The Medusa Chronicles (27 page)

45

Although Falcon had hidden away since Ultimatum Day, he had watched history unfold.

In the decades of ragged interplanetary warfare that had followed the loss of Earth—and building on the legacy of President Amanda IV, the last legitimate ruler of the crumbling world state—the hereditary Springer-Soames administration, far from collapsing in the wake of the loss of Earth itself, had presented itself as the last-ditch saviour of humanity, the final bastion against the Machines: a necessary good, the harshness of its regime mandated by the exigency of the situation. Military law was now dominant. The news channels were full of propaganda, reports of human victories, human technical achievements, human scientific breakthroughs. There was a pattern to it all, Falcon had soon recognised. The end of the war was always
just
out of reach—just one last push, one last concerted effort away.

And in the face of this constant state of near-triumph, even minor dissent had become treasonable. The news also carried reports of arrests, detentions, tribunals, executions. Functionaries and bureaucrats were routinely imprisoned and terminated for various failings and ­under-achievements. “Machine-sympathisers” were rooted out and exposed as traitors against the human species.

A few years back there had even been talk of a “failed overthrow of the government by anti-democratic elements.” Somewhere out there, it was rumoured, was a figure masterminding such coup attempts—a shadowy individual known only as
Boss
. The name was barely acknowledged, no more than a rumour. The official line was that Boss was a figment, a figurehead without substance. Yet the protest persisted.

Meanwhile Falcon had watched the ghastly transformation of Earth. The planet, once a blue pearl, now glowed red—like Venus, like the Moon, worlds that the Machines had also taken. Falcon imagined experiments in tectonic engineering, in mining the worlds' deep cores; Earth had become an infernal factory surrounded by clouds of Machine ships. Nothing living could have survived, not so much as a single extremophile cell.

But more recently, even if distracted by the anguish of Earth, no one could escape noticing the ominous alterations to Jupiter.

Despite the Host around the sun, despite their occupation of Earth and Moon, the giant planet with its tremendous resources was still where most of the Machines were concentrated. But for a long time no one could tell what the Machines were up to down there. There had been little reliable data. Probes were repelled or destroyed, and sensors could only probe so deep now; they were rebuffed by an artificial scattering surface, like a radio mirror a few hundred kilometres down. Clearly the Machines were engaged in deep-level engineering of the Jovian interior. There was some evidence of that visible from space—odd anomalies in the cloud patterns and their chemistry—but no one could be sure what it entailed.

On one level
, Falcon thought,
I wouldn't mind seeing what it's like down there now—and what, if anything, has become of the daughters of Ceto . . .
But on another, the idea of returning to a Machine-held Jupiter sent a stab of pure terror through his soul.

Sometimes he thought of the revenants, as he considered them, the mysterious avatars of Orpheus—
Howard Falcon Junior
—that had been glimpsed throughout the war, this age of the anguish of worlds, one glimpsed even by himself. Were
they
still watching? What did the eyes behind those enigmatic witnesses make of the tyrannical worlds, the
endless conflict? But if they were still observed, Falcon saw no reports of it.

And he feared for mankind, caught between the Machines and the likes of the Springer-Soames, who were empowered by the unending war.

*  *  *  *

They walked back into the main chamber of the Memory Garden, Valentina leading Falcon, her brother following and the guards bringing up the rear, their armour grotesque, out-of-place intrusions in the memorial.

Valentina, apparently faintly curious as she looked around, sneered. “Nothing but a monument to nostalgia. You know, brother, the Machines did us a singular favour when they destroyed Earth. They removed the last shred of sentiment from our considerations. Now we'll do anything, consider anything—sacrifice anything—if it means victory.”

“Fine words,” Falcon said. “I'm not sure they'll mean much to the Machines.”

Bodan asked, “And if I told you we had the means to win the war tomorrow?”

“I'd say you're a liar.”

Valentina stopped at a rockery, waving her hand at the nearest slab to bring it to life. Hope Dhoni's face appeared and began speaking, but Valen­tina only listened to a few words before turning away dismissively and walking on. “He's telling the truth. But the cost is unacceptable,” she said.

“The human solar system economy has been on a war footing for centuries,” Falcon responded. “People have had to accept evacuation to the clouds of Saturn, totalitarian rule, conscription on all the human worlds, on Mars and Titan and Triton. The Jupiter moons are little but fortresses. Hard times for all, except for the cream on top. How much worse can it get for the ordinary masses?”

“She didn't mean a cost to people,” Bodan said carefully. “She meant,
to the Jovians
. The native organisms of Jupiter, which will be the battleground. Your precious medusae, Falcon.” He stooped, picked up one of the soil-smeared stones bordering the path, and turned it this way and that in his glove before replacing it with faint distaste.

Valentina said, as they moved on, “We have a way to take the war to Jupiter. To the Machines' installations there. Our intervention could wipe them out totally. Unfortunately—”

“The medusae.”

“Quite. The action would also eliminate the Jovian ecology.”

“You'd never go that far.”

They reached the centrepiece of the garden, the oak tree. Falcon had planted it himself—after much careful cryogenic preservation, using the very acorn Citizen Second Grade Jeffrey Pandit had gifted him on Mars almost three hundred years ago. The oak itself was now into the second half of its first century, and mature enough to produce seeds of its own. That little acorn had turned out to be one of the most precious gifts Falcon had ever received.

“We would,” Bodan said evenly. “That's the hard part, though—proving our determination.”

Falcon, alone for so long in this place, felt as if he were in some ghastly nightmare. He struggled to think through the consequences of what they were saying. “Which is where I come in?”

“We think you may still have some usefulness,” Valentina said. “As unsuccessful as your previous involvement has been, you have been bound up in the destiny of the Machines since their origins. And, who knows? Things might have been even worse without you.”

“Thanks,” Falcon said dryly.

“Come with us. Back to Jupiter space. Back to Io, in fact—the front line. We'll convince you that we have the means to end the war. All you have to do is bring the Machines around to that view. Take the
Kon-Tiki
! We've had the gondola refurbished, after that little adventure of yours on Earth—made it much stronger and more capable. One last grand gesture—one last chance to prove your loyalty to us, rather than the Machines.”

“You don't understand my position at all, do you? My loyalty isn't to people or Machines. It's not some binary choice. It's to what we could be together, not what we are separately—”

“You might think about your own interests also,” Bodan said, ignoring
him. “You've put a lot of work into this Memory Garden. Decades of soli­tary dedication. A shrine to the woman who gave you back your life. In fact
you
were Hope Dhoni's life's work. Would she want you to just crumble away in this hole in the sky?”

“Hope's dead, as you reminded me. I can't speak for her.”

Valentina shrugged. “Then maybe you should think about your own interest.” She slipped the scroll from her pouch and tugged it open again. “Since we boarded, our security operatives have been running a full-body scan on your systems, Howard. Shall we look at the evidence?”

She took one end of the scroll and allowed Bodan to hold the other, tilting it around for Falcon's benefit. It was a sort of ghostly blueprint of himself, crudely assembled from scans of varying resolution and penetration. He studied it impassively; he was long past the point where he was capable of being repulsed by his own physical nature.

“These pink areas,” Valentina said, scratching a finger around the scroll. “They're places where our analysis has detected compromised functioning—a failure of either machine systems or the progressive breakdown of your remaining biological material. There's a
lot
of pink, wouldn't you agree?” She eyed him. “And even if we didn't have the scans—frankly, Commander, you're slow, you smell of burning, and you make grinding noises when you move. You belong in a museum.”

“That's meant to persuade me?”

“We have good medical resources these days: one of the side-effects of centuries of war. Come to Io, and you'll receive the best care we can offer. An overhaul, a new lease on life.”

Falcon grunted. “Believe it or not, this isn't the first time medical treatment has been used as a lever against me. You two clowns aren't even origi­nal. And what's my reward, I get to watch you murder Jupiter?”

“If you can convince the Machines we mean it, you can stop the war,” Valentina said. “Isn't that what you want? But time is of the essence. You'd need to come immediately.”

Falcon eyed the oak tree. “I can't abandon all this.”

“You could be back here in a short while,” Bodan said soothingly. “Secure
in the knowledge that you've brokered peace. In the meantime we'll drop auto-sentry drones as guards. The biome itself won't come to any harm over a few weeks or months, will it?”

“What do you know about Memory Gardens?”

The brother smiled stiffly. “Only what's in the records. What was the intention—that people would come here to learn about Doctor Dhoni?”

“Not specifically. There are millions of other Memory Gardens out here, drifting through Trans-Neptunian space. You don't go looking for one specific individual. You visit each garden for its own unique quality, and along the way you learn a little of the life of someone now dead.”

Valentina frowned. “The dead are dead. What's the benefit?”

Falcon said, “If you can't see that, I can't tell you.”

Valentina shrugged. She closed the scroll and returned it to her suit.

Falcon sighed. “I have no choice, do I?”

“You have every choice,” Bodan said.

“No, I don't. Not because of your bribes, or your grandiose martial logic. The medusae are at stake. So are the Machines, for that matter. That's why I have to come with you.”

“We know.” Valentina smiled.

46

They allowed Falcon six hours to complete basic housekeeping procedures on the worldlet, doing his best to put it into a state of ­semi-hibernation. One last roam of the pathways, one last chance to take in the work of half a century. And one by one he commanded the identity slabs to dormancy. He believed Hope would have forgiven him, under the circumstances.

Once he was aboard the Springers' ship, Falcon moved to a porthole for the departure. He had not seen the worldlet from the outside since his own arrival, but very little had changed, compared to the transformation he had wrought on the interior. It was nothing but a dirty, off-white spheroid of mixed ice and rubble, glued into stability with a spray-on membrane of plastic, peppered here and there with windows, docking ports, antennae and radiators. In the reaches of the outer solar system there were more icy objects, it was said, than human beings who had ever lived. In better times people would have made homes among these little worlds. As it was, there were enough of them to provide a unique memorial to every individual who ever breathed. The catch was that the creation and curating of the Memory Gardens required years of loving devotion by the friends and family of the deceased.

A Memory Garden was a project suited to an era of long lifespans—which, in Falcon's experience, felt more like an era of extended old age—and to an era of displacement, when the surviving Earthborn sought compensation for the loss of their world, of the ancestral soil in which they had buried their dead. But the unremembered dead would always outnumber those commemorated.

The asymptotic drive phased in, its acceleration as smooth and effortless as a rising elevator, and the ship quickly receded from the Memory Garden. Falcon followed the garden until it had diminished even in the augmented acuity of his eyes.

Then two pulses of light bracketed the worldlet.

An instant later, between those two pulses, a white radiance bloomed and swelled.

The flash abated in a moment. All that was left was a slowly spreading milkiness, a nebula the colour of dirty snow.

For a few seconds Falcon refused to believe what he was seeing. Then, as the truth of it became clear, an almost physical wave of shock and disgust passed through him.

“It was necessary.” Valentina joined him at the porthole, with one of the guards just behind her.

Falcon controlled himself, knowing that to strike out would be to guarantee his own immediate destruction. “You—eliminated her. All that was left of Hope. Why? What possible justification—”

“It was partly a demonstration of our indifference to you,” she said. “Your feelings mean nothing to us, you see. We would have said anything it took to get you aboard this ship—even the truth, if it had been useful. You are a component, nothing more.”

“
Partly
. What else?”

“We need you to understand our ruthlessness. Our lack of sentimentality.” A dark, almost religious fervour had entered her voice. “Our willing­ness to act with absolute, unflinching determination. You must believe it, you see, Falcon, believe it in the very core of your being. Because if you do, then there's a small chance you can persuade the Machines as
well—convince them that we really
will
destroy the entire Jovian ecology in order to stop them. They trust you, Falcon. At least to some extent. That's always been your greatest strength—your greatest utility. But don't flatter yourself that it makes you indispensable.” She patted the hard casing of his shoulder. “Enjoy the rest of your trip.”