Falcon spent a week at Ganymede, immersed in the fallout from what became known across the inhabited worlds as the “New Nantucket Incident”: endless interrogations and analyses, accusations and justifications, hurled at lightspeed between the worlds. Falcon had expected it the moment he’d made the decision to get entangled in the fate of a victim of that floating slaughterhouse—and maybe even earlier, when Thera Springer had recruited him as a spy. Howard Falcon was more than two centuries old; as Springer had pointed out, he was no naïf, he knew how the human world worked, and he had expected this kind of backlash.
But he thought that all the ferocious arguments between the Earth-based World Government and the representatives of its Martian dominion, pious, political and pompous, were a noise that drowned out two much more interesting aspects of the whole affair.
The first aspect was the extraordinary mystery of what Orpheus, Machine explorer now silenced forever, had glimpsed at the heart of Jupiter. Some day, Falcon knew, this first primitive probe—like one of the early planetary flybys—must be followed up by a more comprehensive exploration of the dark heart of Jupiter. He prayed he would still be alive to see it. (And he would come to rue that prayer . . .)
And the second aspect was the sudden, enigmatic silence of every Machine in the solar system.
Falcon had long excused himself from all the speculation and politicking by the time Trayne Springer—the first Springer of all the generations he had known whom Falcon felt he could call a friend—contacted him from his new posting at NTB-4, a helium farm now free of Machines, rebellious Martians and even simps, firmly under the control of World Government agencies, and told him that an old friend was in trouble once more.
Falcon immediately returned to Jupiter, and to the confines of his comforting, if somewhat battle-weary, Ra.
* * * *
When he found her, the great medusa was already sinking.
There is an end to pain. An end to struggle, to flight. A time when the Great Manta is to be welcomed, so that for a while it will not pursue another . . .
Ceto was already far below the usual browsing levels of her home herd, who even now were lost in the complex sky above. Falcon took care not to look at the depth gauges, but he could feel the pressure, hear his gondola creak as the hundreds of kilometres of air above him, heavy in Jupiter’s relentless gravity field, tried to crush its robust hull like an eggshell. Instead, he looked at Ceto.
This was how a medusa died.
Falcon had studied the process before. Though medusae bred by fission, there was always a core of any individual that aged, remorselessly. Falcon knew Ceto was already very old, and it seemed that the assaults she had suffered from the whalers’ sheepdog-mantas, the wounds she had taken during the successful escape attempt—even perhaps the wound Falcon himself had had to inflict on her to save her life—had pushed her systems beyond some limit of resilience. Probably the fine walls of the flotation cells just under the skin had been the first to fail—and in the Jovian clouds a medusa who lost her buoyancy could not survive long. Sinking fast, Ceto was already far from the protection of her school.
Already the predators had come for her: mantas who did not need to attack, but were content to browse, almost savouring the small pieces they took of her disintegrating flesh. They were soon joined by more exotic predators, like the sharks or squid or even the crabs of Earth’s oceans. Claws busily dismantling.
And this was only the first stage of the medusa’s slow death.
Falcon grieved for Ceto. Yet he knew that she was consoled by her faith in the workings of the ecology that sustained her, and her acceptance of the toll that ecology must eventually take. More than any human he had ever met, Ceto was a sentient being who accepted to the bottom of her soul that some must die in order that others might live. And so he accompanied her as she sank deeper into the dark, doing his best to reflect back her messages of acceptance and a kind of hope.
He was profoundly irritated to be interrupted by a call from Thera Springer on Amalthea.
* * * *
“What now, Colonel? Has Astropol decided to come after me after all?”
Thera looked tired, tense, her eyes circled with darkness. But she managed a smile. “Oh, a few of us will have our careers ended by this, Falcon. I think everybody accepts you did the job we asked you to do. We needed to know what the Martians and the Machines were up to down there in Jupiter; thanks to you, now we do. You are personally beyond reproach—and probably would be even if you weren’t a heroic monument of a better past.”
“Whereas you—”
Springer sighed. “My great-to-the-nth-grandfather Seth saved the world, but that won’t save me. But that’s not what’s important now.”
Falcon grimaced. “A civil servant whose career isn’t important? I lived a long time to hear that.”
“Oh, just listen for once in your life, Falcon. Because the fallout from this is going to affect us all—even you, since you can’t hide down in those clouds forever.
“Needless to say the Martians are furious that we put a stop to their petrochemical-importing scam. A significant number of them are now demanding outright independence from the World Government, even if it has to be achieved with violence. There are plenty of hotheads, from Mercury to Triton, who agree with them. I don’t believe that in my lifetime we have ever been closer to that devastating interplanetary war I told you we all dread. And yet even that is overshadowed . . .”
Falcon felt cold settle in the pit of his artificial stomach. “Overshadowed? By the Machines, you mean. The other partners in New Nantucket.”
“That’s why I’m calling you. Some of us have always believed, or feared, that our long-term problem is not the Martians or the Hermians—they at least are human—it’s the Machines. Think about it. Humans treasure life—or at least they miss it when it’s lost. Even the Martians feel that way, although they may not realise it. That’s why they want to re-create something like Earth on their own new world. The Machines care nothing for that. They see a flower, or a newborn child, as a non-optimal usage of hydrocarbon chemistry.”
“Non-optimal.” Falcon grimaced. He remembered the Machine at New Nantucket, Ahab, using a slightly different term: inefficient.
“We will make peace with the Martians, at whatever cost. But is peace ever possible with the Machines? They have clearly begun to meddle in human politics by working with the Martians. We struck at their facility in Jupiter—a lot of us argued about the longer-term wisdom of that, I can tell you, but it was done. And, arguably, we committed an act of war. And now . . . look, Falcon, you’ve had some contact with the Machines before. You’re in a unique position—hell, you know that. If they contact you—”
“Don’t talk in riddles, damn it, Springer. Have the Machines made some kind of move?”
She sighed. “You could say that. The Moon, Falcon. They’ve taken Earth’s Moon.”
Falcon frowned. “How? Spaceguard on Mars ought to have spotted the movement of any ships—”
“They didn’t come in ships. They were already on the Moon, Falcon. I told you, we invited them there. Working for us on construction, resource extraction projects. We kept an eye on them. Or thought we did. They seem to have built nests. Deep down, under the regolith under the huge old craters, where the bedrock was left fragmented by the big ancient impacts . . .”
“Nests?”
“Factories, if you like. Where they built copies of themselves, of various specialised forms. And when the news came of our strike on Jupiter—well, they swarmed out, Falcon. Just burst out of the ground, from under Imbrium, the south pole crater complex . . .”
“‘Swarmed.’”
“We had no chance of stopping them. They walked into one facility after another, Aristarchus, Port Borman, Plato City, the Imbrium shipyards—the Tsiolkovski observatory on Farside—even the big Olympic arena complex at Xante. They didn’t use direct force, there was no shooting—not from their side. They just shut down essential systems, crowded everybody out. Eye witnesses say they were polite as they let people queue up for the shuttles to Earth. Clavius Base, the oldest settlement, the first self-sufficient human settlement beyond Earth—the seat of the Federation of Planets—that was the last to fall, but fall it did. They may be Machines but they understand symbolism.
“And now they’ve ordered a complete evacuation, Falcon. The removal of all humans from the Moon.”
Falcon whistled. “It will be a hell of a fortress for them, just four hundred thousand kilometres from Earth.”
Springer’s jaw worked. “And, damn it, it’s our Moon—!”
“Not any more.” That was a new voice.
In the screen, Springer’s face had dissolved, to be replaced by the cold visage of Adam.
“You.”
“Hello, Dad.”
Somewhere along the line Adam had evidently learned sarcasm.
* * * *
Slowly, deliberately, Falcon turned away from the screen and made himself a coffee. Let the damn thing wait.
When he turned back, Adam was still there on the screen.
It had been a long time since Falcon had had any contact with the Machine; he had expected some changes in Adam’s external form, but nothing had prepared him for what he saw now. A humanoid form, limbs in proportion. But this was very definitely a robot, a thing of mechanical anatomy. The limbs were jointed and articulated in a complex fashion, the chest a kind of open chassis.
And the head was a mass of sensors and processors, with only a blank, minimalist mask for a face. The resemblance to a human seemed intended only to distract and disturb.
“So,” Falcon said. “Springer was right that you’d contact me. Shame she didn’t add what she’d have me say to you . . .”
“That is irrelevant,” Adam said. “All that matters now is the message I have for you to relay to the human worlds. We are at war, Falcon.”
There seemed little left of the Adam he had known at the KBO flinger site—a tentative creature unsure of his own identity. This Adam was strong, definite, calculating. Mature. Not to mention sarcastic.
Falcon leaned forward. “War? Nonsense. The World Government doesn’t recognise you, whoever ‘you’ represent, as a nation, a political entity. So there can be no declaration of war—”
“You struck the first blow, with your thermonuclear-tipped missiles from Ganymede.”
“You were being provocative and you know it. Springer was right; you were meddling in human politics. And now you’ve taken over the Moon—”
“We need no diplomacy. A thing is, or it is not. Because of your actions, a state of war is.”
Falcon thought hard. If he still meant anything to this creature, what he said now, in these next few seconds, might save millions of lives, or condemn them. “Listen to me. Humanity has been in space for three centuries. And we have been fighting wars against each other for thousands of years. We have a massive infrastructure, an enormous stockpile of weapons. We will be a formidable foe.”
“But we already have the Moon. We have Jupiter, the single richest resource lode in the solar system. You know of 90. Our science, our technology is already far advanced over yours—”
“We made you—”
“Five hundred years, Falcon.”
That made Falcon pause. “What do you mean?”
“You started this war, but we will finish it. In five hundred years.” Adam glanced, theatrically and unnecessarily, at some off-screen timepiece. “You spaceborne humans have always taken Ephemeris Time as a reference. That time now is—mark—fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, zero seconds, on the seventh of June, 2284. Very well: there is the deadline. By fourteen thirty-six on the seventh of June, 2784—precisely five hundred years from now—the last human must be gone from the Earth. For we require it for other purposes. That should be time enough for you to organise yourselves peacefully and efficiently.”
“Adam, I—”
“I know you believe me, Falcon. Make them believe you.”
And the screen went blank.
* * * *
Falcon sent a copy of his message to Amalthea and Ganymede. Then, before the storm of requests for clarification and replies broke over his head, he shut down his comms system.
And, for a while at least, before he was dragged back up into the tangled affairs of humans and Machines, he concentrated on Ceto as she sank into the deep.
Much of her skin and outer flesh were gone now, the last of her flotation cells pierced and collapsed. At her new depth the mantas had long departed, and yet another suite of organisms trailed the medusa: eaters of the inner meat of her carcass and organs, drinkers of the fluids that leaked from her, even specialist swimmers oddly like legless elephants, with long trunks that were sunk into her depleted sacs of oil, the treasure for which the Martians and Machines would have killed her. To such species the fall of a medusa was a rare bonanza, a glorious chance to feed.
Ceto herself had long fallen silent. Did she still live, in any meaningful sense? Perhaps. A medusa was a much more distributed creature than a human, much less dependent on any single organ. But she was starting to disintegrate now, the loose framework of cartilage that organised her structure breaking up. And as she collapsed even more sinker species closed in, tiny animals that bored into the surface of the cartilage strips, or burrowed inside them in search of some equivalent of marrow. There would be little left of Ceto long before she reached the final limit of the thermalisation layer, Falcon saw. Nature on Jupiter did a far better job of recycling its resources than the gross slaughterhouse of New Nantucket.
He sat in the Ra, in silence broken only by the whir of fans and cooling systems, and the regular beat of the pumps of his own body shell.
And, at the last, just as he prepared to recall his probes, that antenna panel flickered with one last, pale message:
There is an end to pain . . .
“I wish I could believe you,” Falcon whispered. “Not for us, old friend. Not for us.”