The Medusa Chronicles (24 page)

40

With Hope Dhoni on his arm, Falcon strolled through the gondola of the great airship.
Strolled
: he was a clanking half-cyborg, she a wispy relic of obviously great age. But in this expensive environment nobody was rude enough to stare.

“Even the corridors are plush,” Dhoni murmured. “The carpets, the paintings, the busts on their pedestals—who
were
those people anyhow? I suppose they're all images of the terrible old Nazis who paid for the origi­nal tub.”

Falcon smiled. “And no doubt the detail is accurate down to the cut of their toothbrush moustaches.”

“Well, it would be,” Dhoni said, with a sigh. “The Martians and the Medes would probably say this is all Terrans have done for the last century or so, clung to the past, to the most irrelevant detail . . . A psychologist, which I'm not, would say this whole ship is a symptom of a mass psychosis.”

“And the Mnemosynes might have agreed with you,” Falcon said grimly. “But what would you have people do, Hope? We're losing our home to the fire. Isn't it rational to save as much of the family treasure as we can? Anyhow there's only ten more days left now. For better or worse it will all soon be over, the Ultimatum fulfilled—”

“What's
that
, for instance?” Hope pointed to a gadget on the wall.

A young officer, smartly uniformed, approached them. She had a small, intricate tattoo on her right cheek, of a leaping animal. “That's a cigarette lighter, ma'am,” she said, smiling. “Yes, the original designers really did allow smoking aboard an airship filled with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen—but they insisted on the use of these safety gadgets. However I think the placement is wrong. On the
LZ 129—
the original
Hindenburg—
smoking was only allowed on the B Deck, the lower deck . . .”

They walked on, and the officer politely accompanied them.

Falcon knew that much of the traffic between the great laputas of Saturn was conveyed in vehicles much more basic than this. Why not travel in style, however? Mankind was doomed to exile, it seemed, but was nothing if not rich in energy and materials; a re-creation of the most famous airship in history, nearly eight and a half centuries after its spectacular destruction, was a trivial cost. Falcon however had refused to endorse a proposed project to re-create Earth's
second
most famous crashed airship, the
Queen Elizabeth IV
, a ship now buried almost as deeply in time.

“Those busts, though,” Dhoni said, musing. “All of forgotten monsters. Whereas—”

“Hope.” Falcon thought he knew where this conversation was going.

But Dhoni always had been unstoppable once she was set in motion. “Whereas if our glorious leader had her way, all the statues and paintings would no doubt be of Amanda Springer-Soames IV, Life President of what's left of Earth—”

“
Hope.
You're making the Lieutenant here blush. Didn't you spot the springbok tattoo?”

Dhoni peered down at the officer's name-tag. Her face, itself an antique some centuries old, was still capable of showing shock and embarrassment. “Lieutenant Jane Springer-Soames. Oh, my. I do apologise.”

“It's not a problem,” said the young officer graciously. “To tell the truth I'm used to people quizzing me about my grandmother.”

Falcon was interested. “How do you respond?”

Jane shrugged. “I say that she believes she's doing the right thing for Earth and humanity, the best way she knows how.”

Falcon nodded. “That seems a fair assessment, whatever your politics.”

She responded with a frown. “It's probably a good thing you feel that way, sir. Because, I'm afraid, I need to talk to you about my grandmother. First, please, let me show you to the lounge. We'll soon be arriving at New Sigiriya, and it's quite a view . . .”

As they followed her, Falcon felt a spark of concern.
So much for the holiday.

*  *  *  *

Of the two great passenger chambers of the gondola's A Deck, Falcon actually preferred the dining room, with its stylish red-leather furniture and walls panelled with images of the great zeppelin in flight over 1930s Earth cities. But the lounge was impressive too, with one wall dominated by a large stylised map of the world—of
the
world, Falcon reminded himself, the old world, Earth. Today the lounge was crowded with people in a variety of garbs sitting or standing close to the downward-slanting windows. Children ran and wriggled and played too, in the golden, misty light that seeped into the room.

The light of the clouds of Saturn.

To Falcon, whose first venture to a gas giant had been to mighty Jupiter, Saturn had always been something of a disappointment. Though not much smaller than Jupiter in diameter, Saturn was significantly less massive, and twice as far from the sun. So the upper atmosphere, where the
Hindenburg
sailed and which humanity was now colonising in numbers, was a realm with significantly less free energy than its equivalent on Jupiter: less solar radiation, less inner heat. And with a scarcity of energy, life was sparse too. There was a scattered native biota, but it only amounted to what would have been counted as mere aerial plankton on Jupiter; there was none of the great higher food chain of mantas and medusae that Falcon had first encountered on Jupiter.

If Saturn was a relative disappointment as a spectacle, it had given
mankind a comparatively gentle welcome. The Jupiter Ultimatum had brought an immediate need to ramp up Saturn's production of helium-3 for mankind's energy-hungry civilisation. And, unlike Jupiter, Saturn's gravity in the clouds was no higher than Earth's. Thus, with the slow but relentless approach of Ultimatum Day, the human colonisation of the clouds of Saturn in large numbers had begun. Whatever the willingness or otherwise of the surviving colony worlds, Mars, Titan and Triton, none of them had the capacity to cope with a refugee exodus from Earth. But Saturn was roomy enough to make the refugees welcome, many times over.

Nobody knew how safe this new refuge would prove. But all those people had to be put somewhere.

And now the
Hindenburg
floated over one of the great laputas, an island in the sky of mankind's new home.

New Sigiriya was supported by sacs of heated hydrogen-helium air, like the medusae of Jupiter, like every human vessel that had ventured into the gas giants' atmospheres since Falcon's own
Kon-Tiki
. But this laputa, a flying raft more than ten kilometres in diameter, would have dwarfed even the greatest of Jupiter's medusae. And despite the strangeness of its setting—despite the fact that it rested not on a solid surface but over thousands of kilometres of air, despite its clusters of domes brilliantly illuminated by artificial light—as seen from above this was a very human city, of roads, buildings, parkland, even what looked like nature reserves on the periphery.

“It's beautiful,” Dhoni said. “Strange—out of place here—but beautiful. And a laputa like this will be my home from now on, I guess.”

Falcon said, “But this is only the beginning of Project Silenus. Look further . . .” He took her hand and led her closer to the window.

Beyond New Sigiriya, the sky was full of flying islands. They drifted at all altitudes, from the thick lower cloud decks to the sparse stratosphere. Some were dark shadows, some brilliantly illuminated; while some stood still in the air under their immense flotation bags, others surged purposefully forward, like ocean liners. Lesser craft too threaded their way between the laputas. Lights shone bright everywhere, the smeared city
glow of the islands, the sparking buoys and pilot lamps of the ships. The vision was like one of Falcon's own childhood fantasies of ballooning.

“All this is very recent, ma'am,” Jane Springer-Soames said to Dhoni. “Most of the refugees from Earth have come up here only in the last few decades. In fact most people here at Saturn right now are sleepers, stacked up in the big orbiting hibernacula vessels, and there are more still waiting to be shipped from Earth. They will be restored as soon as possible.”

“That was always expected,” Falcon put in. “The late rush.”

Hope smiled. “For me it was the calendar. When the date finally clicked around to 2700, and I realised that for Earth there would
be
no 2800—that somehow made it real. ‘Project Silenus,' though?”

“The laputa construction projects are run out of Oasis City on Titan, but for the resources they're mining one of the inner moons, Enceladus. And, according to Euripides, Silenus was a drunken companion of the gods who boasted of killing Enceladus with a spear.”

“How apt.”

“I did have to look it up.”

Springer-Soames said, “More laputas are coming into service as fast as they can be built. And that's only the beginning,” she went on with enthusiasm. “There are grand plans to link up individual laputas to make flying continents, enormous structures—well, there's room on Saturn. And beyond that we may be able to join it all up into
one vast shell
enclosing the whole of Saturn, all at one gravity, with a thick layer of breathable air above. Like a planet with a hundred times Earth's surface area . . .” She seemed to remember herself, and stalled.

Falcon smiled at her. “I like your dreams.”

“You would,” Dhoni said. “The enthusiasm of the young. That's what will save us in the end, Howard.”

Falcon said, “Maybe. But we have to get through Ultimatum Day first.” He faced Springer-Soames. “You said there is a problem?”

“Yes, sir.” Jane glanced uneasily at Dhoni, then turned back to Falcon. “I'm afraid I have to ask you to come back to Earth. Have you heard of the ‘Peace Hostages'?”

“No, but I don't like the sound of it.”

“It's my grandmother's last-ditch effort to save the planet—so she says. But to do it she's put twelve thousand lives at risk.”

Falcon frowned. “Twelve
thousand
? Who asked for my help? The President herself?”

“No, sir,” Springer-Soames said simply. “
Adam
.”

The name took Falcon aback.

Dhoni, too, seemed shocked. “It's so peaceful here. As if we're drifting in a bubble of the past. But there's always trouble. Oh—” She grabbed Falcon's arm. “Don't go. Not again. You've done your job, Howard. You—
we
are too old. Have some iced tea! Oh, Howard, stay with me, and let me look after you.”

But, of course, he had no choice.

He bent stiffly, and with great care kissed Dhoni on the cheek. Her ancient flesh was surprisingly warm. “Wait for me.”

“I will,” she said softly.

He straightened with a whir and turned away.

But Springer-Soames called sharply, “Commander—careful.”

He froze, and looked down. At his feet was a toy, a ball, which had rolled across the carpet to bump, unnoticed, against his undercarriage. It was a simple inflatable thing, like a grounded balloon—but it was a globe of Earth, battered, scuffed, evidently much cherished. Falcon imagined this thing deflated and tucked into a pocket, a souvenir of a lost home. He had nearly run it over.

A little girl approached him. Perhaps five years old, she had short blonde hair, and a face that would one day look strong rather than beautiful, he thought, with a good chin and cheekbones. But right now she was staring at the toy uncertainly.

“Can I help you?”

“Please,” the kid said shyly. “Can I get my globe?”

“Allow me.” Falcon bent, servomotors whirring, and with infinite care picked up the fragile toy with one hand, and held it out to the girl.

She watched the toy, not Falcon; she reached out and grabbed it from him.

A woman behind her murmured, “Be polite, Lorna.”

Hugging the toy, she said, formally, “I'm Lorna Tem. Thank you very much.” And then she looked up at the gleaming pillar of Falcon's body—he had the feeling she had thought he was some robot, a servomechanism, a mechanical steward serving drinks, perhaps—but then she looked into the leathery remnant of his face, peering out from the machinery, and her eyes widened.

The woman put a hand on her shoulder. “That's enough. Come away now . . .”

Falcon grunted. “And that's how the children of the human race react to me.”

Dhoni was here. She rested her head on his upper arm. “Go save mankind once again, Howard.”

Outside the windows of the
Hindenburg II
, a ferocious ammonia blizzard began to lash at the drifting laputas.

41

After being escorted by Lieutenant Jane Springer-Soames on a high-­acceleration dash across the solar system—and despite the urgency, there were only days left before the Ultimatum expired—Falcon knew he needed rest. Before descending to Earth he had the liner from Saturn stop at the venerable Port Van Allen.

Falcon tried to remember when he had first come here, to a station that predated his own first flight into space, and how many times he had visited since. He knew there would be no attempt to save or salvage Van Allen when the Machines came. Instead, like the other stations which still studded near-Earth space—and indeed the great equatorial space elevators that had become fountains of fleeing refugees—in the final days Van Allen would be used by a corps of Witnesses. And then it would be abandoned, to the whim of the Machines.

For now, as he relaxed in the care of the great wheel's primitive but sufficient facilities, within the scuffed aluminium walls of his favourite room, Falcon sat before the window and looked out at Earth and Moon.

The Moon was no longer the Moon, the human Moon of antiquity. Since the Machines had moved in on the satellite at the time of the Jupiter Ultimatum, Falcon, like much of the rest of mankind, had watched with
reluctant fascination as human relics had been dismantled or simply ploughed into the dust, from the famous old Federation of Planets building to the fragile remains of Borman's pioneering Apollo lander. Then the work had gone much further. The regolith had been strip-mined, leaving great rectangular scars; the inner heat of the Moon had been released to flood the great old craters and the dark
maria
with fresh lava. All this was visible from Earth, from where the face of the Moon came to look like a lurid industrial landscape—or like Mordor, and Falcon wondered if anybody else alive would pick up
that
reference.

But, of course, the Moon had not been the Machines' true target. Now, reluctantly, Falcon looked down on the turning Earth.

The world had been transformed since his own first youthful forays into space. The ice now encroached far from the poles, north and south, even though it was northern midsummer. Still, the environmental recovery overseen by the WG in earlier generations had largely survived. The northern continents were still swathed in oak woods, the forests had recovered in South America and Africa too, and grasslands washed over much of what had once been the great deserts, the Sahara, in central Asia. Falcon knew that those forests and plains still swarmed with wildlife. As Ultimatum Day approached, every effort had been made to sample and preserve offworld all the planet's ecosystems. But Falcon knew that all the living things down there on Earth itself, the animals, the vegetation—the elephants and the oak trees—all of them were doomed to be casualties of a war of which none of them could have any understanding. Now the old station passed over Earth's night side, much of which had already fallen largely dark. In the end, with whole nations abandoned, a diminished mankind had huddled in a few centres. But even now some cities still blazed with defiant light—and some, sadly, burned in the night, immense bonfires of culture.

Just as it had only been in the last few decades that the great refugee flows off the planet had begun, so it had been only at the end that the most concerted conservation efforts had been made. Physical records and treasures—even whole buildings, wrapped in shells of quasicarbon, itself
once mined from the depths of Jupiter—had been transported offworld. Those treasures that could not be saved had been mapped and sampled and imaged. Thus dreamers in the clouds of Saturn could roam across “Earth II,” a crowd-sourced virtual copy. Falcon had tried it; in some options you could watch the people who had happened to be there on the day the recordings were made, and they would look into the camera and smile.

Once or twice Falcon had cautiously ventured down to Earth himself. He had found an age of tragic glamour. Falcon would always remember wandering around a mostly abandoned London, when, rolling up from the flooded, reforested valley of the Thames, he had come upon the great Victorian museums of South Kensington, looming above the green—and he had been reminded of a similar antique palace surviving in a greened, abandoned England, discovered, in the pages of Wells's much-loved book, by a Traveller who had gone much further in Time than even Falcon had, to the year 802,701 AD . . . In the end Falcon had found London, like Earth itself, hard to bear: a great city stilled and silent save for the cries of birds and animals, and he had retreated to his orbiting refuge.

In the last years, there had been gestures of despair. Mass-suicidal “games.” Religions that flourished and died like mushrooms. Some even affected to worship the Machines themselves; people dressed up, or altered themselves, to become faux cyborgs. There had been a decade when Falcon himself, reluctantly, became a kind of fashion icon to such people—before the mood shifted again, and he came to be hated once more as a relic of an age of blame.

And yet there had been nobility too. Consider the Witnesses, volunteers who were preparing to sacrifice their lives to provide a final human account of the fate of the planet—and to gather evidence against the day when the Machines stood in the dock to account for this tremendous crime.

But, whatever the complexity and tragedy of the response to the coming deadline, the end was approaching now, at last.

In the final few days, above these scenes of desperation and sacrifice—
and visible from Port Van Allen itself—the great ships of the Machines at last arrived, lenticular forms kilometres across, driven across space by a physics no human understood, and now were suspended like silver clouds above the cities of Earth . . .

*  *  *  *

Jane Springer-Soames burst into the cabin.

“Sir—Commander Falcon! I'm sorry to disturb you—”

Falcon stood stiffly. “Jane, it's fine. What's happening?”

“We've had a message from my grandmother—from the President. An offer.”

“Of what?”

Jane, panting, swallowed hard. “A hostage exchange, sir.”

“You mean the Peace Hostages . . . ?”

As he had travelled to Earth, Springer-Soames's stratagem had become brutally clear. Two of the last sleeper ships—cargo scows with crowded hibernacula in their holds—had been diverted to Unity City and forced to land under the watchful eye of armed security guards. And there they had been kept, with twelve thousand people crammed helplessly in their cold hives.

“If Springer-Soames ever thought that holding a human shield like that would persuade the Machines to spare Unity City, let alone Earth, she's a fool, Jane—”

“I don't know what she was thinking, sir,” Jane said. “Honestly. I can only tell you what she's offering now.”

“You said an exchange.”

“She will release the twelve thousand—
in exchange for you
.”

Falcon took that in. “Ah. Of course. That's what this has been all about. She wants to lure me down to Earth, in the hope, probably, of luring a Machine ambassador there too—Adam himself, no doubt.”

“What for? A final negotiation?”

Falcon looked at the planet below. “She must know that's futile. More a photo opportunity, I think.”

“Sir?”

“Sorry. An antiquated reference. Well, it will do no harm. You're sure she will release the twelve thousand if I go down?”

“She is my grandmother, sir. I trust her that far.”

He smiled. “And I trust you, Lieutenant. Let's make the descent.”