The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  Don’t feel too bad about it. Even apes have to start somewhere.

  You should know, Falcon.

  The whiteness was swelling now, engulfing more and more of the shaft ahead of them.

  You know, Falcon, they say the dying see a tunnel. White light at the end.

  I’m not ready to die just yet, Adam.

  The universe may have other ideas . . .

  The whiteness closed around them like a soft, lulling fog.

  * * * *

  The physical structure of Falcon/Adam at last abandoned the fight against pressure, temperature and the strains of acceleration. Howard Falcon, who had once been a man—and in these last hours had come to accept himself as fully Machine—was for an instant no more than an imprint, a pattern of information, a footprint in the sand.

  And yet aware.

  Falcon sensed a deep scrutiny, cold and vast. He was beyond hope, beyond fear.

  A white sea washed over that imprint, absorbing it, effacing it.

  There was nothing. Not even the memory of having lived.

  And then—

  62

  Tem navigated the empty corridors, the darkened wards, for one last time. The engine at the heart of Io was under constant power now, and she was increasingly disturbed by the seismic throb rising from the building’s foundations—and by the sense that her entire world lay on a tilt, like a capsizing boat.

  The medical complex was already beginning to be starved of power. Even now the complex was not entirely deserted; she knew her staff still patrolled the wards. Tem could imagine the conversations, as she’d had to conduct several herself: “We don’t know what it will be like, in the end. But if you wish to be spared it, we can put you under now . . .”

  Put you under. Such a lovely, comforting euphemism. And what a climax to Tem’s own medical career. If only she had been born in different times, she thought—if, if.

  But her career, such as it was—or her careers, including her overt medical profession and her more secretive activities—her careers were not finished just yet.

  In her office, Tem staggered to her desk. It was comforting to sit, not to have to keep her balance in the shifting apparent gravity.

  She found mail waiting for her: that purported case note query. She checked that the message was indeed from Surgeon-Adjutant Purvis on Ganymede. And so wasn’t a case note query at all.

  She snapped, trying to stay in character, “Accept the call.”

  The Surgeon-Adjutant’s face appeared on an area of the wall, tired, grey, the collar of a sterile medical tunic still buttoned around his neck. “Surgeon-Commander Tem. I’m sorry for the interruption, but I needed to discuss a case with you. I know it’s not a good time.”

  That was a scripted line—she fretted briefly that “not a good time” was too obvious, something of an absurd understatement in the ­circumstances—but that couldn’t be helped now. She gave her own scripted response. “It’s never a good time, Surgeon-Adjutant. But we have our duty, don’t we? Please show me what you have.”

  “Just a moment.”

  Purvis held an image up to whatever camera was capturing his face. It was a medical scan, and he pressed the image closer, so that it filled the entire field of view. The scan was the lacy outline of a skull, walls of bone as thin as the folds of gas around a nebula.

  “This is the patient,” Purvis said, again following a word-perfect routine.

  “I see,” she answered carefully.

  These behind-the-scenes channels were meant to transmit medical data, supposedly subject to patient confidentiality—and, more important, data too routine and too technical for the Springer-Soames’ monitors to tap into. But they were now, and not for the first time, being subverted for other purposes.

  The image began to change. The scan of the skull thickened out, gaining depth and texture. Bones knitted together, then smothered themselves in meat and nerves, muscle and tissue.

  A face was looking back at her. A moving image now, grinning.

  But it was not a human face.

  It was a Pan face.

  It was Boss.

  63

  Falcon/Adam was suspended in whiteness.

  After a timeless time, upon the face of that formless white, a regularity imposed itself. A pattern of lines. The lines themselves thickened. Where they intersected, the lines delineated white squares. The lines were a dark grey, the squares containing a curious sense of depth. And the distribution of whiteness across their faces was not uniform. It was thicker along two of the adjoining lines, thinner on the opposing pair.

  Beyond the squares, seen through them, stood a further, more distant whiteness.

  The regularity sharpened. The grey dividing lines formed into the iron bars of a many-paned window . . .

  Howard smeared his dressing gown sleeve across a cluster of panes in the cottage’s window, wiping away the condensation. Each little square of glass had gained a precise L-shaped frosting of snow on the outside, where it had gathered on the lower edge and in one corner. There had been flurries of snow over the preceding days, but nothing as heavy as this overnight fall. And it had come in right on schedule, a seasonal gift from the Global Weather Secretariat.

  The garden Howard knew was transformed. It seemed wider and longer from the hedges on either side to the sawtooth fence at the end of the gently sloping lawn, and a ridge of snow lay on the fence, neat as the deco­ration on a birthday cake. It all looked so cold and still, so inviting and mysterious.

  And the sky above the fence and hedges was clear, cloudless, shot through at this still-early hour with a delicate pale-rose pink. Howard looked at the sky for a long time, wondering what it would be like to be above the Earth, surrounded by nothing but air. It would be cold up there, but he’d put up with that for the freedom of flight.

  Yet here in the cottage it was snug and warm. Howard had come down from his bedroom to find that his mother was up already, baking bread. She liked the old ways of doing things. His father had prepared the fire in the parlour hearth, and now it was crackling and hissing. On the mantle over the hearth, one of a collection of ornaments and souvenirs, stood a clumsily assembled model on a clear plastic stand: a jet-black cube with Howard Falcon Junior clumsily painted on one corner.

  Howard found his favourite toy, and set it on the windowsill so it could see the snow too. The golden robot was a complicated thing, despite its antique radio-age appearance. It had been a gift on his eleventh birthday, only a couple of months earlier. He knew that it had cost his parents dearly to buy it for him.

  Now they stood side by side together, boy and robot, looking out of the window. The robot had been small once, a toy that had to stand on the sill to see through the window. Oddly, the robot now came up to Howard’s shoulders.

  That was not even the strangest thing. The strangest thing was to be having thoughts at all.

  Howard Falcon tried to speak. His voice was piping and boyish, but recognisably his own. “This is . . .”

  “Odd?” the robot asked, turning its clunky angular head to address the boy. “I’ll say. Especially as I seem to be sharing in your delusion.”

  “What delusion? . . . Oh. I see.”

  “We were dying.”

  “Coming apart. Losing coherence. What happened?” Falcon turned his hand slowly, the fine hairs catching the golden flicker of the hearth. He had skin again. Skin and bones and sinews, an arm sticking out of a dressing gown sleeve. Falcon was torn between the view through the paned window, and a fascinated inspection of his own hand and wrist.

  None of this could be real.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” Adam said, his voice a buzzing modu­lation that was nonetheless perfectly clear to Falcon. “Except that if someone wished to dig into your memories, the moment of our dissolution—when our architecture was most exposed—wou
ld have been the ideal opportunity. Perhaps the gentleman will be able to shed some light on matters.”

  “What gentleman?”

  The robot swivelled its head. “The one outside in the snow. The one beckoning to us.”

  A snowman stood in the garden beyond the window. Falcon had not noticed him until now, but he supposed that the snowman had been there all along, waiting. And he was indeed inviting them outside, his twig-thin arms waving in encouragement.

  “It would seem rude to ignore him,” Falcon said.

  “Indeed.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  Falcon went to the cupboard under the stairs and—just as he’d expected—found a scarf. He swung it around his throat, tightened the cord on his dressing gown, and led the robot out into the garden.

  Beyond the cottage, the cold reached through his slippers to his feet, and the chill air pricked at his senses. Each breath was an icy intoxication, making him feel even more alive.

  Above them was a cloudless pink sky.

  He was no longer Falcon the cyborg, after centuries. He felt as if he had been released from an enclosing pressure suit. It was good to be living, even in illusion. If this was merely a dream, Falcon thought, a last pattern of impressions generated by a dying mind, it was still a blessing not to feel pain, not to know fear.

  Yet there was still apprehension. It still took him an effort of will to face the snowman.

  The figure waited in the snow. But the snowman’s form had undergone a profound alteration while they were leaving the cottage. Instead of being a lumpy, misshapen approximation to a man, the snowman had become fully anthropomorphic. The white figure stood on well-defined legs, the rela­tive sizes of its body, head and limbs entirely in proportion. Gone were its twigs-for-arms; gone were its carrot nose and button eyes. Save for the whiteness of its skin, and the softness of its outlines—it had no features, no distinct musculature or gender—it could have been a statue, a marble figure from classical antiquity.

  It was still waving them closer.

  Falcon and the robot approached the silently beckoning form. Falcon’s apprehension had sharpened to dread, but he could not turn back.

  He summoned the nerve to speak. “Well, you’re a better snowman than any I ever made. I never had the patience . . . Who are you?”

  The snowman answered, “Who do you think?” His voice was deep. There was amusement in it, but also a certain lofty condescension.

  “A representative of the inhabitants of Jupiter Within,” Falcon said. “Whatever you call yourselves.”

  “You are mistaken.”

  Adam said, from Falcon’s side, “Whoever you are, I should like to know where we are. We have long posited the existence of a purposeful technological culture in Jupiter Within. The assaults on our cities were proof enough of that. Now, I suspect a capability of—space-metric engineering. Something akin to a wormhole. Remember, Falcon, my accelerometers recorded a journey incompatible with our still being inside Jupiter, let alone within the core . . .”

  “Why do you imagine you are anywhere, little Machine?”

  “Because we are having a conversation,” Adam replied, with a defiance that drew some admiration from Falcon. “That fact sets certain existential parameters. Even if we are disembodied intelligences our minds are running in some sort of emulation. Any such emulation must be physically grounded on some substrate, and there must be a source of power . . .”

  The snowman nodded its faceless white bulb of a head. “Good, good. I applaud clear thinking. Howard Falcon: would it surprise you to hear that we have already spoken? Or that Adam and I know each other intimately? As well we should, given that Adam helped shape me for the mission that made my name—”

  “Orpheus,” Falcon said, with a shiver of awe that had nothing to do with the cold. “My God. You survived.”

  “I endured—call it that. As you endure. I passed into the realm of those you would wish to know, those you would wish to understand. Call them the First Jovians. I met them, and they altered me so that I might survive and learn. Learn and adapt, learn and evolve. Becoming more than the thing I once was. More than you.”

  “You have been watching us,” Falcon said slowly. “You were seen in human spaces—your avatar. I saw you. In the ruins of our worlds.”

  “And in our cities too,” Adam said now. “A representation of the primitive form of Orpheus.”

  “You never told us that,” Falcon said, looking at him.

  Adam made a creaking shrug. “We were at war, remember. Besides, you never asked.”

  “Yes, I was sent to watch you,” said the snowman. “Once your activities became . . . obvious. Sufficiently large-scale.”

  “Like the dismantling of Mercury,” Falcon said dryly.

  “Quite. Perturbations on a planetary scale. Indeed, by then you had already had the audacity to send me, a probe, down into Jupiter Within. I was a frail thing, and I was cherished by those much greater than me. Since then my purpose has been to help them interpret what I see, understand what you are doing.”

  Adam nodded, his metal neck creaking. “I am glad you were preserved, Orpheus. The intended final upload of your personality back to Amalthea was never achieved. You were thought lost. You did not deserve that.”

  “Can you take us to . . . them?” Falcon asked.

  The snowman made a laugh—not a kindly laugh, but one born from pity and no small measure of contempt. “That will not be possible. I am the bridge by which you shall achieve what narrow comprehension is possible for you. The First Jovians speak through me, and I distil their thoughts and utterances into a form compatible with the limits of your understanding. Ask for no more than this.”

  “We’re entitled to ask whatever we like,” Falcon said. “And I resent being patronised. You were made by us, for a purpose—and a bold one, a voyage of science and exploration. And now you must have a purpose in bringing us here.”

  “Your physical identities no longer exist in the forms you once knew. But you are not dead. And you still have responsibilities.”

  “How can you know us so well?” Adam asked the snowman.

  “You are as glass to me. I see your enmities. Your jealousies and grudges. Your endless desire for vengeance against each other.”

  “Fine,” Falcon said. “Then you’ll know that Adam and I acted together to defend the Machines against a human weapon. We went deep into Jupiter, trying to prevent a logical-agent weapon from spreading. We sacrificed ourselves.”

  “And your point?”

  “That our intentions are honourable. In fact, I only came to Jupiter in the hope of averting a larger catastrophe—the use of the Io weapon. Do you know of that?”

  “How could I not? But the fate of Io is utterly irrelevant.” The snowman motioned past them, to the cottage. “We shall continue our discussion indoors.”

  * * * *

  Falcon and the Machine turned around and retraced their footsteps back to the door, the snowman following them. From outside, the windows glowed with an inviting, golden light. Falcon’s simulated heart ached with an almost unbearable longing for home and the comforts of childhood. He knew that this was a fiction woven from his memories, no substitute for the real thing, but the more real it seemed, the crueller the illusion.

  They stepped into a bubble of warmth. Falcon closed the door, latching it tight even as wisps of snow curled between the door and its frame. There was no sign of his parents, he noticed, with a pang of loss. He hadn’t even spoken to his mother, glimpsed earlier in the kitchen . . .

  * * * *

  The snowman ushered them into the parlour. The hearth was still glowing, but the roar and crackle had gone out of the fire. Some barely remembered instinct caused Falcon to grasp the wrought-iron poker and prod the fire back into life, rummaging through the coals and embers until they sparked and flamed.r />
  The snowman extended a hand. “Come. Sit with me.”

  * * * *

  “Aren’t you concerned about melting?” Falcon asked, easing into one of the chairs.

  “Good point. A crack in the verisimilitude? But actually melting is the least of my concerns.” The snowman’s hands were like fingerless mittens, now linked together in its lap. Its white skin glistened and sparkled but showed no other sign of being affected by the fire. “Our environment, were you able to perceive it in its true nature, would be . . . confusing for you. Confusing and upsetting. Hence this simulacrum. Is it acceptable to you?”

  “Would you care if it wasn’t?” Falcon asked.

  “I do not wish you to be distressed. Given that we are inside the sun.”

  Falcon wondered if he had misheard.

  Adam leaned forward. His feet did not quite reach the carpet, lending him the comical look of a mechanical teddy bear propped up in a chair. “How can we be inside the sun?”

  “Come, Adam, you have worked some of this out at least. If metric engineering is sufficient to open a wormhole inside Jupiter, constructing a redoubt inside a star is scarcely more challenging. What is Jupiter but a failed embryo star, lacking the mass to achieve fusion?” Something in the snowman’s demeanour seemed to soften. “You will forgive my earlier tone. I confess I struggle to find the right balance in my dealings with you. When you stand between gods and men, it is easy to assume a certain . . . haughtiness. But even I am as nothing to them—a mere mouthpiece.” The snowman nodded at the fire. “Stir it again, if you would.”

  Falcon leaned from his chair to grasp the poker. But as his fingers closed around the iron, he hesitated. “Why? What does it matter if I do or don’t? This isn’t real. You’re manipulating our perceptions at such a deep level you can decide for yourself how cold or warm we feel.”

  “I thought a second demonstration of your capabilities would serve some benefit,” the snowman said. “But in truth, once was probably sufficient. They cannot have failed to notice.”