The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “You’ve still gained kinetic energy from somewhere,” Falcon said.

  The brother said, “Yes, the MP still requires energy to function—vast amounts of it. We bleed the core of Io for that. It’s the momentum we . . . well, steal. Again, the books are balanced—locally and globally.”

  “Local and global causes.” Memory stirred, belatedly, for Falcon.

  “What?” Valentina asked.

  “Never mind the economics crap. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? The behaviour of each particle is bound up with the large-scale structure of the universe. Local depends on global . . . Is this some kind of quantum Mach principle in action?”

  The Springer-Soames exchanged a glance. “Why do you ask?”

  “There was a Machine, working on the KBO flingers back in the twenty-­second century. He came up with a new formulation of physics, out in the dark, that his supervisors dutifully reported to the controlling authority. Never got a reply, as I recall. And is this the result? Is your silver bullet based on Machine science?” He laughed. “What an irony, if it is.”

  Bodan was dismissive. “No Machine can be a physicist. A Machine is an abacus, its thoughts no more than the click-clack of beads on a wire. What it produces is ours, by definition: because we made it.”

  “His name was 90,” Falcon said sternly. “And his life was thrown away needlessly.”

  Bodan received this with a look of utter contempt.

  The sister said, “I presume you don’t doubt the veracity of what you experienced. Even in this brief demonstration we have already altered Io’s orbit. Nothing now stands between us and—”

  “If you have altered the orbit of a moon, the Machines will have noticed.”

  “Let them,” the brother said, with a flick of his hand. “Let them speculate. Let them fear our capabilities. You may tell them as much or as little as you wish. It will only add credence to your ultimatum, Falcon.”

  “An ultimatum? I thought this was to be a peace proposal.”

  “Whatever you choose to call it,” Valentina said. “The treaty is going through last-minute revisions. You’ll take it with you.”

  Alarm bells rang for Falcon. “You want me to take something with me, physically? Can’t you just squirt the text to them?”

  “No,” she answered. “The Machines would be distrustful of any complex electronic transmission. They would assume that we had embedded logic bombs into its structure—recursive loops, destruct codes. A physical docu­ment actually affords greater trust and transparency.”

  “And the chance to sneak some nasty nanotech into their midst, with me as the carrier pigeon?”

  Bodan gave a look of distaste. “Such cynicism, Falcon.”

  “Again, it wouldn’t work,” Valentina said coolly. “Over the years, we have engaged in many levels of warfare. Always the Machines have devised countermeasures—and, indeed, vice versa. No, we are beyond such gambits. Our overture is sincere. The document is a physical object, a solid core of tungsten, engraved with our terms.”

  “And am I allowed a look at this hallowed item before I deliver it?”

  “You couldn’t begin to skim the tiniest fraction of its contents,” she said. “It is rather lengthy. You don’t negotiate for control of the solar system without making sure the terms of surrender you demand are absolutely watertight, down to the last detail.”

  “Sounds a thrilling read. But the terms don’t really matter, do they? You’re putting a loaded gun to their heads, whatever the details of the offer.”

  Bodan smiled. “They are free to accept or reject our terms. If they accept, they will be subjugated and controlled. If they reject, they will be annihilated. At least that’s clear—don’t you think?”

  Even if the Machines might have some kind of choice, Falcon realised, he himself had none. “When do I leave?”

  Valentina smiled. “Two days.”

  50

  The deceleration mounted quickly as he hit atmosphere.

  After the Memory Garden, and then the low gravity of Io, the force of the re-entry came as something of a shock. But Falcon knew that both his craft and his body were more than capable of enduring the stresses, hard as that was to believe as the force on him rose, climbing inexorably to ten gravities, more.

  It was dawn on this part of Jupiter, the sun fat above a horizon of pink clouds. On the scale apprehended by Falcon’s own senses, and those of his newly restored Kon-Tiki, nothing had changed since his first expedition into these clouds: the scale-height of the pressure, the length scale of temperature and pressure variations, all these parameters were unvarying. And since he could see no more than a few thousand kilometres in any direction, there was no sense of the planetary-scale modifications that were so humbling when seen from space. He was like an ant on the Plains of Nazca, crawling along, all unaware of the vast patterns all around him . . . And that thought gave him pause, for the Nazca lines, such a magni­ficent sight from a hot-air balloon, had, like so many other monuments, been destroyed in the Machines’ transformation of the Earth.

  All the same, no part of this oceanic atmosphere had been untouched by the Machines’ activities. Falcon felt no sense of homecoming. Jupiter was alien territory now, and all his past experience counted for nothing.

  At last the deceleration force died away, and it was safe to deploy the drogues, and then the final balloon. The tiny asymptotic-drive engine in the gondola supplied more than enough power to keep the balloon inflated, his altitude stable—but for now Falcon allowed himself a steady descent, quickly passing through into the warming, thickening depths. The sun was a little higher now, flooding the cabin with golden light.

  Falcon’s entry point into Jupiter—insofar as it could be specified, given the lack of permanent landmarks in a fluid, dynamic environment—was close to the area where Ceto had died from her wounds. If there were still medusae in Jupiter, Falcon counted on the herds not having strayed too far from their former browsing zones. He wanted to see them one more time, for himself if no one else. As for the Machines, they could come and find him—that would be the easy part.

  Slowly, the fine fretwork of the ammonia cirrus clouds above him became obscured by brown and salmon layers of intervening chemistry, the air stained a nicotine-coloured haze of complex carbon molecules. Soon it was warmer than a summer’s day out there, and already the gondola was enduring more than ten atmospheres of pressure, the structure making slight creaking sounds as it absorbed the mounting forces. Falcon eyed the hull around him with a certain wariness, trusting that the Kon-Tiki’s molecular-scale refurbishments had been as thorough as claimed.

  A hundred kilometres deep. He had first encountered the mantas near this altitude—and sure enough it was not long before he spied a squadron of the dark, deltoid shapes, traversing the sheer side of a cloud bank not more than two hundred kilometres from him. A shiver of pure awe passed through him. Even after all this time, the wonder of that first encounter had not entirely abated. How little he had known! But, at the mercy of the winds, Falcon could not have followed the mantas even if he had wished, and he soon dipped below their graceful gliding. But he allowed himself a twinge of relief: whatever had become of Jupiter, at least part of the ecology was still functioning.

  The descent continued. Meanwhile the gondola maintained its litany of grumbles and complaints, while the pressure and temperature readings on his control board twitched ever higher.

  There. The first distinct waxberg—a ropy, mountainous mass, veined in red and ochre, floating in the air. Two more below it, with tenuous connecting threads bridging the masses, rising up from the cloud level the Jovian meteorologists had labelled D. Cloudy, with a chance of waxballs, Falcon thought. And he wondered if there was anybody left alive who would pick up that reference, a much loved if elderly movie from the childhood of a ballooning-obsessed little boy.

  Now, at
the limit of his magnified vision, he made out scores more mantas, sculling around the floating food store with lazy undulations of their bodies—like a gathering of crows at dusk, he thought, another memory of England. Near the suspended cliffs, the mantas peeled away on individual feeding patterns, occasionally diving right through the barely-­substantial masses. Elsewhere, they dropped in and out of eerily regular formations, finding their places like well-drilled combat aircraft in chevrons and diamonds, some groups comprising hundreds of mantas. Those tight formations were something new, Falcon thought—a kind of emergent behaviour he had never witnessed before.

  Where there were mantas, there would soon be medusae. The prospect lit a glow of anticipation in Falcon. He would rather the circumstances had been different, but still, here he was in Jupiter once more, still seeing things that were wondrous and fearful in equal measure. What a fine thing it was simply to be alive, to have survived all these troubled centuries—simply to be a creature with eyes to see, with a memory in which to hold the gift of experience . . .

  And there were the medusae! Tawny ovals browsing a landscape of waxbergs sixty kilometres beneath the gondola. This was clinching proof of their survival, despite the large-scale alterations to Jupiter. There had been no hard proof even of that for centuries, not beyond the odd suggestive radar echo; the interior of Jupiter had slipped back to becoming almost as unknown as it had been before the first descent of the Kon-Tiki. Falcon prepared to squirt a report back to Io. “Tell Doctor Tem that there is still life in Jupiter. And thank her for doing such a good job on her patient, despite everything.”

  But even as he completed the report, he felt uneasy about what he saw.

  He watched twenty or more medusae in that one grouping, eating their way through the waxberg as if they were excavators in an open-cast quarry, bulldozing grooves and spirals into the very bulk of the wax . . . There was something about that organised consumption that looked almost industrial. Too much so: just like the mantas, over-regimented. Herding behaviour was normal enough for the medusae—and Falcon had witnessed the medusae forcibly lined up to suffer the industrialised horror of New Nantucket—but this was something else. Nothing was coercing these medusa, nothing visible at least, but they were behaving exactly as if enslaved, mere components in a larger industrial enterprise.

  Falcon focused his attention on a single medusa, cranking his magnifi­cation to the limit. The basic form was unchanged, immediately recognisable: a humped, lumpy, nimbus-like form with a forest of tentacles ­dangling from its underside. Nor was it in any sense distinct from the other ­creatures browsing the wax.

  But there were unusual markings on the side. Falcon had been the first to witness the natural radio antennae that the medusae carried on their flanks—he had seen patterns like checkerboards—but now the patterns were different. They were much more complicated, more like some cryptic geometric encoding—or like a prime number factorisation expressed in black and white pixels, or a snapshot from a simulation of artificial life. And the patterns were changing—a rapid flicker, a new configuration appearing from one moment to the next. The process was captivating, almost hypnotic. Were radio waves being generated by these patterns, or had their function shifted to a purely visual display mode? He studied the console, trying to make sense of the readouts, pushing the patterns through hasty computer analyses, without coming to a conclusion.

  He could only guess at the cause of what he was seeing.

  The giant cloud formations visible from space alone proved that the Machines were adjusting the Jovian environment on an immense scale—and any environment shaped its denizens, even as they shaped it. Perhaps it was no surprise to see these animals’ strange new information-dense markings and behaviours given the new information-dense energy fields that must permeate Jupiter. It did mean, though, that nothing was as it had been when he first met the medusae—and, perhaps, never could be again, even if human and Machine alike tinkered no further.

  All he had seen so far was surely only a side-effect of a grander engineering of Jupiter. It was that greater scale he must confront now. He wondered if he would return this way, if he would ever see the medusae, his old friends, again. But in a way it didn’t matter. They had changed too much, while he had stayed still; he was no longer their concern.

  He resumed his descent.

  51

  He maintained his rate of fall, dropping far beneath the level of the browsing medusae and through the yielding floor of cloud bank D. Now he was a hundred and fifty kilometres down, the pressure was up to eighteen atmospheres—and he was certain that today he would fall deeper than ever before. His internal monitors showed complex displays. Soon, as the pressure and density increased, his craft would adopt a new configuration. The balloon envelope would collapse and be drawn back into the gondola—but the buoyancy of the gondola itself would now be enough to draw it upwards. So a band of small fusor-powered ramjets would start up to drive the ship deeper into the thickening murk—and the main asymptotic-drive engine could be called on too if necessary. And then the strengthening of the hull by the Springers’ technicians would be thoroughly tested.

  Overhead, the sky was darkening through shades of purple. This was not the onset of evening—dusk was still hours away—but the gradual filtering out of solar illumination. Much the same thing happened in the depths of Earth’s oceans. The main difference here was that the external temperature was steadily rising, even as the iron crush of the atmosphere redoubled its hold on the gondola. Above him, he knew, the buoyancy envelope was adjusting, narrowing, controlling its own internal temperature and pressure to match the external conditions, and provide the lift he needed.

  Two hundred kilometres deep. There were still complex molecules floating in the crushing air, but nothing that met the usual definitions of a living organism. It was already too hot and dark for life: too hot for the right chemical cycles, too dark for photons to pump energy into any sort of food chain. Falcon, believing that he had “seen” all he was going to, prepared to switch from his visual system to a composite overlay stitched together from radar, sonar and infrared channels . . .

  Wait.

  To his astonishment—and consternation, for it contradicted all he knew of the Jovian cloud layers—a faint, milky glow was rising up from the depths.

  He needed the maximum amplification of his enhanced eyes to see it at all, but nonetheless there it was. It shimmered and strobed, like a neon tube struggling to light. The glow was coming from a fixed depth, perhaps three hundred kilometres down, and when he looked further out he saw that it came from all directions. There was an oddly regular patterning to it—like a quilt, stitched together from square swatches of slightly varying radiance—a quilt stretched wide and deep across this Jovian sky. And there were hints of solid forms embedded in that surface of textured light, nodes defining the boundaries of those quilted squares. Each node was separated from its four nearest neighbours by a hundred kilometres of clear air.

  Something associated with the glow was confusing his radar and its interpretive software. Falcon reverted to optical/sonar, abandoning the radar. The milky glow was tenuous, but there was sufficient contrast to enable him to pick out the rough forms of the nodes. Each was an upright spindle, like two sharp-tipped cones joined base to base. Each was huge, about as tall as Kon-Tiki and its balloon. And there were hundreds, thousands of them . . .

  The spindles were floating in that layer of milky light—but they were also creating it, he saw now. Sweeping out from the spindles’ midsections were moving beams, pinwheeling like searchlights. The beams must be intense electromagnetic projections: ultraviolet lasers or something analo­gous. They were exciting the layer of air between the spindles, heating it into plasma. The whole exercise was choreographed with tremendous precision, the plasma layer billowing around the spindles, and the ­spindles rising and falling with the undulations. They made him think of buoys floating on a roilin
g, angry sea of their own making.

  A dark intuition convinced him that these were elements of a sentry system, primed to deter intruders. And, falling at random into the planet, surely he had not simply chanced on one concentration of defences. It must spread far, perhaps across all of Jupiter. A planetary-scale structure: a thing of wonder in its own right. And if so, no wonder the upper cloud layers had shown such large-scale disruption.

  And at least he had resolved one mystery: this plasma curtain was surely the radio/radar scattering surface which had prevented any recent study of the Jovian interior, cloaking the work of the Machines . . .

  “You have been busy little bees,” he murmured.

  Now he must think of his own continued survival.

  Falcon quickly decided that the plasma curtain was not going to hurt him; Kon-Tiki would pass through it without damage. And nor would he approach a node so closely as to risk collision. The lasers, though, were something else. If one of those beams should choose to linger on the ­gondola or the balloon . . .

  But there, suddenly, was a way through. Four of the spindles had become inert, no longer exciting the air between them, creating an aperture in the plasma curtain—a single black chessboard square. It was not directly below him, but exactly on his projected path, given his angle of drift and descent speed.

  It was a door with Falcon’s name on it. “Come on in, the water’s lovely,” he murmured.

  And then it occurred to him to wonder if the open square was no more than a lure to guarantee his easy destruction. Nothing for it now, one way or the other.

  He fell towards the gap, on edge all the while.

  “This is Falcon,” he sent back to Io, and he sent back a stream of hastily compiled imaging and other data. “I’m still here, but I’m close to the depth of the scattering surface—you’ll see what I’ve found down here, which is probably the cause of that scattering—I expect that this is likely to be the last you’ll hear from me for a while. Try not to do anything rash . . .”