The Medusa Chronicles (29 page)

49

As the post-operative confusion lifted, Falcon concluded that he felt no better or worse than he had done before the procedure. That was to be expected, he supposed. Tem had serviced him, taken care of the worst defects, but a more thorough overhaul would have to wait—if he ever got one at all.

After twenty-four hours, he was summoned for a briefing.

The Springer-Soames waited for him in the same treatment room where he had been brought to meet the Surgeon-Commander. Falcon was wheeled in, leaning slightly back, propped up in a support chassis. Other than his face and arms he was immobile, clamped to the chassis like a maximum-security prisoner.

Brother and sister faced him in fold-down chairs. Between them was a low table. Off to Falcon's right, the Surgeon-Commander was examining a scroll.

Jupiter was still framed in the wall screen.

“So,” Falcon asked, “who brought the grapes?”

The Springer-Soames just stared. “Are you delirious, Falcon?” asked Valentina, taking a sparing sip from a beaker on the table between her and her brother.

“He's no less sane than he ever was,” the Surgeon-Commander said. “I'm scanning his frontal and temporal lobes as we speak. Normal neural traffic across all nodes. He's entirely
compos mentis
. Aren't you, Commander Falcon?”

“If you say so, Surgeon-Commander Tem.”

“You did well to complete the work in the agreed time,” Valentina Atlanta said. “These days have been taxing for us all. Surgeon-Commander, we thank you for your loyalty and commitment.”

“I did what needed to be done. Falcon is yours now. Wind him up like a clockwork mouse and send him into Jupiter—”

“Leave us now,” Bodan said.

Surgeon-Commander Tem snapped shut the scroll. She gave a curt, oddly disrespectful bow, and exited the room.

Falcon said, “I like her. The bedside manner could use a little work, but other than that . . .”

“War will harden the best of us,” Valentina said. “With your help, though, it will soon be behind us.”

“If this super-weapon of yours actually works.”

“Oh, it works,” Bodan said. “In fact, you'll have all the proof you need of that very shortly.” He lifted a wrist to study an elaborate, multi-dialled watch. “As it turns out, the timing couldn't be better. The engine has just been brought to full power. We should experience the effects within a few seconds . . .”

Falcon
felt
it. A rising tectonic rumble, a shift in the local gravitational field, a tiny but detectable tilt in the acceleration vector . . . Even fresh out of surgery, his old orientation skills had not left him.

And on the table, the water in the two glasses trembled, their surfaces beginning to shift from the horizontal. It was a small effect, but it was enough to make the point. The moon really was moving.

Valentina said. “The test is scheduled for thirty seconds. It should be ending about . . .”

“Now,” Bodan said triumphantly, as the tremors died and the water returned to its former equilibrium.

“You moved Io,” Falcon said, awed despite himself.

Valentina seemed unmoved. “Of course we did. But you need to understand
how
we moved Io. From understanding, belief follows. Did you ever study economics?”

Falcon shrugged. “There wasn't a lot of call for it in the middle ranks of the World Navy.”

“I only mention it by way of analogy. You saw the engine in the core of Io. Have you any idea how it operates?”

“Breakthrough physics? Don't brag. Just tell me.”

“Breakthrough physics . . . I suppose so. Our engine is a reactionless drive,” Bodan said. “I'm certain you're familiar with the broad concept?”

“A magic box that produces acceleration without thrust?”

“Something like that,” the brother replied.

“So much for Newton's third law.”

“The reason my brother asked about economics,” Valentina said with strained patience, “is that we use a kind of accounting trick to make our engine function. Or so the physicists explain it to us, by analogy.

“The engine—the Momentum Pump—‘swindles' a negligible amount of surplus momentum from
every
other particle in the universe. Some kind of quantum effect, they tell me. The engine accumulates all that momentum as if from nowhere. And in doing so it imparts a push to Io—a reactionless impulse! But there is no violation of Newton's laws. The rest of the universe twitches just enough to preserve the sanctity of the conservation of momentum, and Sir Isaac rests peaceful in his grave. But we move!”

“You've still gained kinetic energy from somewhere,” Falcon said.

The brother said, “Yes, the MP still requires energy to function—vast amounts of it. We bleed the core of Io for that. It's the momentum we . . . well, steal. Again, the books are balanced—locally and globally.”

“Local and global causes.” Memory stirred, belatedly, for Falcon.

“What?” Valentina asked.

“Never mind the economics crap. That's what you're talking about, isn't it? The behaviour of each particle is bound up with the large-scale structure of the universe. Local depends on global . . . Is this some kind of quantum Mach principle in action?”

The Springer-Soames exchanged a glance. “Why do you ask?”

“There was a Machine, working on the KBO flingers back in the twenty-­second century. He came up with a new formulation of physics, out in the dark, that his supervisors dutifully reported to the controlling authority. Never got a reply, as I recall. And is
this
the result? Is your silver bullet based on Machine science?” He laughed. “What an irony, if it is.”

Bodan was dismissive. “No Machine can be a physicist. A Machine is an abacus, its thoughts no more than the click-clack of beads on a wire. What it produces is ours, by definition: because
we
made
it
.”

“
His
name was 90,” Falcon said sternly. “And his life was thrown away needlessly.”

Bodan received this with a look of utter contempt.

The sister said, “I presume you don't doubt the veracity of what you experienced. Even in this brief demonstration we have already altered Io's orbit. Nothing now stands between us and—”

“If you have altered the orbit of a moon, the Machines will have noticed.”

“Let them,” the brother said, with a flick of his hand. “Let them speculate. Let them fear our capabilities. You may tell them as much or as little as you wish. It will only add credence to your ultimatum, Falcon.”

“An ultimatum? I thought this was to be a peace proposal.”

“Whatever you choose to call it,” Valentina said. “The treaty is going through last-minute revisions. You'll take it with you.”

Alarm bells rang for Falcon. “You want me to take something with me, physically? Can't you just squirt the text to them?”

“No,” she answered. “The Machines would be distrustful of any complex electronic transmission. They would assume that we had embedded logic bombs into its structure—recursive loops, destruct codes. A physical docu­ment actually affords greater trust and transparency.”

“And the chance to sneak some nasty nanotech into their midst, with me as the carrier pigeon?”

Bodan gave a look of distaste. “Such cynicism, Falcon.”

“Again, it wouldn't work,” Valentina said coolly. “Over the years, we have engaged in many levels of warfare. Always the Machines have devised
countermeasures—and, indeed, vice versa. No, we are beyond such gambits. Our overture is sincere. The document is a physical object, a solid core of tungsten, engraved with our terms.”

“And am I allowed a look at this hallowed item before I deliver it?”

“You couldn't begin to skim the tiniest fraction of its contents,” she said. “It is rather lengthy. You don't negotiate for control of the solar system without making sure the terms of surrender you demand are absolutely watertight, down to the last detail.”

“Sounds a thrilling read. But the terms don't really matter, do they? You're putting a loaded gun to their heads, whatever the details of the offer.”

Bodan smiled. “They are free to accept or reject our terms. If they accept, they will be subjugated and controlled. If they reject, they will be annihilated. At least that's clear—don't you think?”

Even if the Machines might have some kind of choice, Falcon realised, he himself had none. “When do I leave?”

Valentina smiled. “Two days.”

50

The deceleration mounted quickly as he hit atmosphere.

After the Memory Garden, and then the low gravity of Io, the force of the re-entry came as something of a shock. But Falcon knew that both his craft and his body were more than capable of enduring the stresses, hard as that was to believe as the force on him rose, climbing inexorably to ten gravities, more.

It was dawn on this part of Jupiter, the sun fat above a horizon of pink clouds. On the scale apprehended by Falcon's own senses, and those of his newly restored
Kon-Tiki
, nothing had changed since his first expedition into these clouds: the scale-height of the pressure, the length scale of temperature and pressure variations, all these parameters were unvarying. And since he could see no more than a few thousand kilometres in any direction, there was no sense of the planetary-scale modifications that were so humbling when seen from space. He was like an ant on the Plains of Nazca, crawling along, all unaware of the vast patterns all around him . . . And that thought gave him pause, for the Nazca lines, such a magni­ficent sight from a hot-air balloon, had, like so many other monuments, been destroyed in the Machines' transformation of the Earth.

All the same, no part of this oceanic atmosphere had been untouched
by the Machines' activities. Falcon felt no sense of homecoming. Jupiter was alien territory now, and all his past experience counted for nothing.

At last the deceleration force died away, and it was safe to deploy the drogues, and then the final balloon. The tiny asymptotic-drive engine in the gondola supplied more than enough power to keep the balloon inflated, his altitude stable—but for now Falcon allowed himself a steady descent, quickly passing through into the warming, thickening depths. The sun was a little higher now, flooding the cabin with golden light.

Falcon's entry point into Jupiter—insofar as it could be specified, given the lack of permanent landmarks in a fluid, dynamic environment—was close to the area where Ceto had died from her wounds. If there were still medusae in Jupiter, Falcon counted on the herds not having strayed too far from their former browsing zones. He wanted to see them one more time, for himself if no one else. As for the Machines, they could come and find
him—
that would be the easy part.

Slowly, the fine fretwork of the ammonia cirrus clouds above him became obscured by brown and salmon layers of intervening chemistry, the air stained a nicotine-coloured haze of complex carbon molecules. Soon it was warmer than a summer's day out there, and already the gondola was enduring more than ten atmospheres of pressure, the structure making slight creaking sounds as it absorbed the mounting forces. Falcon eyed the hull around him with a certain wariness, trusting that the
Kon-Tiki
's molecular-scale refurbishments had been as thorough as claimed.

A hundred kilometres deep. He had first encountered the mantas near this altitude—and sure enough it was not long before he spied a squadron of the dark, deltoid shapes, traversing the sheer side of a cloud bank not more than two hundred kilometres from him. A shiver of pure awe passed through him. Even after all this time, the wonder of that first encounter had not entirely abated. How little he had known! But, at the mercy of the winds, Falcon could not have followed the mantas even if he had wished, and he soon dipped below their graceful gliding. But he allowed himself a twinge of relief: whatever had become of Jupiter, at least part of the ecology was still functioning.

The descent continued. Meanwhile the gondola maintained its litany of grumbles and complaints, while the pressure and temperature readings on his control board twitched ever higher.

There
. The first distinct waxberg—a ropy, mountainous mass, veined in red and ochre, floating in the air. Two more below it, with tenuous connecting threads bridging the masses, rising up from the cloud level the Jovian meteorologists had labelled D.
Cloudy, with a chance of waxballs
, Falcon thought. And he wondered if there was anybody left alive who would pick up
that
reference, a much loved if elderly movie from the childhood of a ballooning-obsessed little boy.

Now, at the limit of his magnified vision, he made out scores more mantas, sculling around the floating food store with lazy undulations of their bodies—like a gathering of crows at dusk, he thought, another memory of England. Near the suspended cliffs, the mantas peeled away on individual feeding patterns, occasionally diving right through the barely-­substantial masses. Elsewhere, they dropped in and out of eerily regular formations, finding their places like well-drilled combat aircraft in chevrons and diamonds, some groups comprising hundreds of mantas. Those tight formations were something new, Falcon thought—a kind of emergent behaviour he had never witnessed before.

Where there were mantas, there would soon be medusae. The prospect lit a glow of anticipation in Falcon. He would rather the circumstances had been different, but still, here he was in Jupiter once more, still seeing things that were wondrous and fearful in equal measure. What a fine thing it was simply to be alive, to have survived all these troubled centuries—simply to be a creature with eyes to see, with a memory in which to hold the gift of experience . . .

And there were the medusae! Tawny ovals browsing a landscape of waxbergs sixty kilometres beneath the gondola. This was clinching proof of their survival, despite the large-scale alterations to Jupiter. There had been no hard proof even of that for centuries, not beyond the odd suggestive radar echo; the interior of Jupiter had slipped back to becoming almost as unknown as it had been before the first descent of the
Kon-Tiki
.
Falcon prepared to squirt a report back to Io. “Tell Doctor Tem that there is
still
life in Jupiter. And thank her for doing such a good job on her patient, despite everything.”

But even as he completed the report, he felt uneasy about what he saw.

He watched twenty or more medusae in that one grouping, eating their way through the waxberg as if they were excavators in an open-cast quarry, bulldozing grooves and spirals into the very bulk of the wax . . . There was something about that organised consumption that looked almost industrial. Too much so: just like the mantas, over-regimented. Herding behaviour was normal enough for the medusae—and Falcon had witnessed the medusae forcibly lined up to suffer the industrialised horror of New Nantucket—but this was something else. Nothing was coercing these medusa, nothing visible at least, but they were behaving exactly as if enslaved, mere components in a larger industrial enterprise.

Falcon focused his attention on a single medusa, cranking his magnifi­cation to the limit. The basic form was unchanged, immediately recognisable: a humped, lumpy, nimbus-like form with a forest of tentacles ­dangling from its underside. Nor was it in any sense distinct from the other ­creatures browsing the wax.

But there were unusual markings on the side. Falcon had been the first to witness the natural radio antennae that the medusae carried on their flanks—he had seen patterns like checkerboards—but now the patterns were different. They were much more complicated, more like some cryptic geometric encoding—or like a prime number factorisation expressed in black and white pixels, or a snapshot from a simulation of artificial life. And the patterns were changing—a rapid flicker, a new configuration appearing from one moment to the next. The process was captivating, almost hypnotic. Were radio waves being generated by these patterns, or had their function shifted to a purely visual display mode? He studied the console, trying to make sense of the readouts, pushing the patterns through hasty computer analyses, without coming to a conclusion.

He could only guess at the cause of what he was seeing.

The giant cloud formations visible from space alone proved that the
Machines were adjusting the Jovian environment on an immense scale—and any environment shaped its denizens, even as they shaped it. Perhaps it was no surprise to see these animals' strange new information-dense markings and behaviours given the new information-dense energy fields that must permeate Jupiter. It did mean, though, that nothing was as it had been when he first met the medusae—and, perhaps, never could be again, even if human and Machine alike tinkered no further.

All he had seen so far was surely only a side-effect of a grander engineering of Jupiter. It was that greater scale he must confront now. He wondered if he would return this way, if he would ever see the medusae, his old friends, again. But in a way it didn't matter. They had changed too much, while he had stayed still; he was no longer their concern.

He resumed his descent.