When the moment of contact came, Falcon paused his work with the trowel and fell into a condition of perfect mechanical stillness.
It had not been a sound that alerted him, but rather a barely perceptible jolt, communicated through the fabric of this little world—through rock and soil, through his balloon wheels and hydraulic undercarriage, into the core of his being. The feeling of a footfall in an otherwise empty house.
An uninvited presence.
Falcon set the trowel down next to the hopper of fertiliser and rose to his full height. He looked down at the rockery, the border where he had been working. Howard Falcon was a machine riddled with clocks and timers—too many to disregard, too many for him to be able to ignore the passage of time. He knew very well that decades had worn away in this enclosing shelter. Decades since the end of the world. Well, evidently his long isolation was coming to an end.
Leaving his tools, he set off through the Memory Garden, passing along indulgently winding paths, over little stone bridges and under arched tunnels shaded beneath canopies of interlaced willow. Most of the rockeries were surmounted by black slabs that glowed into life as they detected his passage, and images of Hope Dhoni appeared in the slabs, her face turning to meet his. Had he lingered, the images would have invited him to listen as they recounted events and anecdotes from her life, accompanied by recordings and third-party testimonies. A stranger wandering these paths would have quickly built up a picture of Hope and her life. The longer they stayed—the more they explored the byways and corners of the Memory Garden—the more detailed that picture would have become.
Hope Dhoni had died not long after the destruction of the planet on which she had been born; in fact there had been a wave of such deaths in those first years. And Falcon had spent five decades since then constructing this place in her honour.
Falcon stopped at an intersection in the pathways, where a thick-walled window had been set into the floor—a window that looked out of this small body entirely, out into the star-littered sky of the outer solar system. From this angle he could make out the docking complex, just visible around the curvature of the worldlet. It was a long time since there had been any ships attached to that dock. When he arrived, Falcon’s first act had been to send his own ship back into space with a self-destruct command, so that he had no means of leaving the Garden. No matter the calls made on him, no matter the desire he might feel to return to the worlds of people or Machines, he would be a prisoner of his own making.
But now there was a ship.
He studied the belligerent lines of its shark-shaped hull, noting the smooth bulges that almost certainly marked the presence of long-range sensors, weapons systems, defensive countermeasures. Probably one of the new asymptotic-drive cruisers—human weaponry built around technological insights stolen from the Machines. The ship was night-black, save for a silver marking on one of its fins; the jumping springbok was impossible to mistake.
Another jolt reached Falcon—heavier now. A moment later he picked up the tiny shift in air pressure that meant a lock had been opened.
Falcon moved on from the window. He quickened his progress, his undercarriage whining. The winding paths climbed up through a succession of rockeries and screens, tightening as the diameter of the roughly spherical hollowed-out worldlet narrowed nearer the pole, and Falcon’s weight diminished as the effect of centripetal gravity was lessened. Sounds were reaching him now—heavy mechanical noises. People with equipment, on the move.
He took one last look back at the enclosed bubble of the garden, the rockeries wrapping around the worldlet’s interior, the glowing yellow shaft of the artificial sun along its axis. Whole acres were still unfinished, the paths winding through areas of rubble and soil that had yet to be landscaped and cultivated. There was so much that he had still meant to do.
He turned away.
* * * *
In the stony chamber of the reception area, the gravity was down to a tenth of a gee.
Here his visitors waited in a group. Two of them, wearing standard pressure suits of a lightweight, modern design, consulted a spread-out scroll, its translucent membrane displaying a cross-sectional map of the Memory Garden. Behind this pair stood three much more heavily armoured figures; their bulky, visorless, power-assisted suits were festooned with tools and weapons, in addition to the hand-held cannons they carried. Falcon instinctively slowed his approach, but even so the guards were still bringing their guns to bear on him, lining up the fist-sized barrels with his artificial head.
“Stand down,” said one of the map-holders, barely glancing up. “He’s harmless.”
With visible reluctance the big guns were lowered, but autonomous weapons mounted on the guards’ suits still had him targeted. Peering out from the suits on little swivelling necks, they reminded Falcon of snakes’ heads.
“Harmless? You’re sure of that?” he asked, his own voice sounding unfamiliar through long disuse. “I’ve been here a while. Maybe long enough to go a little stir crazy—”
“Do you know how long it’s been?” said the first map-holder—a woman’s voice. She let go of the scroll so that it snapped shut into a tube.
“I haven’t been keeping score.”
“Fifty-six years. Which would be long enough to test any normal person’s sanity—but not Howard Falcon’s. If becoming the thing you are didn’t drive you mad, nothing else stands a chance.”
“Said with all the tact and diplomacy of a true Springer.”
The figure jammed the scroll into the utility pouch, then reached up to lift off her helmet to reveal blue eyes and tied-back dark hair, her partner—a man—following suit a moment later. The woman snapped, “Who else would go to the trouble of finding you?”
“I’m glad it wasn’t easy.”
“My name is Valentina Atlanta Springer-Soames. This is my brother, Bodan Severyn.”
“Children of President Amanda IV? The rightful heirs to the Quasicarbon Throne, no doubt?”
“Grandchildren,” she corrected. “We are two of that generation . . . You knew one of us, didn’t you? Jane.”
“Yes. Good kid. What became of her?”
Valentina said dismissively, “Died in a futile battle amid the ruins of the Earth.”
“Ah.” And that was the sort of news that still, it seemed, had the capacity to hurt. But I no longer have a heart to break, he’d once complained to Hope. Don’t worry, Howard, she’d said. A heart will be provided . . .
The Springer-Soames seemed quite unaware of his reaction. The advantage of having a face like a piece of old shoe leather.
Valentina Atlanta spoke on relentlessly. “And no, finding you hasn’t been easy at all. You did a spectacular job of dropping off the map, Howard. But don’t you remember your own grand words, as Earth died? One way or another the Machines are going to pay for what they’ve done today. What happened to all that fire, that righteousness? Before the rubble of Earth had time to cool, you vanished from human affairs. Turned hermit. You didn’t even have the decency to come back to Saturn for Hope’s funeral.”
“That’s none of your business.”
Valentina Atlanta reached up and undid a clip at the back of her scalp, allowing her hair to loosen and spill down over her neck-ring. Bodan Severyn did likewise. They were facially similar, especially framed with those long, lavish locks of black hair. Falcon retained enough human sensibility to recognise an icy, imperious beauty in both sister and brother—no doubt the product of generations of the best genetic selection and engineering.
“What changed your mind?” Bodan Severyn asked. “About revenge on the Machines. Tell us.”
“I suppose I had what you might call a moment of clarity.”
“Clarity?” Valentina said.
“I realised that there were better things to be doing than planning the next level of retaliation. So we strike back at the Machines for destroying Earth. All we’d be doing is inviting further escalation. Asymmetric response after asymmetric response—an endless game of one-upmanship. Where would it end? When one of us takes apart the sun to prove a point?”
“It would end with justice,” Valentina said.
“Good luck with that.” Falcon made to turn. “Now, do you mind? I’ve gardening to do.”
“The outside world hasn’t gone away,” Bodan said. His voice was pitched fractionally deeper than his sister’s, his clipped intonation identical. “We’re still at war.”
“I know. I watch the fireworks. It’s very pretty. You could map the ecliptic plane, just by following those megaton sparks.”
Valentina smiled. “The war’s turned Darwinian—it’s a question of pure survival. Lately we’ve become very concerned about Machine activity in Jupiter. Things have entered a new and troubling phase . . . Have you been keeping abreast?”
And Falcon could not deny that he had.