The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “And then what?”

  “Nothing. We would exit the lower levels and continue into the void.”

  “Like a rat falling out of a drain-pipe.” Falcon smiled. “Fine, that’s how we’ll do it. But the timing has to be precise. If we get it wrong, if we look like we’re trying to dive-bomb the city, your friends will surely destroy us.”

  Adam closed avatars of eyes. “I have already downloaded our course into the gondola’s systems. I must not communicate with my fellows, but when they track our trajectory the weapon port below us will be opened to allow us to pass. I will allow no doubt in the minds of my fellows that we merely intend to fall through the city, never to return. The timing needs to be precise, of course . . .” Adam turned his face to Falcon. “The logical agent is proving a worthy adversary, Falcon. I do not have limitless resources. Everything aside from the inner struggle is an effort.”

  “Do what you can.”

  Adam settled his golden hand over the drive control. “May I? . . . But are you quite sure of this?”

  “I’ve never been less sure of anything. Incidentally, why do you call it a weapon port? It’s too deep to be useful in any human incursion . . .”

  “It’s a long story. Come now . . .”

  Adam squeezed Falcon’s hand. And Falcon’s hand activated the asymptotic drive, directing its thrust to drive the gondola down, rather than up. It cut against every human instinct to go deeper when escape lay above—but then, he recalled, it was only an echo of the manoeuvre that had saved his life during his first encounter with the medusae, when he had dived down into the Jovian air. Second time lucky? He doubted it. But they were committed anyhow.

  The shaft came up below them. It was a square aperture, a dozen or so kilometres across on each side, with red-gridded walls leading down.

  “So,” Falcon said. “Still alive!”

  “I must temper your elation. Our life expectancy is, after all, rather limited. And in the meantime, of course, in the wider picture, the Springers’ logical attack has been contained. Once they realise this, they must proceed with the Io weapon. Given warning of the drop, our weapons stand a fair chance of shattering the moon . . . The ecology may not endure, but we shall. But then what? More war, another escalation?”

  “Maybe the Springer-Soames will have a change of heart.”

  “Do you think that likely?”

  Falcon didn’t bother to reply.

  They were deep into the shaft now, driven by the smooth thrust of the asymptotic drive. Most of the gondola’s instruments were still working, to a degree. According to the radar the bottom of the shaft was coming up quickly . . .

  Then they were out.

  Falcon turned the sensors back on the underside of the city. The flicker of the asymptotic drive illuminated a configuration very much like the upper side, an arrangement of planes and blocks. He supposed the near-­symmetry was to be expected: when you had conquered the pressure and heat of these iron depths, even Jovian gravity was barely a detail.

  And they were already more than five hundred kilometres deep into Jupiter.

  Falcon directed the main sweep of the sensors ahead, down along their descent path—and allowed himself a twitch of surprise, for there were more objects floating below them. “What are they?”

  “Similar to what you saw above. Another weapons garden, as you called it.”

  Falcon thought back. “That shaft we passed through. You said that was a weapons port.”

  “Indeed. And it was symmetrical, you’ll have noted.”

  “Fires both ways . . .”

  “Yes. And when we reach the second weapons garden you’ll notice a significant difference.”

  “Will I?”

  “These guns are pointed down, not up.”

  55

  They continued their assisted fall, passing phalanxes of guns at six hundred, six hundred and fifty, seven hundred kilometres.

  And then no more weapons: only smaller floating spheres which Adam said were the deepest elements of a “distant early warning” system.

  “A warning against what, Adam? Renegade Machines, a splinter movement that went deeper into Jupiter?”

  “Nothing like that. We’ve had our differences, our internal squabbles. You deduced that for yourself. But the enemy we fear was in Jupiter long before we arrived.”

  Humanity had known nothing of this, Falcon realised. “Orpheus found something. Is that what you’re saying? Many of his later communications were ambiguous.”

  “Perhaps it might be better to say that Orpheus woke something. Some­thing that had been barely cognizant of human or Machine civilisation until that little probe brought it news from outside.”

  “‘Something’—what?”

  “We do not know, Falcon,” Adam said gently.

  Whatever fears Falcon had felt before this revelation now felt utterly inconsequential—a child’s anxieties, nothing more—even though after a moment’s consideration he realised that his predicament had not altered, that this new threat was irrelevant to his own drastically curtailed life prospects. “And you only thought to tell me this now?”

  “You humans had a certain view of us,” Adam said. “You thought we were lords of Jupiter. Had you known otherwise—that in fact we were squeezed between two adversaries, above and below—you might have recalculated your chances of displacing us. Although even if you had won, you might then have found yourself facing a still more formidable foe. Would you have been that foolhardy? No, don’t answer that.

  “Still, there needn’t be any secrets between the two of us now. After all nothing we see or experience on this descent will ever be relayed to anyone else. I can attempt no more communications of any kind, for I will not unleash the logic weapon on my fellows.”

  “You’re cheerful company, you know that?”

  “Did your masters tell you how far down this capsule was capable of travelling?”

  “Whatever they told me, I’m not sure I’d take much of it on trust.”

  Adam nodded sagely. “When I passed through your hull, I took the chance to assess the state of your equipment. The engineers have done well with their materials science, given their cognitive limitations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The asymptotic drive is well engineered for deep operations. But the pressure will overcome the gondola at a thousand kilometres, at about the depth we transition to the molecular-hydrogen ocean. The collapse will be rapid. There will be little warning. However—”

  “Yes?”

  “The journey need not end there. I can protect you.”

  Falcon frowned. “How?”

  “I am more robust; I could survive the collapse—for a time at least. The gondola is a mere shell. Think of me as another shell, Falcon. I can encompass you. Provide you with another layer of armour, against the moment when the gondola fails you.”

  “Like a pressure suit?”

  “If you wish. A thinking, communicating pressure suit.”

  “We’ll only be delaying the inevitable.”

  Adam smiled. “Well—what is existence but an endless, ultimately futile delaying of the inevitable?”

  “Very philosophical. I don’t think you inherited that from me.”

  “We are already approaching nine hundred kilometres. I would not care to put undue faith in my earlier calculation. It might be wise to prepare.”

  Falcon surveyed his surroundings. The secret horror of all submariners was implosive collapse; such a fate had seldom troubled his imagination as a balloonist, but now he found his mind turning to it with a grim fascination. Would there be a final moment when he sensed the walls closing in, squeezing tight like an iron fist? Or would the hydrogen-helium find a weakness in the hull and gush in? Would he be aware of it, the crushing, the burning?

  Falcon had died once. Such consid
erations ought not to have troubled him. A death was a death.

  But he was not quite ready to give in.

  “Go ahead,” he told Adam. “But make me one promise. If you sense the end coming for both of us, make it fast and make it painless.”

  “You have my word,” Adam said.

  And immediately the golden form lost definition, melting like a wax figurine, until Adam was reduced to a blob of amorphous material.

  The blob flowed across the floor, then elongated into a torus, a ring around Falcon’s wheels. The torus began to extend vertically, adhering to Falcon’s form as it rose, creeping up him like a blight. Through his peripheral sensors—the nerves in his undercarriage—Falcon felt an oozing coldness. It was curious, alien, unsettling, but not painful.

  While these transformations were going on, Falcon reminded himself, Adam was still conducting his own internal battle against the logical attacker. Falcon could only begin to imagine the desperate ferocity of that internal conflict, the war going on beneath that golden surface.

  The Machine flowed over his arms and torso and upper body and at last his head, obscuring Falcon’s view of the gondola and its instruments. For a moment, pleasantly numbed by that cold cocoon, Falcon felt himself adrift in a darkening void.

  “Falcon.” The voice was inside his head now, as if heard through high-quality headphones.

  “Yes, Adam?”

  “If you wish to access my senses—to see, to hear—I must interface directly with your nervous system. I will render my own non-human perceptions into human-acceptable formats. You have the remains of a rather antiquated neural jack, among other crude neuroinformatic systems, which I will be able to work with . . . Do you agree?”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I am already doing so. The auditory channel was the simplest; vision, taste, smell and proprioceptive functions will follow in a moment—”

  And sensation poured in. Suddenly Falcon was looking out into Jupiter’s mighty ocean.

  * * * *

  Adam’s sensory faculties had always been far superior to Falcon’s own. Of course it was still dark, but now the visual spectrum was only a tiny sliver of the sensory stream reaching Falcon’s mind. He could sense the electromagnetic environment in which they descended, the pressure and temperature gradients, the eddies and currents in the hydrogen-helium fluid, even the salting of other chemical elements still present in the sea.

  And at the same time he saw the thin bubble of the gondola, still holding back a nightmare of force and heat. He sensed the rising strain in the material, nano-scale fractures spreading and multiplying.

  “When it happens, Adam, are you sure you’ll be strong enough to hold out?”

  “I am more resilient than you think. The collapse of the gondola will be the least of our problems—a mere foretaste of the ferocious conditions yet to come.”

  “That’s cheering.”

  “Let us rejoice that we have this opportunity. To see what others have failed to see . . .”

  “Even as it kills us. Tell me more, Adam, now we’ve got the time. Those down-pointing weapons. You must have tried to find out what’s down there.”

  “Indeed. We studied the last transmissions from Orpheus, with its hints of organised activity at the threshold of Jupiter Within . . . Once we were securely installed in our ocean city, new envoys were prepared. Ambassadors rather than explorers. Stronger and cleverer than Orpheus, each better than the last, and each equipped to make contact, even to negotiate. But none returned intact. We mourned them—those that never came home.”

  “And others did?”

  “But their minds had been damaged—perhaps deliberately. They babbled nonsense, or screamed in ceaseless agonies of inner conflict. A second of pain, Falcon, is an eternity in hell for a cybernetic consciousness. They became the object of pity, revulsion. Their testimonies offered nothing of use. They were put out of their misery.

  “And still we persisted with our efforts at contact—all fruitless.

  “Until one day a force rose from the depths and struck at our cities.” There was a sort of regretful pride in Adam’s tone now. “A deep war. You knew nothing of it. We concealed it well. Had you had an inkling—you, humanity—that would surely have been the moment to take us. You would have triumphed, too.”

  “This force . . .”

  “It has never returned. We think it was a kind of test of our capabilities. Perhaps a warning. But nor have we ever ventured back into the Jovian deeps. Perhaps the situation is now one of stalemate. So long as we do not disturb the core, the entities who occupy it allow us to retain our hold on the outer atmosphere. We, even now, must be an irrelevance to them—barely substantial ghosts, haunting the thinned-out margins of their world. As you might have regarded ethereal spirits in the stratosphere.”

  “While we still had a stratosphere above us . . . But now our descent threatens to destabilise your ceasefire.”

  “We two represent little threat. There comes a point where neither of us has anything to gain from the status quo, wouldn’t you agree? Perhaps now is the time to confront that which we have both feared—by which I mean humans and Machines.”

  “Let’s hope something comes of this little moment of détente, in that case.”

  “I share that sentiment. In the meantime you should brace yourself, Falcon . . . Stress indices are rising. I believe the moment is upon us.”

  So it was.

  Farewell, faithful Kon-Tiki.

  * * * *

  Despite his intellectual understanding of the coming event, Falcon could not help but anticipate the gondola’s collapse as a process, a thing of definite stages, with a beginning, middle and an end. Like a fist closing in on a tin can: close, crush, discard. It was not like that all. There were two discontinuous instants. An instant when the gondola still held. And an instant in which the gondola no longer existed, crushed out of existence by the cruel, ramming pressure of the hydrogen-helium.

  All Falcon knew was a consuming brightness, a soundless thunderclap, a pressure shock driving in from his outer skin to the deepest part of him.

  He was a golden form in darkness, not quite in the shape of a man, and he endured.

  Adam retrospectively reviewed the collapse event. Even in the last instants of its demise, the gondola had transmitted status reports—and, anticipating its own imminent destruction, the asymptotic drive had “decommissioned” itself in a flurry of microscopic operations. The tiny black hole at the heart of the engine could never be made entirely safe, but as the outer walls of the engine buckled, the singularity had been packed into an armoured pinhead, a sarcophagus-like device that would draw just enough power from the black hole itself to maintain electrostatic structural force fields. Theoretically, the pinhead could endure the highest pressures and temperatures of the Jovian core for billions of years, drifting harmlessly.

  Godspeed, little pinhead, Falcon thought. Carry your message into the distant future.

  “You did well,” Falcon said at last.

  “We did well. But I am sorry for your craft. It had served you well.”

  “Are you all right, Adam? Did the collapse damage you?”

  “No, the event was within the range of variables I had calculated. But I cannot raise false hopes about our chances below. There are a number of options by which we may prolong our survival further, but none will take us as deep as Orpheus.”

  “Might be our lucky day.”

  “It certainly has been so far.”

  “Keep that up and you’ll be in danger of developing a sense of humour.”

  “When I consider humanity, I cannot help but laugh.”

  “Touché.”

  Arguing, bickering, speculating, joking, they fell together into the formless void.

  56

  Surgeon-Commander Lorna Tem had been expecting
her visitors. Now her monitors showed they were already in the medical complex, approaching her suite of theatres and offices. She sat at her desk, surrounding herself with case notes and surgical records.

  They entered without preliminaries, without courtesy.

  The usual security retinue came first, then the odious Springer-Soames siblings Valentina Atlanta and Bodan Severyn. Tem leaned back in her seat, affecting studied nonchalance. The security detachment stood aside as the siblings walked up to her desk. Their weapons were not pointed directly at Tem, but neither were they pointed away from her.

  “Is there a problem?” Tem asked mildly.

  Valentina leaned over the desk, fists clenched on the surface. “Falcon. What did you do to him?”

  Tem blinked. “Do to him?”

  “You were given express orders,” Bodan said, flanking his sister, his face flushed red with anger. “You were told to alter his DNA. You were told to embed the logical pathogen.”

  “I did as I was instructed.”

  “Then why isn’t it working?” Valentina’s mouth, astonishingly, was dripping drool, a silken line of it reaching Tem’s desk. “There’s been enough time! We know from tests on captured Machines that our pathogen strikes at a latency in their deep instruction core. Falcon must have made contact by now. Why haven’t the Machines petitioned for surrender?”

  “Maybe your pathogen was too effective,” Tem answered, playing for time. “If it spread like wildfire, as you must have hoped . . . Perhaps their command and control structures collapsed before they had time to respond?”

  “No,” Bodan snarled. “It could never have been that effective, not that rapidly. And even so, we’d have some inkling of it by now. Some message from Falcon, however confused. Some confirmation that the agent is working.”

  “Mm . . .” Tem tapped a stylus against her open case notes. “Then perhaps you botched the design.”

  “No!” Valentina shrieked. “No! The design was perfect. Flawless. We tested, over and over.”

  “Then I’m at a loss.”

  “Our entire strategy depended on this intervention,” Bodan added, baring his teeth to the roots.