The Medusa Chronicles (22 page)

36

Falcon rolled back and forth experimentally, testing his latest low-gravity-­issue balloon tyres on a ground of ruddy soil loosely bound by sparse grass. It was like a beach, Falcon thought, like dune grass, although it was a very long time since Howard Falcon had visited a beach anywhere. And he was so close to a stand of trees, mixed oak and pine, that in the air filtered through his face mask, drawn into his synthetic lungs, he could smell the scents of the forest, the resin, the leaf mulch.

He looked around. The sun was high in a tall, blue sky sparsely littered with white, streaky cloud. It was morning, so that way was
east
, and therefore the gentle slope of the ground that he intended to climb was to the
south
, away from the trees.

Which made sense, for this was the northern slope of Olympus Mons. Falcon had visited many times before—the first, in fact, before the flight of the
Kon-Tiki
. It had
not
been like this.

His companions were a young man, frame sparse, big-chested, who wore a quilted coverall, gloves, and a mask through which a calm face could be seen—a
tall
young man, and among these new generations of Martians even Falcon sometimes felt overshadowed—and a woman, serene, but too still, too fragile. She was Hope Dhoni, now virtually as
old as Falcon, the few decades between them now all but inconsequential compared to the span of time both had endured. The resentment Falcon felt at that was entirely illogical, but he felt it nonetheless.

The man was called Citizen Second Grade Jeffrey Pandit. He was a civil servant based at Port Lowell, and Falcon's Martian government host for the next few days. Now he smiled at Falcon. “I hope you got your tyres treated with the right protective cover.” He kicked at the loose, rusty soil. “Still plenty of caustic chemistry going on in this dirt, even after three centuries of terraforming. We don't want you seizing up halfway up the hill, sir.”

“I'd never live it down.”

Now Hope smiled. “So what are your feelings, Howard? For some this would be a mundane scene, but not for you. You spend all your time in space these days. Mercury was—what, over a century ago?”

“More than that, ma'am,” Pandit murmured. “This is the year AFF 567—”

“A hundred and sixty-two years, then.”

Falcon winced. As long as that?

“Most of which you've spent in Port Van Allen. That great rusty wheel—”

“It's a comfortable hotel. I like to live in a building that's older than I am, and that's not so easy to find these days. And you do get one hell of a view. Besides, much of Earth is rather chilly since the Little Ice Age.”

“Well, you'll get one hell of a view from Olympus, sir,” Pandit said, emollient. “Eventually, at the summit.”

“And—
mundane
, Hope?” Falcon said. “Trees, blue sky, a gentle slope to walk up—
on Mars
? I guess it would feel mundane if we weren't wearing these damn facemasks. Mundane, if those oak trees over there weren't
a hundred metres tall
.”

Pandit grinned. “Another couple of centuries and we'll be able to do without the masks, at least in the lowest-altitude locations. Hellas, for instance. Umm, would you like me to take a couple of pictures?”

“Hell, no. I'm no tourist. And my visit isn't exactly a secret, but the Security Secretariat made it clear I wasn't to shout about it.” Falcon peered up the slope; Olympus was so vast, yet so shallow, that its summit was
hidden by the close Martian horizon—hidden by the curve of the world. “I'm here for whatever is going on up there, in the caldera.”

“Project Acorn,” Hope Dhoni said dryly.

“Which name is about all we know of it,” Falcon said.

Pandit hesitated. “One last chance to change your mind. It is a gentle climb, sir, all the way up. People say Olympus is the most unspectacular spectacle in the solar system. But it is three hundred kilometres to the summit, and by the time you're up there you'll be above almost all of the atmosphere . . . Are you
sure
you want to walk?”

Falcon sighed. “You forget I'm not an old man, Pandit. I'm an old engine. But I can still roll up a hill faster than any human could walk. And besides, if I'm on foot, so to speak, maybe there's a better chance the Acorn people will let me through.” He looked up at the blank slope. “You know the situation. Melanie Springer-Soames and her group could hardly conceal their activities from the surveillance satellites. They've got a ­regular colony up there. But they refuse any attempts at contact, and in the only statement they released they claimed that they had set up ‘defences' of some kind. Well, I've known the Springers since great-granddaddy Matt was showing off on Pluto—and
that's
why Port Lowell asked me to come up here. This is a gamble on my unique status, and it's not the first time I've been used this way: a gamble that while they may stop others, maybe they won't stop me.”

Dhoni said, “It all sounds damn flaky.”

“Maybe, but this is Planetary Security policy: peaceful means if at all possible. That's been the standing order since Mercury. And, flaky or not, Hope, if it all goes wrong, what have they lost? One rusty old robot.”

Dhoni snorted. “I'll claim the scrap value.”

“Then, if we're doing this—” Pandit dug into a pocket of his coverall, and produced an acorn, fat and healthy. “I'm honoured to accompany you, Commander. My family cherishes the story of my ancestor's encounter with you at Jupiter.”

“I remember it well. Nicola was a worthy opponent.”

“You know, acorns on Mars are still pretty precious. The dip in sunlight
hurt us too, as we tried to progress the terraforming. We plant acorns, we don't waste them. But those of us on Mars who want nothing but a peaceful future—and a flourishing planet when the Eos Programme is done—would like you to have this, sir. As a token of our good wishes for this mission.”

Falcon took the acorn carefully, in a claw of a hand that could have crushed it in a microsecond. “I'll treasure it.”

Pandit glanced at a chronometer. “Let's make the best of what's left of the day.” He looked back at the rover that had brought Falcon's party here from Port Lowell over in Aurorae Sinus, still Mars's greatest city. Dhoni had made her own way across Mars, having come down at Port Schiaparelli in Trivium Charontis. “Sir, I'll be tracking you all the way in the rover, with my crew.”

“Well, I hope you have a repair kit on board,” Dhoni said.

“Hope—”

“And for the first few hours at least, Howard, you will walk at a reasonably sedate pace. Because
I
will be walking with you.” She held up a small case. “Time for your five-yearly check over, Commander Falcon. And if you think you can escape
that
by climbing the biggest volcano there is, you've another think coming.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Falcon said, resigned.

37

As they began the climb they followed a trail of sorts, not much more than a braid of rover tyre-marks and boot prints, but proof that others had driven this way before, and many had hiked it too.

Hope walked steadily, her thin frame looking oddly sturdy. “I bet Matt Springer did this. And for the same reason he claimed he went to Pluto. Do you remember? ‘Because it's there!'”

“Well, he stole that line. And are you going to talk the whole damn way up?”

“Would you like me to?”

“I'd like you to do your Sleeping Beauty act and fall asleep for another hundred years.”

She waggled a gloved finger at him. “Now, Howard, that's a cheap shot. The hibernacula are a perfectly respectable option these days. Clinically it's just a mixture of deep freeze, targeted drugs and electronarcosis, which is nothing but a mature version of the sleep inducers
you
have been using for five hundred years. And it was an option I was happy to take up. After all, some of my implants are older than most people alive today . . . I intend to husband my remaining days so I can accompany you a little further on your own journey through time. Besides, how well do
you
sleep these days?” She let that hang. “Come on, let me do my tests. You won't feel a thing.” And
as they walked on, she fixed sensors to his exposed flesh and peered into monitors.

He endured this, glowering, as he walked. As he had from the first days after the crash, he preferred to keep his physical condition to himself.

But he was, astonishingly, over five hundred years old. His mechanical shell had undergone multiple upgrades, and the surviving core of his nervous system was much patched by rejuvenation and regeneration treatments, all paid for by slow-maturing trust funds and such components of the World Government as occasionally found Falcon useful, or perhaps amusing. But he was capable of feeling discomfort, and weariness, and yes, pain—low level, a deep intrinsic ache. At times he used painkillers, but despite Dhoni's occasional urging he would never have considered finding a way to detach this sensation altogether. He regarded the pain as a relic of his humanity.

“So,” she said as she worked, “you're playing the peacemaker again.”

“Or trying to. Much good I did on Mercury, the last time I ventured out of my hermit's cave.”

“It's all your fault. Is that what you feel?”

“Isn't that logical?”

“Not really. You and I do come from a unique cadre, Howard. The first undying generation in human history. And that's the point—if we
had
died after a normal lifespan, then we'd never even have seen how history unfolded. But whole generations have passed since our day, and have had a chance to make their own choices. You can't feel responsible—”

“Thom Bittorn did.”

“Bittorn? Oh—the geneticist responsible for the uplift of the simps. I read about his suicide. I hadn't even realised he was still alive.”

“He went into hiding long ago, when the Pan's rights were recognised. He would have faced lawsuits otherwise.”

She folded up her sensor pack. “Medically you're doing as well as I expected—or as badly, depending how you look at it. But before I go back into the hibernaculum you
will
let me put you through a proper evaluation at Pasteur. And, Howard . . .”

“Yes?”

“You can't carry mankind on your shoulders, not forever.” She rapped her knuckles on his steel chest plate. “Even you aren't strong enough.”

“The ground's a little rougher here.” He reached out. “Take my hand.”

*  *  *  *

Once Hope had turned back, Falcon kept his counsel for much of the rest of that day's “walk.” The rover's occupants said little either, as if they were in awe of the man-engine making this remarkable trek. Pandit did steer him away from obvious obstacles, such as particularly deep craters punched into the flank of the volcano, but Falcon preferred to make his own decisions. It wasn't just pride; if the rover failed he might need to retrace this journey without support.

The unworthy resentment he so often felt in Hope's company soon wore off. And as Falcon ascended in silence, up into the thinning air and deepening blue of the Martian sky, he found his soul opening up to the calm experience.

Despite Hope's company for those first few hours, they had travelled almost a hundred kilometres when Pandit called a halt for the night.

At the rest stop, Falcon glanced around. Here he was a third of the way up this greatest of all volcanoes, but the scale was simply too vast for him to be able to see anything more than a fraction of Olympus's own great flank. Even the ground's gentle slope wasn't apparent. And as the western sky displayed a convincing sunset through thickening cloud, it was as if he was in a high desert somewhere—the
altiplano
of South America, perhaps.

“I see we left the oak trees behind.”

“And the pines and the grasses, yes, sir,” Jeffrey called from the rover. “We're already pretty high—ten kilometres above the planetary mean—the atmosphere's scale height is around eleven klicks, so the air pressure is already less than half what it was at ground level. You'll find some lichen and mosses up here, but little else, not yet.”

Olympus, with the group of mighty volcanoes of which it was a part, sat in Tharsis Province, an immense bulge in the Martian crust that would
always push out of the atmosphere, no matter how thick the air became in the future. How strange a fully terraformed Mars would look, Falcon thought: a Moon-like landscape of craters and canyons and volcanoes that stuck out into space, in an eye-blink of geological time studded with blue lakes and scraps of green forest . . .

“Any reason we stopped just here?”

“Actually, yes, sir. If you look to your right, a little way off the trail . . .”

It was a monument, a chunk of basalt evidently carved from the deep flank of Olympus and neatly etched, presumably by laser. It was little more than a metre high.

Falcon had to lean over to read it. “I'm not too good at bending down,” he told Jeffrey. “Miracle of Victorian engineering that I am. Couldn't they have made this a little taller?”

“Ah, but it's not intended for you, sir. The government committee who set this up expressed the hope that more of his kind would some day come this way: a new generation, so to speak. It's meant for them.”

“
His
kind?”

“See for yourself, sir.”

And Falcon saw the inscription. This was a gravestone. Buried here was Eshu 2512a, born Hellas AFF 526, AD 2512; died Port Lowell AFF 555, AD 2541.

“A superchimp.”

“I thought you'd like to see this, given your own connection with the Pans. It's all part of your legend. I mean—”

“It's okay, Jeffrey. I'm a crumbling monument too, I know. So he was the last of them.”

“Yes, sir . . .”

Falcon had looked up the story of the simps when he'd learned of the death of Bittorn. In retrospect the establishment of an independent simp nation in the African forest, one of the first actions of the new World Government back in the twenty-first century, had been the high water mark in the saga of the Pan. After only a few generations, they had started to decline in numbers. The causes were believed to be genetic: relics of
clumsy meddling by Bittorn and others that had been intended to make the simps less vulnerable to the effects of low or zero gravity—or even high gravity—such as bone mass loss and fluid balance problems. The simps, agile, strong and good climbers, had been found to be useful ­workers offworld, and such improvements had seemed commercially astute at the time. More devastating had been the fragmenting of the intellectual capacity of successive generations, as Bittorn's hasty neural ­rewiring had unravelled.

In their last days there had been a generous gesture by the Martian government to offer to host as many of the surviving simps as chose to come in a specially constructed independent compound in the Hellas basin, the lowest point on Mars; perhaps Mars's one-third gravity would be more conducive to the simps' clumsily modified anatomies than either of the extremes of Earth's full gravity or the microgravity of space. The colony had never exactly flourished, but it had survived for a few generations.

“But now it's all over,” Falcon said.

“My mother brought me up here to see this, sir. She remembered Eshu before he died.”

“So why a monument on Olympus?”

“Eshu was alone in the last few years. The last of the Pan. And he tried to do things no other Pan had ever achieved, just to say his species had made it. Walking up Olympus was one of them. Hence this marker.”

“That's a classy touch: a bucket list for a whole race.”

“I just hope that humans behave as well as the Pan, if the Jupiter Ulti­matum is fulfilled.”

Falcon had nothing to say to that.

“One more thing, Commander. The simp monument contains some individual messages. Particular individuals to whom the simps felt they owed a debt. Might be worth checking, sir. For you, I mean.”

“Hmm.” Falcon thought back to the crash of the
Queen Elizabeth IV
, a grace note that had itself passed into legend—and which, sometimes, he barely remembered himself, or, like a story told and retold, it was as if it had happened to someone else—but he had saved the life of one simp worker, at least. “An individual message?”

“You just have to touch the monument—it will sense the contact from your . . .”

“Hand,” Falcon said. He touched the chimp-height gravestone, his mechanical fingers resting on Olympus basalt. Details of cold and texture whispered through to him via the fingers' tactile receptors.

And the head and shoulders of a simp appeared in the Martian air, the hint of some kind of tunic below the neck. After all these years—these centuries—the face was unmistakeable to Falcon. This was Ham 2057a, once President of the Independent Pan Nation—and, it was said, having responded well to anti-senescence experiments, one of the longest-lived simps. “Commander Falcon.” His voice sounded clearly, inside Falcon's head, and Falcon wondered what technology was being used to project this illusion. Now Ham grinned. “Boss—boss—
go
!” And he winked.

With that, the projection was over. Falcon knew those words; they were the brusque command he had given that simp on the doomed
QE IV
. But . . .

“Since when the hell did simps wink?”

“Sir? Are you all right? . . . The sun's nearly gone. Will you be joining us in the rover for the night?”

Falcon straightened up stiffly, trying to focus on the here and now. “Listen, how many of you are there in there? Have you Mars boys ever heard of a game called poker . . . ?”

*  *  *  *

Later that night, on impulse, using the rover's facilities, Falcon looked up the name of that last Pan: Eshu. He found it was a Yoruba name for a god of West African myth.

A trickster god.

And he thought again of Ham, a message left in a monument to a supposedly extinct species, meant for Falcon personally. And he had
winked
.

Sometimes he wondered if anybody in his life had ever told him the straight truth.