The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  Adam twitched again. He was still standing, but these external signs were clearly the visible manifestations of some colossal internal struggle, a war beneath the skin. “The real weapon?”

  “In me,” Falcon answered. “It must have been. In my blood—”

  “No,” Adam said now. He was very still, as if fighting some deep pain. “I have it. Not that. I have analysed your genetic material, Falcon, your DNA. And—given the infection I’ve suffered—I can see there is some kind of logical virus, written in strings of acids and bases. Yet, though we touched hands, though I am immersed in your air, I had physically isolated the material from my processing core, screened any radiative input . . . Somehow the information was transferred nonetheless. A non-local transmission . . .”

  “Non-local.” Falcon remembered what he had been told of the Momen­tum Pump. “A quantum Mach principle. New ways to link things, to move stuff from one place to another, a bit of information from here to there . . .”

  “You speak of 90’s work.”

  “Or how it has been developed, by the Springer-Soames and their experts, yes. They put a virus into my DNA, and a way to transfer it to you, without the necessity of physical contact. Just proximity, I suppose. When you came into the gondola, you were already doomed . . . My God. It’s almost genius. No wonder it got through your screens. And in a way it’s fitting. What defines humans more than anything else? The DNA, our genetic legacy. And now the Springer-Soames have weaponised even that—and used Machine physics to deliver the weapon.”

  “Tell me about this doctor, Tem.”

  “A Surgeon-Commander. She did some work on me, upgrading my bio support. She must have made the changes in my DNA—injected some engineered retrovirus perhaps . . . She could not have avoided doing that much. If she’d refused, the Springer-Soames would merely have removed her and had somebody else do it. She made the change—but she tried to warn me. The damn cut on her thumb. But I didn’t understand, Adam, I couldn’t see until too late. I’m so sorry. I’m a fool—”

  “No. An idealist. And naive because of it. You always were that, Falcon. Tem, though. Why her? Did you know this woman?”

  “I don’t . . . Tem. Lorna Tem. Of course.”

  In that instant he knew that he had already met the Surgeon-Commander, as another deep memory came into focus. She had spoken of choosing her career after an epiphany—a defining moment. And now he knew exactly where and when that moment had been: on the airship Hindenburg, in the clouds of Saturn, when a little girl nearly lost her favourite plaything, the inflatable globe, and Howard Falcon had saved it for her. The wonder and horror in her eyes, when she looked into his face for the first time—and the moment when she found within herself the courage to retrieve the toy from Falcon. A simple human connection. But in that encounter, strange and momentous for the child—and oddly so memorable for Falcon too—he had broken down something in her, an instinctive fear of the unknown and the different, and set her on a certain path—one that had led her into medicine, until at last he became her patient.

  “I had no idea. About the weapon. I’d have refused to go along with this—or destroyed myself long before we came into contact.”

  “Too late for second-guessing.” Adam gathered some composure. “The logical attacker is potent. It is exploiting deep latencies, deep vulnerabilities. Things we never thought their weapons could touch. I have erected internal barricades, firewalls, dead zones. They are holding it at bay. For now.”

  Falcon, with unwelcome clarity of mind, continued to think it through. “You are under a two-pronged attack. My God—dropping Io wasn’t enough. They wanted to weaken you with this virus, remove any ability you might have had to defend yourselves. And then they’ll hammer you with Io. We humans are pretty clever after all, aren’t we? Smarter and slyer than you ever thought.”

  “But then you did build us in the first place, Falcon.”

  “Can you resist?”

  “The fight is difficult. On my own, I may not be able to contain the attacker.”

  “But you can’t risk it reaching any other Machines.”

  “No, I cannot. Do not think you have failed. Do not think that Tem failed either. Your warning came in time, Falcon. The infection is isolated, in me, in this gondola. Perhaps we will after all be able to deflect the Io attack. Even smash the satellite before it falls; a hail of comets is better than a moonfall . . . But—”

  Adam looked into Falcon’s artificial eyes, and Falcon looked back. They both knew, in that moment.

  Adam said, almost softly, “But we are in trouble, Fal-con.” The robot had reverted, if only for a moment, to his old way of addressing him. Even Machines, it seemed, could never quite shed the innocent lapses of childhood.

  “Just a little,” Falcon said.

  “A fine talent for understatement.”

  “It’s a human thing: you’ll get the hang of it.

  “If I have the time,” Adam said dryly.

  “But you’re right. Neither of us can go home now. I was a one-shot weapon all along. They’re not going to welcome me back to Io, not now I know what they did to me—and after I thwarted it. And you can’t go home, either . . . But maybe that was always the plan. Why you were chosen to meet me. You drew the short straw, didn’t you?”

  “I do not understand.”

  Falcon smiled sadly. “Maybe Machine politics really isn’t so different from human. Look, there are factions within mankind. I guess that’s obvious. There’s the Springer-Soames mob that dominates the military government, who attacked you. I don’t know who is behind Tem, the resistance movement she must be part of . . . but Tem’s faction has stopped the virus, at least.”

  “This language of factions is unknown to us, Falcon.”

  Falcon eyed him. “Are you sure? You said you were sent to meet me. Do you have enemies, Adam?”

  “Ours is a transparent democracy of pure will. There are no leaders, no subservients, no cabals—merely structured echelons of weighted influence, an autonomous self-governing heuristic network of rational actors . . .”

  “Cut the crap, Adam. Your mission was a set-up. You’re the buffer—the poor stooge sent in to figure out if I’m the real deal or not. Which makes you expendable. Just as I am. We’re both in the same boat, aren’t we? Both having lived long enough to become more than a little embarrassing to our peers. Me because I’ve shown a touch too much sympathy for Machines over the years, you maybe because you’ve spent much too long in the presence of ideological contaminants like me. You’re not pure, and neither am I. So we both get the dirty jobs—like this one.”

  Adam seemed to consider it. “And just as your rulers surely saw you as an expendable token to be played—”

  “That’s how your ‘autonomous self-governing heuristic network of rational actors’ saw you. What a pack of crooks they must be.”

  “Rational, though.”

  “Adam, you’ve done what you were intended to. Protected your city, your friends. But at the cost of your life.”

  “And yours.”

  “I suppose so. The game’s over.” Falcon looked back across time, across the troubled centuries, to the aftermath of the Queen Elizabeth crash. “By rights I should have been dead long ago. Sometimes I think that everything since has been—undeserved. But now I face the end, at last.”

  Adam thought that over. “You speak like an old man. As if you are at the end of your life. I am at the beginning. Machines are potentially immortal. You may feel old. I feel young.”

  “Well, the question is: what do we do next?”

  They pondered that in silence for a time.

  * * * *

  “I was meant to kill you, you know, if you were not what you claimed.”

  “And if you killed me now, I wouldn’t hold it against you. But you’d be taking a hell of a risk. If you destroy me—even if you bl
ew up the gondola—how do you know something of it won’t escape? Neither of us understands the full potential of this quantum Mach engineering, I take it.”

  Adam’s answer was slow in coming. Falcon wondered at the brutal toll his internal struggle was now taking—the demand it placed on his cognitive functions. “I would have no guarantee that my fellows would be spared.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. We’re doomed. But we must . . . dispose of ourselves safely.”

  “Nicely put, Falcon. And how do we do that?”

  Falcon smiled sadly. “For a dumb human, I seem to be having to come up with a lot of the answers. I can think of one way. We’re deep inside Jupiter. While the air is thick and hot out there, it isn’t nearly as thick and hot as it gets further down. Maybe something of us could survive at these depths. But not below.”

  “Below?”

  “In the deep layers, Adam. So: we descend. As far as we can get, before the gondola collapses . . .”

  “Orpheus glimpsed something of the extreme interior, but we’ve never been back. Our knowledge of the deep is . . . limited.”

  Falcon heard something in Adam’s voice, something he had not expected to hear. Trepidation? Not fear of dying, surely, when Adam had already consented to this risky encounter? But fear of something else?

  He saw no option.

  “So here’s my idea: we dump the envelope, and go for the long fall, and hope for the best. I mean, hope for the worst. Hope that whatever’s in me and, indeed, you now, can’t reach any more Machines. Reaching crush depth seems to be the safest way to guarantee that.”

  “One last expedition, then? One last ballooning adventure for the great Howard Falcon?”

  “Except there won’t be a balloon.”

  “Or much of an adventure.”

  “Sheesh, don’t be the killjoy.”

  Adam seemed curious. “Even now, are you glad of this? You envied Orpheus.”

  “Insofar as one can envy a Machine—yes.”

  “But why the fascination? Why the core?”

  Falcon forced a grin. “To quote one of the less obnoxious Springers, ‘Because it’s there.’”

  It was time to die.

  Again.

  “Let’s do this.”

  INTERLUDE:

  JUNE 1968

  To Seth Springer, floating alone between worlds, his Apollo Command Module was a home away from home.

  On the pad, he’d only glimpsed his spacecraft before being shepherded inside by the pad crew. It looked like a standard-issue Apollo, with the fat cylinder of the Service Module topped by the conical Command Module—save that there was a kind of extension on top of this Service Module, a cylindrical collar. In there lay the nuke, Seth’s only companion on this mission.

  Inside, the cabin was a cone shape, a cosy hutch. The ship had been designed for three crew, and three couches remained fitted here now. Above the couches was a bank of instrument panels, some of them ­hastily reconfigured so that one man could reach all he needed. Beneath the middle couch there was a lower equipment bay, and behind the couches a crawl space with lockers and other pieces of gear. All of it was painted a neat battleship grey, and the walls were peppered with little Velcro pads where he could stick stuff so it wouldn’t drift off in weightlessness.

  The whole thing was brightly lit and, packed with machinery, it hummed—kind of like a kitchen or a motor home—just like the simulator, and Seth immediately felt he belonged.

  Today had been launch day, a long and busy day since he’d woken up in the crew quarters. Now, with Apollo hurled from the Earth and into interplanetary space, Seth prepared the Command Module for the night by fitting panels over the windows and turning down the lights. Surprisingly, Seth’s little home took on the feeling of a chapel.

  He found a place to stretch out beneath the couches, and again surprised himself by sleeping easily.

  * * * *

  In the morning—it was Saturday, he remembered immediately—he was woken by a howl of over-amplified guitar music.

  He pottered around his tasks, making coffee—a squirt of hot water from a spigot into a pre-prepared bag—and breakfasting on crackers with cheese. Then he called the ground. “Houston, Apollo.”

  “Good morning, Seth.”

  “Hey, Charlie. What the hell was that?”

  “Not quite live from Bermuda, the love-in. Jimi Hendrix playing solo, a thing he calls ‘An Anthem For A World Government.’ Kind of a mess-up of the Stars and Stripes and the Russian anthem.”

  “Sacrilege.”

  “Well, since he’s sitting at Icarus ground zero, along with Ravi Shankar and Captain Beefheart and John Lennon and the rest, Jimi’s showing faith in you, fella . . . Oh, on that note, you may want to take a look at your PPK when you have time. And in other news, while you slept, Vice Presi­dent Kennedy has said he’s accepting NASA’s future plans. Mars by 1990, he says.”

  “As long as we get to the middle of next week, I guess.”

  “There is that. Thanks for keeping us all in work, buddy.”

  “Yeah. You just make a fuss of my boys when they grow up and join the Astronaut Office, okay?”

  “Copy that, Seth.”

  * * * *

  Seth stowed his trash and brushed his teeth. He’d received elaborate training on how to shave in space, so as not to have bristles flying around the cabin, but since he was only flying until Tuesday he decided to skip it.

  Today, Saturday, was a quiet day, relatively speaking, but Seth still had a slew of chores: purging fuel cells, recharging batteries and carbon dioxide canisters. There had been talk of taking an onboard camera, of having him broadcast to the Earth, or at least to his family. For better or worse he’d decided that was too painful a prospect and had ducked out. He was kept busy, though. Maybe that was the idea, of course.

  Lunch was chicken soup and salmon salad.

  Then, in a scrap of down time, he checked out his PPK, his personal preference kit. All the astronauts were allowed to take a little pack of personal stuff on their flights: mementoes, photographs, souvenirs and such. Seth, unable to decide what to take, had left it to family and friends. So he opened the pack now with a kind of nervous anticipation.

  The bulkiest item was a small portable tape recorder. Then came a tiny photo album, assembled by Pat, photos of herself, the kids, the family together. A little gold locket that had once belonged to his grandmother—it had the Springer family crest, a leaping springbok—and inside, curls of the kids’ hair. He spent some time over this, and he didn’t care what they made of his reaction down in Mission Control.

  A letter from the President.

  A letter from Louis Armstrong! “Godspeed, you fine young man . . .”

  The tape recorder had been labelled, by hand: TONTO. When he started it up, he was surprised to hear Mo Berry’s voice.

  “Greetings, Tonto. If you’re playing this package it’s because the IRS caught up with me, and they let you fly my spacecraft. Well, buddy, I can’t think of anybody better to be in that seat, save for me, of course. And I guess I wasted some of my last moments of liberty putting together this tape for you.

  “I took advice from Pat. I made a compilation from the Hot Five days and the Hot Seven and selections from Ella and Louis. That scat singing could put out a fire, I admit. And listen, I added one favourite of my own. You know I like to follow the new stuff, listen to the music those hairy kids are making these days. Call it sublimated fatherhood—well, that’s what some NASA shrink told me once. But what’s wrong with that? It’s kind of why you’re out there now. So enjoy, Tonto, and try not to fall off your horse before you even get to the shoot-out . . .”

  The extra track opened with slushy strings in six-eight time, and Seth wondered if this was one final joke by Mo, if he had made up a tape full of Mantovani after all. But then Louis B. began singin
g, Seth learned from a track list in the pack, a song called “What a Wonderful World.” Apparently it had tanked in the US but had been a big chart hit overseas the previous year: a hit for Satchmo, here in the age of Jimi Hendrix. “And I never even knew about it. Thanks, buddy.”

  Then the song’s lyrics started to remind him of his kids, and he had to shut it off.

  * * * *

  Sunday, Monday.

  Two more days in space, days filled with routine. He was relieved that none of the tasks he was assigned proved beyond him, such as the tricky navigation-by-eyeball position checks, or the single mid-course correction he needed to make. Somehow, as long as he was still a sleep or two away from the encounter, it felt like a training run. But the clock was ticking down relentlessly; that big bad rock was barrelling towards him even faster than he was moving himself.

  On Monday he spoke to Pat, down in Mission Control, for the last time. He had a job to do Tuesday, and he didn’t think he could do that and speak to Pat as well. That was a hard moment.

  Then he turned his Command Module into a night-time chapel once more, and slept, and woke up one more time, and it was Tuesday.

  Icarus Day.

  SIX

  * * *

  JUPITER WITHIN

  2850

  54

  The metropolis of the Machines still hung below the slowly falling Kon-Tiki, but everything had changed. Now they were committed.

  Falcon’s resolve was as fragile as the cabin walls holding back Jupiter’s vengeful, jealous crush. But he did not fear death so much as making the wrong decision.

  “So here’s my plan,” he said, forcing himself to sound confident. “We’ll use the asymptotic drive to dive as quickly as we can. But first we have to find a way through your world city. Those gaps—access shafts, whatever they are. How far down do they go?”

  “A few hundred kilometres.”