The Medusa Chronicles (17 page)

27

“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.

“At twelve thousand kilometres down, I have passed through the hydrogen ocean, and reached the region known in the theoretical models as the ‘plasma boundary layer.'

“Essentially, below the upper clouds Jupiter is an immense droplet of hydrogen and helium, all the way to a core of still-unknown composition. I have now reached a depth at which the temperatures are so high that molecular hydrogen cannot survive—where electrons are stripped from their atomic nuclei by heat energy. The resulting plasma is electrically conductive, as is the greater ocean of what is known as “metallic hydrogen” into which I am now descending—it is indeed like an ocean of liquid metal. It is thought that the substance of this sea, by the way, may be useful, perhaps as a room-temperature superconductor, or a high-energy-density fuel . . . All that for the future.

“The plasma layer, however, will block radio transmissions. Therefore I am depositing another relay station at this depth—Charon 3—and to communicate further I will be returning small buoys that will rise to this depth and contact Charon 3 for further relay of information back to Mission Control.

“This communication method is one-way.

“You will not be able to speak to me. I will not be able to hear your voices.

“The plasma layer itself, as some theoreticians predicted, is a place of marvels. The seepage of carbon, silicon and other heavier elements from the cloud layers has reached even this far, and I have detected many complex, even previously unknown molecular forms and compounds . . . Such materials, mined from this layer, may have many useful properties.

“But I have time only to note these phenomena. I fall into a sea of metallic hydrogen over forty thousand kilometres deep. This is an arena of huge electromagnetic energies, which I can already sense.

“As if I fall into troubled dreams.”

*  *  *  *

Falcon followed the news of Orpheus's descent, even as his own fusion-drive craft rocketed through the Jovian clouds. And he listened to the conver­sations of the analysts at Amalthea Control, who were becoming increasingly concerned about some aspects of Orpheus's ­communications—notably the increasing subjectivity of the reports, and the use of words like “dreams.”

During his involvement with the Machines' early development, Falcon himself had studied the theory and history of artificial minds. Like that of all Machines, Orpheus's “brain” was essentially a Minsky-Good neural network, capable of learning, growth, adaptation—a design whose theory went back to the work of twentieth-century pioneers like John von Neumann and Alan Turing. And Orpheus, like any sapient, artificial or otherwise, was vulnerable to instability, especially given an overwhelming experience such as he was currently enduring.

The cyberneticists on Amalthea and Ganymede speculated that a combination of information overload, personal peril, and solitude could compromise the Machine's ability to fulfil his primary functions. They even spoke of the danger of him falling into a Hofstadter-Möbius loop, a kind of psychopathy not uncommon to goal-seeking autonomous ­systems when faced with an overload of information and choices. And security officials spoke darkly of the need to debug any copy of Orpheus's mind that might be returned to the data banks of the inhabited moons.

Falcon, who was not so prone to seeing a divide between biological and artificial consciousness, had a simpler diagnosis. In people, he had seen similar reactions in those he had guided through the world of the medusae. Even old Geoff Webster had had doses of it, on his good days.

Awe. That was what Orpheus was experiencing. Awe.

And the mother hens on Amalthea could do nothing about it now; Orpheus could hardly be brought back.

As for dreaming, Falcon had long ago come to believe that, like all sentient creatures, Machines could dream. Even if few of them admitted it.

28

Trayne, his eyes more youthful than Falcon's—and probably more recently upgraded—was the first to spot the medusae, in a wide-angle viewscreen. “There!” He pointed, excited, though he winced as his arm rose, fighting the gravity with a whine of servomotors.

Falcon looked more closely. Against the tan wash of Jupiter's deeper cloud layers, he saw a curving line of pale oval forms, like a string of pearls in the air. The sun was setting on another short Jovian day, and those pearls cast long shadows. Medusae, surely.

But they weren't alone. Sparks of light flitted around them, bright in the fading light, like fireflies. They were nothing natural; they looked to Falcon like fusion torch ships. And ahead of the line he made out a darker knot, some kind of floating factory supported by a dense forest of balloons.

“What the hell are we looking at?”

Trayne stared ahead. “Those pods
are
medusae, right? Which one is Ceto?”

Falcon glanced at a scanner; Ceto had by now been triangulated precisely from her characteristic radio call. “The third in line—the third from that floating complex.” He glared at Trayne. “You seemed very eager for us to come here. Was it more than just curiosity? Do you know something about this?”

Trayne looked back at him defiantly. “I'm . . . not sure. That's the truth.”

After a beat, Falcon turned away. “Okay. I'll accept that for now. So we figure it out for ourselves.” He pointed to the screen. “This is
not
the way medusae behave in the wild. If you're a prey species, you don't string out in a line waiting to be picked off. You bunch up in three dimensions, because in this ocean an attack can come from any direction. Secondly, we are far from their usual ranges for food, breeding . . .”

Light flared against the flank of one of the medusae in the line, like a fusion spark—dazzling, despite the viewscreen's filters.

“And what was
that
? It looked like they deliberately burned a medusa with a plasma jet.”

Now there was a noise, a deep thrumming, almost like separate impacts, that made the hull shudder.

Trayne looked at Falcon, alarmed. “Some kind of malfunction? A storm?”

“No. Wait and listen.”

The drumming came faster and faster, the individual beats at last merging into a deep wash of noise that grew louder and louder, though it did not increase in pitch, becoming a kind of throbbing bellow that forced Trayne to clamp his hands over his ears—before it cut off with brutal suddenness.

The gondola seemed to rattle. Trayne lowered his hands, cautiously.

“That was a medusa. Would you believe that the acousticians call it a ‘chirp'? Sorry, I should have warned you. That was the cry of a medusa in pain.”

Abruptly an alarm sounded, another grating clamour. Falcon cut it off with a bunched fist. “And
that
was a proximity alarm. Another craft approaching.”

Trayne checked the sensors. “It's already reached us, it's keeping pace with us.” He looked afraid for the first time since they'd left Amalthea.

A comms screen filled with a human face, a stern older woman. “I am Citizen Second Grade Nicola Pandit. I have locked into your systems. I have the capability to override your drive controls.”

A Martian, then. Falcon was furious. He turned to his consoles and
quickly set every camera and sensor he had to record, and initiated an upload data stream to Amalthea and Ganymede. Let them see everything.

Then he thundered, “By whose authority do you challenge me? This is the
Ra
, a science vessel registered with the Brenner Institute and with the Space Development Secretariat, Bureau of Planetary Exploration. And
my
name is Howard Falcon. Override
me
? I'd like to see you try.”

“You will come no closer to the facility. You will turn back, Howard Falcon, and return to your station for the Orpheus mission—”

“Like hell I will. Not until I know—”

“Councillor Pandit?” Trayne was leaning down to see. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”

“Good grief. Do
all
you damn Martians know each other?”

Pandit pursed her lips. “Citizen Third Grade Springer, it is better if you are not involved in this.”

“I'm already involved, Councillor.”

“Then you will share the consequences of any actions Howard Falcon takes.”

Falcon said, “This is my fight. My world. You don't need to do this, Trayne.”

“I think I do,” Trayne said, almost sadly.

Pandit snapped. “I say again, Howard Falcon. Turn back. If you do not—”

“What? What will you do? Citizen, I've been looping loops around the clouds of Jupiter since before your grandpappy was thrown aboard a convict scow to Port Lowell. Catch me if you can;
I'm
going to take a look at what you're doing here.”

He worked his controls, and the gondola surged forward with renewed acceleration.

“Commander Falcon—!”

Falcon tapped a console to silence Pandit's angry voice.

Trayne said, “They never sent convicts to Port Lowell, you know, Commander.”

“I was insulting her, not giving her a history lesson. Okay—we're approaching that complex. There are more ships buzzing around us, but
they can't touch us, not this close; a missile strike on our fusor pod would cause a detonation that would take half that installation down with us. Now, let's see what's really going on here . . .”

He brought the
Ra
to a shuddering halt, set up station-keeping attitude thrusters, turned the hull to its faux-transparent setting.

And the two of them, side by side, looked down on a scene of horror.

*  *  *  *

The medusae were being shepherded into a long line that stretched across the air. The lead medusa, itself two kilometres wide, faced an open cage that was even larger than she was, with a gaping, open mouth. Small flyers darted rapidly around the animal, flaring fusion fire, and attacking the medusa with what looked like small darts.

Trayne pointed. “Look at that scar on her side.” It was a crater of scorched flesh, metres wide.

“They're goading her,” Falcon said, disbelieving. “Forcing her into that cage, with the darts, the plasma jets. And the tight turns those torch flyers are making—they can't be piloted by humans, not even Earthborn, let alone Martian. Machines, then. Martians and Machines, cooperating in this operation. But what are they doing?”

Now the medusa was entering the cage, pushing inside gingerly, gently, like a great liner coming into dock, Falcon thought briefly.

But there was nothing welcoming about this harbour. As soon as the medusa was fully in the cage, a barrage of small missiles was fired into her carcass, from above, below, into the flanks—a sudden, shocking assault. The medusa seemed to become rigid almost immediately: the natural pulsing of her body as she swam, the synchronised waving of her inverted forest of tentacles, all of it was stilled. Now lines shot out of the cage structure towards her, and grappling hooks raked her flesh. From this point, Falcon saw, she would be
dragged
through the cage, rather than swim of her own volition.

And then the real work began.

On the underside of the medusa, lasers spat hard light, the beams
easily visible in the murky Jovian air, and crude mechanical blades whirred. These weapons scythed through the graceful forest of tentacles, which drifted away from the main body to be caught in tremendous nets below the cage. Brownish fluid leaked from the medusa.

Next, more lasers and knives, some of them huge, sliced through the beast's skin, followed by claws that dragged away the fine, leathery substance in great sheets. Falcon watched with an almost distant curiosity as the animal's flotation bladders were exposed, great cells of hydrogen and helium, almost like those contained within the envelope of his own
Ra
. He knew something of the internal anatomy of a medusa; the beasts had been studied by zoologists using sonar, radar, and other non-intrusive probes. He had never seen one dissected before. Of course the gas cells were fragile, only as strong as they needed to be—for all its bulk, medusae were evolved for lightness. The cells popped easily at the touch of the lasers, collapsing into wispy folds that were briskly snipped away.

Now the medusa's oil sacs were revealed, a thick layer of them beneath the flotation cells. These contained, at high density, a kind of petro­chemical sludge, distilled from the atmosphere, which the medusa used to pump air out of the flotation cells when it needed to descend. Specialised craft of some kind, like flying tankers, Falcon thought, closed in on the medusa and plunged pipelines into the medusa's oil sacs, hastily draining them.

“They're like vampires,” Trayne said, recoiling.

Falcon said grimly, “And
that's
what they're after. The oil . . .”

Now, only minutes after it had entered the cage, what was left of the carcass of the medusa was ejected from the far end. Falcon made out a glistening mass of internal organs, and ribbing of what looked like ­cartilage—it could be nothing as strong or dense as human bone for this creature of lightness. These components were drifting apart, some looking as if they might still have some animation, some life left. Medusae were colony creatures, after all; many of these “organs” had their own independent breeding lifecycles. Carl Brenner had long ago suggested that even the flotation sacs had once, in evolutionary history, been independent lighter-than-air flyers, not unlike
Kon-Tiki
.

“When you kill a medusa,” Falcon murmured, “you inflict a thousand deaths.” He felt crushed by a sudden, savage despair, to have come across this butchery on a day that should have been about discovery and wonder. “So this is New Nantucket, just as Dhoni hinted. And it's all about medusa oil.” He looked at Trayne bitterly. “
Did
you know about this?”

Trayne looked guilty. “I guess I suspected it . . . Mars is a small place, Commander. Recently there have been new imports of volatiles, complex hydrocarbons. Massive shipments. You couldn't hide their existence, but their source was a big secret—everybody knows there's an embargo on importing such stuff, laid down by Earth. People started talking about plans to put up more domes, even to accelerate the Eos Programme. And then, since coming here to Jupiter and learning about the medusae—I had nothing but vague suspicions—I guess I figured it out.”

“He's telling the truth, Falcon,” said Nicola Pandit, her face still looming large in the viewscreen.

“Oh, good, you got control of the volume again.”

“Trayne is innocent. But he's bright, like many Martians—we live in an environment which selects for intelligence.”

“But not for conscience?”

Pandit absorbed that. “And I suppose you'd say our partners have no conscience at all.” Now she stood back, and a stiffly artificial visage joined hers in the image.

“Machine, I don't recognise you,” Falcon said.

“My name is Ahab. So my human colleagues have named me.”

“How witty,” Falcon said bleakly. “So this is a Machine-Martian operation.”

“We are partners,” Ahab said neutrally.

“And it's all for the oil?”

Pandit said, “You predicted it yourself, Falcon, in your report on the flight of the
Kon-Tiki
, all those years ago: ‘There must be enough petrochemicals deep down in the atmosphere of Jupiter to supply all Earth's needs for a million years.' I memorised the sentence, you see. In fact we quoted it in our prospectus for potential investors. Thanks for your help.
But you were a lousy prophet; these days
Earth
has no need of Jupiter's petrochemicals.”

“Right,” Falcon said. “But poor, volatile-starved Mars—”

“We are starved only because of the repressive policies of the World Government.”

“So to serve your political goals, you are
whaling
.”

Pandit smiled thinly. “We're hardly twentieth-century eco-bandits, Falcon. We cull the herds selectively, we take only older animals, we don't take so many that we'd make a dent in the planetary population—which is huge, by the way. And we use other medusa products, not just the oil. The helium farms, like the one you visited in the North Temperate Belt—their lift envelopes are constructed from medusa flotation-sac material. I might have thought you'd spot that. And after the flensing process the waste is returned to the thermalisation layer, so little is lost to the ecology.”

“In industrial terms too the process is efficient,” Ahab said. “The resources we require, the petrochemicals, are scattered thinly in the Jovian environment. But the medusae are natural collectors, so when we harvest them—”

“What do you Machines get out of this?”

“This is a purely commercial transaction, conducted under human—Martian—law. In return for the oil we ship to Mars we receive, or will receive in time, a range of high-quality goods and services, which—”

“Rubbish,” Falcon snarled. “Whatever the terms of this ‘transaction,' Pandit—I know the Machines; they work on longer timescales than us—
they have different objectives
. You're being used. But to what end?” He glared at Ahab. “Are you meddling in human politics now, Ahab? Trying to stir up conflict between Earth and Mars? Is that the game?”

“We do not play games,” Ahab said simply.

“And we're doing nothing illegal,” Pandit said.

“Really?” Falcon snapped. “Whales were hunted for their oil on Earth too. Until we figured out the harm we were doing, and stopped. Like the whales, the medusae are intelligent beings.”

“You have proof of that?” Pandit said evenly.