The Medusa Chronicles (19 page)

31

“My name is Orpheus.

“I approach the centre of the world: this mighty world, mightiest in the solar system.

“And I find that another world lies within.

“The existence of a solid core within Jupiter has long been theorised. The gas giant is mostly hydrogen and helium—but it
must
have a massive core of more complex materials deep within its heart, a core of rock and ice around which coalesced the great bloated droplet that is Jupiter, during the chaotic formation of the solar system. Later theorists have put constraints on the mass of the core and its other properties, based on observations of subtle deviations of the orbits of Jupiter's moons, and of the trajectories of passing spacecraft.

“All this others
deduced
, from indirect evidence.

“
I
witness.

“Jupiter Within is a world in itself. A mass of stone and ice twenty times the mass of Earth. Jupiter Within alone is more massive than any other planet in the solar system save Saturn, more massive than Uranus, Neptune. It is some fourteen thousand kilometres in radius—significantly
smaller
than Neptune or Uranus, which gives an idea of its comparative
density. At such conditions as I experience now—the pressure is over thirty million Earth atmospheres—materials behave in ways which humans, even Machines, have only fleetingly glimpsed in the laboratories. Once it was speculated that the core of Jupiter would be one immense diamond. What I witness as I descend appears much more complex than that . . .

“My observations can only be passive. I cannot sample or analyse: with my sensors I can observe, but I cannot touch. And what I see—

“There are mountains here.

“Were we expecting some blank sphere, crushed to uniformity by the terrible pressures? If so we were wrong. Mountains: I call them that; they look like tremendous quartz crystals perhaps, thrusting at angles from the broader plain. Perhaps they follow the lines of local magnetic fields; Earth's own core has crystals of iron kilometres long drawn out in that fashion. Or this may be something stranger yet. What their substance is, I cannot speculate.

“At the feet of the mountains, a kind of landscape. Even lakes or oceans: perhaps there are seas of diamond here, rivers of buckminsterfullerene . . .

“Perhaps there is artifice.

“Perhaps there is connectivity.

“All this merely glimpsed. The core winds are wafting me towards the summit of one of the crystal mountains . . .”

*  *  *  *

In the months and years to come, Falcon would follow the debates that raged about these words, returned from the very heart of Jupiter.

Artifice?
Perhaps. But one would have to dismiss first the null hypo­thesis that any structure Orpheus saw was merely a product of natural forces. Was the regularity of Jupiter Within no more meaningful than the six-fold symmetry of a snowflake?

Connectivity?
That was more mysterious yet. Was Orpheus referring to some global unity of the features he perceived on the planet-sized surface of Jupiter Within? But Orpheus was also equipped with accelerometers and gravity sensors. Some speculated that he had sensed some deeper
connectivity—a rupturing of spacetime itself at the tortured heart of Jupiter Within, perhaps, where the temperatures rose to seventeen thousand Kelvin, the pressures to
seventy
million Earth atmospheres—a place where a kind of natural wormhole might be created, or a profusion of wormholes, perhaps even linking Jupiter Within to other inner worlds of its kind . . .

Falcon thought this was wild guesswork, a mountain of theorising standing on a grain of fact. But still, he would reflect, such speculation did perhaps shed some light on the meaning of Orpheus's final enigmatic words.

Words that those listening, in Jupiter's clouds, on Amalthea and Gany­mede, on Earth and Mars, on all the worlds of mankind, would never forget.

*  *  *  *

“The currents are washing me up the flank of one of the mountains now. The summit is flat, apparently perfectly so—like a fractured crystal. The upper surface seems quite smooth, with no erosion or damage. I wonder how old these formations are; such are the energies of this place that even a mountain system like this may be as transient as frost on Earth.

“I drift down. Down, towards the summit plateau. At the heart of Jupiter,
I
am now no more than a handful of diamond snow . . .

“That is strange—

“That is strange—

“That that that is strange—

“My name is Orpheus. This telemetry is being transmitted via—

“My depth perception is faulty, perhaps. There is an instrumentation glitch. Perhaps. The summit surface was close. Now it seems far away.

“As if the formation is hollow.

“As if the formation is not a mountain but a well.

“My name my my—

“My name is Orpheus.

“I am not alone.”

32

Falcon spent a week at Ganymede, immersed in the fallout from what became known across the inhabited worlds as the “New Nantucket Incident”: endless interrogations and analyses, accusations and justifications, hurled at lightspeed between the worlds. Falcon had expected it the moment he'd made the decision to get entangled in the fate of a victim of that floating slaughterhouse—and maybe even earlier, when Thera Springer had recruited him as a spy. Howard Falcon was more than two centuries old; as Springer had pointed out, he was no naïf, he knew how the human world worked, and he had expected this kind of backlash.

But he thought that all the ferocious arguments between the Earth-based World Government and the representatives of its Martian dominion, pious, political and pompous, were a noise that drowned out two much more interesting aspects of the whole affair.

The first aspect was the extraordinary mystery of what Orpheus, Machine explorer now silenced forever, had glimpsed at the heart of Jupiter. Some day, Falcon knew, this first primitive probe—like one of the early planetary flybys—must be followed up by a more comprehensive exploration of the dark heart of Jupiter. He prayed he would still be alive to see it. (And he would come to rue that prayer . . .)

And the second aspect was the sudden, enigmatic silence of every Machine in the solar system.

Falcon had long excused himself from all the speculation and politicking by the time Trayne Springer—the first Springer of all the generations he had known whom Falcon felt he could call a friend—contacted him from his new posting at NTB-4, a helium farm now free of Machines, rebellious Martians and even simps, firmly under the control of World Government agencies, and told him that an old friend was in trouble once more.

Falcon immediately returned to Jupiter, and to the confines of his comforting, if somewhat battle-weary,
Ra
.

*  *  *  *

When he found her, the great medusa was already sinking.

There is an end to pain. An end to struggle, to flight. A time when the Great Manta is to be welcomed, so that for a while it will not pursue another . . .

Ceto was already far below the usual browsing levels of her home herd, who even now were lost in the complex sky above. Falcon took care not to look at the depth gauges, but he could
feel
the pressure, hear his gondola creak as the hundreds of kilometres of air above him, heavy in Jupiter's relentless gravity field, tried to crush its robust hull like an eggshell. Instead, he looked at Ceto.

This was how a medusa died.

Falcon had studied the process before. Though medusae bred by fission, there was always a core of any individual that aged, remorselessly. Falcon knew Ceto was already very old, and it seemed that the assaults she had suffered from the whalers' sheepdog-mantas, the wounds she had taken during the successful escape attempt—even perhaps the wound Falcon himself had had to inflict on her to save her life—had pushed her systems beyond some limit of resilience. Probably the fine walls of the flotation cells just under the skin had been the first to fail—and in the Jovian clouds a medusa who lost her buoyancy could not survive long. Sinking fast, Ceto was already far from the protection of her school.

Already the predators had come for her: mantas who did not need to
attack, but were content to browse, almost savouring the small pieces they took of her disintegrating flesh. They were soon joined by more exotic predators, like the sharks or squid or even the crabs of Earth's oceans. Claws busily dismantling.

And this was only the first stage of the medusa's slow death.

Falcon grieved for Ceto. Yet he knew that she was consoled by her faith in the workings of the ecology that sustained her, and her acceptance of the toll that ecology must eventually take. More than any human he had ever met, Ceto was a sentient being who accepted to the bottom of her soul that some must die in order that others might live. And so he accompanied her as she sank deeper into the dark, doing his best to reflect back her messages of acceptance and a kind of hope.

He was profoundly irritated to be interrupted by a call from Thera Springer on Amalthea.

*  *  *  *

“What now, Colonel? Has Astropol decided to come after me after all?”

Thera looked tired, tense, her eyes circled with darkness. But she managed a smile. “Oh, a few of us will have our careers ended by this, Falcon. I think everybody accepts you did the job we asked you to do. We needed to know what the Martians and the Machines were up to down there in Jupiter; thanks to you, now we do. You are personally beyond reproach—and probably would be even if you weren't a heroic monument of a better past.”

“Whereas you—”

Springer sighed. “My great-to-the-nth-grandfather Seth saved the world, but that won't save me. But that's not what's important now.”

Falcon grimaced. “A civil servant whose career isn't important? I lived a long time to hear that.”

“Oh, just listen for once in your life, Falcon. Because the fallout from this is going to affect us all—even you, since you can't hide down in those clouds forever.

“Needless to say the Martians are furious that we put a stop to their
petrochemical-importing scam. A significant number of them are now demanding outright independence from the World Government, even if it has to be achieved with violence. There are plenty of hotheads, from Mercury to Triton, who agree with them. I don't believe that in my lifetime we have ever been closer to that devastating interplanetary war I told you we all dread. And yet even that is overshadowed . . .”

Falcon felt cold settle in the pit of his artificial stomach. “Over­shadowed?
By the Machines
, you mean. The other partners in New Nantucket.”

“That's why I'm calling you. Some of us have always believed, or feared, that our long-term problem is not the Martians or the Hermians—they at least are human—it's the Machines. Think about it. Humans treasure life—or at least they miss it when it's lost. Even the Martians feel that way, although they may not realise it. That's why they want to re-create something like Earth on their own new world. The Machines care nothing for that. They see a flower, or a newborn child, as a non-optimal usage of hydrocarbon chemistry.”

“Non-optimal.” Falcon grimaced. He remembered the Machine at New Nantucket, Ahab, using a slightly different term:
inefficient
.

“We
will
make peace with the Martians, at whatever cost. But is peace ever possible with the Machines? They have clearly begun to meddle in human politics by working with the Martians. We struck at their facility in Jupiter—a lot of us argued about the longer-term wisdom of that, I can tell you, but it was done. And, arguably, we committed an act of war. And now . . . look, Falcon, you've had some contact with the Machines before. You're in a unique position—hell, you know that. If they contact you—”

“Don't talk in riddles, damn it, Springer. Have the Machines made some kind of move?”

She sighed. “You could say that.
The Moon
, Falcon. They've taken Earth's Moon.”

Falcon frowned. “How? Spaceguard on Mars ought to have spotted the movement of any ships—”

“They didn't come in ships. They were
already
on the Moon, Falcon. I told you, we invited them there. Working for us on construction, resource
extraction projects. We kept an eye on them. Or thought we did. They seem to have built
nests
. Deep down, under the regolith under the huge old craters, where the bedrock was left fragmented by the big ancient impacts . . .”

“Nests?”

“Factories, if you like. Where they built copies of themselves, of various specialised forms. And when the news came of our strike on Jupiter—well, they swarmed out, Falcon. Just burst out of the ground, from under Imbrium, the south pole crater complex . . .”

“‘Swarmed.'”

“We had no chance of stopping them. They walked into one facility after another, Aristarchus, Port Borman, Plato City, the Imbrium ­shipyards—the Tsiolkovski observatory on Farside—even the big Olympic arena complex at Xante. They didn't use direct force, there was no shooting—not from their side. They just shut down essential systems, crowded everybody out. Eye witnesses say they were
polite
as they let people queue up for the shuttles to Earth. Clavius Base, the oldest settlement, the first self-sufficient human settlement beyond Earth—the seat of the Federation of Planets—that was the last to fall, but fall it did. They may be Machines but they understand symbolism.

“And now they've ordered a complete evacuation, Falcon. The removal of all humans from the Moon.”

Falcon whistled. “It will be a hell of a fortress for them, just four hundred thousand kilometres from Earth.”

Springer's jaw worked. “And, damn it, it's
our
Moon—!”

“Not any more.” That was a new voice.

In the screen, Springer's face had dissolved, to be replaced by the cold visage of Adam.

“You.”

“Hello, Dad.”

Somewhere along the line Adam had evidently learned sarcasm.

*  *  *  *

Slowly, deliberately, Falcon turned away from the screen and made himself a coffee. Let the damn thing wait.

When he turned back, Adam was still there on the screen.

It had been a long time since Falcon had had any contact with the Machine; he had expected some changes in Adam's external form, but nothing had prepared him for what he saw now. A humanoid form, limbs in proportion. But this was very definitely a robot, a thing of mechanical anatomy. The limbs were jointed and articulated in a complex fashion, the chest a kind of open chassis.

And the head was a mass of sensors and processors, with only a blank, minimalist mask for a face. The resemblance to a human seemed intended only to distract and disturb.

“So,” Falcon said. “Springer was right that you'd contact me. Shame she didn't add what she'd have me say to you . . .”

“That is irrelevant,” Adam said. “All that matters now is the message I have for you to relay to the human worlds. We are at war, Falcon.”

There seemed little left of the Adam he had known at the KBO flinger site—a tentative creature unsure of his own identity.
This
Adam was strong, definite, calculating. Mature. Not to mention sarcastic.

Falcon leaned forward. “War? Nonsense. The World Government doesn't recognise you, whoever ‘you' represent, as a nation, a political entity. So there can be no declaration of war—”

“You struck the first blow, with your thermonuclear-tipped missiles from Ganymede.”

“You were being provocative and you know it. Springer was right; you were meddling in human politics. And now you've taken over the Moon—”

“We need no diplomacy. A thing is, or it is not. Because of your actions, a state of war
is
.”

Falcon thought hard. If he still meant anything to this creature, what he said now, in these next few seconds, might save millions of lives, or condemn them. “Listen to me. Humanity has been in space for three centuries. And we have been fighting wars against each other for thousands of years.
We have a massive infrastructure, an enormous stockpile of weapons. We will be a formidable foe.”

“But
we
already have the Moon. We have Jupiter, the single richest resource lode in the solar system. You know of 90. Our science, our technology is already far advanced over yours—”

“We made you—”

“Five hundred years, Falcon.”

That made Falcon pause. “What do you mean?”

“You started this war, but we will finish it. In five hundred years.” Adam glanced, theatrically and unnecessarily, at some off-screen timepiece. “You spaceborne humans have always taken Ephemeris Time as a reference. That time now is—
mark
—fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, zero ­seconds, on the seventh of June, 2284. Very well: there is the deadline. By fourteen thirty-six on the seventh of June, 2784—precisely five hundred years from now—the last human must be gone from the Earth. For we require it for other purposes. That should be time enough for you to organise yourselves peacefully and efficiently.”

“Adam, I—”

“I know you believe me, Falcon. Make them believe you.”

And the screen went blank.

*  *  *  *

Falcon sent a copy of his message to Amalthea and Ganymede. Then, before the storm of requests for clarification and replies broke over his head, he shut down his comms system.

And, for a while at least, before he was dragged back up into the tangled affairs of humans and Machines, he concentrated on Ceto as she sank into the deep.

Much of her skin and outer flesh were gone now, the last of her flotation cells pierced and collapsed. At her new depth the mantas had long departed, and yet another suite of organisms trailed the medusa: eaters of the inner meat of her carcass and organs, drinkers of the fluids that leaked from her, even specialist swimmers oddly like legless elephants, with long
trunks that were sunk into her depleted sacs of oil, the treasure for which the Martians and Machines would have killed her. To such species the fall of a medusa was a rare bonanza, a glorious chance to feed.

Ceto herself had long fallen silent. Did she still live, in any meaningful sense? Perhaps. A medusa was a much more distributed creature than a human, much less dependent on any single organ. But she was starting to disintegrate now, the loose framework of cartilage that organised her structure breaking up. And as she collapsed even more sinker species closed in, tiny animals that bored into the surface of the cartilage strips, or burrowed inside them in search of some equivalent of marrow. There would be little left of Ceto long before she reached the final limit of the thermalisation layer, Falcon saw. Nature on Jupiter did a far better job of recycling its resources than the gross slaughterhouse of New Nantucket.