of course we did. But you need to understand how we moved Io. From understanding, belief follows. Did you ever study economics?”

  Falcon shrugged. “There wasn’t a lot of call for it in the middle ranks of the World Navy.”

  “I only mention it by way of analogy. You saw the engine in the core of Io. Have you any idea how it operates?”

  “Breakthrough physics? Don’t brag. Just tell me.”

  “Breakthrough physics . . . I suppose so. Our engine is a reactionless drive,” Bodan said. “I’m certain you’re familiar with the broad concept?”

  “A magic box that produces acceleration without thrust?”

  “Something like that,” the brother replied.

  “So much for Newton’s third law.”

  “The reason my brother asked about economics,” Valentina said with strained patience, “is that we use a kind of accounting trick to make our engine function. Or so the physicists explain it to us, by analogy.

  “The engine—the Momentum Pump—‘swindles’ a negligible amount of surplus momentum from every other particle in the universe. Some kind of quantum effect, they tell me. The engine accumulates all that momentum as if from nowhere. And in doing so it imparts a push to Io—a reactionless impulse! But there is no violation of Newton’s laws. The rest of the universe twitches just enough to preserve the sanctity of the conservation of momentum, and Sir Isaac rests peaceful in his grave. But we move!”