The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  The hunters had returned when the woods were in shade and October shadows were long on the meadow.

  Cook had had dinner for six to contend with, but a butler, maid, and manservant were sufficient to do the service. Dilys, inexperienced in the ways of the household, had been free to sit in her tiny room in the servant’s wing and watch the viddie, until exhaustion overcame her.

  She’d tried to listen, but after dinner Kingman and his guests had seemed to vanish into some utterly soundproof recess of the ancient manor. Through the crashing din of the nearby kitchen she’d filtered the sound of footsteps descending stone stairs—even the whisper of long robes—then a loud screech of iron hinges and the boom of heavy wooden doors. Then nothing.

  Nothing to do but sit quietly in her little room, while the rest of the staff bustled about her, and think. Seems there was a place beneath the house that did not appear in the oldest plan, those fragments of parchment dating from the late 14th century, when what was to become Kingman’s house had begun as an abbey on the pilgrim road. If the hidden place deep in the earth had been built at that time, its architects and builders had conspired to keep it secret. If it had been dug later, the contractors and workmen were equally discreet.

  How was such perfect discretion obtained? By the ancient expedients, no doubt still in use. How many building inspectors and historians and would-be archaeologists had come into sudden wealth or met with untimely death after professing an interest in this significant pile of old stones?

  Dilys, truly exhausted after fourteen hours of washing and ironing, had been unable to resist exhaustion. She’d fallen asleep then, and wakened to this deathly quiet moment.

  Now she leaves her narrow cell, walks through the big kitchen smelling of grease and soap—moonlight spills through the high leaded windows, reflects from the round bottoms of hanging steel pans and bowls, gleams from racks of knives—moves through the pantry into the service hall beside the main dining room.

  Here a door opens upon a narrow stair, those she had heard them descend. Nothing guards the door. She opens it and moves swiftly down the spiraling stone steps into utter darkness.

  Infrared radiation seeps from the warm stone walls, enough for her to see by. Empty racks and abandoned casks are shoved back against the walls, but someone has recently been in to dust off the cobwebs. The stone pavement underfoot has been washed and waxed. At the far side of the old wine cellar is another door, again unlocked and unguarded. Here, at the heart of the conspiracy, confidence has overruled caution.

  Through the door. More stone steps—cooler now, a cave that keeps a steady temperature all year around. She sees forms in the dim glow of the Earth’s faint radioactive warmth.

  At the bottom of the steps. The air redolent of perfumes and perspirations; by their various scents she knows Kingman and each of his guests. There—their ghosts hang in midair, six white robes still glowing with the body heat of those who have recently worn them.

  In front of her, another door, this one of metal. She touches her tongue to it: bronze, cool and sour. On its surface, only a few handprints, still barely warm and thus visible. Otherwise the door is a slab of black in the dim red darkness.

  She sniffs the air, stares at the cooling prints, listens.

  She eases the door open. Cold air flows gently out of the cavern. From the barely perceptible echoes of her quiet footfalls on the stone she senses the amount of empty space in the chamber.

  To see more, even she will need light. She cups her palm over the bright electric torch, making a lantern of her hand’s bones and flesh. By the blood-filtered light she sees a severely simple octagonal chamber of pale sandstone, like a church without aisles or transept, higher than it is wide. The floor is of black marble, highly polished, unadorned.

  On eight sides slender stone piers soar upward, springing into thin ribs which criss-cross the vault in a star pattern. Between the ribs, a ceiling painted so dark a blue that it is black in the red light. Bright gold eight-pointed stars randomly adorn it, in sizes from nail heads to shield bosses. The biggest star, a kind of gold target, is fixed at the high center.

  The architecture is Late Gothic, a style originating in Eastern Europe in the 14th Century, in England called Perpendicular. The work is original, no copy, but this vault is no church. The stars overhead are not randomly sprinkled.

  This is a planetarium. It depicts the southern sky, and at its center is the constellation Crux. She recognizes the nature of the room from what Blake has told her. The starry vault is an analogue, centuries older, of the last chamber in the underground villa in Paris where Blake’s initiation into the prophetae had culminated.

  She moves slowly about the windowless, utterly sterile room, noting how the golden stars above are reflected in the polished black marble at her feet, as if from the bottom of a deep well.

  There, in the center of the black marble floor, is the single decorative feature, directly beneath the bright golden star in Crux. A raised round stone, with a device carved upon it. She uncaps her torch and shines its intense white beam straight down.

  A Gorgon’s head. Medusa.

  Not the classical fancy of a lovely woman with garden snakes for hair, but an Archaic-period horror mask of deeply carved and brightly painted limestone—red and blue and yellow—fused upon the marble: staring eyes, wide-stretched maw, curved tusks, a scalp writhing with vipers.

  The Goddess as Death.

  The hall in Paris that Blake had told of had been built in the Age of Reason, and the starry chamber which he had attained after many trials was dominated by an enormous statue of Athena, inside of which was housed (O pinnacle of Apollonian calm and exuberance!) a pipe organ. But on the aegis of that same Athena, goddess of wisdom, was an archaic mask of Medusa.

  The prophetae worship the Knowledge, Agia Sophia, Athena and Medusa, Wisdom and Death. To look upon the face of Medusa is to be turned to stone. To resist the Knowledge is to die.

  She could be the greatest of us

  To resist us is to resist the Knowledge

  The gaunt girl who now looks upon the face of the goddess thinks otherwise. Beneath the carved stone mask at her feet rests something of great value, something of deepest significance to the people who put the mask here.

  To confront wisdom is to die. The gate of wisdom is death.

  The slab is heavy, but it lifts easily away. The crypt below, lined with white limestone, is no wider or deeper than the marble plate above. Something in it is hidden under a linen shroud. She plucks the shroud away and penetrates the dark chamber with a spear of light. She sees. . . .

  An iron chalice bearing the figure of the striding storm god. Hittite, older than the carved Medusa, at least 3,500 years old.

  A pair of papyrus scrolls. Egyptian, almost as old.

  The tiny skeletons of two human infants, yellowed to ivory. Origin unknown. Age indeterminate.

  A slim black datasliver, shiny and new.

  “Kon-Tiki Mission Control at mission elapsed time three hours, ten minutes, on the mark,” said flight director Meechai Buranaphorn into the data recorder. “And here’s the mark. . . . Guidance, give us your verbal assessment please.”

  “Tracking still nominal for scheduled atmospheric descent.”

  “Medical?”

  The med controller spoke into his comm unit. “All nominal. EEG indicates our man is in transition out of stage-two sleep.”

  Already there was a lag in signal reception from Kon-Tiki, amounting to perhaps a twentieth of a second and steadily increasing. Mission Control was forced to maintain communication with Kon-Tiki via comm satellites in temporary orbits, for between Garuda and the planet the shield of Amalthea was always upraised, blocking line-of-sight communication.

  The half dozen controllers hung comfortably in loose harnesses above their sparkling flatscreens. Through surrounding windows of thick glass a spectacular landscape of pocked and irregular ice and rock reflected feeble sunlight back into the circular room: it was one e
nd of the oblong moon, which stretched away for dozens of kilometers like a striated, convex plaster impression of Death Valley. From the edge of the dirty white horizon an orange-red glow refracted daytime on Jupiter. The planet itself would never be seen through the windows of this room, but Kon-Tiki’s triumphant return would be.

  For all the relative luxury of its custom-made facilities, Garuda was a crowded ship, with five crewmembers and a total of twenty-one mission controllers, scientists, and supporting technicians. When Howard Falcon was aboard, that made twenty-seven people. There was one other passenger on Garuda’s official roster, but so far as the professionals were concerned he was worse than useless baggage.

  Mister Useless Baggage spoke up now, from a privileged seat peering over the flight director’s shoulder—the controllers knew him mainly as someone from a watchdog citizens’ group authorized by the Board of Space Control to observe the mission, a place a couple of hundred media types would willingly have shed blood over.

  “Consumables, Redfield here, if you can spare a moment. My calculations do not quite jibe with your estimate of oxygen-consumption rates aboard Kon-Tiki. Will you kindly reconfirm?” His voice and manners were those of an unfriendly tax collector.

  The controller in question objected to nothing, offered nothing, merely suffered the indignity and tapped a few keys. The Baggage Man had subjected all of them to such indignity in the weeks since Garuda had left Ganymede.

  Mr. Baggage, Redfield, as he called himself, grunted at the numbers freshly displayed on his screen and said nothing. He was not really paying attention, not even really caring.

  Armed with the plans Blake had worked out for them, Dexter and Arista had launched their public-relations blitz. . . . “Quis custodet custodies?” Arista had demanded, as confident of her dimly remembered Latin as only priests and lawyers can be. Dexter had put the matter a little more earthily: Who sets a dog to watch the eggs?

  Faced with Vox Populi’s persistence and this last bit of untranslatable logic, the Board of Space Control had given in. After much jockeying and negotiating—the Plowmans never hesitating to go public when things bogged down—it was agreed that one or more impartial observers from an organization such as Vox Populi should be allowed free access to every facet of the Kon-Tiki program, throughout its operations.

  Blake sometimes suppressed a grin when he thought how readily the Space Board had capitulated. The mess was not all that funny, really, when he considered that perhaps a dozen people on this ship knew all about it and were merely awaiting a chance to kill him. And even the innocents wished he would go away.

  Yet he stayed and asked harassing questions and watched them, sometimes for two or more shifts at a time without sleeping. What he was looking for, they didn’t know. They weren’t friendly, and neither was he.

  Blake’s bitter reverie was broken by the comm controller. “Flight, we have Howard on line.”

  XVIV

  Kon-Tiki was just emerging from shadow, and the Jovian dawn was bridging the sky ahead in a titanic bow of light, when the persistent buzz of the alarm dragged Falcon up from sleep. The inevitable nightmares (he had been trying to summon a nurse, but did not even have the strength to push a button) had swiftly faded from consciousness. The greatest—and perhaps last—adventure of his life was before him.

  He called Mission Control, now almost 100,000 kilometers away and falling swiftly below the curve of Jupiter, to report that everything was in order. His velocity had just passed fifty kilometers per second (given that he was within the outer fringes of a planetary atmosphere, that was one for Guinness), and in half an hour Kon-Tiki would begin to feel the resistance that made this the most difficult atmospheric entry in the entire solar system.

  Scores of probes had survived this flaming ordeal, but they’d been tough, solidly packed masses of instrumentation, able to withstand several hundred gravities of drag. Kon-Tiki would hit peaks of thirty Gs, and would average more than ten, before she came to rest in the upper reaches of the Jovian atmosphere.

  Very carefully and thoroughly Falcon began to attach the elaborate system of restraints that would anchor him to the walls of the cabin. No simple webbed harness here—when he’d finished making the last connections among the struts and tubes and electrical conduits and strain sensors and shock absorbers, he was virtually a part of the ship’s structure.

  The clock on the console was counting backward. One hundred seconds to entry. For better or worse, Falcon was committed. In a minute and a half he would hit palpable atmosphere and would be caught irrevocably in the grip of the giant.

  The countdown proceeded: minus three, minus two, minus one, on down to zero.

  Nothing happened. At first.

  The clock began counting up—plus one, plus two, plus three—and then, from beyond the walls of the capsule, there came a ghostly sighing that rose steadily to a high-pitched, screaming roar. The countdown had been three seconds late, not at all bad, considering the unknowns.

  The noise was quite different from that of a plunging shuttle on Earth or Mars, or even Venus. In this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, all sounds were transformed a couple of octaves upward. On Jupiter, even thunder would have falsetto overtones.

  Squeaky thunder. Falcon would have grinned if he could.

  With the rising scream came mounting weight. Within seconds he was completely immobilized. His field of vision contracted until it embraced only the clock and the accelerometer. Fifteen Gs and four hundred and eighty seconds to go. He never lost consciousness; but then, he had not expected to.

  Kon-Tiki’s flaming trail through the atmosphere was surely spectacular, viewed by the photogram cameras feeding Mission Control, or by any other watcher—many thousands of kilometers long by now. Five hundred seconds after entry, the drag began to taper off: ten Gs, five Gs, two . . . Then the sensation of weight vanished almost completely. Falcon was falling free, all his enormous orbital velocity dissipated.

  There was a sudden jolt as the incandescent remnants of the capsule’s heat shield jettisoned. The aerodynamic cowlings blew away in that same instant. Jupiter could have them now; they had done their work. Falcon released some of his physical restraints, giving himself a bit more freedom to move within the capsule—without diminishing his intimacy with the machinery—and waited for the automatic sequencer to start the next and most critical series of events.

  He could not see the first drogue parachute pop out, but he could feel the slight jerk. The rate of fall diminished immediately. Soon Kon-Tiki had lost all its horizontal speed and was going straight down at almost fifteen hundred kilometers an hour.

  Everything depended on what happened in the next sixty seconds.

  And there went the second drogue. He looked up through the overhead window and saw, to his immense relief, that clouds upon clouds of glittering foil were billowing out behind the falling ship. Like a great flower unfurling, thousands of cubic meters of the balloon’s fabric spread out across the sky, a vast parachute scooping up the thin gas until finally it was fully inflated.

  Kon-Tiki’s rate of fall dropped to a few kilometers an hour and remained constant. Now there was plenty of time. At this rate it would take Falcon days to fall all the way down to the surface of Jupiter.

  But he would get there eventually, if he did nothing about it. Until he did, the balloon overhead acted merely as an efficient parachute, providing no lift—nor could it do so while the density of the gas inside and out was the same.

  Then, with its characteristic and rather disconcerting crack, the little fusion reactor started up, pouring torrents of heat into the envelope overhead. Within five minutes the rate of fall had become zero; within six, the ship had started to rise. According to the altimeter, it leveled out a little over four hundred kilometers above the surface—or whatever passed for a surface on Jupiter.

  Only one kind of balloon will work in an atmosphere of hydrogen, the lightest of all gases, and that is a hot-hydrogen balloon. As long as th
e fuser kept ticking over, Falcon could remain aloft, drifting across a world that could hold a hundred Pacifics. After traveling in stages some five million kilometers from Earth, the last of the watery planets, Kon-Tiki had begun to justify her name. She was an aerial raft, adrift upon the fluid currents of the Jovian atmosphere.

  Falling toward Jupiter, Falcon had emerged from his painful dreams into triumphant sunlight. In her stinking hiding hole aboard Garuda, in the shadow of Amalthea, Sparta still lived inside hers. . . .

  “Dilys” has no means of reading a datasliver without an interface. Five minutes after discovering the crypt she is back upstairs in Kingman’s kitchen, at the household computer. The terminal has been placed too near the gas range, its flatscreen hazy and its keypad slick with grease. Nevertheless, she enters the terminal with her fingerprobes and feels the tingling flow of electrons. She inserts the stolen chip. Its contents spill directly into her forebrain.

  She rolls the spiky ball of information in multidimensional mental space, seeking a key to entry. The mass of data is gibberish, although not without formal regularities. But the key is nothing so simple as a large prime; its complex geometric quality eludes her for long seconds. Then an image comes unbidden into her mind. It is familiar indeed, the swirling vortex of clouds into which her dreams have so often led her—

  —but seen from higher up, so that the peculiarly curdled patterns of Jupiter’s clouds are as plain and sharply defined as a slowly stirred paint can, drops of orange and yellow paint spiraling into the white.

  Vistas of information split open before her.

  She is falling into and through those bottomless clouds—no, she is soaring through them like a winged creature. Intense waves of radio emission seep through her, fill her with thrilling warmth, a sensation so familiar it causes her sweet pain—for the memory that she once could experience such sensations in her own body.

  She is dazzled, disoriented, made a little drunk. She struggles to retain an objective outlook, to make sense of what she is seeing.