The Medusa Chronicles (8 page)

He grunted. “Of which you think I'm a representative example?”

“Don't underestimate yourself, Commander. You've done great things. Even greater achievements lie ahead of you, I'm sure of that. Oh, and one other thing—”

“Yes?”

“We're an influential arm of the World Government. Your cooperation with us wouldn't go unnoticed, or for that matter unrewarded. I'm confident you won't decline,” Kedar said firmly. “Because any man patient enough to sit through
this
infernal racket certainly isn't one to turn down a challenge.” She dipped a mitten into an outside pocket. “This is my card. Call me within five days. We're very keen to get moving on this.” She held the card in her mittened hand and let it go.

Falcon plucked it out of the air before it had a chance to fall more than five centimetres.

Kedar grinned. “You are just as I've heard. Be seeing you, Commander Falcon.”

*  *  *  *

So he'd got involved in a complex, difficult, yet hugely satisfying project. He'd since had many contacts with Machine Affairs, but he'd heard nothing more of Madri Kedar.

Until now, twenty-six years later, when she came to Makemake aboard that clumsily landed shuttle.

11

The meeting was held in a conference room in the lower levels of Trujillo.

He had been assigned a chairless space at the conference table. Falcon collapsed his undercarriage, moved forward slightly, settled his elbows onto the table and laced his hands. Opposite him sat Kedar and her two colleagues in the WG delegation. He scanned their nametags. Hope Dhoni was here, looking somewhat subdued, he thought.

From their points of view, he knew, in his present posture, he might almost have passed for an unaugmented person. Over his upper limbs and life-support system he wore a black zip-up tunic embroidered with the logos of Trujillo Base and Makemake. Above the tunic's neck, the leathery mask of his face had eyes, nose and mouth in approximately the right positions and proportions. Plastic gloves, sewn with a fine mesh of microsensors, a marvel of responsive feedback, made even his hands look almost real.

*  *  *  *

“So,” he said evenly. “What's this all about?”

“Thank you for agreeing to see us, Howard,” said Kedar. She had not aged much in twenty-six years—or perhaps Falcon was getting worse at
judging such things. “We all appreciate your cooperation in this matter. These are my associates on the Executive Council for Machine Affairs: Marzina Cegielski, Maurizio Gallo. I'm pleased to see you looking so well.” She looked at Hope. “Doctor Dhoni tells us you've made an excellent recovery from your latest set of enhancements.”

Falcon folded his mask of a face into a smile. “Hope's done her usual excellent work.”

“We would not have it any other way, Howard. You are very precious to us—quite literally irreplaceable.”

“Like an old Corvette, and about as up to date.”

He won a wan smile from Hope.

But Kedar's face tightened. “Levity, Commander Falcon? But make no mistake: none of this comes cheap, especially on a facility as isolated as Makemake.”

Falcon wondered why she felt it necessary to make that point. “It would have been less expensive if I'd been allowed to stay on Ceres.”

As he spoke he reached for the iced tea that had been served for the meeting. He allowed the back of his hand to rest near the chilled jug, absent-mindedly testing his ability to register cold across centimetres of air. He became aware of Hope watching him: not the time to run a system check. He poured himself a cup of the tea, sipped it, and raised it to Hope. He was rewarded with a wider smile.

“It was unfortunate that you had to be moved,” said the man, Maurizio Gallo. He was small but muscular, built like a wrestler. “But in the end, Makemake was an excellent choice.”

Marzina Cegielski said, “Public opinion being what it is . . .” She was about the same age as Gallo, but taller and more slender. “These are delicate times. There's a lot of anti-Machine sentiment in the air.” She glanced nervously at her colleagues. “You're not a Machine, of course.”

“Thanks.”

“But in the eyes of the public, or a section of them—”

“Let's cut to the chase, shall we? This is about your Kuiper Belt ice-­mining project.”

“No one else has your insight into the Machines,” Madri Kedar said. “You were there at the start of it all—your mentoring of the early prototype. And now we have a difficulty, one that you may be uniquely poised to resolve.”

“A difficulty?”

“There's been an incident—an industrial accident. Many Machines were caught up in it.” Kedar glanced down at her notes. “Some operational losses are to be expected—it's a harsh and unforgiving environment, mining the iceteroids. Ordinarily, we'd treat the destruction of Machine assets as a capital expenditure, no more than a budgetary problem. Such losses aren't unusual, or even that damaging. We might expect a temporary reduction in volatile throughput to the inner system, with a concomi­tant impact on the frost markets.”

“This time it's different,” Cegielski said.

Like it or not, they had his interest. Falcon toyed with the handle of his glass, pincering it delicately between fingers that could exert enough force to crush coal to diamond dust. “How so?”

“The unit you mentored,” Gallo said, “one of the high-autonomy supervisory robots. You called it Adam, didn't you?”

“Autonomous Deutsch-Turing Algorithmic-Heuristic Machine,” Falcon said. “I just took your description of the machine's design and architecture and came up with an acronym. You were free to choose differently if you didn't like it.”

“Oh, it suited us very well,” Kedar said. “
Adam.
The first of a new lineage.”

“And an appropriate choice for you, Commander,” Cegielski said, apparently interested. “I read your authorised biography on the flight over.”

“Not authorised by me—”

“It mentioned a toy robot with the same name. Hardly a coincidence?”

That personal intrusion jolted Falcon. He was aware of Hope avoiding his gaze. He snapped: “Tell me why Adam is any concern of mine now . . .” A disturbing thought struck him. “Was Adam hurt?”

Cegielski frowned slightly at his turn of phrase. “Not
damaged
, no. Telemetry says the unit was near the scene of the accident, but didn't suffer
any physical harm during the incident itself. But Adam isn't responding to our instructions or requests for more information.”

“A comms fault?”

“Not according to the telemetry,” Gallo said. “It all checks out. The only explanation is that the unit is deliberately ignoring us. That's absurd, of course . . .”

“Whatever's happened,” Kedar said, “it needs to be nipped in the bud. We rely on Adam and similar units to oversee the continued operation of the flingers and mass-concentrators. If this . . . glitch, whatever it is—if it spreads from this Adam to another unit, or to another set of Machines on another Kuiper Belt Object—we could be looking at the collapse of the entire volatile production flow.”

“If you think it's that serious,” Falcon said, “shouldn't you send out a team of analysts?”

“Expensive and time-consuming, not to mention liable to spook the markets,” Gallo answered.

Falcon set down his iced tea. “And we wouldn't want that. Besides, I'm cheaper.”

“What matters to us is that you have prior experience with the Adam unit,” Kedar answered in placating tones. “The iceteroid operation is of incalculable value. Something's gone badly wrong out there. Possibly it is a problem of Machine psychology, if you will. We're hoping you can fix it for us.”

“Psychology? I'm an explorer, damn it,” he snapped. “In as much as I'm anything at all. Not some nursemaid.”

Kedar wasn't perturbed by this outburst. “Our debt to you would be . . . well, let's just say that there'd be no question of continued support for Doctor Dhoni's team.”

Falcon felt oddly disappointed. “As efforts to apply leverage go, isn't that rather crude, Madri?”

“Might I have a say?” Hope said now. “Howard remains my patient—”

“Indeed he does. And you have successfully applied a suite of improvements,” Kedar said, tapping one of the dossiers open before her. “Haven't
they given the Commander even greater independence than before? Greater ability to spend time away from external support, greater ability to tolerate extremes of gravity, pressure, heat and radiation?”

“Within limits,” Dhoni said. “But that doesn't mean that he's out of my care, or that I'm ready to sign him off for a solo jaunt across the Kuiper Belt. Everything about Commander Falcon is experimental—it always was—”

Falcon raised a hand. “It's all right, Hope—they've got us both over a barrel. But there's one detail they've neglected. They needn't have bothered with incentives and threats. Adam's a friend. Just a Machine, maybe, but a friend. I spent a lot of time with Adam, watching it—grow up. And if a friend of mine's in trouble, I don't need any persuasion to go help. Just give me a ship and tell me where to point it.”

12

So they gave Falcon a ship. Hope Dhoni helped him board.

The ship was essentially a dumb-bell: cylindrical spine with fusion engines and landing gear at one end, a spherical crew capsule at the other. In fact, it was similar to the venerable
Discovery
class of interplanetary craft that had first taken Falcon to Jupiter more than three decades ago, though on a smaller scale. The basic engineering logic, that you needed to separate your fusion-powered, radiation-leaking engine module from your habitable compartments, had not changed.

However, everything not absolutely essential for Falcon's voyage had been stripped away, making the craft lean and fast. Once aboard, Falcon was tucked in tighter than a Mercury astronaut in his primitive capsule—and that was a reflection Geoff Webster would have liked. Falcon had no need of independent life-support systems, and he would spend most of the trip out to the Kuiper Belt in induced sleep, so he needed little room.

They had given the craft no name, leaving that to Falcon. He searched his memory, thinking of Webster. What of that dreamy day when the two of them had gone ballooning across the northern plains of India? Falcon's not-so-subtle objective had been to persuade Webster of the joys of lighter-­than-air flight, and so gain his support in Falcon's schemes. Without that
trip, there would have been no
Queen Elizabeth
, no
Kon-Tiki
, no encounter with the medusa . . . It was bittersweet, yes. But so much had flowed from that one trip.

“Srinagar,”
Falcon said.

“I'm sorry?” Hope said. She was leaning over him, into the cabin, with a medical-diagnostics minisec in her hand. She was here to finalise his integration into the ship.

“My call sign.
Srinagar.
Will you pass it on?”

Hope said nothing, and continued to work. She seemed reluctant to leave. Indeed, he was fairly certain that Hope had been wishing for
something
to crop up, some justification for her blocking his involvement in the Kuiper Belt mission.

“I'll be all right, you know,” he said, when she finally backed out and the techs prepared to seal him away.

Hope unplugged the last of her diagnostic feeds; it whipped back into the body of the minisec. “Well, I hope you look after yourself out there.”

He studied her; she sounded as if she'd been rebuffed. “Hope—”

“Yes?”

He rested his artificial hand on hers. “I'll be fine. I meant what I said in that meeting, you know. I don't have too many friends. But the ones I have, I value.”

*  *  *  *

He lifted from Makemake at one gee, exceeding escape velocity within a hundred seconds, with Trujillo's little puddle of light and warmth soon falling behind. Within another minute or two, the curvature of Makemake had brought the lights of Brown Station into view. But soon the whole of the little world was in his field of view and already dropping back.

In free space Falcon increased fusion power by one gee increments, keeping a careful eye on the instruments, until he was satisfied that
Srinagar
was handling smoothly. He would burn at ten gees for three hours, bringing his speed to a thousand kilometres per second. It sounded fast, and indeed it was: at such a speed, he could travel between the Earth and
the Moon in a matter of minutes. But the scale of the outer solar system was much vaster than the mere baby step between the Earth and the Moon. Even at this speed the trip from Earth out to Makemake would take more than two months—as indeed it must have done for the World Government delegates. And although Makemake orbited within the Kuiper Belt, just as did the target iceteroid, the hop would take Falcon across a broad swathe of that huge, sprawling swarm of iceteroids. He would restart the fusor no earlier than twenty-five days from now, and for most of that time he would simply cruise, unpowered.

And asleep.

“Makemake,
Srinagar
. This is Falcon. I'm signing off—I expect to wake in about six hundred hours. Tell Doctor Dhoni her patient is taking excellent care of himself.”

Falcon cast one final glance back at Makemake, backlit by the sun. It occurred to him that all the worlds on which people had ever walked now lay in his line of sight, snug in their warm and cosy orbits; for an instant he felt the ancient and familiar unease of travellers across the ages, as their courses took them into the unknown. But the moment passed, and Falcon readied himself for sleep. He dreamed briefly of ballooning over the sunlit Himalayas with Geoff Webster and Hope Dhoni—with an irritated simp in the rigging, threatening to sabotage the heater . . .

And then there were no dreams at all.