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.