The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “What else?”

  “Among other things . . .” She pointed at the sky. “Views like that.”

  Falcon turned to look beyond the dome. From here Falcon could make out something of the terrain of Ganymede itself: a landscape carved from water ice frozen hard as granite, battered by huge primordial impacts, crumpled and cracked by aeons of tidal kneading. Anubis City had been established in a region of relatively flat terrain, some way north of Gany­mede’s sub-Jovian point.

  But it was not Ganymede’s ground that attracted the well-heeled tourists who patronised the lounge, but its sky.

  The centrepiece was Jupiter itself. This moon, tidally locked, kept the same face turned to its parent as it followed its seven-day orbit, and the giant world, seen at this latitude at a comfortable viewing angle, was fixed in the sky. Like Earth’s Moon, Jupiter had its phases, and this morning the planet was showing a fat crescent.

  On the illuminated face Falcon could count the familiar zonal bands, products of convection and the ferocious winds that stretched right around the planet. The colours, tans and fauns and greyish-whites, came from a lacing of complex hydrocarbon molecules created by the action of the distant sun—the organic chemistry that fed the ocean of life he had become so familiar with. The planet’s dark side, meanwhile, a ghostly half-disc cut out of the starry background, was sporadically illuminated by lightning flashes that spanned areas greater than Earth’s entire surface.

  And then, of course, there were the moons.

  Of Ganymede’s three Galilean siblings, innermost Io was easy to make out, a pinkish spot near the bright limb of Jupiter—a world tortured by continual volcanism. Europa, the next out, must be near its closest approach to Ganymede; it was a sunlit crescent that looked, today, as large as the Moon from the surface of the Earth. Falcon knew there was a science team up there right now studying the peculiar plate tectonics of Europa’s smooth, cracked-mirror surface; an ice crust over a cold sea where primitive lifeforms thrived. Callisto, beyond Ganymede, was invisible today.

  All this would have been a grand spectacle even if it had been static, Falcon thought—but there was nothing static about the Jovian system. The planet itself turned on its axis in a mere ten hours, and even as he watched he could see regions of the banded surface slip across the visible disc. And it didn’t take much patience to see the moons moving too. Little Io ­circled Jupiter in a mere forty-three hours, and even grand Europa hurried through its cycle of phases in less than four days.

  Thousand-mile shadows, shifting visibly.

  “It’s like being inside Galileo’s own head,” Falcon said.

  “Yes, and seeing all that is a good enough reason to be alive, isn’t it? Though I do have my work to keep me engaged. But since the death of my granddaughter—did I tell you about that?—I have no close family left.”

  Falcon grunted. He had attended the funeral of Hope’s daughter; he hadn’t known about the granddaughter. “I’m sorry. No, nor do I. A remote nephew, descended from my cousin, died without issue a few years ago. So of my grandparents’ descendants, none are left save me.”

  This wasn’t uncommon in an age when the World Government was still trying to drive its population down from its mid-twenty-first-century peak. Despite the availability of life-extension drugs, most people seemed content to live lives not much longer than a century or so; in terms of age, Falcon and Dhoni were outliers. So it wasn’t unusual for parents to survive their children, or even grandchildren—and many lineages much more ancient than Falcon’s or Dhoni’s had gone extinct.

  Falcon was distracted by a mist rising from Ganymede’s surface, obscuring his view of the southern hemisphere of Jupiter. “What’s that? Some kind of engineering project?”

  She grimaced. “A new military emplacement near the equator. Top secret, but I’ve been here a month, the Medes are still a very small community, and it’s surprising how much you can pick up just by sitting and listening if folk think you’re old and harmless . . . Even before this Core project you’ve foolishly attached yourself to, there have been a lot of visitors from Earth, from the security and military Secretariats as well as the corporate sector. Contractors. I see the ships come and go, fusion torch drives flaring . . .”

  Falcon said, “I know Earth is taking a keen interest in what’s going on here. Jupiter has become a node of contact between the parties: Earth, Martians, Machines. Which is why I’m involved, I suppose. I’m supposed to be meeting an officer from Interplanetary Relations on Amalthea before we begin the dive. I might learn more there.”

  “If you get the chance, ask about New Nantucket.”

  A puzzling name Falcon hadn’t heard before.

  “And as for you, Howard, naturally you’re planning to plunge your elderly carcass into this maelstrom of political infighting and physical peril. I wish you’d let me bring you in for a decent overhaul first. Even your exoskeletal components need an upgrade. But as ever it’s your human remains that concern me more.”

  “‘Remains’?”

  “Don’t be precious, Howard.” She lifted her own hand, and inspected it in the light of Jupiter. “Even I’m a relic of the past, comparatively; a museum of anti-senescence treatment. We’ve learned so much since I began my own treatment; the youngsters starting their programmes now have a much better expectancy of health and long life. And there are new techniques that could help you, Howard. Blood protein tweaks. Even the regeneration of limbs and other organs is on the horizon—it’s all there in nature. If a deer can grow a new set of antlers every year, why can’t I grow you a new hand or kidney?

  “Look—I know you always find it uncomfortable when I show up. You’ve achieved great things, Commander Falcon, yet here I am dragging you back to your hospital bed, making you an invalid again. Well, that’s my job. Promise me you’ll come and visit me when this latest adventure is done. Why, you could come to the Pasteur; that way you wouldn’t have to come any closer than six thousand kilometres to Earth. For me. Please.”

  He nodded curtly.

  “And now,” she said, sitting back, “surely we have time to watch Galileo’s orrery a little longer. More tea?”

  He thought of what lay ahead for the rest of his day: a journey to Amalthea in some battered intrasystem tug, a scowling WG official at the end of it . . . “What the hell.”

  * * * *

  When he got there, Falcon found he remembered Amalthea very well.

  Long ago this little moon, scudding around its orbit close to Jupiter, had served as Mission Control for his first descent into Jupiter’s clouds in the Kon-Tiki—or rather, the mother ship had sheltered in the radiation shadow of a still-uninhabited satellite. Now, as he walked with Thera Springer, his WG host, he said, “I’ll always remember Carl Brenner complaining about how zero gravity interfered with his studies of the biological samples I brought back. Although it was the state of his own stomach he was mostly concerned about. And of course, back in those days we still referred to the moon as Jupiter V . . .”

  Springer, apparently habitually taciturn, did not reply.

  Colonel Thera Springer, of the World Army and now attached to the notorious Bureau of Interplanetary Relations, was nothing like her remote Martian cousin, Trayne, with all his openness and curiosity. Thera looked at least fifteen years older; terse, evidently tough, she wore her uniform like a second skin. But she was a Springer too. At her breast she wore a small shield bearing the family leaping-springbok design, alongside some kind of campaign medal. And this latest Springer, another scion of the great dynasty that had emerged into public view thanks to the astronautic heroics of her ancestors Seth and Matt, had no interest in anecdotes. She was here to talk interplanetary politics.

  Still, Falcon had been fascinated by what he’d seen so far, on this latter-­day Jupiter V: the new monitoring stations built into craters with names like Pan and Gaea, and the control room for the Jupiter
descent, set deep underground for shielding from Jupiter’s ferocious radiation environ­ment. And he’d seen the Core pioneer itself, a Machine the humans had been encouraged to call “Orpheus”—which had turned out to be ­nothing like the usual quasi-human form the Machines used to interface with mankind these days. To the naked eye Orpheus was a black box, a cube a metre or so on the side, quite lacking in humanity even compared to Falcon ­himself—even if it had allowed some wag to scrawl “Howard Falcon Junior” on the casing.

  Now, for his meeting with Thera Springer, Falcon was escorted to the single most spectacular location on Amalthea: a viewing gallery at the surface of Barnard Base, right at the sub-Jupiter point: a kind of low-rent version of the Galileo Lounge, Falcon thought, amused. Amalthea, a battered ovoid some two hundred kilometres long that sailed only one and a half planetary radii above Jupiter’s cloud tops—its orbital period was a mere twelve hours—was something of a runt of a Jovian moon, even though it had been the first satellite to be discovered in the modern era. But from this Barnard Base gallery, as Falcon stared up, Jupiter spanned a full forty-­five degrees of his field of view: an immense, angry, troubling presence, ever active, its phase shifting almost visibly as the little moon rocketed around its parent.

  At last Springer spoke. “Terrifying sight, isn’t it? Like an ocean in the sky.”

  “That’s a bit of poetry that surprises me, Colonel.”

  “Poetry? I wouldn’t know. To me Jupiter is a deep, dark pit where Martians and Machines hide, getting up to the hell knows what, out of our sight. Even the damn simps are involved.”

  That surprised Falcon. “What about the simps?”

  “Oh, the marvellous Independent Pan Nation has a hand in it too. Or a paw, whatever. Turns out that simps, when toughened up enough, can deal pretty well with Jupiter’s gravity, and they’re useful workers. As ever pursuing their own agenda, and biting the WG hand that feeds them. Ham, the President, denies it all. Well, at least we have some leverage there. The Pan turn out to have a problem with genetic drift. Their precious smarts aren’t locked in by a million years of evolution and rock-bashing, as ours are. They can slip back. It’s heartbreaking, I’m told, to see an infant born without that spark in its eyes.” She didn’t sound heartbroken at all. “So they need research and support from us, from our laboratories—even the Martians can’t fulfil that need yet. So there we have a handle. With the others, though . . .”

  Falcon was appalled to think that any government could think of using the intellectual survival of a species as a weapon. He wondered what long-term damage such manoeuvring might do to relations between humans and Pan.

  Springer was evidently oblivious to such implications.

  “It’s very useful to have you involved in this descent, Commander Falcon,” she said now. “More than useful, and we’re grateful to the Brenner Institute for sponsoring your involvement in the project in the first place—and I’m grateful to my cousin for passing out during that trial descent thus proving that an Earthborn human, you, can still handle stuff beyond the capabilities of a Martian in an exposit. Ha! I bet that went down well in Port Lowell. And also you have your personal connection with the Machines, through the creature we know as Adam.”

  “You mean, ‘the Legal Person (Non-human) we know as Adam.’ It took a lot of debate for that honorific to be earned.”

  “Whatever.” Springer glanced up at Jupiter again, almost resentfully. “The truth is that right now we have no WG-loyal observers monitoring what’s really going on inside Jupiter—and this is our chance to insert one, a golden opportunity riding on the back of this stunt, this descent into the lower layers. Even the Martians, even the Machines, can’t object to you going along, given your physical capabilities and your past record.”

  This was going well beyond the briefings that had brought Falcon here. “Insert? What am I now, a spy for Interplanetary Relations? I thought this project was about discovery. Science. Not espionage and politics.”

  Springer sighed. “You’re much older than I am, Commander, and I’m sure you’re not naive. But I wonder if you grasp our deepest concerns. Am I right that you were born before the first World President was inaugurated?”

  Falcon smiled. “I wasn’t actually old enough to vote for Bandranaik, though.”

  “Falcon, since those days, on Earth we’ve constructed a successful scientific world state. A dream centuries old. You could call it a utopia . . . if not for the bad dreams from the sky.”

  More surprising poetry.

  “Long term, our strategists are deeply concerned about the development of the Machine civilisation—if it’s unified and developed enough to be called that—and what impact it might have on us. But in the short term we have enough turbulence with our own colonies. From Mercury to Triton, the colony worlds have been following their own political and cultural development from the days of the first footfalls.

  “But Mars was always the key. There was a self-sufficient base on Mars for half a century even before Bandranaik was elected. And the World Government has consistently tried to engage with Mars—even to appease it, if you like, right back to the beginning of the WG itself, when Mars was declared a Federated Zone with full voting rights on the World Council. We find ways to pump money out there: the transfer of Spaceguard HQ to Hellas as far back as the 2120s, the establishing of the Port Deimos spacecraft construction yards in the 2170s. At the turn of the century Interplanetary Relations even put up the seedcorn money for the Eos Programme, their long-term terraforming project. More recently we tried to use the Moon as a bridge. Martians and other offworlders can come to Aristarchus Tech to study without high-gravity augmentation . . . Did you know we even have Machines working there, on the Moon? That’s another diplomatic experiment. Sure, they’re banned from the home planet, but we employ them to process lunar ore, and on other programmes. A gesture of trust, right?”

  “I know you allowed the Federation of Planets to set up their head­quarters on the Moon too.”

  “Yes, after the Crawford Declaration they signed in 2186.”

  “I was there—”

  “The Federation still has no legal validity in the eyes of the World Government, but we treat it as a polite fiction even so.”

  Falcon imagined how that kind of patronising dismissal played on Phobos, or at Lowell, or Vulcanopolis, or Oasis—even at Clavius Base. “You know, Colonel, I’m something of an outsider in all this myself. I don’t fit into one world or the other. Hell, I’m older than most of these human worlds. But what I see is that with Earth’s continuing economic and political domination of the solar system, you’re restricting growth. The Martians I meet complain that they could expand a lot faster, even accelerate the Eos Programme, if only you’d increase shipments of essential supplies. Maybe the time’s come for a change of policy. Look at history. From 1492, Columbus’s first landings, to the American Revolution was—what, a little shy of three centuries? And from the first footsteps of John Young, the Columbus of Mars, to now, is about the same interval—”

  “This isn’t imperial Britain and colonial America, Falcon,” Springer said sternly. “You’re showing your age. The history you learned is buried under centuries. This is a different era. Different technologies.

  “Let me explain the cornerstone of government policy. What the World Council fears above all is an interplanetary war.

  “Think about it. Even you probably aren’t old enough to remember the Brushfire Wars in the last years of the nation states . . . There were a number of incidents where aircraft—lumbering tubs driven by no more than chemical fuels—were flown into buildings. Acts of war and terror.”

  “I grew up with the images.” In Falcon’s young imagination such incidents had been like purposeful Hindenburg disasters.

  “Now think about this. A civilian aircraft of the early twenty-first century, fully fuelled, packed as much punch as a few hundred to
nnes of TNT. A modern interplanetary cruiser of the Goliath class, like the ship that brought you here, if flown into a city on Earth, would release as much energy as an entire all-out nuclear war would have done back in my ancestor Seth’s day. Just one craft—and I’m only talking about the kinetic energy involved, even without the detonation of any fusion reactors or the use of any dedicated weapons systems.”

  Falcon glanced up at the fragile dome over his head. “Offworld colonies are pretty vulnerable too.”

  “Right. And so the judgement of the World Council, as advised by the Strategic Development Secretariat, is that an interplanetary war would be like no prior conflict in human history. It would be a potential extinction event for humanity. All of us, on Earth or off it.”

  “I see the logic. War must be averted at all costs. And this is your way of handling it? The Martians are agitating for independence, and your response is to clamp the lid down even tighter?”

  “What would you have us do, Falcon? At least this way we keep control. At least this way we can exclude the unknowns—and a political liberation of the offworld settlements would be a massive unknown. That’s even leaving aside the influence of the Machines in all this, which is another huge uncertainty.”

  He said, “That’s why Jupiter frightens you so much. You don’t know what’s going on down there. And what you don’t know, you can’t control.” Falcon studied Springer, her voice tight, her manner set, determined, clear-thinking—and, under it all, with a bit of poetry in a rebellious soul. And he thought of far-off Earth, nestling close to its sun, a world that had found peace and unity so tragically recently—and yet here was one of its citizens, out in the dark and the cold, wrestling with existential threats on behalf of the whole of humanity. He felt an odd admiration for her. But he didn’t drop his guard.

  As he studied her, so she studied him. She said now, “So will you help me?”

  “What can you tell me about New Nantucket?”