The Medusa Chronicles (20 page)

He sat in the
Ra
, in silence broken only by the whir of fans and cooling systems, and the regular beat of the pumps of his own body shell.

And, at the last, just as he prepared to recall his probes, that antenna panel flickered with one last, pale message:

There is an end to pain . . .

“I wish I could believe you,” Falcon whispered. “Not for us, old friend. Not for us.”

INTERLUDE:

APRIL 1968

Christmas of 1967 had been as rushed as everything else that year.

Then, for Seth Springer, the spring of 1968 was a blur of work. Once, for “diplomatic” purposes, Seth even had to haul ass to Kazakhstan, deep in the heart of the Soviet empire, to witness the launch of one of the unmanned probes they were calling Monitors: basically American Mariner probes of the kind that had been sent to Mars and Venus, launched on the Soviets' sturdy new Proton rocket boosters. There would be one Monitor on hand at each of the six interceptions, the six nuclear detonations that were meant to push Icarus away from its date with the Earth.

But Seth suspected that—assuming he lived through this adventure—what he was going to remember most of all of this time would be the hours, days, weeks he spent in the mission simulator at Houston.

The simulator itself was the size and shape of a conical Command Module cabin, embedded in a rats' nest of cabling, wiring, and huge stuck-on boxes that generated visual emulations of mission events. The controlling computer, in air-conditioned security in its own compartment behind a glass wall, looked smugly down on the astronauts, the mere humans who had to crawl into the middle of the thing. Which was galling when you remembered that humans were only being drafted in for this
fallback mission in the first place because nobody really trusted computers alone to do the job. Seth wondered if it was rational to have a relationship with a machine, even if it was one of irritation and resentment.

Seth and Mo took it in turns to ride the sim, Mo as primary pilot taking the lion's share of time. But whichever pilot wasn't in the can would be in Mission Control, assisting the other. Here, working with the flight directors, they worked up plans and checklists for all the crucial moments of the sixth flight of Apollo-Icarus, should it be needed, down to every switch that had to be thrown, every command that had to be punched into the guidance computer. And
then
they started working on contin­gencies: if system A fails, do this; if system B fails, do
that
. They did this over and over, until it became instinct.

Seth would always admit that Mo was the better pilot, and picked up stuff quicker than he did. Seth, in fact, counted it a victory when in a given day he screwed up fewer times than the overloaded computer “bombed out,” as the sim controllers put it. But given enough time, their performances would be indistinguishable.

The trouble was, there never was enough time.

And suddenly it was April 1968, and the programme went live.

On Sunday the seventh, bang on time, the first Apollo-Icarus Saturn V, with its big nuke aboard, was successfully launched. For once Seth and Mo were together to watch the launch, which went flawlessly. But even as the Saturn disappeared into the sky from Pad A, a second Saturn was already sitting on Pad B being prepped for the second launch on April 22, and Pad A itself was being torn down to be made ready for the launch of Apollo-Icarus 4 on May 17.

It was a consequence of the compressed schedule and the fast approach of the asteroid that by the time the first flight reached Icarus itself, at the maximum feasible distance of twenty million miles, three more flights would already have been fired off. Still, to see that first bird go on time was a major milestone, a huge motivator for everybody.

It was as the second launch approached that everything changed.

On April 21, a week after Easter Sunday, Seth showed up at the Cape
to witness the launch due the following day. Mo, on his way in from Huntsville, was flying independently, in his own T-38.

But Mo was overdue.

In the late afternoon George Lee Sheridan called Seth into a private lounge in back of the launch control bunker, and handed him a glass of bourbon.

“We don't know what happened yet,” Sheridan said. “Ground observers say the damn bird just went out of control—a roll—it took a dive straight at the ground. Still supersonic when it hit, they estimate. Damn those T-38s. I know you guys love your toys.”

Seth stared at the bourbon, trying to take this in. “We ought to measure the size of the crater he made.”

“Hmm?”

“We were taken to a lab in Texas where they were simulating lunar craters by firing cannon into the ground. Measuring basin diameter as a function of incoming kinetic energy.” He forced a smile. “Mo would want to end up as a data point on one of those graphs. It would make him laugh.”

“I'll drink to that,” Sheridan said. He eyed Seth. “This changes everything. The truth, the existence of Apollo-Icarus 6—Mo's true mission, and yours—broke as soon as the crash did. Amazing we kept it quiet so long, I guess. First things first. There'll be a funeral at Arlington. I have to ask you to attend that. We'll fly you in by Gulfstream. Service uniforms and horsedrawn carriages and rifle fire, and the missing man formation in the sky. Families—well, whoever we can find for Mo. You'll have to make some kind of speech, alongside RFK, maybe even the President.”

“I understand.”

“Then we'll move you into the crew building on Merriott Island. Pat and the boys too. We won't let the press or anybody else near you—anything you want.”

“I appreciate that.”

Sheridan drank again. “This is a tragedy, but it doesn't change the urgency of the mission. Even if you never need to fly, you're a symbol of the effort we're making. It's not just about Icarus, you know. Look at the
offensive the Viet Cong launched in January . . .” Atrocities on both sides, as undermanned American positions had been overrun. Sheridan shook his head. “Some things they didn't ought to show on TV. Then Martin Luther King gets shot, and the whole country's like a damn brush fire. And in the middle of all
that
, still invisible in the sky, Icarus is on its way.

“You know, I went to a preview of a new space movie, some damn science fiction thing. Opens with ape men beating each others' brains out with clubs made of bone. Is that all we are? I prefer to think we are better than that. In my own lifetime, in the '30s I worked on the New Deal, a war on poverty, in the '40s I was involved in a total war against fascism, and in the '50s I was on the technological front line of a nuclear confrontation. And now, this.

“I believe we can work together, that an advanced technological nation like the United States can be shaped for a worthy goal—like beating Hitler, like putting a man on the Moon, yes, like swatting Icarus aside. And after we're all long gone, the work we do now will be an inspiration for all mankind, in the future. Your kids and grandkids, Seth. They'll know that
this
is what our generation did.” He reached over and grabbed Seth's shoulder. “Listen, son, if we do need you, I've as much confidence in you as I would have had in Mo.”

Seth believed him. But all he could think of now was what he was going to have to say at Arlington. And how he was going to break all this to the boys.

Anyhow, the chances were still that he wasn't going to have to fly.

He'd forgotten his bourbon. He drank it down in a gulp.

FOUR

THE TROUBLED CENTURIES

2391–2784

33

After Jupiter, Falcon returned to Port Van Allen, and to other retreats.

He wrote, read, reflected. Sometimes he travelled, even explored new worlds, new terrains. And periodically he was drawn back into the brusque care of Hope Dhoni, a scion of a vanished dynasty like himself, as ageless as he was, and yet, somehow, in her inner strength and determination, and in her devotion to Falcon himself, far more enduring.

More years, more decades, rolling like tides across the worlds of human and Machine. As the Machines' half-millennium slowly unwound, he waited to be called into the fray once more.

And when, more than a century after the Nantucket affair, that call did come, it was to a small, hazardous, angry world even he had never visited before.

*  *  *  *

Chief Administrator Susan Borowski briskly led Falcon through an airlock set in the outer dome of Vulcanopolis, capital of the Free Republic of Mercury. They emerged into a night-time landscape of shattered rock and craters, under a star-littered sky. A black sky, even though Mercury was less than half the distance of Earth and Moon from the sun. The perpetual
shadow of a polar crater's walls protected Vulcanopolis and its people from the direct light—the sun never rose here—but even from here Falcon could see a corona flaring above walls of rock. This was why he was here, in a sense, why he had raced across the solar system in a warship called the
Acheron
. There was something wrong with Mercury's sun. It was all the fault of the Machines. Already more than a century since Adam's declaration of war, Howard Falcon was still the nearest mankind had to an ambassador to the Machines. And an audience had been requested here on Mercury.

He felt oddly detached from the situation, urgent as he'd been told it was. It wasn't an uncommon feeling for him these days. Oddly detached? Oddly
old
. Well, it was more than three centuries since his birth now; how was he supposed to feel? Years, even decades seemed to pass in a blur, leaving barely a trace in his capacious, cluttered memory. A full century after the Jupiter Ultimatum, Howard Falcon was becoming adrift, floating like a balloon in clouds of unstructured time.

But—whatever reason had brought him—here was Howard Falcon, rolling along a gravel track on the surface of yet another new world. How many was it now? His only personal first footfall, so to speak, had been on Jupiter, but to be the John Young of the world's mightiest planet was not an achievement to be sneezed at . . .

As he wool-gathered, Falcon could see Borowski smiling at him, her face illuminated behind her visor. He tried to focus on the here and now.

Borowski said now, “Sorry we had to come out through a cargo bay door. It's the only one that would fit. It was that or dismantle you.”

This was what passed among the Hermians for humour, Falcon was learning. “Oh, I wouldn't put you to any trouble. And the track's comfortable.”

“Comfortable, Commander? Evidently we haven't been working you hard enough. Come on.”

Abruptly she veered off down a trail marked by lanterns embedded in the gritty dust, leading towards the crater-rim mountains that shadowed the sun. In that shadow Falcon made out a cluster of lights: it was one
of Messenger Crater's many mines, here to extract the treasure that had motivated the establishment of Vulcanopolis in the first place—water ice.

Falcon followed more cautiously.

You had to take the Hermians at face value. Like all inhabitants of low-gravity worlds they tended to be tall, spindly, often wiry but physi­cally fragile—but they thought of themselves as uniquely tough, and they expected offworlders to keep up. Then again, this was perhaps the harshest environment from which any humans had yet tried to wrest a living. Mercury's “day” of fifty-nine Earth days was two-thirds of its “year” of eighty-eight days, a resonance created by the sun's tidal tweaking: a combi­nation that meant that any point on Mercury's equator, between sunrise and sunset, would endure a blistering one hundred and seventy-­six Earth days of continuous sunlight, during which the surface temperature became hot enough to melt lead and zinc.

But for once nature had given mankind an even break. Mercury, unlike Earth, had no axial tilt; its poles pointed perpendicularly out of its plane of orbit. As a result the floor of a crater placed precisely at either pole—which pretty much described this crater, Messenger—never saw the sun at all. And in the unending shadow of those crater walls, over millions of years, water and other volatiles, delivered sporadically by the splash of comets, could condense out, collect, and freeze. That was the basis of the ­economy of Vulcanopolis. The comet-ice water mined here was pumped to equatorial cities like Inferno and Prime, which in return fed back energy collected from the sun by sprawling solar-cell farms.

Borowski said now, “I hope Bill gave you a heads-up on this little expedition.”

“Bill? Oh, Jennings, your—umm, Vice-Chief Administrator. On any other world, poor Bill Jennings would glory in the title of Vice President.”

She laughed. “You can blame my predecessors for that. When the Treaty of Phobos was signed back in '15 Jack Harker decided he'd like to keep his old Interplanetary Relations Bureau job title. It amused him, I think. So ‘Chief Administrator' he remained.”

It took Falcon a moment to do the maths; dates were slippery for him
these days. In the aftermath of the Machines' Jupiter Ultimatum, Earth had quickly recognised the colony worlds as free states: the World Government had decided it needed stronger allies more than it needed resentful colonies. The Phobos convention had met in the year 2315—a date chosen for its resonance with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, and now Martian barons liked to brag they had brought a Terran king to heel. And today's date, May 11, 2391, had long been engraved into Falcon's mind for another resonance: it was the date of a transit of Mercury as seen from Earth. So, from 2315 to 2391—

“Oh, come on. The Phobos deal was seventy-six years ago!”

“We Hermians don't make many jokes. When we come up with a good one we keep it . . .” The path was steepening sharply. “You okay on this gradient? Until the Machines came we used to run a funicular for the tourists: one of the seven wonders of the solar system, or so our ads claimed.”

“I'll be fine.”

“We'll be in sunlight soon. Check out your suit.” She tapped a panel on her chest. The front of her own suit silvered and the back turned dark, a chameleon-like adaptation that would, Falcon knew, respond to a change of position so that she always kept her mirrored side to the solar glare, the heat-dumping dark side turned away. Meanwhile extraordinary wings folded out from a backpack, so that she looked like some overgrown, ­silvery bat. The wings were radiator panels, more thermal control.

Falcon inspected his own clumsier systems. There was, of course, no human-issue suit that would fit Falcon. But the Hermian engineers, who famously relished a challenge, had swarmed over the latest iteration of his prosthetic carriage, checking the integrity of his basic life-support systems, swaddling him in protective thermal blankets, and fitting an adapted set of radiator wings and other systems to his frame. It would never be as elegant as Borowski's suit, which was the product of more than three centuries of technological evolution since the first landings here—but, the engineers told him, it would keep him alive long enough to get to shelter if anything went wrong. A pragmatic if not entirely reassuring promise.

And while he was distracted by the unfolding of his wings, Howard
Falcon rolled into sunlight. His optical shields immediately cut in, reducing the brilliance to a mere dazzle. The mighty sun glared over a sharp, crumpled horizon. From this elevation Falcon looked out over a plain of broken rock, across which long shadows stretched. Superficially this world was Moon-like; a world scarred by craters, the relics of impacts dating back to the solar system's violent formation. But Falcon had been to the Moon many times—at least, before the Machines had moved in—and he could see significant differences. The crater walls seemed visibly less steep, perhaps a product of Mercury's higher gravity and the inner heat of its larger, molten core. And Falcon saw a twisting line of cliff faces, almost like a wrinkle in the landscape that cast a band of shadow within which more artificial lights huddled. Such features, called
rupes
, were the relics of episodes in which Mercury, its inner heat dissipating, had
shrunk
, leaving its skin a little like that of a withered apple.

Above it all hung the sun, more than twice its width as seen from Earth, but with around seven times the intensity. Falcon seemed to
feel
that tremendous outpouring, just standing here. It was impossible to reconcile the physical force of the star's presence with the pale thing he remembered from the winter mornings of his childhood in England, as if the sun barely mustered the energy to lift itself above the horizon. It was that monstrous flow of energy that had made Mercury a key colonisation target, first for humans—and latterly for the Machines. The sun: star of humanity and of the solar system, and now a prize of war.

He was aware of Borowski watching him. She said, “You know, a lot of people just don't get Mercury. Or us Hermians, come to that. Even though we're such a jolly bunch.”

Falcon smiled. “I looked you up. During the Phobos negotiations your ambassador's ‘irascibility' was actually minuted.”

She looked out over her world of rock and raw energy. “Earth is a pretty alien place for us, you know. Mars, though, we have something in common with. We have dreams of terraforming too. Or we did. You're surprised? It would be a big job. You'd need to shield the planet from the sunlight, spin it up to give a sensible day-night cycle, import volatiles for
oceans and an atmosphere.”

“I thought most Hermians liked the place the way it is.”

“Well, I'm among them, but you have to think of the future. You need a long-term habitability solution, just in case your children forget how to maintain the air engines. That was the ambition, anyhow.”

Falcon nodded. “But here are the Machines taking all that away from you.”

Borowski squinted up at the sun, its fierce light flattening the planes of her face. “The shield isn't yet visible to the naked eye, but you can already measure the dip in the solar energy reaching the planet. And you
can
see it with a bit of visual processing: a kind of web hanging right in front of the sun, a bit larger than Mercury's diameter; a hell of a thing, and yet, according to our spy probes, gossamer thin. Mostly aluminium—
Mercury
aluminium, and that theft pisses me off greatly.”

“I don't understand how the shield is being kept in position, up there in space. You have the pressure of sunlight, and Mercury's gravity pulling it down to the planet—”

She pointed back over his shoulder. “There's a secondary structure back there, even bigger than the shield itself. It's a mirror, Commander—an annulus, a circular band, with a hole you could slide Mercury through, literally.”

Falcon the engineer peered up in wonder. “So the shield blocks the light from Mercury. But the sunlight that passes the shield hits this mirror, and is reflected back to hold the shield itself in place, pushing against the gravity and direct sunlight.”

“You've got it. The whole thing is one vast engine, using gravity and beams of sunlight as girders.”

“I wish I could see it.”

She laughed. “Now you sound like a Hermian. Of course there's more to it than that. Mercury's orbit is strongly elliptical, and the shifting solar and planetary tides disturb the set-up—it needs a lot of station-­keeping. But we know that both shield and mirror are composed of Machines, which are individually pretty smart, and a swarm of them will be that much smarter again. Working en masse their components are able to sense
their positions, compensate for the shift in balance of the competing forces.

“For now, most of the sunlight still gets through, but it won't stay that way; the holes are being filled in. My engineers tell me that the final phase will be very rapid—that's in the nature of exponential growth. We'll see the sun go dark in a
day
. Cutting off the sunlight on which we depend for everything.

“Anyhow, it's nice to know we Hermians have friends at our backs as we face this crisis.” She glanced at him sourly. “Friends from Earth. One warship. And
you
.”

He spread his hands. “The World Government is a cumbersome beast that's slow to respond to a crisis. But the people of Earth are right behind you. That's why the
Acheron
timed its mission to arrive today.”

She grunted. “For the coincidence of the transit.”

“Well, it's only a partial transit, but the timing is apt.” He turned and pointed, directly away from the sun. “Today, Mercury happens to lie on a straight line between sun and Earth. And if you were standing on Earth you could see the planet's shadow crossing the face of the sun . . . All over the world, people are looking up at Mercury, right now, looking at us. President Soames is big on symbolism.”

“Great. But what are you Terrans going to
do
?”

“Whatever we can.”

Which, Falcon admitted, had been little enough so far.

*  *  *  *

For an old stager like Falcon, it had been a surprise when the Ultimatum's centenary had suddenly arrived, marked by grim headlines and analyses.

But even in an age when extreme longevity was becoming routine, the making of a threat to be fulfilled five centuries hence—perhaps twenty old-fashioned human generations away—seemed beyond the capacity of most people to comprehend. It didn't help to focus minds that at first the Machines had appeared to
do
nothing more threatening than to suspend shipments of Jovian helium-3 and other products to Earth.