The Medusa Chronicles (37 page)

66

Lorna Tem listened, and listened again.

Very carefully.

At first the childlike tone of the voice had argued against any possibility of it being the Falcon she knew. But what was that when set against the rank impossibility of a human voice imprinted on a modulated flux of neutrinos boiling out of the very heart of the sun?

She clung to her scepticism almost until the end. Falcon and the Machine—the one called Adam—laid out their joint terms for an end to the war. None of it was objectionable to her.

Then he had delivered the part of the message that shredded the last of her doubts.

“Oh, and Surgeon-Commander Tem? I remembered, belatedly, how we first met, many years ago. You were that brave little girl on the
Hinden­burg
. I am sorry that our second meeting was not under better circumstances. But you did your best to warn me that I had been weaponised. I am sorry if my revelation now places you in difficulty, but I wanted you to know of my gratitude, and I may not have another chance to express it.”

When the message ended, she only had to assure Boss that as far as
she was concerned it was quite authentic—that that was the Falcon she had known.

The Boss grinned that wide chimp smile once again. “Good luck, Surgeon-Commander—and you may need it after being outed by your exotic friend. If you see him again, remember me to him.
Hoo!
But today a new age begins, for all of us.” And he closed the connection.

It took only seconds before the door buzzed.

“Come in,” she said, feeling neither dread nor curiosity.

It was a Springer-Soames, of course, Bodan Severyn, and a pair of security guards.

Tem said, “I thought you'd have had the sense to leave by now.”

“We held a last shuttle on-pad for ourselves, and anyone else who needs mopping up. And then we heard that message.”

She smiled. “Of course. So there's a message from the sky, from the heart of the sun—an incomprehensible event, a revelation. And your first response is to come for me.”

“You're under arrest, Surgeon-Commander. The charges are too numerous to have been detailed yet, but they will include sabotage of the Falcon operation against the Machines, the dissemination of military secrets, espionage, free association with known dissident elements . . .” He glanced at the guards. “Detain her. Bring her to the shuttle. She isn't to visit any of the other areas in the complex.”

His piece delivered, Tem's humiliation complete, Bodan turned and prepared to march out.

But the guards were hesitating at the door. They glanced at each other, and at Tem, then at Bodan.

Bodan halted and turned, curious more than alarmed. “I told you to take her. Why are you delaying?”

And in the bowels of the world, Tem felt something change. A vast engine silenced.

“Take her!”

Still the guards hesitated.

Tem smiled. “I'm sure your guards heard the message. Everybody must
have heard it. You heard my name spoken on a string of neutrinos, pouring from the heart of the sun.
So did your sister
, Bodan. Can't you hear it, feel it?
She
understands that everything's changed—she, evidently, has already shut down your Momentum Pump. Already halted this absurd act of folly. Everything is different now—you must see that.” She turned to the guards. “As for you—ask yourselves. Whose side are you on?”

At last the guards moved. But it was not Tem they came for.

Bodan Severyn tried to run.

EPILOGUE (1)

A final awakening by Mission Control. Polite, comparatively.

He'd been told he should be able to see the rock with the naked eye by now, even though it was still further from him than Earth was from the Moon. So he climbed down into the navigation bay for a look. There it was: just a dull star moving across the sky. He felt an odd shiver as he reported this in.

“Houston, Apollo. So it's not a hoax after all.”

“Evidently not, Seth. We do have some new information. All five previous shots hit the target.”

“You guys did a hell of a job.”

“Well, we caused some deflection, but we didn't get the angle we needed.”

“So I'm not wasting my time up here.”

“Certainly not, Seth. It's still feasible, if you drop that nuke on the sweet spot.”

“And if it's four hours out from me, it's now precisely one day out from the Earth, right?”

“Apollo, Houston. The Vice President asked us to tell you Pat and the boys are with him right now. And to wish you Godspeed.”

“I . . . thank you, Charlie.”

“My pleasure.”

“Time to get to work, then.”

“That would be my suggestion, Apollo.”

*  *  *  *

So the terminal phase of the mission began.

Up to now the spacecraft had been guided by the navigation system that would have taken NASA to the Moon, a gyroscopic inertial platform backed up by optical star sightings made by Seth himself. With the quarry in sight, the hunt could be much more precise. The big tracking radars on the ground had been able to spot the rock from as far out as twenty million miles. Now, Apollo's own antennas could pick up reflections of those radar signals, which provided much more detailed information on the asteroid's relative range and velocity, and there was a clatter of attitude thrusters as the guidance computer tweaked Apollo's course with ever greater delicacy.

Meanwhile, Seth made what observations of the rock he could. After all, nobody had ever seen an asteroid close up before. “Houston, Apollo, I see that baby, CAVU.” Clear And Visibility Unlimited, a pilot's term. “It's not a sphere, more a kind of a potato-shaped lump. Man, its hide is covered in crater walls, like breaking waves. Looks like it's been battered half to death.”

“Apollo, Houston. Don't you start feeling sorry for it now.”

“The colours are—odd. Grey-white at low light, kind of a light brown, almost a tan, where the sunlight is direct. Looks like an intriguing place to explore.”

“You need to leave something for your sons to do, Seth.”

“Copy that.”

“Apollo, Houston. Just to advise that our blue guest just sent a love letter to your passenger.”

Meaning a USAF officer in Houston had authorised the sending up of an enabling code to wake up the nuke. Even now security was maintained on the ground; even now Seth's conversation with Charlie Duke had to be vague and disguised.

That, however, was kind of a final warning for Seth too. He was just an hour out: time for him to make ready for his own encounter.

He debated using the ship's primitive urine collector one last time. No need.

He settled in the pilot's seat. He had to be ready to duck down to the navigation window, ready to use the steering controls if the automatic guidance failed. He had his tape recorder playing steadily now, stuck to a Velcro pad over his head. And over his window he'd fixed a picture of his wife and kids, taken from Pat's album in the PPK, and an image of the whole Earth from space taken from Apollo 2—a striking image, seen by no human eye before Schirra and his crew.

A soft alarm chimed.

“Ah, Apollo, Houston. Just to say your onboard radar has now acquired Icarus and is feeding down good quality R and R-dot data . . .”

Range and velocity information was now being provided, ever more precisely, by the Apollo's own onboard radar, for Icarus had come into its range. Under this latest navigation mode the computer once more squirted the thrusters, tweaking the closing trajectory.

And, Seth knew from a checklist he'd memorised, that meant he was only four minutes out. Somehow the time had slipped away from him. He grabbed his tape recorder and rewound it quickly. Just time for one more run-through of Satchmo's song.

Even now, he realised, he didn't really believe it.

“Fifty seconds,” Duke said. “Fusing radar is live.”

Ship and rock were closing at a hundred and twenty-five thousand feet per second—over twenty
miles
a second. To make its destructive statement within a hundred feet of the surface of Icarus, at a point precisely calculated to deliver the maximum deflection, the bomb would have a window of opportunity less than half a second wide. Now the bomb itself was awake and sensing the asteroid, pinging it with radar signals, just as it would have sought out the centres of Moscow or Leningrad had it fulfilled its original design objectives. Another thruster rattle, another trajectory tweak.

“Houston, Apollo. The nuke is guiding me in now, all by itself. I'm like
Slim Pickens in
Doctor Strangelove
, right? Well, I surely have learned to love this bomb.”

“Nearly home, Seth,” Duke said gently. “You're gonna do it, you'll kick that damn thing's ass.”

“And when I do, you guys break out the cheap cigars like you always do.”

“Copy that,” Duke said, sounding choked.

He peered out of his window, looking for the target one last time. What had George Sheridan said, right at the beginning?
Like a kiss on a pool table.
Just a kiss, and now all of this.

But here he was, on the spot, alert and confident and competent. Seth touched the image of his children. He had never felt more alive.

“Houston, Apollo. Signing out.”

Louis B., his timing perfect as ever, was reaching the end of the song, and Seth let himself dissolve into that mellow voice.

“Oh, yeah—”

EPILOGUE (2)

Falcon opened his eyes to golden sunlight.

He was sitting in a deckchair, facing out across a railed platform. Only one other person was here on the platform with him. She leant with an elbow resting nonchalantly against the low guardrail, a glass in her hand, displaying an admirable lack of concern for the drop behind her. Beyond the rail, far below, sweeping grandly into the distance, was the elegant continuation of an airship's envelope. And beyond
that
a crumpled grandeur that he recognised as the Grand Canyon . . .

An airship.

Falcon realised, with a kind of delayed recognition, that he was back on the
Queen Elizabeth
. This was the little external platform that jutted out behind the main observation deck, in the lee of the deck's big Plexiglas dorsal blister. Normally open to VIPs only. But the woman leaning against the railing was no ordinary passenger. She had one foot on the floor, the other on the lowest rail. Her clothes were white, almost luminous in the sunlight.

Falcon stared at this angelic vision. “If I'm going mad, keep it coming. I'm rather enjoying the experience.”

“No,” she said quietly. “You're not mad, or delirious.” She held up the glass. “You want some iced tea?”

“You sound like Hope. You look like Hope. But Hope always said I should stay away from the crash site. And how did I get
here
? The last thing I remember . . . something about the sun . . . I remember Jupiter Within. The snowman, the cottage—Adam?”

“Adam was released.”

Falcon, oddly, imagined a moth cupped in a child's hands, and set free in the safety of the night dark. “I'm glad.”

“And he brought out with him all that was left of you—
all
of you.”

“And all of
you
? Who decided you should be here?”

Her smile was teasing. “Complaining?”

“Far from it. But how the hell—”

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“No. Given that we're having this conversation, though . . . Where are we?
What
are we?”

“In the future, Howard. I mean,
our
future. At a point in time where the Machines have become—well, pretty powerful. They can resurrect a convincing emulation of almost any historical personage. Even more so when they have direct access to the memories of those who knew that person. Adam had preserved the essence of you, of course. As for me—do you recall the Memory Garden?”

The pain of its destruction still pushed a little sliver through whatever counted as his heart. “The Springer-Soames destroyed it.”

“Not as thoroughly as they imagined. Shattered it, yes. Obliterated its living ecosystem. But the testimonies, the recordings, the ­biographical accounts, all were still recoverable. Even as the terms of the human-­Machine accord were falling into place—even as Boss, Tem and others were negotiating with the Springer-Soames to establish a new democratic regime to replace the wreck of the WG—there were investigators busy sifting through the rubble cloud of the Memory Garden. After that stunt, Howard, your speech from the heart of the sun, anything associated with you was suddenly of huge interest.”

“Nice to know.”

“Yes, much of your memorial to Hope was lost. But much more was
preserved. You did a good job, Howard. You remembered her well. She would have been pleased—and she would have understood why you did it.”

“She would?”

“There was always a longing in you, Howard—a hole in your psyche where human companionship used to fit. You needed me. So, as they reassembled you, the Machines stitched me back together as well.”

“So you're not Hope—just a clever impersonation.” He smiled even as the truth took the edge off his joy. “Should I call you False Hope instead?”

“Call me what you like. All I know is that she was a remarkable doctor. It's an honour to be her emulation. You don't find this distressing, do you? . . . Let me show you something.” She bid him rise from the deckchair, and join her at the guardrail.

Falcon stood and moved to the railing. Even that simple motion was a strange experience. He now had legs rather than undercarriage; shoes rather than wheels. For the first time in centuries he could feel the fabric of the uniform against his skin, the scratch of it against the hairs of his shins as he moved. Even, he realised, his brief embodiment as his eleven-year-old self was nothing compared to the sheer authenticity of
this.

“That body you're wearing now. It isn't real. None of this is real. But it can be, if you choose to accept the Machines' offer.”

“This is all a gift of the Machines? . . .
What
offer?”

“Physical embodiment is the easiest part of the puzzle, actually. You're like wine. They can pour you into any bottle.”

He grunted. “Well, I'm a sour old vintage. I bet there's a catch,” he said slowly. “There always is with the Machines.”

“No, it's unconditional. No strings. No coercion. But if you were willing to help them with a little local difficulty, I'm sure they'd appreciate the gesture. May I show you something else?”

“Go ahead.”

Hope swept her free hand across the sky.

And, all at once, the blue deepened to an inky darkness, transitioning from the horizon through degrees of purple and navy and indigo to black
at the zenith. And, beneath the prow of the
Queen Elizabeth
the Arizona landscape had faded to transparency, ghosting quietly away.

Despite himself, Falcon felt a surge of vertigo. He reached for support, felt the cold steel rail under his fingers. Wherever Hope had taken him, it was somewhere else. Somewhere very else. “We're not in Arizona any more,” he whispered.

Hope smiled. “Or Kansas, for that matter.”

The
Queen Elizabeth
was suspended over a planet, far enough from the surface that the curvature of the world's horizon was plainly apparent. Hovering above some great bay or bight, a blue-green sea partly enclosed by long peninsulas.

Falcon stared at the scene for long seconds, trying to be analytical, determined not to jump to premature conclusions, especially on the basis of such sparse sensory data. He was seeing things differently now, his impressions squeezed through the arrow-slots of human perception. How could people stand being like this, he wondered? It was as if they walked around with masks on, only ever catching a glimpse of things. His eyes no longer even had a zoom feature.

He supposed he would have to make do with it. And in truth, there was a satisfaction in making the best of such meagre resources. He studied the scene anew, trying to forget the battery of senses he had come to rely on, and to just absorb the view as gathered by his eyes.

For a start there was clearly atmosphere down there, evidenced by a band of blue that formed a perfect circumscribing arc above the horizon. The landmasses were more than barren rock, for they threw back tints of green and ochre and blue. Near their extremities those two claws of land shattered into chains of islands, diminishing in size as they reached further out into the sea. Falcon glanced from one island to the next. Each was surrounded by a bright margin of cliff or beach, further hemmed by white breakers.

Complexity. Detail. There were atolls and reefs and archipelagos and lone, isolated islands. In the sky there were clouds, and the plumes of barely-slumbering volcanoes.

“It's lovely,” Falcon said. “Please tell me it's not just another simulation.”

“It's real enough. And we're close enough that seeing it with your own eyes—touching it, exploring it—wouldn't be a problem. We could be
down there
, in that air, swimming those seas, walking those shorelines. In a way, though, this world is just a starter. It's not why the Machines called you back to life—or for that matter, why they summoned
me
.” Hope gave a sidelong smile. “But they thought you'd like it, just as they hoped you'd like me.”

Falcon met her smile with one of his own. He had grown used to the leathery stiffness of his old mask—it had been a useful filter for his deeper feelings, he realised now with chagrin. He was more transparent now; he would have to be careful. “If this is a starter, what's the main course?”

“That,” Hope said, and directed his attention to the horizon at his right.

Beyond this nameless world, the limb of another planet was rising into view. From its flattened oval, and the heavy banding of its surface features, it could not help but remind Falcon of Jupiter. But he could no more have mistaken it for Jupiter than he'd have mistaken Earth for Mars. This was another Jovian world, but it was unlike any in the solar system. It
glowed
, a sullen red.

“They have a name for it, but it's not one you and I are presently capable of understanding. Or indeed pronouncing. Not that that matters for now. We're here, and they need us. Do you remember the terms of Orpheus's accord, Howard? The separation of human and Machine spheres of influence?”

“Somewhere at the back of my mind.”

“Courtesy of the Machines, we're in an extrasolar system, accessed through the gateway inside Jupiter Within. Just as Orpheus promised. But this Earthlike moon is a mere pendant to a Machine world, Howard: that hot Jupiter is
full
of Machines. A remarkable situation—and light-years from Earth. And yet you could be useful here.”

“
Useful
. You make me sound like an old trowel.”

“Better than obsolescence, wouldn't you say?”

“I suppose. Useful how?”

“Do you believe in accidents, Howard? Chance events? This timeline we've found ourselves on—this braid of historical events, this one strand out of all the myriad paths we might have taken—do you ever wonder if there's a deeper purpose to it all?”

“Purpose?”

“A random gust of wind ended your old life, above the Grand Canyon. Without that gust, you'd have sailed on, and no one beyond a small cadre of airship historians would have had reason to know the name Howard Falcon. You'd never have been reconstructed—you'd never have gone to Jupiter, met the medusae. And what caused that gust of wind? Some random atmospheric fluctuation, a butterfly flapping its metaphorical wings. Chance shapes our lives on the smallest of scales, and history itself on the largest.”

“Hm,” Falcon said, remembering.
“
A kiss on a pool table . . .”

“Howard?”

“Sorry. Just a line from an old movie. But what's this got to do with me?”

“Do you remember what Orpheus said of the First Jovians?”

Falcon remembered that firelit room, the poker in the hearth, the snowman in the armchair. It felt like some sepia-tinted memory from his earliest childhood. “Hard to forget. But we weren't told much.”

“We have learned a little more, with time. The First Jovians have achieved an expertise with metric engineering beyond anything in our understanding. They have touched the bedrock of reality . . . and felt ghosts, vibrations, singing through it. Whispers and rumours of other realities, other histories, adjoining our own.
We
can only ­imagine the paths not taken. The First Jovians—well, they seem to
feel
those lost worlds in their bones. And in some sense—although this is only my ­intuition—I think they have the means to nurture the paths they deem most ­favourable . . . those with the outcomes most useful to them, most favourable to life, the most beautiful. However they measure it.

“Now, along with the Machines, they've met—encountered—
something
, inside that hot Jupiter, something that doesn't fit into their preconceived framework. Perhaps another order of life, which isn't playing by the
usual rules. It's got them befuddled—enough that they need a fresh perspective. I think we, you and I, have been brought to this moment, this place, because even gods need mortals. Because the First Jovians need
us
. Human and Machine. A partnership in curiosity. Because the real work of life, of mind, is still to be done. The question is: are you ready for a new journey?”

“I feel like I've done enough journeying for one lifetime.”

“Oh, enough with the self-pity. You're just getting started.”

Falcon felt a shiver of recognition.
That
sounded like Hope Dhoni. “I see they left you with the same rough edges.”

“You'd have been disappointed with anything less.” She took a final sip from her glass. “So what's it to be? A quiet retirement with a view to die for, or something that might stretch you, just a tiny bit?”

He smiled, and turned away. His gaze returned to that kiss of atmosphere below, to the cold, clear envelope enclosing a planet's worth of seas and islands and weather. He found himself wondering what the ballooning would be like down there.

He said softly, “Astonish me.”