Valentina, apparently faintly curious as she looked around, sneered. “Nothing but a monument to nostalgia. You know, brother, the Machines did us a singular favour when they destroyed Earth. They removed the last shred of sentiment from our considerations. Now we’ll do anything, consider anything—sacrifice anything—if it means victory.”
“Fine words,” Falcon said. “I’m not sure they’ll mean much to the Machines.”
Bodan asked, “And if I told you we had the means to win the war tomorrow?”
“I’d say you’re a liar.”
Valentina stopped at a rockery, waving her hand at the nearest slab to bring it to life. Hope Dhoni’s face appeared and began speaking, but Valentina only listened to a few words before turning away dismissively and walking on. “He’s telling the truth. But the cost is unacceptable,” she said.
“The human solar system economy has been on a war footing for centuries,” Falcon responded. “People have had to accept evacuation to the clouds of Saturn, totalitarian rule, conscription on all the human worlds, on Mars and Titan and Triton. The Jupiter moons are little but fortresses. Hard times for all, except for the cream on top. How much worse can it get for the ordinary masses?”
“She didn’t mean a cost to people,” Bodan said carefully. “She meant, to the Jovians. The native organisms of Jupiter, which will be the battleground. Your precious medusae, Falcon.” He stooped, picked up one of the soil-smeared stones bordering the path, and turned it this way and that in his glove before replacing it with faint distaste.
Valentina said, as they moved on, “We have a way to take the war to Jupiter. To the Machines’ installations there. Our intervention could wipe them out totally. Unfortunately—”
“The medusae.”
“Quite. The action would also eliminate the Jovian ecology.”
“You’d never go that far.”
They reached the centrepiece of the garden, the oak tree. Falcon had planted it himself—after much careful cryogenic preservation, using the very acorn Citizen Second Grade Jeffrey Pandit had gifted him on Mars almost three hundred years ago. The oak itself was now into the second half of its first century, and mature enough to produce seeds of its own. That little acorn had turned out to be one of the most precious gifts Falcon had ever received.
“We would,” Bodan said evenly. “That’s the hard part, though—proving our determination.”
Falcon, alone for so long in this place, felt as if he were in some ghastly nightmare. He struggled to think through the consequences of what they were saying. “Which is where I come in?”
“We think you may still have some usefulness,” Valentina said. “As unsuccessful as your previous involvement has been, you have been bound up in the destiny of the Machines since their origins. And, who knows? Things might have been even worse without you.”
“Thanks,” Falcon said dryly.
“Come with us. Back to Jupiter space. Back to Io, in fact—the front line. We’ll convince you that we have the means to end the war. All you have to do is bring the Machines around to that view. Take the Kon-Tiki! We’ve had the gondola refurbished, after that little adventure of yours on Earth—made it much stronger and more capable. One last grand gesture—one last chance to prove your loyalty to us, rather than the Machines.”
“You don’t understand my position at all, do you? My loyalty isn’t to people or Machines. It’s not some binary choice. It’s to what we could be together, not what we are separately—”
“You might think about your own interests also,” Bodan said, ignoring him. “You’ve put a lot of work into this Memory Garden. Decades of solitary dedication. A shrine to the woman who gave you back your life. In fact you were Hope Dhoni’s life’s work. Would she want you to just crumble away in this hole in the sky?”
“Hope’s dead, as you reminded me. I can’t speak for her.”
Valentina shrugged. “Then maybe you should think about your own interest.” She slipped the scroll from her pouch and tugged it open again. “Since we boarded, our security operatives have been running a full-body scan on your systems, Howard. Shall we look at the evidence?”
She took one end of the scroll and allowed Bodan to hold the other, tilting it around for Falcon’s benefit. It was a sort of ghostly blueprint of himself, crudely assembled from scans of varying resolution and penetration. He studied it impassively; he was long past the point where he was capable of being repulsed by his own physical nature.
“These pink areas,” Valentina said, scratching a finger around the scroll. “They’re places where our analysis has detected compromised functioning—a failure of either machine systems or the progressive breakdown of your remaining biological material. There’s a lot of pink, wouldn’t you agree?” She eyed him. “And even if we didn’t have the scans—frankly, Commander, you’re slow, you smell of burning, and you make grinding noises when you move. You belong in a museum.”
“That’s meant to persuade me?”
“We have good medical resources these days: one of the side-effects of centuries of war. Come to Io, and you’ll receive the best care we can offer. An overhaul, a new lease on life.”
Falcon grunted. “Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time medical treatment has been used as a lever against me. You two clowns aren’t even original. And what’s my reward, I get to watch you murder Jupiter?”
“If you can convince the Machines we mean it, you can stop the war,” Valentina said. “Isn’t that what you want? But time is of the essence. You’d need to come immediately.”
Falcon eyed the oak tree. “I can’t abandon all this.”
“You could be back here in a short while,” Bodan said soothingly. “Secure in the knowledge that you’ve brokered peace. In the meantime we’ll drop auto-sentry drones as guards. The biome itself won’t come to any harm over a few weeks or months, will it?”
“What do you know about Memory Gardens?”
The brother smiled stiffly. “Only what’s in the records. What was the intention—that people would come here to learn about Doctor Dhoni?”
“Not specifically. There are millions of other Memory Gardens out here, drifting through Trans-Neptunian space. You don’t go looking for one specific individual. You visit each garden for its own unique quality, and along the way you learn a little of the life of someone now dead.”
Valentina frowned. “The dead are dead. What’s the benefit?”
Falcon said, “If you can’t see that, I can’t tell you.”
Valentina shrugged. She closed the scroll and returned it to her suit.
Falcon sighed. “I have no choice, do I?”
“You have every choice,” Bodan said.
“No, I don’t. Not because of your bribes, or your grandiose martial logic. The medusae are at stake. So are the Machines, for that matter. That’s why I have to come with you.”
“We know.” Valentina smiled.
46
They allowed Falcon six hours to complete basic housekeeping procedures on the worldlet, doing his best to put it into a state of semi-hibernation. One last roam of the pathways, one last chance to take in the work of half a century. And one by one he commanded the identity slabs to dormancy. He believed Hope would have forgiven him, under the circumstances.
Once he was aboard the Springers’ ship, Falcon moved to a porthole for the departure. He had not seen the worldlet from the outside since his own arrival, but very little had changed, compared to the transformation he had wrought on the interior. It was nothing but a dirty, off-white spheroid of mixed ice and rubble, glued into stability with a spray-on membrane of plastic, peppered here and there with windows, docking ports, antennae and radiators. In the reaches of the outer solar system there were more icy objects, it was said, than human beings who had ever lived. In better times people would have made homes among these little worlds. A
s it was, there were enough of them to provide a unique memorial to every individual who ever breathed. The catch was that the creation and curating of the Memory Gardens required years of loving devotion by the friends and family of the deceased.
A Memory Garden was a project suited to an era of long lifespans—which, in Falcon’s experience, felt more like an era of extended old age—and to an era of displacement, when the surviving Earthborn sought compensation for the loss of their world, of the ancestral soil in which they had buried their dead. But the unremembered dead would always outnumber those commemorated.
The asymptotic drive phased in, its acceleration as smooth and effortless as a rising elevator, and the ship quickly receded from the Memory Garden. Falcon followed the garden until it had diminished even in the augmented acuity of his eyes.
Then two pulses of light bracketed the worldlet.
An instant later, between those two pulses, a white radiance bloomed and swelled.
The flash abated in a moment. All that was left was a slowly spreading milkiness, a nebula the colour of dirty snow.
For a few seconds Falcon refused to believe what he was seeing. Then, as the truth of it became clear, an almost physical wave of shock and disgust passed through him.
“It was necessary.” Valentina joined him at the porthole, with one of the guards just behind her.
Falcon controlled himself, knowing that to strike out would be to guarantee his own immediate destruction. “You—eliminated her. All that was left of Hope. Why? What possible justification—”
“It was partly a demonstration of our indifference to you,” she said. “Your feelings mean nothing to us, you see. We would have said anything it took to get you aboard this ship—even the truth, if it had been useful. You are a component, nothing more.”
“Partly. What else?”
“We need you to understand our ruthlessness. Our lack of sentimentality.” A dark, almost religious fervour had entered her voice. “Our willingness to act with absolute, unflinching determination. You must believe it, you see, Falcon, believe it in the very core of your being. Because if you do, then there’s a small chance you can persuade the Machines as well—convince them that we really will destroy the entire Jovian ecology in order to stop them. They trust you, Falcon. At least to some extent. That’s always been your greatest strength—your greatest utility. But don’t flatter yourself that it makes you indispensable.” She patted the hard casing of his shoulder. “Enjoy the rest of your trip.”
47
More than half a century after the destruction of Earth, Io was the first and last line of human security.
Jupiter itself might have fallen to the Machines, but humans still clung to its moons. All the Galilean satellites—the four big moons, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io—were militarised, serving as defence stations as well as armament and fuel factories. An unspoken truth, though, was that everything hinged on Io. This was the nearest large moon to Jupiter, swinging closest to the cloud layers; its hugely energetic surface environment had long supported a key industrial hub. Now the military government had thrown everything at Io, layering it with fortifications and packing sentries, cruisers and battleships into inclined orbits so tight that, in the radar echoes at least, they formed an almost solid shell. Nothing got close to that shell—or through it—without having passed the highest levels of authentication.
And it was not until the Springers’ ship was inside the cordon that Io itself became visible.
Before the coming of people, the surface had been a sickly, mottled yellow brown—the entire moon crusted over with sulphur belched into airless skies from numerous geysers, billions of tonnes of it expelled each year from the vast furnace of the moon’s core. Now, under human occupation, the great energies of Io’s interior had been dammed and diverted, providing power for the war effort. Refrigerated shafts had been sunk into the crust, pushing down through hundreds of kilometres of molten magma, grasping for the hard, hot prize of the core itself. The most troublesome lava flows had been quenched or redirected, or looped into circuits, whichever served human needs the better. Now the geyser activity was down by a factor of two-thirds, with all that surplus energy used in refineries and factories larger than cities, their cooling towers and radiator vanes bristling out to heights of hundreds of kilometres: satanic installations that floated on the impermanent crust like plaques of carbon slag on molten iron. And each refinery or factory was in turn cordoned by an equally extensive battery of weapons. Gun after gun, each squat barrel like a miniature volcano. None had ever been used in anger, for the orbital screens had until now proven unbreakable. Nonetheless they were tested constantly, maintained at hair-trigger readiness.
It was into this military-industrial hell that Howard Falcon now descended.
* * * *
Falcon watched the final approach from the bridge. “So, this weapon of yours. It’s in Io somewhere?”
“Not in Io,” Valentina answered. “Io is the weapon.”
Falcon had long wearied of the Springer-Soames’ clumsily enigmatic bragging. “You’ll have to explain that to me. What will you do, blow up the whole moon?”
“That would be within our capability,” Valentina said. “But it wouldn’t achieve much. A new ring system, a perturbation of the orbits of the other moons, some disruption to Jupiter’s outer cloud layers . . . Our plans for Io are different—grander. You appreciate a grand gesture, don’t you, Howard?”
He wistfully remembered Geoff Webster. “I used to.”
She nodded to her brother. “Do we have entry clearance?”
“Final authorisation just came in. For the last time—are we sure it’s wise to bring him in?”
“He must see the engine,” Valentina insisted. “Then he’ll understand—”
Without warning the ship dived hard for Io, arrowing down through a thicket of towers and vanes towards a smooth, black surface. It was going to take one hell of a pull-up, Falcon thought. And if anything went wrong . . . After all that he had endured, Falcon supposed that it would be a small mercy to die instantaneously, wiped out in a high-speed crash—neatly closing the long chapter of his life that had begun with another crash, eight hundred years ago—as if everything that had happened in between was but the dream of a dying mind.
The ground loomed.
And at the last instant a door irised open in the black surface. The Springer ship slipped through, harpooning down a long, straight shaft, with barely a whisker of clearance on either side. Red lights marked the speed of their descent, clipping past at what must have been several kilometres per second. Brother and sister looked on with a nerveless cool, as if they had done this a thousand times.
Falcon was almost impressed. “I knew you’d tapped the core. I had no idea there was anything this extensive. The pressure pushing back on these walls—”
“Is nothing,” Bodan said. “Nothing compared to what the Machines must be dealing with in Jupiter, at least. Tunnelling through a few thousand kilometres of moon is child’s play.”
“Don’t talk down our achievements, brother,” Valentina chided. “Think of all that bright magma, just beyond these walls, waiting to burst through and reclaim this tunnel we dug out of the rock. Does that scare you, Howard?”
“Other than human wickedness, I’ve more or less run out of things to be scared of.”
“Wickedness? This is total war,” Bodan said sternly. “There are no moral absolutes—no universal reference frames of good and evil. We do what we must to survive. Nothing else matters.”
“Oh, he’s still cross with us about the Memory Garden,” his sister said with a mock pout.
“Then he should get some perspective. There’d be no point commemorating Hope Dhoni if the Machines win. Left to themselves, they’d eradicate every trace that there was ever a prior civilisation in this system at all. We’re vermin to them—nothing
more.”
“You misunderstand them,” Falcon protested.
“No,” Valentina answered with a sudden fierceness. “They misunderstand us. They underestimate our resolve—how far we’ll go. To make them understand is the point of the exercise, Howard.”
Turning back to a console, Bodan said, “Coming up on the enclosure.”
The ship began to decelerate. A secondary iris popped open ahead of them, and then they were through, still braking hard, as they emerged into a much larger sealed space. By now, Falcon judged, they must be deep inside Io—perhaps beneath the magma layer, even inside the core itself.
It was clear that the Springer-Soames had been busy.
The space inside Io was an artificial chamber many tens of kilometres across, the curvature of distant walls traced by a haze of fine red lines. And occupying much of the central part of the chamber was some kind of engine, or power plant, scaled up to mountainous proportions. The thing was walnut-shaped, with a kind of axle running through the middle of it, extending out both ends and sinking into colossal plugs on either side of the chamber. In fact, this engine was comfortably larger than any spacecraft or station Falcon had ever seen—larger even than the Acheron—no part of it smaller than kilometres across, the whole titanic assemblage itself the size of a small moon.
And all cunningly bottled inside Io.
The Springer ship, reduced to the proportion of a krill next to a blue whale, nosed slowly along the length of the device. Floodlights picked out areas of detail, with the occasional pinprick flash of a laser or welding tool hinting at ongoing activity. Falcon could see no human workers—they would have been lost in the detail.
“I take it this isn’t some immense bomb?”
“We call it the MP,” Bodan said. “Short for Momentum Pump. It’s a starship engine, in all but function. In fact the basic technology came from research into interstellar travel, the physics and engineering.”
“We already sent starships. The Acorn ships—one of your own ancestors was involved—”
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