The Medusa Chronicles (16 page)

24

Effortlessly at first, the
Ra
tracked the bathyscaphe as it descended into ever-thickening layers of Jovian air, followed by a swarm of camera drones.
Bathyscaphe
: that had been an archaic word even when Falcon was born, and yet it was apt, he thought, for what was this but a descent into a mighty ocean?

Soon
Ra
plunged through cloud level D, and into a gathering darkness. As the descent continued, the pressure and temperature steadily increased, and Falcon had Trayne call out regular readings. The
Ra
, of course, hanging under its envelope of heated hydrogen, was itself dependent on a balance of air temperature and pressure to stay aloft. The
Ra
was more advanced than the old
Kon-Tiki
and, thanks to technologies piloted in the oceanic air of Venus, could reach greater depths without risk of being crushed. Nevertheless, they had gone little more than two hundred kilometres—Orpheus's descent had barely begun—when Falcon, reluctantly, called a halt.

“We're safe to hover at this level,” he reported up to NTB-4, and through them up to Mission Control on Amalthea. “Regret I can't follow you any further, Orpheus. All your systems look nominal, as far as I can tell.”

“Your company has been appreciated, Commander Falcon.”

In the monitor, Hans Young smiled. “Like all the best Machines, he's
programmed to be polite. Prepare to hold your station,
Ra
, and to deploy transmission relay gear.”

“Copy.”

Falcon and Trayne got to work transforming the
Ra
into a stationary radio relay post. Antennas unfurled around the envelope, including the long, trailing receptors that Falcon, on other days, used to communicate with his friends the medusae. But both of them kept an eye on the images, in visual light, radar and even sonar, of Orpheus's descent into a thickening murk. Most of the camera drones still followed, but one or two, it seemed, were already failing as the conditions grew tougher, the images they returned fritzing to empty blue.

A key milestone came when Orpheus's balloon envelope was cut away and allowed to drift off.

“Too deep for hot-air ballooning now,” Falcon muttered. “But look at the rate of descent. It's hardly increased, even without the envelope. Air resistance, and the bathysphere's own buoyancy, is enough to slow it now.”

“I don't understand,” Trayne said, frowning. “I knew I shouldn't have skipped those briefings at Anubis . . . Without the balloon, how will they bring Orpheus home?”

Falcon studied him. “I guess you haven't been around Machines much. Trayne, he
won't
be coming home—nor will the Charons who are guiding him. Any more than
Mariner 4
ever came back from its flyby of Mars.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“That isn't quite true, Commander,” said Charon 1. “Before his craft is finally destroyed—or rather before
he
is destroyed, there being no distinction between craft and passenger—Orpheus's identity complex will be uploaded through the relay stations we will establish, including your own, and copies will be captured here at NTB-4 and at Amalthea. I understand that this kind of replication of minds gives humans no comfort, but it suffices for us if the copy is indistinguishable from the original. So you see, Dr. Trayne Springer, in a sense he
will
come home—”

A flare of light showed up in several of the monitor screens.

Trayne was startled. “What was that? Is there something wrong?”

Falcon shook his head. “He already reached the thermalisation layer. Where it's so hot that anything that can be heat-destroyed, will be. Certainly anything organic. That is the ultimate limit for Jovian life.”

Hans Young said cautiously, “Well, the limit for the life forms we know of, Commander. That's one objective of the descent. To see what's down there . . .”

To challenge the planet's greatest depths had been one of Howard Falcon's dreams since the
Kon-Tiki
. He longed to follow Orpheus. He could only wait here and watch.

*  *  *  *

The fall continued relentlessly. The pressure and temperatures recorded by the probe continued to mount, leaving one comparison after another in their wake: a higher pressure than the surface of Venus, higher than Earth's deepest ocean trench.

And as the pressure gauge crept up towards two thousand atmospheres, the probe revealed another of its secrets. Its hull abruptly
collapsed
, and this time it was Falcon who thought some catastrophic failure had befallen it. But the handful of remaining cameras, specialised for depth, showed that while the spherical hull had imploded, a kind of open framework survived, a space-filling, regular arrangement of bars and nodes.

“You see the design philosophy,” Hans Young said. “We do not fight the pressure, we yield to it. Though the Jovian air has flooded what was the interior, the craft still has some buoyancy, with small, very robust ballast tanks embedded deep in the surviving structure.”

“And I too survive,” reported Orpheus. “Along with the Charons, downloaded onto chips of diamond. We are comfortable.”

“Show-off,” Falcon muttered.

The probe plummeted through one cloud layer after another, as exotic species of molecules congealed out of the thickening air. But the light faded quickly, and soon the last and sturdiest of the camera drones fell away, and no more visible-light images were returned.

At about five hundred kilometres deep, the level once believed to have corresponded to Jupiter's “surface,” Orpheus's probing with radar, sonar and other sensors revealed the presence of masses of some kind drifting in the air, lumpy, granular. Quasi-solid “clouds” in an air of impossible density, Falcon speculated, which had perhaps fooled earlier observers into thinking this was a solid crust.

But Orpheus soon passed through this intriguing layer and fell deeper yet. The dense hydrogen air through which he fell now seemed featureless—­and lifeless, lacking the sunlit glamour of the high clouds of the medusae. Time passed. Falcon was sure that reports on this stunt were being transmitted across the solar system, but he wondered how many viewers in their domes on Triton, or in the gardens of Earth, would be tuning out when the reports of this dull phase of the mission were sent to them at lightspeed's crawl.

The next milestone came at one thousand kilometres deep.

“Pressure of eighty thousand atmospheres,” Orpheus reported. “Temperature eight hundred Kelvin. Pressure and temperature profiles have largely matched theoretical models so far. However the hydrogen-­helium slush outside the hull is now more usefully described as a liquid rather than a gas . . .

“This is Orpheus. We are through the transition zone, and have reached Jupiter's ocean of molecular hydrogen. The first sapients ever to do so.”

Falcon glanced at Trayne. “I'm sure I can hear a trace of pride in that voice.”

Trayne shrugged. “Why not?”

“Phase one is complete. A further layer of hull will be discarded; my descent will continue, while Charon 2 remains at this waystation.”

“I can confirm that,” called a new Machine voice: Charon 2. “I am ready to take up my station-keeping duties here.”

And Falcon was astonished by what Charon 2 said next:

“Godspeed, Orpheus.”

The descent continued.

25

“My name is Orpheus. This telemetry is being transmitted via radio signals received by Charon 2 at the hydrogen gas-liquid interface, relayed via the
Ra
at the thermalisation layer to Charon 1 at Station NTB-4, and then to Mission Control on Amalthea. I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally. I remain fully cognisant of and fully committed to the objectives of the mission.

“I am currently descending through an ocean of molecular hydrogen-­helium. I am quite safe. For this first descent I have been emplaced far from any of the great volcanic-like features we call Sources. Their investigation is for the future.

“The pressure and temperatures I am experiencing are rising steadily. My configuration continues to adjust as designed. In the greatest depths my consciousness will be contained in little more than a swarm of slivers of enhanced crystalline carbon—an advanced form of diamond—kept solid at such extreme temperatures by the very pressures I will endure. In this way I will leverage the physical conditions to maintain my structure, as opposed to fighting them.

“There is no visible light. I fall through darkness. But the hydrogen ocean is electrically neutral, and long-wavelength radio waves can penetrate the gloom.

“Nevertheless—

“Nevertheless I am aware of forms, structures, moving through the dark around me. Immense, shapeless masses.

“These may be inanimate blocks of some more exotic high-pressure form of hydrogen. Drifting icebergs. Or perhaps they are animate, a form of life, living off the thin drizzle of complex compounds from the atmosphere above, or even feeding off this ocean's gradual temperature differences, or the saturated electromagnetic radiation. Humans and Machines have found life wherever they have travelled; life forms here would not be a surprise. Their movement shows no pattern, however, no intent. Even if there is life, this featureless ocean may be too impoverished to support mind. An encounter with these deep Jovians, if that is what they are, must wait for more advanced missions than mine.

“It is anticipated that at a depth of approximately twelve thousand kilometres, where the pressures will approach one million Earth atmospheres, I will reach an interface to a realm of different physics, and my design will come under fresh challenges.

“For now, however, I am comfortable.”

26

It was Trayne who first noticed the anomalous radio signal.

Falcon was listening to the transmission from Orpheus with a mixture of wonder and envy. “‘For now, however, I am comfortable.' Textbook laconic. By damn, you'd swear Orpheus was as human as Young or Hilton—and as cold-blooded.”

“Maybe,” Trayne said, frowning, distracted. He pointed to a display. “Commander, look at this. One of your filters is picking up another signal. Nothing to do with Orpheus. Is it one of your medusae?”

Falcon looked over to the screen. Indeed, pulses of shortwave radio transmissions were being detected by the
Ra
's huge antenna arrays, and he immediately recognised the basic modulation pattern. Hastily he locked in the translation software suite he had patched together over the decades—the centuries, now—of his contact with the inhabitants of Jupiter.

Trayne said, “I can't tell how remote the source is.”

“I can guess from the signal strength, and we'll have triangulation soon . . .”

A synthesised voice, soulless, sexless, without inflection, gave the first rough translation of the signal.
The Great Manta has returned. The Great Manta is among us. Pray to the Great Manta that you are spared. Pray to the Great Manta that you are
not
spared . . .

Trayne's eyes were wide. “Is that . . . ?”

“A medusa. You bet it is.”

“And I bet I know who it is—that is,
which
medusa. Ceto, yes? The one we encountered before. “The Great Manta.” You said she was talking about that. It had something to do with a medusa's ideas of death and extinction?”

“Yes—an ambiguous myth. Medusae are sentient prey animals. They understand that they are locked into a wider ecology in which the mantas and other predators play an essential role. So they accept the loss of a proportion of their own kind, a toll they pay to the ecology that sustains them—and yet at the same time they will pray to a manta to spare themselves, just for today . . . Something's happening. She's in trouble.” He hesitated. “She's calling for help.
My
help. She wouldn't be shouting in the shortwave band otherwise.”

Trayne eyed him. “And you want to help her, don't you?”

He grimaced. “Why? Because that's what your kids'-story version of a hero would do? Abandon his post and go dashing off to a damsel in distress?” A damsel two kilometres wide . . .

Trayne looked faintly offended. “No. It's just that I know you, at least a little. And if she's calling for you, maybe the trouble she's in has something to do with humans.”

Falcon hadn't thought of that. He said grudgingly, “You may have a point. We're narrowing the fix. She's many thousands of kilometres away. Even if we broke away, how could we get there in time? The
Ra
, like the
Kon-Tiki
, is basically designed to float around on the wind, not set speed records.”

Trayne shrugged. “So we cut away the lift envelope. The gondola has its own fusor propulsion system—”

“Designed to take us out of the atmosphere and back to orbit, not for jaunts in the cloud banks.”

“Sure. But there's plenty of spare energy. And the engine is a ramjet—it uses the external air as reaction mass—so it's not as if we are going to run out of propellant.” In response to Falcon's surprised look he said more
hesitantly, “I checked out the
Ra
's specs before we set off from Amalthea.”

“You did, did you?”

“I'm not some pampered Terran, Commander. I'm a Martian. I grew up under a plastic dome on a planet that will kill me as punishment for the slightest slip. Of course I checked.”

“Okay. I'm reluctantly impressed. But we have a mission here. We're a relay station for Orpheus—”

“The envelope can station-keep. It has a backup comms systems of its own. Besides, even without us, the signals from Charon 2 are probably strong enough to be picked up directly by Charon 1 back at NTB-4.”

“You checked all this out too, right?”

Trayne grinned.

Falcon turned to his controls. “Okay. You asked for it. Checking deuterium-helium-3 ratio . . .” Restraints locked down Falcon's frame, fixing it tightly to the structure of the
Ra
. Make sure you have your exposit powered up and locked into its frame, I'm not going to be sparing the acceleration.”

“Wouldn't dream of asking you to.” Trayne backed up to his suit's wall station.

“Checking jet chamber temperature.” Falcon glanced over his instruments one last time. Then he broke the safety seal over the ripcord button. “Lighting the blue touch paper.”

“The what?”

“Never mind.” He pressed the button.

There was a sharp crack as explosive bolts separated the gondola from the gas envelope, a brief sensation of falling—they were already committed to this jaunt—and then the ramjet drive cut in. Acceleration pressed. The gondola had turned into an independent craft in the Jovian air, a candle riding a column of superheated hydrogen-helium.

“You okay, Martian?”

“Never better.”

“Liar. I'll get our trajectory locked in. And I see Amalthea Control is already demanding an explanation. I'll let
you
take care of that . . .”