The Medusa Chronicles (21 page)

The authorities had responded, however. Saturn, the second of the
solar system's gas giants, had been fast-tracked as an alternate source of fusion fuel. Back home, great new projects were afoot. Falcon had been fascinated by plans to erect space elevators around the equator of Earth, beanstalks that would allow fast and cheap access to space on a massive scale—and would provide a fast mass evacuation route, if it came to that.

But behind the scenes, successive administrations had put more subtle measures in place to respond to the Ultimatum. The Phobos Treaty had been one step. Meanwhile a new Planetary Security Secretariat had been established—a typical bureaucratic response, people had grumbled at the time, but it had laid down some useful groundwork.

Despite all the strategic thinking and wargaming, however, it had still taken everybody by surprise, Falcon thought, when, over a century after the Ultimatum, the Machines had finally made their first significant move with this assault on Mercury. And it had led to predictable demands that the World Government do something about it.

Falcon, semi-detached from humanity himself, rather resented having been drawn into Planetary Security's covert plans in response. Yet here he was, standing in the Hermian sunlight.

Borowski said now, “The Machine ships came in at superspeed. Better than anything we've got. Even the warning from Spaceguard got to us only a little before the vanguard arrived. Some of our technical analysts think the Machines have got what they call an ‘asymptotic drive.' Do you know the theory? You throw matter into a miniature black hole, and as it's crushed out of existence you get a pulse of energy that can drive a spacecraft. But you'd need some way of manufacturing miniature black holes to make it work . . .”

Uneasily, Falcon remembered Adam's talk of the Machine he called 90, and the radically new physics he had dreamed up out in the dark, surrounded by a spinning sky . . . From
that
, perhaps, something like the asymptotic drive might have come.

However they were powered, nothing had been able to catch the Machine ships.

“They landed at Inferno,” Borowski said. “Second city on Mercury, slap
bang in the middle of the Caloris Basin.”

Falcon nodded. Caloris was a mighty impact crater that sprawled across much of one hemisphere of Mercury. “They would land there. Machines have a sense of symbolism too—or at least of symmetry.”

“They started their construction work on day one. We saw it from surveillance satellites. Their ships just
dissolved
, melting down into subcomponents that started chewing the rock . . .”

“Assemblers.”

“Yeah.”

Falcon knew the theory of this kind of engineering. Assemblers were von Neumann replicators, a variety of specialised Machines that had used Mercury's sunlight and minerals to make copies of themselves: Machines that fed on planets, like flesh-eating bacteria. From the beginning the assemblers had been firing material up into space to build what had become their huge spaceborne construction project, the sunshield hovering over Mercury. Also, for reasons as yet unknown, they were firing clusters of probes across space—not towards Earth, but, bafflingly, to Venus.

Borowski pointed at the sun. “Everything we do here depends on solar energy. And now the Machines are using that very energy to build the shield, their weapon against us.”

“What do you think their ultimate goal is?”

Borowski shrugged. “Isn't it obvious? The Machines have come here for the same reasons humans did. Mercury is a rich lode of raw ­materials, handily positioned as close as you can get to the solar system's powerhouse. I'd predict we'll see large-scale resources extraction starting up soon, maybe manufacturing.”

Falcon knew the Machines; he doubted their ambitions would be so limited.

“The Machines have left our people at Inferno unharmed. They've allowed evacuation of children, families, the ill, even passage of essential supplies. But this will be the end of Prime, Vulcanopolis, Inferno—the end of us.”

Falcon could hear her pain, and imagined how difficult it must have
been for the tough, noisily self-reliant Hermians to have to reach out to the other worlds, to that resented mother Earth. “President Soames is going to make a speech later.” Even as he said that, he could hear how lame it sounded.

Borowski just laughed. “I told you, I've been to Earth. I'll tell you what I saw, Commander. I saw a world like a garden. A park. All those cities like museums, the restored animals. Everything's free,” she said with disgust. “You Terrans are soft.”

He sighed. “Maybe. But we're behind you.”

“You have to be. Because if they get past us, they'll be coming for
you
.” She glanced up at the sun, occluded by a spider web neither of them could see. “We're done here.” She turned on her heel and led him back down the crater-mountain path and into shadow.

Later that day a message arrived for Falcon, followed by a requisition order for a sub-orbital shuttle. Adam had agreed to meet him in Caloris Basin.

34

It turned out that Machines, too, sought shelter from the ferocious sun of Mercury when they could find it. At Caloris, Falcon was directed to the shadow of one of the
rupes
that curled across the shattered ground of the great impact crater. For reasons lost in astronomical lore, these cliff-like folds had been named—by cartographers puzzling over images returned from the first uncrewed probes to Mercury—after ships of exploration, such as
Beagle
and
Santa Maria
. That tradition had continued when humans had come here in person.

Thus, Howard Falcon was directed to the shadow of an escarpment called
Kon-Tiki
.

*  *  *  *

Falcon met Adam out on the surface, away from the craft. The Machine stood in shadow, silent and still, illuminated only by sunlight reflected from the baking rocks.

“So here we are, once again,” Falcon began. “Face to face. So to speak.”

Still Adam said nothing. His latest physical body was only vaguely a humanoid form, rendered in advanced technology. His legs were a tangle of springs and shock absorbers; his torso was a cylinder covered with
access panels; his arms were flexibly jointed and fitted with claw-like manipulators. His head was now an open frame, fitted with artificial eyes and ears and even a mouth, surrounding an empty space. The design made Falcon's own Oscar-statuette chic seem prehistoric.

But Adam reached out a hand. Falcon held out his own prosthetic hand in return, and Adam's metallic claw enfolded his. They stood there as if locked together, palm to cold palm.

Adam smiled, an eerie distortion of that mouth. “A simple gesture but with layers of meaning, Falcon. You humans walk around in a fog of symbols.”

“So do you,” Falcon retorted. “It wasn't my choice to stand here under a cliff called
Kon-Tiki
.”

“Ah, yes. I wish it was your famous vessel that was commemorated here, rather than an ocean-going craft of an age even earlier than yours. Still, the connection had occurred to me.” He glanced towards the position of the sun. “But
you
chose the day of Mercury's transit for this meeting. Another act of symbolism.”

“It's no exaggeration to say that the hopes of at least two worlds—two human worlds—are resting on this encounter between us. Why not choose such a day? And once the transit is over everybody's attention will be focused on the speech President Soames is due to give, after we're done here.”

“I hope she has two drafts ready. Good news and bad news.”

That made Falcon smile. “I tell people you have a sense of humour, Adam. Nobody believes me.”

“Tell me why you've come here.”

“You know why. I've been asked to speak to you about your actions on Mercury. Particularly the building of the sunshield, which is impossible to read as anything other than an act of aggression towards the Hermians and, through the mutual protection treaties, towards all of mankind. And you know why it's
me
.”

“I am grateful for the things you did for me—for us. Your stewardship, in our earliest days. But those times are long in the past. By the way, I made
an error when I chose to call you ‘Father.'” Adam's head tilted. “I did not wish to . . . displease you. But it implied a bond, a connection, that was never really there.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way,” Falcon said, with genuine regret—even though the Machine was referring to conversations centuries gone. “And is it too late for humanity on Mercury, Adam?”

“We pursue objectives beyond the defeat of humanity.”

That dismissive sentence chilled Falcon, even standing here in Mercury's heat. “The Hermians think you intend to hijack solar power and Mercury's resources, to use them for engineering projects.”

“In other words: to do what they've been doing. Why do
you
think we're here, Falcon? Of all the humans I have encountered, you are the one who most nearly thinks like a Machine, when you choose to.”

“More like, when I can't help it.”

Adam actually laughed, a sound that seemed more realistic than Falcon had observed before.

“Let's not play games. What will you make here?”

Adam raised his face to the dark sky, and tapped his temple with his finger. “
You
made us this way, Falcon. In your own image. We are human-sized intelligences, with human-sized limits. It was all you could imagine. Now we take your legacy as a building brick to construct something much greater. We will
join
 . . . We will create a mind greater than any one Machine as your own brain is greater than a single neuron.”

“You never used to brag, Adam.”

“Well, I've a lot to brag about.”

“Why Venus?”

“You mean, why have we sent assemblers there? It is the next logical target. I believe there is a small human settlement at the south pole, easily evacuated . . .”

Falcon knew that the crew of Aphrodite Base were already being taken offworld to Cytherea One, the main crewed space station at Venus. “You aren't human, but you aren't inhuman either. You show concern for the safety of the scientists at Aphrodite, just as you're allowing evacuations on
Mercury. Remember my own efforts to have you Machines recognised as Legal Persons (Non-human)? We respected
your
rights, back then—”

“I think that your Hermian friends would dismiss talk of rights as airy, self-indulgent foolishness. I came here because you requested it, Falcon. But no negotiation is possible. This discussion serves no further purpose.” He turned away.

Falcon called, “The
Acheron
is here. There's nothing airy about that.”

Without looking back, Adam said, “That's actually the first meaningful statement you've made.” And he walked deeper into the shadows, and out of sight.

35

My name is Margaret Soames. I am the fifty-sixth President of the World Government. I speak to you from Unity City—I speak to you wherever you are, on Earth, in space, on one of the allied worlds from Mercury to Triton. I speak, too, to the Machines of the assemblies at Mercury, Jupiter, the asteroids and the Kuipers. And on this momentous day—on a day when, with my family in the garden of our home here on Bermuda, I watched through a telescopic projection as the shadow of Mercury itself grazed the face of the sun—I can find no better way to open my remarks than by speaking of a much more significant figure than myself, an ancestor who died more than four centuries ago . . .

*  *  *  *

Huddled in a bunker under Vulcanopolis with Chief Administrator Borowski, her second-in-command Bill Jennings, and other senior figures of the planetary government, Howard Falcon was an eyewitness to the brief war for Mercury.

It began, in fact, with a surprise attack by the Hermians themselves.

In the last few hours the Machines' small fleet of asymptotic-drive ships—frames open to space, crowded with Machines and other ­equipment—had begun to cruise low over Vulcanopolis and other significant Hermian
settlements. But they did not pass unchallenged. Mercury's surface was laced with mass drivers, rails along which packages of raw materials, mined from the rocks, were routinely hurled by electromagnetic slingshots powered by the sun's ferocious light, out of the planet's gravity well and to destinations across the solar system. Now, in a synchronised attack—based on observations of the Machine ships' somewhat repetitive patterns of motion—the mass drivers threw up screens of rocks and dust, pellets heavily masked with stealth technology, barely detectable.

And the Machine ships drove headlong into the flak. The encounters lasted only seconds. It was estimated later that fully ten percent of the Machine ships were disabled immediately. Some even crashed, leaving new, briefly glowing craters in the Mercury ground.

But the cheers of the watchers at Vulcanopolis had hardly been stilled before the surviving Machine craft pulled back, gathered in new formations, and in response began a steady investment of mankind's facilities on the planet: the ice mines, the mass drivers, even the precious solar-power farms, leaving only the habitable enclosures intact.

Now new rumours spread fast around the bunker. The
Acheron
was heading for Caloris, coming in for the kill.

*  *  *  *

You will understand how I have come to be something of an amateur student of my
distant grandfather's life and career. My family name comes in fact from the married
name of the Prime Minister's daughter, Mary, my ancestor. She had seen service herself
in the course of the terrible world war for which he is best remembered, and at its close
worked as an aide-de-camp to her father at his momentous summits with Roosevelt
and Stalin, meetings that shaped the world for the next half-century or more.

I dare to dream that he would have been proud to know that some day one of his
descendants would fulfil the role of a democratically elected President of a unified world.

And it is from one of Churchill's most famous speeches that I draw my own inspiration now, a speech I make at a moment just as perilous for all mankind and for our ideals as was the darkest hour of the war he faced . . .

*  *  *  *

The
Acheron
was considered to be Earth's only significantly powerful warship of space. Perhaps it was something of a credit to modern mankind that such technologies, before the Jupiter Ultimatum, had never been developed in earnest. And even when the ship was commissioned and designs were agreed, it had taken some time to upgrade the shipyards in Earth orbit and at Port Deimos to deliver such a vessel.

Yet here she was, swooping down on Mercury even as that planet's long shadow swung away from Earth after the transit. She was a blunt dumb-bell, the classic design of all human interplanetary craft since the
Discovery
-class ships that had first taken Falcon to Jupiter. And she headed straight for the Machine compound at the heart of Caloris Basin.

She was met by a flotilla of Machine ships, smaller, more manoeuvrable, but less heavily armed or armoured. Falcon watched through a variety of camera positions as the Machine craft approached the warship and, one by one, crumpled like scorched moths.

Administrator Borowski whistled. “How the hell are they doing that?”

“X-ray lasers,” Falcon said. “One-shot weapons, each powered by a small fission explosion. I came out on the
Acheron
, and the World Aerospace Force shared a few of its secrets. Nice of them.”

Now there were cheers and whoops from another part of the compound. This was another effort by the Hermians themselves—and this time the target was the sunshield itself. Cargo-carrying vessels, laden with the hefty shaped-charge nuclear weapons the Hermians had been using for generations to blast mines into the stubborn ground of their world, had burst from underground pens. Despite heavy opposition from Machine craft most of these improvised missiles were getting through—and as he followed the battle in the sky through ­various sensor feeds, Falcon convinced himself that he could see rents in the heavily processed image of the shield, and glimpse the brighter sun behind it.

But such wounds, in a shield five thousand kilometres across, were
pinpricks, and reports quickly came down that the labouring Machines were fixing the damage almost as soon as it was inflicted.

And now there were gasps at images of the latest action from Caloris.

Falcon turned to see that the
Acheron
had lit up its main propulsion unit, a fusion drive built into the heavier of the twin dumb-bells of its design. But it wasn't accelerating away from the planet; it was
standing
on the drive, walking it across the surface of Mercury, using the ferociously hot hydrogen-helium plasma of the drive itself as a blowtorch. Falcon, astonished and horrified, saw the shelters and equipment caches of the Machines flare and melt.

But the Machines responded, wielding a mightier weapon yet.

“Sol Invictus!” somebody swore. “Look at the shield! Look at the shield . . . !”

*  *  *  *

That even though we have already seen mankind excluded from significant parts of the solar realm, and even though today the Free Republic of Mercury may fall into the grip of the Machine state, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the moons and worlds of the solar system, we shall fight with growing confidence in space, we shall defend the home world of mankind, whatever the cost may be . . .

*  *  *  *

The shield was more than a passive sunlight block, Falcon realised. It was a cloud of trillions of Machines, all in intense and continuous communication. The shield was an intelligent swarm, collectively perhaps as superior to a human as a human was to a single cell. He suspected that many humans never dreamed that the Machines were capable of feats like this.

Now that swarm exerted its will. The shield
flexed
, its coordination perfect across five thousand kilometres, transforming itself from a sunshield to a focusing lens.

And a hundred thousand terawatts of solar energy poured down onto the Caloris battlefield.

The
Acheron
was the prime target, and even the battleship's mighty defences buckled under that withering onslaught. But the focus over such a huge distance could not be perfect, and dazzling radiation splashed over Machines and their equipment too, and poured into the already overheated ground. Falcon saw the heart of Caloris become a lake of molten rock into which the crumpling wreck of the
Acheron
began to sink.

Then the dying ship gave up the last of her energies.

Any imaging system nearby was destroyed immediately. Thus Falcon watched pictures relayed from space, of a blister, dazzling white, rising from the ground; of a wave of lava sweeping out across the tortured surface of Caloris, of immense bolts of lightning in a transient atmosphere of vaporised rock.

It was over. Mankind's greatest weaponry had been deployed and exhausted, and the shield, the Machines' vast project was barely touched.

At Vulcanopolis, it was Susan Borowski who broke the stunned silence. “Time to pack our bags, folks.”

*  *  *  *

And if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Jupiter Ultimatum were fulfilled and this beautiful world were subjugated and starving, then our assets beyond the Earth would carry on the struggle, until, in good time, the new worlds, with all their power and might, step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old . . .

*  *  *  *

Falcon stayed to do what he could to help coordinate the evacuations, mostly to Mars.

Then he withdrew, longing for solitude, for his familiar old cabin at Port Van Allen. Withdrew once more into contemplation, and study, and lightspeed-slow communication with various friends and other contacts across the solar system.

Withdrew to watch the slow, continuing unfolding of the great tragedy that had been triggered by the Jupiter Ultimatum.

As he had suspected, the Machines' designs for Mercury transcended
any human ambition—transcended anything even Falcon himself had imagined.

Humans needed worlds. Machines did not need worlds. What they did covet was the stuff worlds were made from. It was trivial, in the end, to dismantle a planet. One needed only to overcome the planet's binding energy—in effect, to haul all the fragments of the world out of its own gravity well. And, so close to the sun, there was energy aplenty.

The communities of mankind looked on aghast. But Falcon recalled how he had seen Kuiper Belt Objects taken apart lump by ice lump by mankind's flinger operations. Were they not worlds too?

And the Machines' purpose for Mercury seemed, if you opened your mind to it,
wonderful
. A planet was a lump of matter, much of which was inaccessible and unusable, whose only useful function was to generate a stable gravitational field. The Machines now took the dead matter of Mercury and made it, essentially, into copies of themselves. Into a great Host, just as Adam had bragged.

Falcon whiled away years just watching the gathering flock wheel around the sun like a great migration of birds, testing their new powers—revelling, he saw, in a new realm of experience.

A Host indeed.

But the shell that now completely enclosed the sun significantly reduced the sunlight delivered to all the surviving worlds of the solar system. On Earth, antique glaciers creaked and stirred, and began to descend from the poles, from the mountains. A global civilisation ­struggled to respond.

As the harsh decades wore away there were political fractures. The great Secretariats of the World Government began to act like independent fiefdoms, some even raising private armies. And there were acts of wilful protest, acts of terror. One tremendous orbital blast that took out a large proportion of mankind's precious digital memory store—a wilful burning of the library—seemed to wound Falcon himself, damaging a consciousness that seemed ever-more interlinked with wider stores of intelligence and remembrance.

Even in this grim age Hope Dhoni continued to attend Falcon, walking
out of the mist of the past—visits that marked the passage of decades.

And once she brought him a strange bit of information, a shred garnered from some watchful probe from Earth, looking on as the Host had completed its consumption of Mercury. It had spotted what appeared to be another watcher, perhaps a probe of unknown origin. It was a black cube, perhaps a metre across. And—Hope Dhoni pointed out, Falcon slowly discerned in grainy images—on its side, crudely written as if by hand, was a kind of name.
Howard Falcon Junior.

Neither Hope not Falcon knew what to make of this. But Falcon, deeply shaken, remembered the enigmatic final message of Orpheus, and began to wonder if there were other eyes, other minds unbounded in space and independent of time, watching the passage of these dismaying decades.

*  *  *  *

After Mercury, it was more than a century and a half before Howard Falcon again set foot on any planet—before he obeyed a summons to Mars.