The Medusa Chronicles (14 page)

21

Falcon, at the controls, let the
Ra
drift away from the great medusa and down into the water-ice clouds. Soon the layered sky above was obscured, but they glimpsed still deeper cloudscapes below. A kind of snow fell around the hull now, pinkish flakes that spun in the updraught, and there was a slower, more elusive rain of a variety of complex shapes, kites and tetrahedra and polyhedra and tangles of ribbon. These were living creatures. Falcon knew they could be large in themselves—larger than a human—and yet, in this ocean of air, they were mere plankton: food for the medusae.

As the dirigible backed off, Ceto became more visible. The
Ra
was a tremendous craft, its envelope of fusion-heated hydrogen more than eight hundred metres long. But the medusa was more than three times that length, an oval-shaped continent of creamy flesh from which that inverted forest of tentacles dangled, some as thick as oak trunks, Falcon knew, and some so fine they ended in tendrils narrower and more flexible than human fingers. Her coloration mostly matched the background of the pale-pink cloudscape, and even close up her features were oddly elusive: this was camouflage, a protective measure in a sky full of predators. But along her flank was a vivid tiling, a pattern of huge regular shapes in black
and white that, if Falcon looked closely, resolved into finer sub-patterns of almost fractal complexity. This was one of Ceto's voices, her natural radio antenna. The
Ra
had instruments to hear that voice, and to reply: huge antennas, wires trailing through the Jovian air.

Trayne Springer seemed stunned. Falcon let him take his own time.

“Ceto,” Trayne said at last. “Why that name?”

“The mother of the medusae, in classical mythology. Ceto isn't literally a mother, but she has given birth. Medusae are a kind of colony creature—so Carl Brenner used to think anyhow; I haven't followed the academic debates since he died. Certainly I've seen her . . .
bud
. She spins in the air and fragments at the rim, and infant medusae spin off. She's very vulnerable as she does so, and others of her kind stand guard to draw away the mantas and other predators. It's quite a sight, a formation of beasts the size of small islands hanging in the air, all working together. And
this
, this region between cloud layers C and D, is where the medusae live out much of their lives. It's like a world-spanning sea tens of kilometres deep.”

Trayne pointed down at a dense, dark cloud layer. “
That
is D, then.”

“There are several more layers below that, between here and the ocean boundary. The labelling is controversial, and I'd avoid getting into a discussion about
that
with the boffins up in Anubis City.”

“The ‘ocean boundary.' A transition from gaseous to liquid hydrogen—”

“A thousand kilometres down, yes. The surface is nothing like as clearly defined as the oceans on Earth—”

“The pink flakes. Is that
snow
?”

“Hydrocarbon foam,” Falcon said. “The sun's radiation bakes complex organic molecules, which rain down through the air.”

“Food from the sky. And that's what the living creatures feed on. Like your pet medusa.”

“Actually, I think
I'm
Ceto's pet . . . And in turn there are predators that hunt down herbivores like the medusae. In a way, the ecology's structure is similar to the upper layers of Earth's oceans.”

“We don't have oceans on Mars—yet.” Trayne glanced around at the instrumentation panels. “And it's true,” he said, wonderingly. “I can see
the data chattering in. You actually do talk to the medusae.”

“As best I can. Carl Brenner and I made the first tentative observation of their ‘speech,' their booming acoustic songs, and their decametre-­wavelength radio transmissions. Their acoustic songs span frequency ranges too great for us to pick up, let alone to retransmit. Whereas the radio signals are accessible through the
Ra
's trailing antennas. It's taken time, and a lot of dialogue, but we have slowly managed to piece together some common concepts.”

Trayne stared out at the medusa. “But it's nothing but an immense gas bag. It doesn't
do
anything but eat, and breed, and get eaten by mantas. What does it have to talk about?”

Falcon was irritated, but held his tongue. Sometimes it seemed to him that off-Earth humans, Martians especially, were halfway to Machines in their callous disrespect for any other form of life but their own. That was what came of growing up in a plastic box on a lethal planet, he supposed.

“
She
is an individual. As are all medusae. They store shared information in what seems to be a suite of very long, carefully memorised songs. When they die, they are remembered. They are people, Springer. And individu­ally they have
long
memories. Ceto wasn't the first medusa I encountered, but she was around long before I showed up. She remembers the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact.”

“The what? Oh, the comet that hit Jupiter—”

“Even before
I
was born. For the medusae it was close to an extinction event. Many died, communities were scattered . . . They are accepting of death, however. They are intelligent creatures who accept the reality of predation as a kind of toll you have to pay for existence. Their culture is quite unlike ours—but rich nonetheless.”

Trayne shrugged. “I don't mean any offence. I'm just a high-gravity guinea pig; my technical speciality is human biomechanics. So what is Ceto saying right now?”

Falcon turned his mind back to the frustrating conversation that had been curtailed when Trayne woke up. “She's disturbed by something. A medusa's image of death is a Great Manta—huge, unstoppable,
inescapable. A dark mouth. The Great Manta last came to Jupiter when the comet struck. And now, she says—or
sings
—the Great Manta is coming again. It's as if there's something wrong in her world, something that shouldn't be here.”

Trayne stared out, and Falcon wondered if, despite his youth and the coldness of the frontier culture he came from, he was capable of empathy. “Are you saying that that immense animal is . . . ?”

“Scared?” Falcon let that hang, unanswered. “Anyhow, back to work. We have a checklist to get through before we can return to Ganymede: tests of your piloting and other skills.”

“Fine with me.” Trayne stood stiffly and made his way to the pilot's position. “Though I don't imagine you're in any rush to get back.”

“Why's that?”

Trayne grinned, almost maliciously. “Hadn't you heard? Your doctor has come out from Earth and is asking to see you. Oh, and cousin Thera wants a word . . .”

22

The balloon wheels of Falcon's support infrastructure were silent as they ran over the thick carpet of the Galileo Lounge. Clusters of couches and privacy booths divided up the floor space, and he was aware of pretty heads turning to track him as he passed. Celebrity-spotting was a favoured pastime here. He resolutely ignored them all.

And besides, the sky above the clear Plexiglas ceiling was a more spectacular sight than any human or post-human. An annex to a new hotel set just outside Anubis City's most ancient pressure domes, the Galileo Lounge was already the most famous landmark of this two-hundred-year-old settlement, Ganymede's largest town. And the lounge's selling point was that its only light came from the sky: the grand lanterns that were the sun, Jupiter and the inner moons.

He found Hope Dhoni relaxing on one of a pair of couches. She turned to smile at him as he approached. “I ordered you the usual.” Two glasses sat on the table between the couches.

Falcon settled beside her and cautiously took a glass, his fingers closing with a click. Iced tea: their once-every-few-decades ritual. “A young Martian warned me you were here.”

“‘Warned'? Nice to see you too, Howard.” Dhoni watched him, appraising.
At first glance he might have thought of her as genuinely young—forty perhaps, no more. But a certain smoothness of her skin, and a peculiar, almost reptilian stillness of her posture, gave away the truth. Like himself, Hope was now over two centuries old.

“I know what you're thinking,” she said.

“You do?”

“‘Mutton dressed as lamb.'”

“I bet there's not many left who remember sayings like that. ‘Mutton' . . . ?”

“Oh, it's probably a setting on a few of the older food synthesis machines.”

“What I was actually thinking is that you look fine, Hope. For sure it's better than the alternative, which is a coffin, or—well, a coffin like mine.”

“You always did have a morbid streak, Howard, and I never liked it. That's precisely why I insist on seeing you in person, oh, at least every few decades—even though I monitor you constantly, you know that. And before you say it, no, following your glamorous career is not the only thing keeping me alive.”

“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.”