The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  “Just because you try to make it sound important doesn’t let me off the hook.”

  “Stay on your damned hook. You hit some of the Free Spirit, but it wasn’t a clean hit. Who the hell taught you to try to hit anything with a handgun at five hundred meters?”—he was angry, filled with professional scorn—“Yeah, we did wreck their plans on Jupiter, without your help, but we haven’t cleaned them out. Laird, or Lequeu, or whatever he calls himself, is still loose.”

  “He can’t do anything. The creatures in the clouds have spoken.”

  The commander’s eye brightened. “Do you claim to interpret this revelation for us? For me, who knows the Knowledge almost as well as you?”

  “You don’t know what they said.” Sparta grimaced. “Don’t try to make a fool of me.”

  “The medusas had something to say, though.”

  “Something, yes.”

  “What was that? Is the Pancreator coming for us now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, huskily, dropping her glance. “I no longer have organs to hear.”

  “If they are coming for us, it could be the oldest problem of all, Linda. Down here in the slaughterhouse, could be sheep against goats.” His smile was bleak. “Always thought goats were a hell of a lot more charming than sheep. Maybe that puts me on the wrong side.”

  “You make me small,” she whispered. “I am not small.”

  He got angry then. “You make yourself small—if you will not fight for the right of free human beings to hear this so-called revelation! You can’t keep it to yourself, any more than Laird and his phony prophets could keep it to themselves.”

  She ducked her head—a gesture of shame she had recently acquired—before she looked up at him, still defiant. In the end, his best Jesuitical arguments had failed to move her.

  But he didn’t need to tell that to Forster.

  The commander found himself staring into the searing embers of the crumbling oakwood fire. He looked up at the eager little professor. “End of my story, I’m afraid.”

  “Ahh—and now for mine,” said Forster, leaning forward in the overstuffed armchair, making the leather squeak. A lookof pure glee stretched his disturbingly youthful face. “I’ve analyzed the material you provided.”

  “So you said.”

  The professor couldn’t resist a moment of pure pedagogy. “It is worth noting that the Medusa—the Gorgon’s head—is an ancient symbol of stewardship. The shield and guardian of wisdom.”

  “Yeah, I thinkI heard that somewhere before.”

  “The recordings of the transmissions of the ring of medusas were easily deciphered—relatively easily, after a bit of play with SETI analysis programs—and according to the linguistic system I had previously outlined for you and Mr. Redfield, I determined that the transmissions were definitely signals, and most definitely in the language of Culture X.”

  “Professor, if you would just . . .”

  “And they signify”—Forster drew out his words, almost crooning them—“They have arrived.”

  “They have arrived?”

  “Yes. That’s the message: ‘They have arrived.’ ”

  Was Forster playing a joke? “I don’t believe it,” the commander said. “Those things were beaming straight at Kon-Tiki’s mission control. Why would they . . . ?”

  “Why tell those who had just arrived that they had arrived?” Forster chuckled. “Good question. Especially since the medusas hardly seem to be intelligent creatures in any sense that we understand the word—perhaps no more intelligent than trained parrots. Likely they were responding to some stimulus planted eons ago. Even coded in whatever serves them for genes.”

  “But why aim at Mission Control?”

  “I think it unlikely their message was intended for Mission Control. I believe they were aiming elsewhere.”

  “Forster . . .”

  “Thanks to your good offices, Commander, my survey of the moon Amalthea has already been given a firm launch date.” Forster peered into his newly empty glass.

  “Let me freshen that,” said the commander, leaning forward. He took the heavy silver tongs and lifted ice cubes from the bucket and dropped them ringing into Forster’s glass. He reached for the whiskey bottle. “Amalthea, you say . . .”

  The sun had set beyond the western cliffs, sucking the color into the matte gray forested hills across the river. Lights came on, dim yellow bulbs hidden in crevices of the low stone wall beside the river cliffs. Blake and Sparta walked beside the wall, their boots rustling the dead leaves. Cold air moved heavily against their backs, the breath of winter sliding down the valley from the high ground. Both were hunched against the cold, hands in pockets, insulated from each other.

  Blake looked up at the lodge. A light had just come on behind the stained glass window of the pantry. The staff was preparing for supper. “That’s the one I smashed through, that night.”

  “When will you drop the subject?” she said irritably.

  “I remember everything that happened, as clearly as anything in my life. For weeks I thought you betrayed me—but you weren’t there at all.”

  It had been Blake’s ingenious notion to persuade Sparta that she had never murdered Singh or the others, that those were false memories planted by the commander for reasons of his own—perhaps because he was unwilling to admit that the Free Spirit had escaped his grasp again. Blake had pleaded with her: “Why he wants you to think so, I don’t know. Maybe he killed them. But you’ve got to admit, you were out of your head. God, the amount of Bliss you were gobbling . . .”

  But she had destroyed his argument even before he’d well stated it. “Even if they have a way to rewrite memory, they didn’t use it on me. They didn’t even know where I was.” And in the end, Blake could not even convince himself of his implausible scheme.

  Now she was mute, insulated against his concerns, as she was insulated against his warmth.

  They walked in silence, but for the dead leaves. Gradually a solitary human shape coalesced from the shadows a dozen meters in front of them.

  They were alert, but neither of them was alarmed. Both knew how very unlikely it was that an unauthorized visitor was on the grounds. They were prepared to pass by the figure in silence—

  —but as they approached, the shadow-man whispered, “Linda.”

  The flesh on her arms crept; the cold had somehow slipped inside her parka on her whispered name. She faltered. “You . . . ?” She was afraid to finish the question. The shadow had the shape and sound of him, but the cold wind blew his scent away, and she could no longer see in the dark.

  “Yes, darling,” said the shadow. “Please forgive me.”

  “Ohh . . .” Shemoved into his solid arms, crushed herself against him, clung to him as if she were falling.

  Blake looked on astonished and said the first natural thing that occurred to him, absurd as it was. “Where the hell have you been, Dr. Nagy?”

  Jozsef Nagy looked up, over his daughter’s shoulder. “Never far away, Mr. Redfield,”

  “Uh . . . call me Blake, sir.”

  “Yes, we are far from the classroom. Call me Jozsef, Blake.”

  “Right,” said Blake, but it would be a while before he got up the courage to address the most imposing authority figure of his childhood by his first name.

  “Linda, Linda,” Nagy was crooning to his daughter, who had broken into desperate sobs. “We treated you so badly.”

  “Where is Mother? Is she . . . ?” Her words were muffled; her face was thrust into the folds of his woolen overcoat.

  “She is very well. You’ll see her soon.”

  “I thought you were both dead.”

  “We were afraid . . . afraid to tell you.” He glanced at Blake and nodded, and although Blake could not see him well, there was diffidence in the gesture. “We owe both of you our deepest apologies.”

  “Well, she was pretty worried,” Blake said, instantly thinking how foolish he sounded: Nagy wasn’t exactly a lost kid who�
�d scared his mommy. And Ellen . . . Linda had been beyond mere worry.

  “Yes, I know,” Nagy said simply. “There were reasons that seemed very good to us at the time. We were wrong.”

  Sparta’s sobs had subsided. She relaxed in her father’s arms. He took one arm from around her shoulders, groped in his pocket, and came up with a handkerchief. She took it gratefully. Nagy said, “I will try to explain—with Kit’s help. Perhaps we should go inside now?” The last was a question addressed to Sparta. She nodded mutely, swiping at her nose.

  The three of them started slowly up the long slope toward the lodge. Blake had had a moment to think; there was firm insistence in his voice when he spoke again, overlying a hint of anger. “It would be good if you just gave us a simple ‘why,’ sir. Now . . . I mean, without the commander’s kibbitzing.”

  “We are in a war, Blake. For years my daughter was a hostage. Then we realized she had become our best weapon.” Nagy hesitated as if it were an effort, but went on in a clear voice. “It proved too hard for us to let go the habits of parenthood, of teacherhood. We tried to protect both of you by controlling you. To do that we had to stay in hiding. At first only you proved difficult, Blake—finally impossible—to control.”

  “Your daughter is an adult, too.” Blake saw Nagy duck his head and suddenly understood where Ellen . . . Linda . . . had acquired her gesture of shame.

  Sparta pulled a few centimeters away from her father. “I killed them,” she said tonelessly.

  “You came to Striaphan unprepared because we failed to tell you what we had learned,” Nagy said. “Your resistance had already been largely destroyed by our attempts to hurry your dreams.”

  “The commander’s attempts,” Blake said hotly.

  “By my orders, though. To his credit and my shame, I forced Kit to continue when he objected. I had hoped to speed your recovery, darling. Instead I . . .” He broke off, watching his daughter with apprehension. She had drawn away from him. “You were acting under a compulsion we knew existed but didn’t understand. Everything you did, in England and in orbit around Jupiter, was in the service of that compulsion. You tried to eliminate those who stood in your way, including those who had planted the compulsion in you.”

  “You can’t remove the guilt.”

  “I would not try. But I ask you take the next step.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “To admit that you are a human being.”

  She was weary and wounded, but she refused to weep again. “That is for me to say.”

  “So it is. Please just leave the question open until you have heard all we have to say. You too, Blake.”

  The three of them walked silently toward the massive stone house with its jewel-like windows. After a few minutes they drew closer. Linda reached to take her father’s hand. There was a renewed warmth of light in her eyes, coming from somewhere deeper than the reflections of the windows.

  There was a knock at the library door and the commander opened it a crack. A young blond steward said, “Dinner is ready, sir. Four settings, as you specified.”

  “Put it on hold. Shouldn’t be long.”

  “Sir.” The steward closed the heavy paneled door behind him.

  The commander gestured to the drinks tray. “Professor?”

  “I’ve had more than enough,” Forster said abruptly. “I don’t mind telling you, I’d hoped Troy and her friend would be able to come with me on the trip.”

  “The trip to Amalthea?”

  “Unusual expertise, between them. Might possibly supplement my own.”

  The commander regarded him with well-disguised amusement. That anyone might be able to supplement Forster’s expertise was an unusual admission for the little professor.

  “Where are they?” Forster demanded. “I was so looking forward to seeing them again this evening.”

  The commander walked to the tall windows that overlooked the dark lawn. He watched the shadowy group on the lawn. “Give them a little time. They’ll make it yet.”

  Afterword

  by PAUL PREUSS

  I f you’re reading this, it’s a good bet you’ve read the first three volumes of Venus Prime, any one of which could have afforded easy entry to the series. But with this volume a threshold has been crossed: Venus Prime 4, based on Arthur’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” is not another in a string of related tales. It is a chapter in the middle of a long novel.

  You can pick up a crime story featuring, say Dave Robicheaux or V.I. Warshawski without having to worry about what they were up to in their last book. Historical series are more demanding: with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, if you start a dozen novels in you may find yourself at sea in more ways than one. Science fiction and fantasy series can be harder still. Frodo and Paul Atreides must be followed from the beginning.

  Venus Prime crosses a few genres, however, and this volume of science-fiction mystery adventures makes flattering assumptions about you, the reader: that you are sophisticated, intellectually astute, and emotionally mature; that instead of needing an invincible superhero, you’re willing to bear with a protagonist who makes bad decisions and because of them sometimes acts immorally . . .

  That you know what the Roman playwright Terence meant when he wrote “I think nothing human is foreign to me.” Like that sympathetic realist—despite your revulsion—you’re willing to thread the dark, labyrinthine passages that must be followed toward a realized humanity.

  Trying to make sense of the human mix has vexed politicians, religious leaders, philosophers, storytellers, scientists, and many other thoughtful sorts since the dawn of self-conscious thought itself. No reasonable person denies that human nature could use improvement, but no one agrees on anything else. What sort of improvement? How do we accomplish it? Will we still be human if and when we do improve our species? Is an improved human still human? Is humanity itself worth preserving?

  Arthur Clarke has posed this last question more than once, variously and provocatively—for example, in 1953’s deeply affecting Childhood’s End, in 1968’s 2001, and in the long and elegant story incorporated in this volume, “A Meeting with Medusa.”

  In the character of Howard Falcon, Arthur anticipated a current fashion (though one with its own long history, like all fashions), that some sort of melding of human and machine is the key to improvement and thus the next step in “evolution.” Robot fanatics like MIT’s Hans Moravec look forward to the day when humans “evolve” into machines, uploading their consciousness and memory into mechanisms instrumentally superior to the human body in every way imaginable.

  Never mind that classic evolution by means of natural selection has nothing to do with improvement, only with a necessarily provisional fitness. In the interests of fitness we routinely—if not always voluntarily—enhance our bodies with spectacles and contact lenses, hearing aids, artificial joints, pacemakers, wheelchairs, and other mechanical aids; more sophisticated and complex biomimetic tissues and organs are the subject of intense research and clinical testing, and some at least will soon join the physician’s arsenal.

  Biomedical therapies based on “natural” materials of purely biological origin, including gene therapies, are making rapid progress at the same time. When it comes to curing human diseases, the distinction between a natural fix and an artificial fix may soon become meaningless.

  Every day, information from the human genome and the genomes of other organisms becomes more complete and available. As we translate this information into operating knowledge of protein structure and function, of cell circuitry and extracellular communication—as we learn to engineer and mimic living cells at the level of tissue differentiation and organization—we fast approach the time when a Howard Falcon or Sparta, enhanced as they are, may seem crude paste-ups. Before long we will have acquired the means to mold any conceivable combination of human and machine. Ecce homo.

  When that time comes, not only will all the old questions about the nature of humanity remain, they will
become ever more pressing. For quite some time, however, they are liable to be decided on a case by case basis.

  By the end of this volume—this chapter, rather—Howard Falcon, reassembled and equipped to boldly go where no one has gone before, already finds the human race becoming more remote and the ties of kinship more tenuous, yet he is content to be an ambassador between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of ceramic and metal. Sparta, on the other hand, is not yet willing to admit that she is what she most desires—a human being.

  Long before humanity as a whole wrestles with these questions, many more of us—made mobile, kept alive, our senses restored by deliberate interventions (insulin from recombinant DNA, in my case)—will wrestle with them personally. In the end, the essence of humanity resides in an intricate negotiation between individual wants and needs and those of a changing society.

  But then, it always has. Exploring the innumerable ways this has been done and could be done is one of the continuing themes of Arthur’s life work, and of the long novel that is Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime.

  Paul Preuss

  Sausalito, California

  September 2000

  Infopak Technical Blueprints

  The following are the computer-generated diagrams representing some of the structures and engineering found in Venus Prime:

  Kon-Tiki

  Kon-Tiki Manned Jupiter probe—wire frame overview; nose cone doors open, instrument booms deployed; re-entry shell cutaway views; plan views.

  Snark

  Snark Twin rotor attack helicopter—wire frame overview; rotation; weapons systems; plan views.

  Falcon

  Falcon Bio-mechanical reconstruction project—standing configuration; sitting configuration, front and back views; side, front and top plan views.

  AN OPEN LETTER TO OUR VALUED READERS

  What do Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov, Irving Wallace, Ben Bova, Stuart Kaminsky and over a dozen other authors have in common? They are all part of an exciting new line of ibooks distributed by Simon and Schuster.