The Medusa Chronicles (23 page)

38

In the morning, the flank of Olympus sparkled with frost.

“Wow,” Falcon said, rolling back and forth over the thin rime. “Here's a sight John Young never dreamed of.”

“Yes, sir. We even get a little snow—I mean, water-ice snow, not the native dry-ice sort—but no rain yet, and no standing water. That will come. One day there will be glaciers in the Valles Marineris for the first time in billions of years . . . Umm, take care with your locomotion just here. There can be ice under the surface, and it can be treacherous.”

“Noted. So, you guys ready to roll . . . ?”

The second day of the climb was as dull and featureless as the first had been. The sky was undeniably beautiful, a blue of an exquisite shade Falcon had never seen on Earth, with high, icy clouds catching the light of the remote sun. But the ground was plain as ever, if not more so, with fresh craters more common at this elevation than skims of lichen or moss. It was as if he was climbing from Earth to Moon, Falcon mused.

As it turned out, the most spectacular sights came at the end of the day.

When they halted for the evening, Pandit emerged from the rover in what looked to Falcon like a bona fide pressure suit. “Just wanted to make sure you take a proper look at the sunset, Commander . . .”

The sun, visibly shrunken from its apparent diameter at Earth, seemed to be resting on the western horizon. Its low, reddened light swept across an Olympian flank of craters, gullies and scarred plains that showed precious few signs of the new life that was being laboriously cultivated here.

But it was not the ground Falcon was supposed to look at but the heavens. Pandit pointed, drawing Falcon's gaze. Falcon briefly wondered if Pandit wanted to show him the immense solar-collector mirrors that had been hung in orbit around Mars, to drive the terraforming programme—but it was not that.

There, clearly visible against a sky the colour of a deep bruise, was a great semicircle centred on the sun itself, with half its arc hidden beneath the horizon. Falcon tried to measure its scale against the apparent diameter of the sun: it might have been a hundred times the width. This was not a circle, a hoop, but a perspective of the vast sphere of Machines that enclosed the sun; the faint tracery of scattered sunlight was only really visible at the edge, where the optical thickness was greatest.

“The Host,” Falcon said grimly.

“Yes, sir.”

“A shell the size of the orbit of Mercury . . . What a spectacle. What an—obscenity. Is Venus visible yet?”

“It will be later, sir. You know, given the accounts of how the Machines took apart Mercury, many of us are puzzled that they haven't yet done the same to Venus.”

“Security have been keeping an eye on Venus. We send the odd daring close-in probe—we're not allowed to land, but much of the atmosphere is gone, and we can see the exposed surface. The Machines are there, working. Building . . . something. Structures whose purpose we can't identify. It seems they want to experiment, to see if an intact planetary-mass body could be useful to them after all. We forget sometimes how
young
they are . . .” Indeed it was less than five centuries since Falcon had stood on the deck of the USS
Shore
with Conseil, the comic serving-bot that had turned out to be the precursor to all of
this.
“To them a few centuries is as nothing.”

“But it's an eternity to us humans, sir. And we're only a little more than
halfway to the Jupiter Ultimatum date.” Pandit stared at the strange vista. He asked hesitantly, “What about people on Earth, sir? Do they, umm,
believe
the threat? I can tell you that day to day
we
don't give it a thought.”

Falcon smiled. “That's because you've got a world to build. You've something to
do
.” Which Falcon often envied as he rattled around in his cabin, trapped in the endless cycles of the spinning, orbiting Port Van Allen. “Oh, it's taken seriously on Earth now. It was the Little Ice Age that changed things, I guess. Even the Mercury war had been just a light show in the sky. Then the war came to Earth itself. At last serious long-term programmes were launched. Cultural treasures stashed off-planet—”

“I know. The Port Skia museum has a pretty impressive Leonardo collection.”

“But a great deal of digital treasure was lost in the Mnemosyne bombing back in '34 . . .” The Mnemosynes, taking their name from a goddess of memory, had argued that mankind's ability to deal with the terminal future of the Ultimatum was hampered by a clinging to the past—and that therefore the past should be sloughed off, abandoned. “You can't save everything, I guess.”

Pandit said, “There are rumours there have been negotiations about mass evacuations. Well, look at the Hellas basin, three thousand kilometres wide and nine deep, and predicted to have a breathable atmosphere well before Ultimatum Day. That would make for a pretty big refugee settle­ment.”

Or, Falcon thought more bleakly, a concentration camp.

The Martians had already been more than generous, it was generally thought. Hellas was littered with domes containing samples of Earth biomes, from the sub-Arctic tundra to the tropical rainforests. Attempts had even been made to reconstruct Aboriginal songlines in the Martian dust. But in historical terms Mars had barely won its independence from Earth, and unlike the Hermians, swarms of Terran migrants wouldn't be too welcome.

“Meanwhile,” he said, “Security is pressing for more extreme solutions.”

“Like the hibernacula?”

“That's one possibility. If we run out of refuges we may have to
store
whole populations.” The technology that Hope Dhoni was using to sleep-stalk Falcon across the centuries was in fact a spin-off of such last-resort studies. “Or a drastic reduction of numbers. If the population is virtually zero by Ultimatum Day, you see—”

“Those unborn can't be harmed. We have a
high
birth rate. We're trying to fill up an empty world. How strange that must be, culturally.”

“The steady pressure of the Ultimatum is making us a less human society, Jeffrey. Distorting us. Was Earth under the World Government ever a utopia? Well, the shadows are closing in. And it's going to get a lot worse before the Machines' work is done.”

Pandit, staring into the dying sun, seemed troubled. He was a thoughtful young human being, Falcon thought, Martian or not. Very carefully—a cybernetic limb and a delicate pressure suit made for a risky ­combination—Falcon patted Pandit's back. “Come on. Let's get back to the trailer. Time I took some more of your salary off you in the poker school . . .”

39

The final day was much as the first two had been, a patient, steady slog. But as they slowly approached their goal, Falcon's curiosity about what might be found on the summit of Olympus sharpened.

When they did breast the final rocky slope, Pandit, in his pressure suit, emerged to join Falcon, and they looked out in silence.

The caldera of Olympus Mons was a pit eighty kilometres across, a plain of nested volcanic vents: craters so huge that individually they would have been striking features, even if they had not been crammed together and lifted into the sky atop the solar system's largest mountain. Falcon, standing beside the rover, could see all the way to the caldera's far rim. The air was clear, the sky above a deep blue. This was as close to the pre-Eos Martian environment as still existed. Inevitably there were some conservatives who argued for erecting a dome over this tremendous basin and preserving it as an environmental museum of the old Mars, and standing here Falcon wasn't sure he disagreed.

But all of this was a mere backdrop to the human affairs of the day.

Falcon wasn't surprised to see a rover driving up the slope to meet them, unmarked, a clone of Pandit's. And as he followed the rover's trail back into the caldera, Falcon made out a small settlement, evidently temporary:
a handful of domes, a couple more rovers, a surface widely scuffed by tyres and boots—and, there, cupped in the craters, gantries, workshops, fuel stores, and the slim forms of rockets.

“Good grief,” Falcon said. “Just as the surveillance missions reported. They really did build Cape Canaveral on top of Olympus Mons.”

Pandit laughed. “More like Peenemunde, sir, if you want an even older reference. They're very much experimental here.”

The rover drew to a halt, and a figure in a pressure suit—a young woman, Falcon could see her face behind her visor—and a handful of others clambered out. Falcon didn't
think
these people were carrying weapons, but he felt uncomfortable having to bet his life on it.

“Welcome, Commander Falcon.”

“You're Melanie Springer-Soames, of course.”

“You recognise me from the mug shots Security no doubt hold on me.”

“Also from the leaping-gazelle logo on your helmet. And your reputation . . .” Springer-Soames was the product of two mighty dynasties, the heroic-explorer Springers and the presidential Churchill-Soames. Falcon had no doubt she would turn out to be the tough operator Planetary Security reported her to be. “You knew I was coming?”

She shrugged. “We do have spies.” She glanced at Pandit, who seemed uneasy—and Falcon immediately began to speculate
who
of the friendly poker school was the traitor. She said, “And I happen to know you were given a souvenir, the gift of an acorn, by your naive young friend here. Let me repeat the gesture.”

From a pocket on her outer suit layer, she produced a silver sphere the size of an apple, and handed it to Falcon. He hefted it; it felt heavy even in Mars's low gravity.

She said, “We call it an Acorn, too—and it's what this project is all about.”

Pandit said now, edgily, “Naive, am I? You must know that the Lowell administration has an embargo on weapons development—”

“Officially.”

Falcon said, “He's right, though. And now here you kids are, building a missile base one planet in from Jupiter itself.”

Springer-Soames stiffened. That word “kids” seemed to provoke her, as Falcon had hoped; to be contemptuous to the arrogant and ambitious was one way to make them open up.

“This is not a missile base,” she said now. “And we are not manufacturing weapons. Or at least, not weapons to be used to kill.” She indicated the metal sphere he held. “
That
is a weapon of a metaphorical kind that will win mankind—not the worlds of the solar system—the stars.”

And Falcon looked down at the “Acorn” with new respect.

*  *  *  *

Melanie Springer-Soames walked the visitors around the launch site. Falcon, always a technology buff, was fascinated.

The scheme was simple in principle, challenging technically.

“Those slim ships are fusion rockets, Commander. They're sufficient to get off Mars and out to the Oort Cloud, at high speed. The Machines may try to stop us; we're confident they won't get them all. Out in the Cloud we've already established a resource extraction operation; the ships will be refuelled with big, flimsy bags of comet ice and fusion fuel—”

“You're making starships,” Falcon guessed wildly.

“It will take centuries, but that's where we're going. We aim to hit every remotely habitable exoplanet within reach, as long as we're capable of continuing the programme. And the payload . . .” She gestured. “You're holding it. One Acorn per world would be sufficient, theoretically. We'll send two or three to each target for redundancy. Acorns planted on new worlds.”

Falcon started to see it. “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

“That's the idea. An oak tree, you see, is a machine created by acorns for the purpose of making more acorns, constructed from local resources, the soil, the air. Commander, each of
our
Acorns is crammed with data. The heart of it is a nugget of engineered carbon: a bit of stolen Machine technology actually, a product of their deep mining of Jupiter. The information density is somewhere between that of human DNA and nano-engraved diamond. One gram of it would be enough to store all of human culture. A lot
less
than one gram is enough to store the DNA definition of a human.”

“So that's it,” Pandit said. “You could ‘store' the blueprints for millions of people in there. And I guess these little Acorns are like Machine assemblers. You will grow humans, manufacture their bodies and whatever support systems they need from the resources of the target planet.” He grinned, despite himself. “That's outrageous.”

Springer-Soames grinned back. “It takes twenty years for an acorn to grow an oak tree mature enough to make more acorns. We figure we can match that: from an Acorn landing to a baby's wail, in twenty years or less. You see, Commander? Maybe we're going to lose the solar system. But we aren't prepared to concede the stars—and
this
is a way of blindsiding the Machines. When they do get out there eventually, they'll find humans, ready and waiting for them.”

“Your ancestors would be impressed,” Falcon said. “All the Springers, even the ones I never got to argue with.”

“Maybe so,” she said more coldly. “The immediate issue is, what are you going to do about it? You, an agent of Planetary Security.”

Falcon winced at that, but he couldn't deny it was
de facto
true. “I take it you want a resolution to the legal challenges you face. If not, you wouldn't have allowed me up here.”

She nodded grudgingly. “That's true. We don't need any help, but we'd rather proceed without threat of interference. My family has known you a long time, Commander. You have your limitations, but you do have integrity.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly. “But why be so secretive in the first place? Why didn't you work through the authorities?”

She laughed. “Why do you think? Because the World Government, under the pressure of the Machine Ultimatum, is slowly but surely turning into one of the most repressive regimes in human history. Security would have quietly spoken to Port Lowell, and we would have been stopped, simple as that.
That's
why we went dark.”

“But you can't be stopped now, can you?” Falcon said, almost sadly. “Not if you've already fired your first few missions.”

“Exactly. So we've won already.”

“It's not a game,” he said sternly. “And while the World Government isn't perfect, it's not evil either.” He made to rub his cheek, a gesture that was a vestige of his more human days; the young people around him watched curiously, and, self-conscious, he dropped his hand. He said, “I wouldn't be surprised if some think tank somewhere inside the administration hadn't already proposed doing exactly what you're undertaking. As you say it does achieve long-term goals—it could secure the future of humanity.”

“Then why haven't they done it already?”

He sighed. “For ethical reasons alone, I should think. You speak of using local resources on those remote planets to make humans. What about any creatures who are
already
dependent on those resources? We like to think it's a long time since humans were prepared to despoil living worlds for our own benefit.”

“These are desperate times—”

“Not that desperate.” He hefted the silver sphere in his hand. “Look, I'm not going to stop you. I don't suppose I could, and the cat is out of the bag already. But I want you to come with me and report what you've done—talk it through with the Extraplanetary Ethics Bureau.”

“A Terran hot-air factory,” Springer-Soames grumbled. “I prefer action.”

“I know you do,” Falcon said with a smile. “All you Springers are the same. I met Matt, remember?”

“But that's the deal?”

“That's the deal.”

She looked up at the sky. “This is all about what they used to call the First Contact directives, isn't it? That some day we will be judged by a higher intelligence. Do you really take that seriously, Commander?”

“Well, I knew the philosopher who drafted those directives. And . . .”

And he thought of
Howard Falcon Junior.
There had been more of those enigmatic entities, replicas of the Orpheus that had been lost in the heart of Jupiter—and yet, over the decades, glimpsed in the scattered ruins of Mercury, on the churned-up Machine-held Moon, in the depths of space . . . Even Machines had made such sightings—so he had learned
from a leaky section of Planetary Security, who had ways of knowing such things. No human knew what this could mean, how it could be happening, and nor could any Machine, Falcon was prepared to bet. One had even been observed from Port Van Allen, hanging in space above the planet Earth with all its peoples, like a glittering toy . . .

“Yes, I do take the First Contact directives seriously,” Falcon said simply. “Okay, enough business. Are you going to show me your rocket ships?”

Talking, gesturing, they walked down the shallowing slope towards the brilliantly lit domes clustered deep in the caldera.

*  *  *  *

When Howard Falcon visited Mars, it was little more than halfway between the delivery of Adam's Jupiter Ultimatum and its completion date. His mission completed, once more he returned to his orbital shell of isolation, contemplation and communication.

And as the Ultimatum date approached, when he looked back, Falcon was astonished how quickly the remaining time had fallen away. Five hundred years, gone like a fleeting dream.
You really are getting old, Falcon.