The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “Notice what?” Falcon asked. “What demonstration? What capabilities?”

  Adam snapped, “And who cannot have ‘failed to notice’?”

  “Your kind. Humans and Machines. Who will have noticed that you have interfered with the proper functioning of your star. The fire in the hearth is a symbolic representation. In reality, when you stirred the coals earlier, you were perturbing the very fusion reactions which sustain your sun—the fire that warms the worlds which orbit it.”

  Falcon stared down at his hand, at the fingers that still clasped the poker, with a shudder of horror. As if he suddenly found himself holding a snake. “That isn’t possible.”

  “By your measure of things, but not by theirs. Think of the poker as the control system, the user interface, of a chain of machinery largely beyond your comprehension. When you prod the fire, you make your star skip a few nuclear heartbeats. A complete cessation of fusion, for a few instants.”

  Adam was still leaning forward, his hands on the rests of his chair. “This will have a profound effect on the hydrodynamic stability of the stellar envelope.”

  “That is correct. The sudden absence of photon pressure from the core will cause a progressive collapse and rebound of the sun’s internal structure. The stellar equivalent of a hiccough. The effect is transient, but it will create a powerful mass ejection when the rebound reaches the surface.”

  “Which will come in about . . . thirty thousand years?” Adam asked.

  “That is correct.”

  Falcon, very cautiously, eased his hand away from the poker. “I don’t understand. Why so long?”

  “Simple plasma dynamics,” Adam whispered. “The sun is very opaque, to light at least. After a photon has been produced by a fusion reaction in the core of the sun, it takes it thirty thousand years to fight its way out to the surface. The sunlight that warms your face now began its journey from the stellar interior somewhere around the time of the Cro-Magnons.”

  “Adam speaks correctly,” the snowman said. “Nothing can quickly pene­trate the bulk of the sun’s mass—”

  “Except neutrinos,” Adam stated.

  The snowman raised a mitten, acknowledging the robot’s point. “Except neutrinos. Created by the fusion processes in the heart of the sun. Instead of thirty thousand years, it takes them only two seconds to battle through the same density of matter. That ceaseless squall of subatomic particles has just had an interruption, as if a great door slammed shut in the furnace of the sun, only to reopen a moment later. And they will have noticed: astronomers, monitors of solar weather—those who observe such phenomena, whether human or Machine.”

  Falcon wryly remembered Kalindy Bhaskar’s Ice Orchestrion, that neutrino-sensitive instrument of ice in Antarctica. Surely that could no longer exist; if it did, he imagined it would be sounding a few sour notes.

  “And in thirty thousand years?” he asked now.

  “There will be a disturbance. But your descendants will know that it is on its way. They will have time to prepare, time to make arrangements.”

  Falcon’s horror had turned to revulsion. “This is monstrous. To perturb the sun, merely to make—what, a gesture?”

  “Any more monstrous than to destroy worlds to win a war? One of you is human—or was. One of you is a Machine—or was. Do either of you shrug off the moral burden of the forms you once assumed?” The snowman turned its blank and imperious face. “Falcon, you helped the Machines gain their liberty from human control. But at the destruction of Earth—in those final moments, you would have gladly annihilated them, your very words conveyed such a threat, if the choice had been yours. If it had been possible, had you been granted the means, in the full fury of that moment—would you have had the moral strength to resist?”

  Falcon searched deep inside himself. He knew better than to lie. “I can’t be sure.”

  “And now your people plan to smash Jupiter itself, or at least its upper atmosphere, in order to gain some advantage over your foe. And you.” The snowman turned to Adam now. “Falcon allowed you Machines sentience and the means to pursue your own destiny. Yet you could not bring yourselves to live in lasting peace. Greed overcame you—a very human flaw, by the way. When your greed was challenged, you punished the humans by stealing their birth world. You, Adam, were a significant contributor to the decision process that led to that terrible act. What was the deeper meaning? Was it all revenge over the one you called ‘Father’? Do you retain that much of the flawed creatures who made you?”

  Adam turned away.

  “And now, between the two of you, you prosecute a war which, in the end, will threaten every remaining ecological niche in the solar system. Do not think yourself blameless, either of you.”

  Falcon looked at Adam; neither of them spoke.

  The snowman paused and extended his hands, palms raised to the warming hearth. “However—here you are, together. Man and Machine. The First Jovians had considered dealing with you two as they had dealt with the previous ambassadors from the Machines—that is, by swatting you away. But here, by some chance, fortuitously, were the two of you, representatives of both realms, tumbling down, down into the dark, intertwined. So I was sent to . . . inspect you. Neither of you is without some blemish. But by the same token, neither is without the courage or the willingness to set aside old prejudices. Still, I was stirred by your decision to proceed with self-sacrifice and cooperation. It gave me encouragement. It gave me an opportunity.”

  “To do what?” Falcon asked.

  “To petition those who stand above me. To plead with the First Jovians to grant you a second chance.

  “The Io weapon is the final straw, you see. By their reckoning it is an almost unbearably primitive weapon, conceptually no more advanced than a bone club—but it marks a threshold. You hurl worlds at your enemy, as once your ape predecessors beat each others’ brains out with clubs of bone, and with barely more sophisticated reasoning behind the act.

  “And in the next stage of your development, you humans, you Machines—you will begin to meddle with the fundamental properties of matter, of spacetime. The idea of such energies being deployed in an unending, ever-escalating war—well.” The snowman settled his hands back into his lap. “Even then you would have been no more than a nuisance. But if a nuisance must be dealt with, then the sooner the better. Their preferred solution was extinction. They have the means, as I am sure I do not need to demonstrate.”

  “And now?” Adam asked.

  “You have been granted a stay of execution. Contingent, I should add, on the outcome of the next few hours or days. The Io weapon must not be used.”

  “They’re determined,” Falcon said. “The Springer-Soames. The military government.”

  “Now you have a chance to argue them out of it,” the snowman answered. And he gestured at the fire, and the poker set beside it.

  64

  Boss said, “We have always believed that in every crisis there is also opportunity. Could this time of greatest peril also be the moment when we finally show our true strength?”

  “I will follow your lead,” Tem answered. “As always.”

  “I see the Io deployment is proceeding. Have you been offered escape?”

  Tem swallowed. “I was offered, but declined.”

  “To remain with your patients?”

  “It’s the least I could do.”

  Boss nodded. He scratched at the overhanging prominence of his brow, and brushed at his flat nostrils, as he always did when at his most thoughtful. It was some years since Tem had spoken to the leader of the resistance in person. She had time to notice the smoothness of his speech now, inevitably gruff in tone but otherwise convincingly human. Centuries of practice would do that for you, she supposed.

  “We had hoped to destabilise this regime, this rotten remnant of the World Government, before it could commit this final atro
city, the fall of Io. Well, we have failed there. But at least we have saved the Machine ­culture—thanks to you. I can confirm that the logical agent you implanted into Falcon was never delivered. The warning you gave him worked. The Machines were not disabled; there is at least a chance they will survive the Io event. Whatever happens, Lorna—whatever becomes of us—you have acted well. I could not have asked more of you.” He grinned, showing huge, yellowed teeth. “A pricked thumb! I would have not thought of anything so subtle—so human. And indeed, knowing Falcon of old, I might have feared it would be too subtle for him. But it worked—although unfortunately at the cost of Falcon’s own long life itself. Shame. He was a friend to us simps, in as much as any of his generation was.” He grimaced, and reverted to the crude speech of the early simps: “Boss—boss—go!” He grinned and hooted laughter.

  And it was as if the years fell away, and he resembled his earliest archive images.

  This was Ham 2057a, born as a disposable worker for human society, given a birth stamp and a slave name—Ham, who had risen to be the first president of the Independent Pan Nation—Ham, who had retreated into the shadows in response to the increasing corruption of the old World Government. Ham, a Pan who now led an interplanetary network of simps and humans in resistance against the Springer-Soames regime.

  Lorna Tem had been recruited by agents of the underground Pan Nation as a young, idealistic medical student—a student already appalled at how her profession was being compromised by the demands of the military government. She had found she was able to justify working as a medic for the military forces. A doctor was a doctor; a life saved was a life saved, whatever the circumstances—and her patients, mostly broken soldiers, had had little choice about their careers. But in parallel she had treasured her covert links to the resistance.

  And she had never met Boss in person—few had.

  She asked now, curiously, “What of you personally? Are you—­comfortable? Wherever you are. Are you able to live, to raise your children?”

  The Pan smiled, a chimp’s toothy grin. “Don’t you worry about me; Boss is fine. We simps have no regrets about the choice we made, our withdrawal from the human world—it was three hundred years ago. We faked our own extinction! Not bad for dumb chimps, huh? Humans were too busy laughing at the bucket-list antics of Eshu the trickster, to notice the Departure. He was a true simp hero. And we got away with it, even as the grip of the new surveillance state took hold of mankind.

  “No, we do not regret. The World Government respected the Pan Nation, but how long would that respect have endured as the Machine war escalated? We would have been an irrelevance at best—or seen as a disposable asset at worst. This was the best way. I am still engaged in history, am I not?”

  “Yes—”

  “Wait, please.” Boss turned away and frowned, at a monitor out of shot. “There is something new. It concerns Howard Falcon.”

  She was astonished. “Falcon? But you told me he was gone—lost in Jupiter.”

  Boss was distracted by whatever was coming through. “Well, he’s not lost any more. If this is authentic—”

  “What, sir?”

  “A message. Delivered by a very strange means.” He faced her. “You’ve had some dealings with Falcon these recent days. I need your assessment, Lorna. This message—our agents and assets have word of it, and knowledge has already permeated all levels of government security. They just don’t know what to make of it, or how to respond. I think you ought to hear it for yourself . . .”

  “I’ll help if I can.”

  Ham nodded to an off-screen assistant.

  There was a crackle, and then a human voice started speaking. But Tem needed no more than the first few seconds of it to know that, whatever it claimed, it could not possibly be the man she knew.

  Not unless something quite astonishing had become of him.

  65

  The snowman had leaned forward to pick up the poker and pass it to Falcon. “Here. Take it.”

  “I did enough damage just now, didn’t I? Besides, they’ll either have seen the drop in the neutrinos or they won’t. Doing it again won’t make any difference.”

  “You misunderstand my intention. That was a mere demonstration of what is possible. Now for something subtler. If the solar neutrinos can be stopped, they can also be modulated. When you hold the poker with one end in the fire, your words will be imprinted on the neutrino flux, like sound waves on air. A message that can be decoded. Think on your words carefully.” He glanced at Adam. “Make this a joint statement. You will be addressing Machines as well as people. Both must grasp the severity of the moment.”

  Still with great trepidation, Falcon closed his fingers around the end of the poker. But he did not yet place the other end in the hearth. “What are the terms to be? Another ceasefire? It’ll hold about as long as all the rest.”

  “Something more permanent,” the snowman suggested. “A separation of territories, at least for the time being.”

  “We tried that,” Adam said. “At the end of the twenty-second century we Machines left the inner solar system altogether. It’s never worked. There are resources we both covet. We chafe against each other’s borders.”

  “Then the borders need to be redefined. There are more worlds than the planets of the sun.” The snowman gestured around at the firelit parlour of the little cottage. “From Jupiter Within, Adam, you have already walked to the heart of a star. Now, a thousand other worlds lie within your reach. Worlds beyond your solar system. Worlds like Jupiter: most heavier and hotter, but almost all of them have ecologies of one sort or another. Some are simple. Others are . . . shall we say interestingly complex?”

  “Extrasolar Jovians,” Adam guessed. “Hot Jupiters—”

  “They are yours for the choosing. The First Jovians have established lines of dialogue with some of the occupants of these worlds—but not all, in some cases the conceptual gulfs are too vast. You would bring fresh perspectives, fresh approaches—fresh ways of thinking. The First Jovians think you could be valuable. In turn, you would need to learn empathy. I have seen the glimmerings of it in you, Adam.”

  “What are you proposing?” the robot asked.

  “Most of your kin are already inside Jupiter. Call the others home. From the Kuiper Belt, from the Oort cloud, from your Host around the sun—summon your lonely warriors. Tell them the solar system is theirs no more, but that prizes beyond imagining await inside Jupiter Within. Make the case persuasively—you’ll only have this one chance. And you, Falcon . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Let no human interfere with the Machine migration. Give them free passage. Open the cordon around Jupiter. And make it plain that all mili­tary action must now cease. If humans obey these stipulations, you will have lost Jupiter and its great treasures . . .”

  And the medusae, Falcon thought wistfully.

  “But the rest of the solar system is yours. The separation need not be forever. Say—a thousand years? You can agree the terms yourselves. A trial separation. Then envoys of people and Machines may meet again.”

  Falcon said, “It must be together—you and I, Adam. But what if they don’t heed our words? The human governments, the Machine collectives—they may not listen.”

  “You will be speaking in pulses of modulated neutrinos,” the snowman pointed out dryly. “Issuing a proclamation from the heart of the sun. I think they will listen.”

  Falcon stood. “Very well.” He beckoned Adam to stand to his right. Adam closed his metal fingers around the poker just below Falcon’s childish hand. Slowly they advanced the poker into the crackle and blaze of the hearth, this time being careful not to stir the fire.

  “We speak?” Falcon asked. “That’s all we have to do?”

  “Speak,” the snowman said, with a wave of encouragement.

  Falcon cleared his throat.

  “Hello,�
�� he said, with all the formality he could muster. His voice was still absurdly high, piping and boyish, lacking any authority. He wondered what his audience would make of it, then smiled at his own misgivings. “This is Commander Howard Falcon, USN, speaking from inside the sun. Ephemeris Time . . . frankly I have no idea. With me is Adam of the Machines. We have come a long way together, and we have something important to tell you. And by that we mean all of you. People and Machines. Wherever you are.

  “Please listen carefully—oh, and please tell the Brenner Institute there is life in Jupiter Within. And it’s big . . .”

  66

  Lorna Tem listened, and listened again.

  Very carefully.

  At first the childlike tone of the voice had argued against any possibility of it being the Falcon she knew. But what was that when set against the rank impossibility of a human voice imprinted on a modulated flux of neutrinos boiling out of the very heart of the sun?

  She clung to her scepticism almost until the end. Falcon and the Machine—the one called Adam—laid out their joint terms for an end to the war. None of it was objectionable to her.

  Then he had delivered the part of the message that shredded the last of her doubts.

  “Oh, and Surgeon-Commander Tem? I remembered, belatedly, how we first met, many years ago. You were that brave little girl on the Hinden­burg. I am sorry that our second meeting was not under better circumstances. But you did your best to warn me that I had been weaponised. I am sorry if my revelation now places you in difficulty, but I wanted you to know of my gratitude, and I may not have another chance to express it.”

  When the message ended, she only had to assure Boss that as far as she was concerned it was quite authentic—that that was the Falcon she had known.

  The Boss grinned that wide chimp smile once again. “Good luck, Surgeon-Commander—and you may need it after being outed by your exotic friend. If you see him again, remember me to him. Hoo! But today a new age begins, for all of us.” And he closed the connection.