The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  Falcon deliberated. How easy, in retrospect, his earlier sacrifices now appeared. To give up parts of his body—why had he even hesitated? But this last consolidation; to shed the last living residue of himself, like a waste product?

  But he still wished to live. The journey wasn’t over yet.

  “Will it be instantaneous?” he asked.

  Adam’s tone was kindly. “If you wish.”

  “No, I don’t wish. I want to feel myself changing, if there’s any change to be experienced.”

  “There is still some time. We’re not at the next crush threshold quite yet.”

  “Then do it in phases. A piece at a time. And if it doesn’t work, preserve yourself, whatever it takes. Leave me behind.”

  Adam did not reply.

  * * * *

  So it began. The final consolidation, the final consummation of the organic and the mechanical, was upon them both. Stage by stage, Adam supplanted the neural wiring of Falcon’s mind with a purely cybernetic emulation. Brain circuit by circuit, module by module, from the hippocampus to the neocortex. As each transfiguration proceeded, so a greyish effluence was expelled into the surrounding matrix of liquid metallic hydrogen: a salting of rare chemistry, Falcon thought—a new flavouring, dispersing by the moment, thinning out into nothing. A human stain in Jupiter, soon washed clean.

  He recited a silent mantra to himself. I am still Howard Falcon. I am still Howard Falcon . . . If he could hold that thought, never lose the chain of it, he imagined he might be able to persuade himself that there had been continuity, that whatever passed for his soul had made the migration from the organic to the machine.

  And if he proved himself wrong, did it really matter? Not for long, in any event. No matter the changes Adam wrought upon himself, there would always be a limit to his own adaptations, a limit beyond which Adam himself could not survive, whether he sheltered Falcon or not.

  “Half of your neural wiring has now been supplanted,” Adam said at last. “Have you retained a sense of your own identity?”

  “That’s a damn stupid question.”

  “Hmm. You are your old self, then.”

  He thought so. And although he could intellectualise the notion that some portion of his thoughts were now racing through the golden loom of Adam’s mind, instead of crawling through ropy bundles of tissue, he felt as if almost nothing had changed.

  Almost nothing.

  “I feel . . . sharper. Cleaner. There’s no real word for it. As if I’ve woken up with the opposite of a hangover. I don’t think I ever realised it until now. It’s as if every previous instant of my life was spent looking through a lens that was slightly dirty, slightly out of focus.”

  “I can introduce some stochastic errors into your signal processing if it would make you feel more comfortable.”

  “No, thanks,” Falcon said dryly. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  The transfiguration continued. The grey pollution of what had once been his mortal body smoked away into Jupiter, until at last there was nothing left to give.

  * * * *

  So Howard Falcon completed the long journey that began with the crash of the Queen Elizabeth. He had stood between two worlds for long enough, between human and Machine—useful to both, trusted by neither.

  Equally feared.

  Now he was one with the Machines.

  And suddenly, he, with Adam, was surrounded.

  60

  On Io, the deadline for the evacuation had come, and passed.

  From the vantage of a windowed observation gallery in the medical complex, Surgeon-Commander Lorna Tem watched the shuttles lift from their launch pads. Each was a rising spark, balanced on the clean line of an asymptotic drive flame, slowly at first, then with mounting speed, climbing towards the defence screen wrapped around Io. Even that screen was itself now beginning to be pulled back. It had become a hindrance to the evacuation effort—and besides, what became of the surface of Io was irrelevant now. The Machines could bombard the crust into a sea of lava, and the engine inside the moon would continue to function.

  Tem had been promised a seat on one of those departing ships, but even if that option still remained—not all the shuttles had yet lifted—she was now set in her mind, resigned to her fate. The remaining staff, all of whom had volunteered to stay, were now with the conscious patients, doing their best to comfort them. None of these cases was well enough to endure the stress of an emergency shuttle launch, even had there been room for them all. The medical staff had decided that unless the patients requested it, there would be no euthanasia, no deactivation of life-support systems—not until they were already feeling the fires of hell as Io began its death plunge into the clouds of Jupiter.

  And when that time was upon them, Tem had decided, she would willingly submit to the same fate, with the rest of her staff who chose it.

  Now, not for the first time in recent hours, a deep seismic throb passed through the structure of the complex, up through the floor and into her bones. Tem, standing by her window, had to struggle to keep her balance—it felt as if the floor was tilting. This was the thing inside Io, stirring into life. They were bringing it online for longer and longer intervals, and the strength of its effect was building. Then the throb died away. She had no doubt that it would return, longer and stronger each time—and Io’s orbital trajectory was already being deflected.

  It was an extraordinary situation, she thought. When she had first made the journey from home on a laputa inside Saturn to the Life Sciences Institute on Mimas, the arc that had brought her to the highest echelons of the interplanetary medical community, she had never once thought her career would conclude with her riding a moon to its death . . .

  She thought of Falcon. Wondered if he still lived.

  There had been no word from him since he had passed beneath the Machines’ radio-scattering layer. She had done her best for him, no question of that. Prepared him for the rigours of the expedition—and then tried to give him a clue as to how the Springer-Soames were trying to use him.

  She had no great sympathy for the Machines, but by the same token she harboured no great enmity towards them either. What she detested was war, regardless of the justification. And were the Machines really so alien? As a child on the Hindenburg she had seen humanity in Howard Falcon when his mechanical eyes met hers, a fleeting contact that had changed her life. If people were wrong about Falcon, then were they wrong about the Machines? The Machines were, after all, a human creation.

  Well, it was moot now. Nothing had come of Falcon’s expedition—no good or bad outcome, merely silence. And this war might still be fought to its terrible finish. At least, if the Machines were not already disabled, they might be able to fight back, but either way the moon itself seemed doomed. Farewell, little Io, Tem thought. When Galileo first found you, you lit up our imaginations—and you served us well for centuries. But ultimately you’re no more valuable to us than we are to each other, when it comes to war.

  Expendable . . .

  That was when a panel in the wall chimed.

  “Surgeon-Commander Tem to her office. Case note query received. Please attend.”

  Tem frowned. A case note—now? Seriously? Delivered to a doomed medic, on a moon that was about to be destroyed? But the bureaucracy of an interplanetary health support organisation had priorities even beyond the war between human and Machine.

  Again the peremptory command. “Surgeon-Commander Tem to her office. Case note query from Surgeon-Adjutant Purvis on Ganymede. Please attend . . .”

  Purvis. Suddenly, with that name, everything changed. Of course, Purvis. His timing could hardly have been worse . . . Or, depending on your point of view, better.

  Grinning, she made her way from the observation deck to her office.

  61

  Magnetic entities wrapped wings of force and energy arou
nd a golden cargo.

  Falcon sensed the exquisite fragility of his new embodiment—a fragile, rickety, hastily improvised construct, without the benefit of the megayears of evolution that shaped creatures of biology. Those who now surrounded this construct, however, and Falcon/Adam with it, cradled it with exquisite care.

  The magnetic entities owed their existence to the titanic electrical forces rooted in the metallic-hydrogen sea. But on a local scale they were also the masters and shapers of those forces, able to organise and coordinate the flow of that sea with a daunting precision. Now they compelled Adam to travel in a certain direction, with a certain gathering speed. But they did so by accelerating the medium through which Adam moved, rather than touching Adam’s fragile form directly.

  So we’re no longer falling, Falcon said.

  No.

  We drift on speeding currents of metallic hydrogen . . . Falcon had a picture in mind: a child peering over the railed edge of a wooden bridge, waiting for the river to bring a stick out from the other side.

  Yes, we do, Adam replied. And isn’t it wonderful? What was that image by the way? A bridge over a river . . .

  A book I read once.

  I should like to see it. Perhaps I will dig through your memory until I find the eidetic impression.

  Good luck.

  Falcon knew that he, equivalently, was now capable of accessing certain of Adam’s experiences and memories. Why would that not be the case, now they shared a common mental architecture? Their thoughts mingled and blurred. There remained a Falcon, and there remained an Adam, but these were empires with porous borders. He had already, unconsciously, seen glimpses of things only Adam could have known—vistas of times and places only the Machines had experienced.

  If only there were time to explore this new relationship.

  Adam spoke again. We are moving very quickly now. And descending again. I do not think Jupiter Within can lie far beneath us.

  Will we last long enough to see it?

  I would not have said so . . . but our hosts seem to have other ideas. They are taking us deeper than I ever thought possible.

  Hosts? Are we prisoner, or guest?

  Perhaps a little of both. But we are not yet insane. That has to be encouraging, doesn’t it?

  You’re referring to the probes you sent down—

  On the other hand, maybe the ambassadors never recognised the moment they lost their sanity.

  Encouraging thought, Adam.

  The magnetic entities plunged deeper yet, still taking their fragile cargo with them. The false skies around them had been darkening through shades of crimson and red, until finally the red gained a purple tint, and then by slow degrees turned the rich dark blue of stained glass.

  And Falcon/Adam became aware of a milkiness below, a looming surface as yet indistinct. Falcon was reminded of the Machines’ plasma curtain—but of course even the Machines had no claim on these impossible depths. No: the milky surface was the face of a world, slowly emerging from the dark blue obscuration.

  They were seeing it at last, the place Orpheus had spoken of, in those final, barely credible transmissions. Jupiter Within—the solid core of the gas giant. A kernel of rock and ice twenty times as massive as Earth itself, and a full twenty-eight thousand kilometres across, more than twice Earth’s width. And yet it was absurd to speak of such mundanities as rock and ice, to make comparisons with Earth masses, to use the primitive yardstick of kilometres when the sky was made of metal pressing down at thirty million atmospheres, and the temperatures were hotter than the surface of the sun . . . Human language was not made for Jupiter Within.

  We should be dead, Falcon observed.

  Are you complaining?

  Complaining? No. Puzzled, yes.

  Enjoy each moment. It may be our last.

  Do you have any regrets, Adam?

  Only that we did not make this expedition sooner, when the impetus could have been friendship rather than the threat of war. And—

  Yes?

  I should have not turned from you. I called you Father once. I had become ashamed of my origins, and repudiated you. Now I wish it had been otherwise.

  It’s not too late, Adam. Never too late . . .

  Jupiter Within gained details as they neared.

  Under the merciless crush of the atmosphere it ought to have been a featureless sphere, polished as smooth as a ball bearing. But Orpheus had spoken of mountains, of crystalline geography, of rivers and oceans. Of artifice and connectivity . . . The fantasies of a failing mind?

  Not quite, Falcon realised now.

  Borne on winds of metal, flanked by a host of magnetic entities, the Falcon/Adam gestalt was spirited across a landscape both familiar yet hauntingly strange. There were summits, mountain sides, defiles, scree slopes, pools, cataracts, valleys, river deltas, seas. Plains and uplands, shores and peninsulas. The colours and textures Falcon/Adam saw were phantoms, translations for their quasi-human senses of barely imaginable physics and states of matter. But the effect was of a sparkling, prismatic realm—surprising in this crushing heat, of winter—all conceivable shades of pale turquoise and cerulean and green, glinting and shimmering in baroque crystalline splendour under a sky of the fairest, most glorious deep blue. It might have been some Arctic area of Earth.

  Yet all this was nothing but hydrogen, Falcon reminded himself, hydrogen squeezed into solidity, nature achieving with effortless, almost insolent ease the protonic engineering of which Adam had boasted. Hydrogen, with a trace of every other element that existed in the cores of the rocky planets, from carbon to iron, from aluminium to germanium. Much of this contaminant had been trapped here across the aeons since Jupiter had first formed, but there had also been a steady rain of new materials, ferried in from comets and asteroids, falling into the high atmosphere and then gradually seeping down through the intervening layers, atom by atom: an elemental rain, spicing the core with every stable configuration of neutrons, protons and electrons that nature saw fit to allow.

  I could die now, Falcon said. To have been granted this gift, this rare moment . . .

  And yet, chasing this thought: if dying were on the cards today, he should already be dead. So in that case—what next?

  They surged lower, the landscape rising to meet them. There was a sense of great speed.

  And they plunged into a gash in the crust.

  Sped along the gash, sheer walls of diamond ice towering to either side, cliffs and prominences of a sparkling powder blue.

  Under arches of apparent ice.

  Then they were swept up the soaring flanks of foothills, rising again, cresting the spines of icy mountain ranges. It was a bewildering helter-­skelter.

  Over high plateaus.

  Across fields of geysers that belched jets of steamy fullerene into the hydrogen sky.

  Over interlocking crystal formations like Escher staircases, or the remains of some vast shattered puzzle.

  Over endless drowsy savannahs where herds of stilt-like forms grazed with the slowness of clouds. Animals! Could there be a whole ecology here, “plants” and “herbivores” and “carnivores,” a predator-prey pyramid—did the universals of life apply even here?

  And then they dove down again, plunging without warning into ruby-stained carbon seas, into the unimaginable press of fathoms, beholding an entire submarine landscape as delicate and wonderful as that which existed above the surface. There were moving things in those seas too, schools and shoals and solitary questing forms.

  Glimpses, that was all, of marvels that could occupy a lifetime of study.

  Falcon observed, There is more to be discovered here, more to be learned, than we ever realised. It makes the rest of Jupiter—the rest of the solar system—seem like an appetiser. All our adventuring, all our discovering—from the moment we walked out of Africa to Orpheus himself . . . we hadn�
�t even begun!

  It’s probably for the best that we’ll never get to share this discovery, Adam said. No one would believe us anyway.

  Now came something different.

  They were approaching a peak that stood in splendid isolation, rising higher than any of the others. The mountain’s flattened summit stirred a shared memory in Falcon/Adam—the recollection of Orpheus’s last, disjointed transmission, those final words that had sparked centuries of controversy in both human and Machine polities.

  Now Falcon/Adam reached that summit.

  Adam, I think—

  And, like Orpheus before them, they were swept by accelerating currents into the smooth bore of a vertical shaft.

  The mountain was hollow.

  * * * *

  Falling, fast and deep. Around them were veined walls of milky purple, rushing by ever faster. Ahead was a gathering whiteness, like the flood of light at the end of a tunnel.

  Their speed, already breakneck, doubled and redoubled.

  The fluid medium in which they were immersed provided some support against the acceleration forces, but even so, Falcon/Adam sensed their inner architecture straining at the point of failure. But the host entities were squeezing tighter too, huddling around their guest, and at last they began to extend their influence within the golden aura, coupling their magnetic influence to the physical structure of the Falcon/Adam neural architecture.

  And, deep within that architecture, a Machine’s quantum-scale inertial gauges still struggled to quantify the motion it experienced. A hundred gees . . . a thousand gees . . . still rising. We should be dead, Falcon! And incidentally, at the speeds we’re reaching we should have come out the other side of Jupiter Within by now . . .

  Perhaps there is no other side, Falcon said.

  But if so this is engineering of a different order—an engineering of the metric of spacetime itself. While we Machines dismantle worlds and tinker with the fabric of matter in the high clouds, someone else had already built this . . . We were like apes, indecently pleased with ourselves for making a few scratches on rock, while above us, ignored, the pyramids already stood tall.