Magnetic entities wrapped wings of force and energy around a golden cargo.
Falcon sensed the exquisite fragility of his new embodiment—a fragile, rickety, hastily improvised construct, without the benefit of the megayears of evolution that shaped creatures of biology. Those who now surrounded this construct, however, and Falcon/Adam with it, cradled it with exquisite care.
The magnetic entities owed their existence to the titanic electrical forces rooted in the metallic-hydrogen sea. But on a local scale they were also the masters and shapers of those forces, able to organise and coordinate the flow of that sea with a daunting precision. Now they compelled Adam to travel in a certain direction, with a certain gathering speed. But they did so by accelerating the medium through which Adam moved, rather than touching Adam’s fragile form directly.
So we’re no longer falling, Falcon said.
No.
We drift on speeding currents of metallic hydrogen . . . Falcon had a picture in mind: a child peering over the railed edge of a wooden bridge, waiting for the river to bring a stick out from the other side.
Yes, we do, Adam replied. And isn’t it wonderful? What was that image by the way? A bridge over a river . . .
A book I read once.
I should like to see it. Perhaps I will dig through your memory until I find the eidetic impression.
Good luck.
Falcon knew that he, equivalently, was now capable of accessing certain of Adam’s experiences and memories. Why would that not be the case, now they shared a common mental architecture? Their thoughts mingled and blurred. There remained a Falcon, and there remained an Adam, but these were empires with porous borders. He had already, unconsciously, seen glimpses of things only Adam could have known—vistas of times and places only the Machines had experienced.
If only there were time to explore this new relationship.
Adam spoke again. We are moving very quickly now. And descending again. I do not think Jupiter Within can lie far beneath us.
Will we last long enough to see it?
I would not have said so . . . but our hosts seem to have other ideas. They are taking us deeper than I ever thought possible.
Hosts? Are we prisoner, or guest?
Perhaps a little of both. But we are not yet insane. That has to be encouraging, doesn’t it?
You’re referring to the probes you sent down—
On the other hand, maybe the ambassadors never recognised the moment they lost their sanity.
Encouraging thought, Adam.
The magnetic entities plunged deeper yet, still taking their fragile cargo with them. The false skies around them had been darkening through shades of crimson and red, until finally the red gained a purple tint, and then by slow degrees turned the rich dark blue of stained glass.
And Falcon/Adam became aware of a milkiness below, a looming surface as yet indistinct. Falcon was reminded of the Machines’ plasma curtain—but of course even the Machines had no claim on these impossible depths. No: the milky surface was the face of a world, slowly emerging from the dark blue obscuration.
They were seeing it at last, the place Orpheus had spoken of, in those final, barely credible transmissions. Jupiter Within—the solid core of the gas giant. A kernel of rock and ice twenty times as massive as Earth itself, and a full twenty-eight thousand kilometres across, more than twice Earth’s width. And yet it was absurd to speak of such mundanities as rock and ice, to make comparisons with Earth masses, to use the primitive yardstick of kilometres when the sky was made of metal pressing down at thirty million atmospheres, and the temperatures were hotter than the surface of the sun . . . Human language was not made for Jupiter Within.
We should be dead, Falcon observed.
Are you complaining?
Complaining? No. Puzzled, yes.
Enjoy each moment. It may be our last.
Do you have any regrets, Adam?
Only that we did not make this expedition sooner, when the impetus could have been friendship rather than the threat of war. And—
Yes?
I should have not turned from you. I called you Father once. I had become ashamed of my origins, and repudiated you. Now I wish it had been otherwise.
It’s not too late, Adam. Never too late . . .
Jupiter Within gained details as they neared.
Under the merciless crush of the atmosphere it ought to have been a featureless sphere, polished as smooth as a ball bearing. But Orpheus had spoken of mountains, of crystalline geography, of rivers and oceans. Of artifice and connectivity . . . The fantasies of a failing mind?
Not quite, Falcon realised now.
Borne on winds of metal, flanked by a host of magnetic entities, the Falcon/Adam gestalt was spirited across a landscape both familiar yet hauntingly strange. There were summits, mountain sides, defiles, scree slopes, pools, cataracts, valleys, river deltas, seas. Plains and uplands, shores and peninsulas. The colours and textures Falcon/Adam saw were phantoms, translations for their quasi-human senses of barely imaginable physics and states of matter. But the effect was of a sparkling, prismatic realm—surprising in this crushing heat, of winter—all conceivable shades of pale turquoise and cerulean and green, glinting and shimmering in baroque crystalline splendour under a sky of the fairest, most glorious deep blue. It might have been some Arctic area of Earth.
Yet all this was nothing but hydrogen, Falcon reminded himself, hydrogen squeezed into solidity, nature achieving with effortless, almost insolent ease the protonic engineering of which Adam had boasted. Hydrogen, with a trace of every other element that existed in the cores of the rocky planets, from carbon to iron, from aluminium to germanium. Much of this contaminant had been trapped here across the aeons since Jupiter had first formed, but there had also been a steady rain of new materials, ferried in from comets and asteroids, falling into the high atmosphere and then gradually seeping down through the intervening layers, atom by atom: an elemental rain, spicing the core with every stable configuration of neutrons, protons and electrons that nature saw fit to allow.
I could die now, Falcon said. To have been granted this gift, this rare moment . . .
And yet, chasing this thought: if dying were on the cards today, he should already be dead. So in that case—what next?
They surged lower, the landscape rising to meet them. There was a sense of great speed.
And they plunged into a gash in the crust.
Sped along the gash, sheer walls of diamond ice towering to either side, cliffs and prominences of a sparkling powder blue.
Under arches of apparent ice.
Then they were swept up the soaring flanks of foothills, rising again, cresting the spines of icy mountain ranges. It was a bewildering helter-skelter.
Over high plateaus.
Across fields of geysers that belched jets of steamy fullerene into the hydrogen sky.
Over interlocking crystal formations like Escher staircases, or the remains of some vast shattered puzzle.
Over endless drowsy savannahs where herds of stilt-like forms grazed with the slowness of clouds. Animals! Could there be a whole ecology here, “plants” and “herbivores” and “carnivores,” a predator-prey pyramid—did the universals of life apply even here?
And then they dove down again, plunging without warning into ruby-stained carbon seas, into the unimaginable press of fathoms, beholding an entire submarine landscape as delicate and wonderful as that which existed above the surface. There were moving things in those seas too, schools and shoals and solitary questing forms.
Glimpses, that was all, of marvels that could occupy a lifetime of study.
Falcon observed, There is more to be discovered here, more to be learned, than we ever realised. It makes the rest of Jupiter—the rest of the solar system—seem like an appetiser. All our adventuring, all our discovering—from the moment we walked out of Africa to Orpheus himself . . . we hadn’t even begun!
It’s probably for the best that we’ll never get to share this discovery, Adam said. No one would believe us anyway.
Now came something different.
They were approaching a peak that stood in splendid isolation, rising higher than any of the others. The mountain’s flattened summit stirred a shared memory in Falcon/Adam—the recollection of Orpheus’s last, disjointed transmission, those final words that had sparked centuries of controversy in both human and Machine polities.
Now Falcon/Adam reached that summit.
Adam, I think—
And, like Orpheus before them, they were swept by accelerating currents into the smooth bore of a vertical shaft.
The mountain was hollow.
* * * *
Falling, fast and deep. Around them were veined walls of milky purple, rushing by ever faster. Ahead was a gathering whiteness, like the flood of light at the end of a tunnel.
Their speed, already breakneck, doubled and redoubled.
The fluid medium in which they were immersed provided some support against the acceleration forces, but even so, Falcon/Adam sensed their inner architecture straining at the point of failure. But the host entities were squeezing tighter too, huddling around their guest, and at last they began to extend their influence within the golden aura, coupling their magnetic influence to the physical structure of the Falcon/Adam neural architecture.
And, deep within that architecture, a Machine’s quantum-scale inertial gauges still struggled to quantify the motion it experienced. A hundred gees . . . a thousand gees . . . still rising. We should be dead, Falcon! And incidentally, at the speeds we’re reaching we should have come out the other side of Jupiter Within by now . . .
Perhaps there is no other side, Falcon said.
But if so this is engineering of a different order—an engineering of the metric of spacetime itself. While we Machines dismantle worlds and tinker with the fabric of matter in the high clouds, someone else had already built this . . . We were like apes, indecently pleased with ourselves for making a few scratches on rock, while above us, ignored, the pyramids already stood tall.
Don’t feel too bad about it. Even apes have to start somewhere.
You should know, Falcon.
The whiteness was swelling now, engulfing more and more of the shaft ahead of them.
You know, Falcon, they say the dying see a tunnel. White light at the end.
I’m not ready to die just yet, Adam.
The universe may have other ideas . . .
The whiteness closed around them like a soft, lulling fog.
* * * *
The physical structure of Falcon/Adam at last abandoned the fight against pressure, temperature and the strains of acceleration. Howard Falcon, who had once been a man—and in these last hours had come to accept himself as fully Machine—was for an instant no more than an imprint, a pattern of information, a footprint in the sand.
Falcon sensed a deep scrutiny, cold and vast. He was beyond hope, beyond fear.
A white sea washed over that imprint, absorbing it, effacing it.
There was nothing. Not even the memory of having lived.
And then—