Again Falcon returned to Srinagar, and opened the radio channel back to Makemake.
“It’s done,” he told Kedar. “Went like a charm. I did the three million second reset. Adam’s back to his old self. Its old self, I should say.” Damn it, he thought. One of the few advantages of his leathery, nearly expressionless face and his artificially produced voice: he could lie without fear of detection. But he couldn’t afford to fumble his lines. “Now all it wants to do is get on with volatile production. It’ll take a while to get the flinger back up to capacity, but I’ve no doubt it’ll happen. In the meantime, though, I’m going to stay here for a few weeks, just to make sure everything’s back on track.”
After an acknowledgement, and as he waited for Kedar and her team to analyse his report, he tried to get some rest. Given that he had just deceived his World Government masters—and the holders of the puppet-strings controlling his medical support—Falcon was at ease. There had been only a few occasions when he knew he had done the absolutely right and proper thing. Telling the superchimp how to save itself from the wreck of the Queen Elizabeth, while descending to his own near-certain peril. Cutting himself away from Kon-Tiki’s balloon, even though he had no guarantee that his little capsule would ever get him out of Jupiter again—it had been that or risk an over-curious medusa’s life.
Now he had spared Adam—spared a thinking, mindful being he himself had helped shape and educate. It was up to Adam what happened next; Falcon could only do so much. But this was a start.
He tried to sleep.
* * * *
He went out to meet Adam in person just once more.
“Before you leave,” Adam said, lifting one arm. “One last time. Tell me about the Kon-Tiki.”
“You heard it a hundred times, during your training.”
“Indulge me again. Speak of the winds of Jupiter. Of the voices of the deep, of the Wheels of Zeus, the lights that filled the sky.”
“Bioluminescence, that’s all—”
“Tell me of the predatory mantas. Of your meeting with medusa.”
“Why are you so interested in my old exploits?”
“We have no stories of our own, Father.”
Father . . . ?
“No past beyond the first moment of our activation. But you give us dreams. You give us fables.”
So Falcon told him the old story, once again.
Father.
Him?
* * * *
Years passed.
Falcon kept himself busy. It was not hard. He visited Earth—or at least Port Van Allen—the Galilean moons, even mighty Jupiter itself. New plans, new schemes—and new backers, new sources of funds. He followed wider developments, as human society, now interplanetary, slowly evolved. He even attended in person, on Mars, the signing ceremony that launched a new Federation of Planets, a sign of young worlds gently (for now) straining against the smothering control of the old.
Hope Dhoni, gracefully ageing, remained a constant support. But, oh, how he missed Geoff Webster.
Meanwhile the Machines of the Kuiper Belt kept up their relentless, remorseless production of volatile materials. The comets were mined, the flingers operated, the awesome flows of ice were assembled into their graded convoys and sent on their way back to the sun. Bright trains of icy wealth already bought and sold a thousand times before they crossed the asteroid belt—and there was enough dirty ice out there to stoke the furnaces of human prosperity for a thousand centuries.
* * * *
The years became decades.
Falcon began to wonder. What if he had been wrong? Was Adam failing in his uplift project—could Adam have been doomed to true uniqueness? Or, if an accident had triggered self-awareness in Adam, could the reverse happen just as spontaneously?
By the time the calendar ticked around to the close of the twenty-second century—the second century’s end Falcon had known—he had almost convinced himself that mind had flickered only briefly into being, out there in the dark. The sadness came in slow waves, less like a bereavement than a gradual recognition of failure.
But in the year 2199 Falcon had his answer. And so did everyone else.
* * * *
The migration was coordinated across the entire Kuiper Belt, around every production centre.
There was no warning, no ultimatum—no grand and defiant message from the Machines. They simply downed tools and disappeared. They left in their millions, heading for the darkness of outer Trans-Neptunian space like an exodus of dandelion seeds, dispersed in one quick breath.
After all this time, no one thought to connect the exodus with Falcon’s intervention—or at any rate, nobody cared enough to prosecute. It had been sixty-six years, after all. Even if they had made a link, it was absurd to think the Machines had been biding their time for so long, waiting for exactly the right moment—that every action they had performed since Falcon’s visit had been a sham, designed to lull their uncaring masters . . .
But Falcon knew. He had no need to speculate on the possibility of a connection. It was there in the calendar, plain for all to see—for anyone with the wit to make the connection, anyhow. The Machine exodus took place exactly one century, to the day, after Howard Falcon had encountered an alien intelligence in the clouds of Jupiter.
If this was Adam’s message to him, Falcon accepted it with pride.
And he would remember that feeling when, decades later still, the Machines returned—and with them a bold new challenge, a challenge to revisit the arena of his greatest triumph.
It seemed that Howard Falcon was not done with Jupiter—nor Jupiter with Falcon.