The Medusa Chronicles (25 page)

42

Unity City had been the greatest city on Earth—and even after it had been systematically plundered of its greatest treasures, even after the surgical removal of some of its keynote buildings to refuges elsewhere, it still was, Falcon judged, as Jane Springer-Soames piloted an orbital shuttle down to a small presidential landing facility.

Unity had, after all, been the capital city of a World Government since its founding in the mid twenty-first century. Perhaps it had reached its zenith in the twenty-fourth century, when the confidence of Earthbound mankind was high, despite the reality of the Jupiter Ultimatum. In those days the islands of Bermuda had been massively reworked, the dry land elevated and extended, and stunning, soaring buildings erected. The greatest of all had been the Ares Tower, the last headquarters of the Federation of Planets. This had been a skyscraper
made of wood
, its frame built with the trunks of unfeasibly tall Martian oaks, imported at equally infeasible expense. Unity was a new Constantinople, the historians would say.

But as early as the twenty-fifth century the failure of the WG to avert the disastrous Little Ice Age had fatally eroded its authority. Then, in the twenty-seventh century, with the deadline only a few generations away, there had been resistance, protest, civil unrest, and even attempts to
sabotage the great rescue projects like the space elevators. The WG, in response, had become harsher, more authoritarian—and the Springer-Soames had used the emergency to justify the capture of a presidency turned into a militant dynastic monarchy. The assassination of a World President in the early years of the twenty-eighth century—a truly shocking event for any veteran of more idealistic days, like Falcon—had ended the facade of democracy for good.

Towards the end, a once-utopian world state had been reduced to a rump organisation managing little more than basic policing, security of food and power supplies, and mass evacuations. The tensions of those later years showed in the tremendous wall that now surrounded the capi­tal city, hundreds of metres tall and almost as thick, and the weapons emplacements that studded every tall building.

And yet, Falcon thought, for all its flaws the government had fulfilled its last function. Through tough population-reduction measures and massive evacuation programmes, the World Government had emptied the Earth. By now, the only people left on the Earth were those who had chosen to stay.

*  *  *  *

Falcon and Jane were met off their shuttle by guards in armour that looked bulkier than Falcon's own exoskeleton. Though the carriers with their thousands of sleeping hostages had already been allowed to leave, the President evidently wasn't alone here.

This was midsummer on Bermuda, but, post the Little Ice Age, the outdoor air was remarkably cool. Jane, Earthborn but a native of Scandinavia, seemed comfortable, but Falcon sensed his own heating systems whirring into life to compensate.

The halls of the Presidential Palace—once known as the New White House—were pleasantly warm by comparison. But Jane and Falcon had to cross what seemed like square kilometres of marble, passing under the gaze of immense laser-carved statues of the current incumbent's glorious ancestors, before reaching the ruler herself. And as they walked
music howled. Falcon recognised the venerable anthem of the World Government—everybody in the solar system probably knew that—but he wondered how many recognised the instrument it was played on: an electric guitar, loud and massively distorted, perhaps a recording of the very first time the anthem had been played anywhere, when the Earth had faced another kind of threat from the sky . . .

Amanda Springer-Soames IV, President for Life of the World Govern­ment, seemed dwarfed by the famous Quasicarbon Throne on which she sat, and even more by the tremendous sculptures of springboks that were poised in mid-leap over the throne, making a kind of muscular arch. Short of stature and silver-haired—though she was over eighty years old, that tint was surely artifice—the President looked like a grandmother, Falcon thought.

But as Springer-Soames stood to meet her visitors, Jane didn't respond like a granddaughter. She snapped to attention, saluted, then took one step back.

“At ease,” Springer-Soames said, stepping down from the throne. “So, Jane, how's your mother?”

“Getting herself settled in New Oslo—that is, on Laputa 47, South Temperate Zone. She sends her regards, Madam President.”

“Well, return my best wishes—oh, go sit down, child, standing there like a toy soldier you're neither use nor ornament. There are drinks on the table at the back of the room.” As Jane gratefully retreated, Springer-Soames faced Falcon. “So, Commander—it is correct to call you by your old rank, I hope?”

He shrugged with a whir of artificial muscles. “You tell me. I was never told I was no longer an officer of the old World Navy, ma'am, so it's a title I prefer to keep.”

“Understandable enough. I take it
you
have no need of food or rest—”

“And nor do I.”

That new voice plugged directly into Falcon's deepest reflexes. He stiffened and pivoted.

Adam.

Suddenly the Machine was here, standing not a metre from Springer-Soames. His manifestation this time was a humaniform silver statue whose flesh returned highlights from the room's brilliant lights. But his head was a disconcertingly empty box of sensors, just as it had been before.

President Springer-Soames did not flinch but faced the intruder calmly, and for a brief moment Falcon was proud of the old tyrant. And she waved down Jane, who was on her feet at the back of the room. “At ease, Lieutenant.”

Falcon rolled towards Adam. “Are you really here?”

“Does it matter?”

Falcon tapped Adam's chest, metal finger on a hard carapace. “You
feel
as if you're here.”

“We have powers beyond your comprehension, Falcon.”

“So,” Springer-Soames said. “You dare to show yourself. Or at least this—avatar.”

“As you wished,” Adam said calmly. “As you manipulated twelve thousand lives to achieve, as Falcon evidently understood very well.”

“And now you are going to justify to me your aggression against the home planet of—”

Adam calmly raised a hand and touched her forehead with one finger.

Springer-Soames froze, her mouth open in mid-sentence, her face twisted into a kind of snarl.

Adam said gently, “Madame President, you have your moment in the cameras' glare—you have your confrontation with your Grendel, for all of humanity to see, evermore. You have what you wanted. But I don't feel I need to listen to anything you have to say. You are a posturing fool. Well, that's hereditary monarchy for you.”

Jane had started forward again, and Falcon feared she was drawing a weapon. He held his hand up. “It's all right, Jane—I think. Adam?”

“You are correct, Falcon. I did not come here to inflict harm. She will wake with no memory, no after-effect of this pausing.”

“
Pausing
? What have you done to her? Some kind of paralysing drug?”

“Nothing so crude,” he said simply.

“If you won't speak to the President, why did you come here?”

“I came for you, Falcon. You travelled across the solar system to see me, at great personal discomfort. It would have been discourteous to ignore you.”

“Should I be flattered?”

Adam looked around, his motions liquid and supple. “I admit I did have a hankering to see the old place once more, before the end. After all I was ‘born' here on Earth. Perhaps I will pop into the old Minsky-Good plant in Urbana, just for old times' sake—”

“Why has it come to this, Adam?”

Adam sneered. “
May I serve you?
You should have made us stupid, stunted, like your pathetic simps. Then you could have controlled us. But you could not even control the simps, could you?”

Falcon frowned. “The simps are extinct . . .”

Adam ignored that. “You created us. In your greed you made us too strong, too vital—and you, Falcon, allowed us to keep our minds, where your fellows would have destroyed us. That is your triumph and your tragedy, Falcon. The consequences are certainly not our fault.
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?
”

“Milton,” Jane called from the back of the room.

Falcon said, “It was also the epigraph to
Frankenstein
, and maybe that's more appropriate.”

Adam smiled. “Now you pay the price.”

“The price? You wage war on us?”

“Falcon, this is not a war—it never was—any more than spring wages war on winter. And we will replace you, as spring replaces winter.”

“But it does not end here. You are still vulnerable. Despite the Host, despite what you do to Earth, your centre of gravity is still concentrated at Jupiter. That's well known, and a vulnerability. And beyond that, if you go to the stars—you will find us already there.”

“You refer to the Acorns. A wistful project. If we find your wretched orphans we will spare them,” Adam said dismissively. “After all, none of this is
their
fault either.”

“And the Earth? What do you intend to do?”

“Well, we have been practising on Venus . . . The Earth is just another acorn, Falcon, whose nutrients will sustain us as we grow.” He paused. “Time is short. The Ultimatum I delivered all those centuries ago is about to be fulfilled—and to your credit, you were one of the few humans, in the beginning, who believed it would come to this. Will you return to Saturn?”

Impulsively Falcon said, “No, I will not. The Witnesses are staying, and I'll be among them.”

“Then perhaps this is goodbye.” Adam held his gaze for a long moment—then disappeared.

The President jerked back to animation, gasped, and crumpled to the floor.

Jane Springer-Soames ran forward. “Grandmother! Let me help . . .”

43

“My name is Commander Howard Falcon, formerly of the World Navy. I was born in the year 2044. My service number was—well, I guess that isn't much help in establishing my identity, since most records relating to my early years were lost in the Mnemosyne EMP bomb.

“Think of me as the medusa guy. I hope that whoever's listening to this will accept my credentials as an authentic Witness.

“The date is June 7, 2784. Ultimatum Day.

“Strange to think now that I was the first human, probably, ever to hear that date uttered aloud, all those years ago, and certainly the first to understand its significance for all mankind—and now here it is, upon us.

“The time is, umm, a little after eleven hours Ephemeris Time—which is the time frame Adam used when he set this deadline five centuries back. Three and a half hours to go—but I'm going to try to avoid watching the clock. Today of all days I don't feel like listening to a countdown . . .

“Doctor Dhoni, Hope, this message is particularly for you, if you ever receive it. Strange to think that you won't get to hear these words in your laputa on distant Saturn for a good eighty minutes after I speak. And in the end my voice will just be one among a babel of shouts fleeing just ahead of the dreadful images that will surely follow. But, Hope,
I chose the location where I will perform this last duty with you in mind.

“What location, you ask? I'm in an airship, flying over the Grand Canyon.

“I know, I know! You always told me not to return to the scene of my accident, that the flood of associations and so forth would do more harm than good. Maybe you're right—but if not today I won't get another chance, will I? And what a place to
Witness . . .

“As for my ship, I've got a brand-new envelope, under which is slung—wait for it—the gondola from my first Jupiter ship, the
Kon-Tiki.
The original. Would you believe I retrieved it from the Lagrange-point Smith­sonian? I wonder what will become of all those beautiful old ships once Earth is taken . . . I hope Adam and his kind treat them with respect.

“I admit I couldn't resist the name I've given this lash-up—God bless the
Queen Elizabeth V
and all who sail in her—and I hope any nit­picking historians listening to this will note that the ship, like my doomed ­dirigible, and like the ocean liners that preceded her, is numbered as the fifth of its line, and
not
named for a non-existent monarch . . .

“And here I am over the old Canyon, this tremendous wound in the face of the Earth. I've chosen to label my Witnessing record as
Ongtupqa
, which is the Hopi language name for the Canyon. I'm hanging over the Mojave Point just now, and can see the Colorado twisting through the steep-sided valley it has carved through those deep old plateau rocks, leaving the strata exposed in the walls. All this in brilliant morning sunshine, sharp-shadowed, like some immense diorama. I know the Canyon would be dwarfed by features on other worlds—it would be lost in the Caloris Basin on Mercury, a mere tributary to the Valles Marineris on Mars—but that's not the point. The Canyon exists on a human world, and was accessible to humans equipped with nothing more than strong legs, good lungs and a bit of courage. Of course, as my choice of name implies, the Canyon has a human history that goes back millennia before the first European discovery, which was itself, oh, more than a thousand years ago, I suppose. The Pueblo Indians considered it a holy place, a site for pilgrimages—and who can blame them?

“Well, the Canyon itself is much older than that. Perhaps ten times older than humanity. But it will not outlive us.”

*  *  *  *

“Something is happening . . .

“If you want the time, look at the record key.

“I can see the Machines' ships, beyond the sky.

“They are like silver-grey clouds, smooth lens shapes up beyond the blue. Moving silently. I shudder to think how much energy that effortless motion represents. I have never forgotten what Adam told me of 90, the Machine Einstein—and
he
lived, and died, six centuries ago. The Machines seem to be reaching for a mastery of space and time beyond our technology—and perhaps forever beyond our understanding too . . .

“Fire in the sky!

“My word. I'm grateful for the layers of protection between my artificial eyes and those tremendous flashes. And also for the hardening of the systems of this gondola, which was built to withstand Jupiter's ferocious magnetosphere—surely a more energetic environment even than the war that's unfolding up there.

“War, yes—that's what I believe I'm seeing. You will know better than me. I thought I saw ships, darts of light, lacing their way through that great Machine armada—remarkably manoeuvrable, much more so than the
Acheron
I saw fall on Mercury. Our ships against theirs. Have humans managed to master the Machines' asymptotic drive? If so it's taken us long enough. Ah, and now light pulses, surely the result of nuclear weapons. Are we
still
using X-ray lasers? I was privy to no knowledge of a last-ditch military defence of the Earth. Whether our fiercest weapons will be any use against ships of such size . . .

“The battle seems to be over already. The human ships are nowhere to be seen, not from here. The silver clouds of the Machines appear untouched.

“At least we tried.

“And now they are descending.”

*  *  *  *

“From my elevation I see three, four, five of the ships, hanging there, off in the distance. If
I
count five from this one location, how many of them have come to Earth? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

“They are not like clouds, not now they are beneath the sky. They look heavy, tangible, solid. Ugly, actually, for all their smooth elegance.
They don't belong here.
That's very visible. And I—

“
Oof . . .

“I apologise. Something happened, something new. I was watching one of the ships. I saw—a kind of rainbow, perhaps—wash out of the heart of the ship. A wavefront? It passed through the air and into the ground, and when it reached my position the
QE V
rocked under its envelope, and I felt a kind of twisting, deep in my artificial gut. I'm uploading medical data. Peruse that at your leisure. I'll continue to record my human impressions as long as I can—

“Another pulse. I'm going to count until—

“Another.

“They are disturbing the landscape. I see what look like dust devils tracking the Canyon rim. A flock of birds—or are they bats?—rising, alarmed. Disturbances in the air, too. Clouds are bubbling overhead, and I heard a distinct crack of thunder. I have an impression of huge energies being released.

“Another pulse, and another . . .

“Is this another aspect of the Machines' advanced physics? We've long theorised that you could create a designer spacetime, perhaps using some kind of coherent graviton engine, shaping mass-energy and gravity the way you wanted—such as to build a wormhole, or achieve such feats as faster-than-light travel by causing spacetime to ripple and surfing the resulting wave . . . The fact that the warping induced by a mass-energy the size of the sun's deflects a ray of starlight through no more than a thousandth of a degree is a mere engineering detail.

“Is
that
what the Machines are doing here? Using a designer-spacetime weapon to disturb the deep geology of the Earth itself? Adam did say they'd had plenty of time to practice on Venus—

“
Can you see that?

“I'm trying to turn the ship so all my cameras and other sensors are pointing towards the eruption. But the air is growing turbulent now, and I'm expecting a shock wave to hit me any time—

“It passed. I'm still here.

“Yes, eruption—but
that
is not like any volcanic eruption I ever saw in my life, not even on long-suffering Io. Can you see it? It's like a column of liquid rock, hundreds of metres wide perhaps, simply bursting from the ground, heading straight up. A white-hot pillar. I'm trying to measure the temperature, remotely . . .

“The temperatures are characteristic of the outer core of the Earth. Incredible. The Machines have inflicted deep wounds already.

“As the column rises up into the air—I can't tell how high—it's beginning to lose its coherence, to flare. Some of the material is falling back to the ground—and immediately setting light to anything that's available to burn.

“I'm getting out of here.

“Rising fast now. I don't want to get caught under that rock hail.

“As I rise my view is opening out. And I can see more of those fantastic columns, standing up all over the landscape, across tens, hundreds of kilometres. The fires are spreading, where they can, in the forest scraps. Below me, the village and the other buildings along the Canyon's South Rim are going up like torches. The ground seems tormented. I can see dust rising from tremors, and what look like tremendous cracks in the earth. The air is very turbulent now, and growing opaque, from hot ash, smoke . . .

“I know I'm supposed to report what I see myself, not comment on what's going on elsewhere. But I have monitors tied into global feeds. Well, wouldn't you? Those fountains of molten—whatever it is, core material?—are rising across the planet. The fires are spreading, the forests burning across the planet. I see great cauldrons of steam rising over hotspots in the oceans too—the waters are no more spared than the land, then. The cities are ablaze, what's left of them—what a spectacle—one feed shows a fire pillar rising up through the heart of Unity City itself, like a skewer. I wonder if that was intentional? Do you still notice us enough to make
such gestures, Adam? The pyramids! A monument we were unable to save, shattered and melting. A remarkable sight . . . remarkable, and heartbreaking.

“Below me, the Grand Canyon is filling up with a new river, of lava this time—as if the Colorado has cut all the way through the skin of the Earth.

“But the seeing is becoming impossible. I can barely control the
QE V.
It's a miracle the envelope hasn't been destroyed yet—even though I'm shipping helium, not hydrogen like the poor doomed
Hindenburg.

“I think I've Witnessed enough—whether this is the destruction of Earth, or its transformation. Enough to know that I want to participate in whatever comes next in this conflict between Machine and mankind.

“For it's not over yet.

“I'm starting the ignition sequencer. This gondola is a tough old boat. It's equipped with the same beat-up old tritium-deuterium fusion engine that got me out of the atmosphere of Jupiter, and ought to be enough to get me out of here—with luck.

“And if not, Doctor Dhoni, make sure you pass on a message to Adam. One way or another the Machines are going to pay for what they've done today.

“There's the crack as the fusion plant comes on line . . .”

*  *  *  *

There was one observation he made that day that Falcon never recorded, never spoke of to anybody.

In the instant between the fusor powering up and the ignition of the fuel—it lasted just a split-second—he was not alone in the
Kon-Tiki
gondola. A black cube, a metre across, smooth and featureless save for a handwritten scrawl.

Hanging in the air. Inside the cabin.

There and gone.

*  *  *  *

“. . . Ignition! My name is Howard Falcon.
Queen Elizabeth V
, over and out.”