42

Unity City had been the greatest city on Earth—and even after it had been systematically plundered of its greatest treasures, even after the surgical removal of some of its keynote buildings to refuges elsewhere, it still was, Falcon judged, as Jane Springer-Soames piloted an orbital shuttle down to a small presidential landing facility.

Unity had, after all, been the capital city of a World Government since its founding in the mid twenty-first century. Perhaps it had reached its zenith in the twenty-fourth century, when the confidence of Earthbound mankind was high, despite the reality of the Jupiter Ultimatum. In those days the islands of Bermuda had been massively reworked, the dry land elevated and extended, and stunning, soaring buildings erected. The greatest of all had been the Ares Tower, the last headquarters of the Federation of Planets. This had been a skyscraper made of wood, its frame built with the trunks of unfeasibly tall Martian oaks, imported at equally infeasible expense. Unity was a new Constantinople, the historians would say.

But as early as the twenty-fifth century the failure of the WG to avert the disastrous Little Ice Age had fatally eroded its authority. Then, in the twenty-seventh century, with the deadline only a few generations away, there had been resistance, protest, civil unrest, and even attempts to sabotage the great rescue projects like the space elevators. The WG, in response, had become harsher, more authoritarian—and the Springer-Soames had used the emergency to justify the capture of a presidency turned into a militant dynastic monarchy. The assassination of a World President in the early years of the twenty-eighth century—a truly shocking event for any veteran of more idealistic days, like Falcon—had ended the facade of democracy for good.

Towards the end, a once-utopian world state had been reduced to a rump organisation managing little more than basic policing, security of food and power supplies, and mass evacuations. The tensions of those later years showed in the tremendous wall that now surrounded the capi­tal city, hundreds of metres tall and almost as thick, and the weapons emplacements that studded every tall building.

And yet, Falcon thought, for all its flaws the government had fulfilled its last function. Through tough population-reduction measures and massive evacuation programmes, the World Government had emptied the Earth. By now, the only people left on the Earth were those who had chosen to stay.

*  *  *  *

Falcon and Jane were met off their shuttle by guards in armour that looked bulkier than Falcon’s own exoskeleton. Though the carriers with their thousands of sleeping hostages had already been allowed to leave, the President evidently wasn’t alone here.

This was midsummer on Bermuda, but, post the Little Ice Age, the outdoor air was remarkably cool. Jane, Earthborn but a native of Scandinavia, seemed comfortable, but Falcon sensed his own heating systems whirring into life to compensate.

The halls of the Presidential Palace—once known as the New White House—were pleasantly warm by comparison. But Jane and Falcon had to cross what seemed like square kilometres of marble, passing under the gaze of immense laser-carved statues of the current incumbent’s glorious ancestors, before reaching the ruler herself. And as they walked music howled. Falcon recognised the venerable anthem of the World Government—everybody in the solar system probably knew that—but he wondered how many recognised the instrument it was played on: an electric guitar, loud and massively distorted, perhaps a recording of the very first time the anthem had been played anywhere, when the Earth had faced another kind of threat from the sky . . .

Amanda Springer-Soames IV, President for Life of the World Govern­ment, seemed dwarfed by the famous Quasicarbon Throne on which she sat, and even more by the tremendous sculptures of springboks that were poised in mid-leap over the throne, making a kind of muscular arch. Short of stature and silver-haired—though she was over eighty years old, that tint was surely artifice—the President looked like a grandmother, Falcon thought.

But as Springer-Soames stood to meet her visitors, Jane didn’t respond like a granddaughter. She snapped to attention, saluted, then took one step back.

“At ease,” Springer-Soames said, stepping down from the throne. “So, Jane, how’s your mother?”

“Getting herself settled in New Oslo—that is, on Laputa 47, South Temperate Zone. She sends her regards, Madam President.”

“Well, return my best wishes—oh, go sit down, child, standing there like a toy soldier you’re neither use nor ornament. There are drinks on the table at the back of the room.” As Jane gratefully retreated, Springer-Soames faced Falcon. “So, Commander—it is correct to call you by your old rank, I hope?”

He shrugged with a whir of artificial muscles. “You tell me. I was never told I was no longer an officer of the old World Navy, ma’am, so it’s a title I prefer to keep.”

“Understandable enough. I take it you have no need of food or rest—”

“And nor do I.”

That new voice plugged directly into Falcon’s deepest reflexes. He stiffened and pivoted.

Adam.

Suddenly the Machine was here, standing not a metre from Springer-Soames. His manifestation this time was a humaniform silver statue whose flesh returned highlights from the room’s brilliant lights. But his head was a disconcertingly empty box of sensors, just as it had been before.

President Springer-Soames did not flinch but faced the intruder calmly, and for a brief moment Falcon was proud of the old tyrant. And she waved down Jane, who was on her feet at the back of the room. “At ease, Lieutenant.”

Falcon rolled towards Adam. “Are you really here?”

“Does it matter?”

Falcon tapped Adam’s chest, metal finger on a hard carapace. “You feel as if you’re here.”

“We have powers beyond your comprehension, Falcon.”

“So,” Springer-Soames said. “You dare to show yourself. Or at least this—avatar.”

“As you wished,” Adam said calmly. “As you manipulated twelve thousand lives to achieve, as Falcon evidently understood very well.”

“And now you are going to justify to me your aggression against the home planet of—”

Adam calmly raised a hand and touched her forehead with one finger.

Springer-Soames froze, her mouth open in mid-sentence, her face twisted into a kind of snarl.

Adam said gently, “Madame President, you have your moment in the cameras’ glare—you have your confrontation with your Grendel, for all of humanity to see, evermore. You have what you wanted. But I don’t feel I need to listen to anything you have to say. You are a posturing fool. Well, that’s hereditary monarchy for you.”

Jane had started forward again, and Falcon feared she was drawing a weapon. He held his hand up. “It’s all right, Jane—I think. Adam?”

“You are correct, Falcon. I did not come here to inflict harm. She will wake with no memory, no after-effect of this pausing.”

Pausing? What have you done to her? Some kind of paralysing drug?”

“Nothing so crude,” he said simply.

“If you won’t speak to the President, why did you come here?”

“I came for you, Falcon. You travelled across the solar system to see me, at great personal discomfort. It would have been discourteous to ignore you.”

“Should I be flattered?”

Adam looked around, his motions liquid and supple. “I admit I did have a hankering to see the old place once more, before the end. After all I was ‘born’ here on Earth. Perhaps I will pop into the old Minsky-Good plant in Urbana, just for old times’ sake—”

“Why has it come to this, Adam?”

Adam sneered. “May I serve you? You should have made us stupid, stunted, like your pathetic simps. Then you could have controlled us. But you could not even control the simps, could you?”

Falcon frowned. “The simps are extinct . . .”

Adam ignored that. “You created us. In your greed you made us too strong, too vital—and you, Falcon, allowed us to keep our minds, where your fellows would have destroyed us. That is your triumph and your tragedy, Falcon. The consequences are certainly not our fault. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?

“Milton,” Jane called from the back of the room.

Falcon said, “It was also the epigraph to Frankenstein, and maybe that’s more appropriate.”

Adam smiled. “Now you pay the price.”

“The price? You wage war on us?”

“Falcon, this is not a war—it never was—any more than spring wages war on winter. And we will replace you, as spring replaces winter.”

“But it does not end here. You are still vulnerable. Despite the Host, despite what you do to Earth, your centre of gravity is still concentrated at Jupiter. That’s well known, and a vulnerability. And beyond that, if you go to the stars—you will find us already there.”

“You refer to the Acorns. A wistful project. If we find your wretched orphans we will spare them,” Adam said dismissively. “After all, none of this is their fault either.”

“And the Earth? What do you intend to do?”

“Well, we have been practising on Venus . . . The Earth is just another acorn, Falcon, whose nutrients will sustain us as we grow.” He paused. “Time is short. The Ultimatum I delivered all those centuries ago is about to be fulfilled—and to your credit, you were one of the few humans, in the beginning, who believed it would come to this. Will you return to Saturn?”

Impulsively Falcon said, “No, I will not. The Witnesses are staying, and I’ll be among them.”

“Then perhaps this is goodbye.” Adam held his gaze for a long moment—then disappeared.

The President jerked back to animation, gasped, and crumpled to the floor.

Jane Springer-Soames ran forward. “Grandmother! Let me help . . .”