The Medusa Encounter Read online

  By the time the little train reached its terminus, Sparta’s thinking had evolved. It seemed to her that her role as Ellen Troy, inspector for the Board of Space Control, had finally and completely outlived its usefulness. For what she was about to do, what was a badge but an encumbrance? She walked across the train platform to the nearest infobooth. All by itself—as she had so often proved in her short history—it was a ticket to wealth and mobility and invisibility. A smile tugged at her perpetually open lips. She rarely smiled, and this one was not pleasant.

  A day after leaving Darjeeling, she walked into the Varanasi shuttleport. Her eyes were liquid brown, her hair was as long and straight and black and sleek as Holly Singh’s own, and her sari would have graced a maharani. When she spoke to the cabin attendant on the hypersonic jitney to London, her accent was perfect BBC, enlivened by musical hints of India.

  But when she left Heathrow for London by magneplane three hours later, her hair was once more red-gold and curly and her eyes were sparkling green.

  The next morning she woke up stiff and cold, to the sound of black rain beating against her apartment’s single small window. Winter had come to London.

  The videoplate brightened to the image of a young man wrapping his rosebud lips around his words as if he were sucking a lozenge. “Ronald Weir of the BBC reporting. Here is the morning’s news. The Board of Space Control has just announced the seizure of the freighter Doradus. The vessel was discovered abandoned in a sparsely populated region of the main asteroid belt. The Doradus and its crew have been sought for several months in connection with the attempted robbery of the artifact known as the Martian plaque. A Space Board spokesperson notes that the Doradus was discovered to have been heavily armed with sophisticated weapons of a type restricted to use by authorized agencies of the Council of Worlds. The registered owners of the vessel have been approached with new inquiries.” The announcer shuffled his papers. “In Uzbekistan, South Central Asia Administrative Region, religious leaders have announced a cease-fire in the nine-year-old hostilities . . .”

  Sparta put on one of Bridget Reilly’s plainest dresses and sweaters. After a quick breakfast of soy paste on bran, she wrapped her threadbare Burberry around her and made her way through the gray rain to her office in the city.

  Without a good morning to anyone, she hung up her coat and umbrella and sat down at her terminal.

  To date, no bureaucracy had been safe from her electronic inquiries. Like ivy on a stone wall, her mind had reached into the crevices of every bureaucratic facade, patiently prying loose a flake of information here and a flake there, until massive structures of obstinacy and deceit had crumbled.

  The Board of Space Control operated the most sophisticated computer nets in the inhabited worlds; an entire bureau within the Board was devoted to perfecting computer security, and another whole bureau was dedicated to ruining the work of the first. There was a way, only one, to maintain perfect security in a computer: complete isolation, not allowing the machine to talk to any other—and for the Space Board’s purposes, that sort of security was useless.

  Sparta—although she was not supposed to be—was thoroughly familiar with the intricacies of the Space Board’s primal and fractal encryption systems. When all else failed and she chose to take the time, the computer behind the bone of her forehead could break encrypted codewords by sheer number-crunching power. Thus, in the long run, she could peek into any file she wanted to see. Much more easily, she altered files and created new files as she needed them.

  Information was an ocean, one she swam in freely.

  XVI

  “The Prime Directive states that in any contact between humans and unknown forms of life, the human explorers shall take whatever steps are necessary to avoid disturbing the unknown forms. There follow quite a few footnotes and clarifications, of course, but that’s the gist of it.”

  “An excellent principle; one we lobbied for with great energy.” Dexter Plowman looked alarmingly like his sister, with gaunt face, bristling brows, and a tight cap of crimped, gray-black hair. “And successfully, of course.”

  Blake and the two Plowmans were trudging briskly northeastward along a seemingly endless, garbage-fouled beach. To their right, tired surf the color of tea slumped against the sand. To their left rose the twisted and blackened ruins of Atlantic City.

  Arista had tracked her brother to this bleak shore, where he was making a personal inspection—and incidentally providing the mediahounds with photogram opportunities—in preparation for his next big suit against the government. The mediahounds having been reluctant to leave the parking lot and fill their shoes with sand, Blake had Dexter and Arista alone long enough to make his pitch.

  “What I’m getting at, sir, is that the Prime Directive was promulgated at a time when there was no clue whatever of surviving life of any kind elsewhere in the solar system. . . .”

  “Plenty of evidence for life!” One could almost hear the unspoken objection! in Dexter’s tone. “All those fossils!”

  “Yes, sir, at the time a half dozen scraps of fossil had been discovered on the surface of Venus—all confidently dated to a billion years ago, when Venus had oceans, a moderate climate, and an Earth-like atmosphere.”

  “The whole point, Redfield! Close the gate before the pigs get out, isn’t that what they say?”

  “The horse, Dexter,” his sister muttered.

  He ignored her. “And sure enough, it wasn’t long before the Martian plaque proved they had gotten here. And just a few months ago, there were those spectacular discoveries on Venus. . . .”

  “Yes, sir, I was on Port Hesperus at the time,” Blake said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “My question is different. I’m wondering just what motivated . . .”

  “Motivation!” Dexter vigorously kicked at a cluster of used syringes. “A space station worker came to us with evidence that he had been infected with extraterrestrial microorganisms.”

  “What a fiasco!” Arista sneered. “You couldn’t produce a shred of evidence at the trial.”

  “While we may have lost the horseshoe, dear”—he wasn’t looking at her when he said “dear”—“we saved the nail.”

  “You lost the case,” she muttered.

  “We won the principle. No contact between humans and aliens. Quarantine established as the baseline. A resounding victory for exo-ecology. None of this going in and mucking about with things we don’t understand.” He paused long enough to scrape a gob of tar from his foot.

  “Yes sir. While the worker’s lawsuit didn’t succeed, the Space Board did not resist your subsequent initiative campaign to write the Prime Directive into administrative law,” Blake said.

  Dexter gave him an appreciative glance—what a bright lad! “In fact, their Long Range Planning office had already come over to our side. Given friendly testimony.”

  Blake hesitated, approaching the delicate moment. “The worker whose grievance you undertook . . .”

  “A class action, as a matter of fact. On behalf of all employees of the Board of Space Control who had been exposed to disease-causing extraterrestrial organisms.”

  “Nonexistent extraterrestrial organisms,” Arista muttered.

  “No attempt was made to punish or discipline the worker because of his legal action,” Blake said.

  “We made damn sure of that!”

  “In fact, he was given a raise and promoted within a year after losing his suit against his own employers.”

  Dexter’s bushy eyebrows jumped—oh, really?—but he said nothing.

  “I was curious as to where the actual text of the Prime Directive originated,” Blake continued. “I managed to uncover a draft of a memo from Brandt Webster, who as you may know is now Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans. . . .”

  Dexter erupted. “How?”

  “Sir?”

  “How did you discover this draft memo?”

  “I used a, uh, home computer. Webster’s memo spells out the wording of
the Prime Directive virtually as it was adopted more than a year later. I’m wondering. . . .”

  As Dexter’s thick brows drew closer together he stumbled over a seagull carcass.

  “. . . if possibly Webster worked with your people at Vox Populi in drafting the proposal to the Council of Worlds.”

  Dexter’s glance flickered to his sister. “Certainly it’s possible. I’m not sure, at this late date.”

  “Sir, Webster’s superior initially rejected his proposal on several grounds, mainly that in unprecedented situations astronauts should be allowed the greatest possible scope of judgment and action. Further, that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial life in the solar system at the time and plenty of evidence against its existence under any but Earthlike conditions. All that happened five months before the Space Board worker came to you with his complaint.” Blake patted the polycanvas briefcase he had lugged up the beach. “I have the holocopies here.”

  “Mm. Later, Mr. Redfield.”

  “I also have copies of the documents the worker, Mr. Gupta, showed you when he came to you with his complaint. And holos of the recovered Jupiter probe that supposedly brought an infectious organism back to Ganymede Base. And microcphotograms of the supposed alien organism. And the doctor’s report of the worker’s CNS infection . . .”

  “I remember all those perfectly well,” Dexter said irritably, but the fire had gone out of his objection.

  Arista smiled nastily. “Then Mr. Redfield won’t have to show you the documents that proved the so-called alien organism was ordinary S. cerevisiae—yeast—mutated, by exposure to gamma radiation and antibiotics.”

  “That didn’t come out until much later,” said Dexter.

  “And his nervous-system infection turned out to be a mild case of herpes,” said Arista.

  “So the defense contended,” said Dexter.

  “So the jury believed,” said Arista.

  “By then we had dominated the media for months,” Dexter said. “The larger issue was well understood by the public—dangerous alien lifeforms could exist. As I said at the time, bugs in the bushes—”

  “Birds,” Arista muttered.

  “—are worth a timely stitch. And I still firmly believe that.”

  “Sir, this Gupta may be a member of the group I mentioned earlier, the Free Spirit . . .”

  Dexter’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah, I see it now! A conspiracy!” He made a sharp left turn, leading the little group around the outfall from a sewage pipe. “You are implying that I was duped into helping create a political climate in which the Prime Directive would pass over the objections of Space Board higher-ups. Yes, yes, Redfield, now I see why my sister swallowed your sugar-coated argument. But you’ve skipped something.”

  “What would that be?” asked Arista.

  “Motivation!” Objection! “What possible motivation could this Free Spirit cult of yours have for protecting human explorers from extraterrestrial germs!”

  “None, sir.”

  “F. O. B.!” Dexter crowed.

  “Q. E. D.,” muttered Arista.

  “That’s not what the Prime Directive primarily does, sir,” Blake said mildly. “The Prime Directive in effect requires an explorer to sacrifice himself or herself before harming or causing distress to an extraterrestrial.”

  “Even an extraterrestrial bug,” Arista said sourly. “Dexter, shut up a minute. Stop defending yourself and just listen.”

  Brother and sister locked gazes. Dexter blinked first.

  “Go ahead, Redfield,” Arista said.

  “When I infiltrated the Free Spirit I learned that their beliefs are based on historical texts which they think are records of alien visits to Earth. This so-called Knowledge indicates the approximate location of the alien home star. It also indicates when and where they think the alien Pancreator will return.”

  “Which would be . . . ?” Dexter grumbled.

  “Jupiter. Two years from now.”

  The little group came to a halt. The beach ahead was crowded with small purplish shapes like abandoned baggies. “What are those?” Dexter demanded, horrified. “Leftovers from somebody’s lunch?”

  “Jellyfish, sir. Don’t step on them. They could sting.”

  “As you say.” Dexter shoved his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets. Standing still, the wind seemed stronger. “Redfield, why should Vox Populi or anyone else be concerned with the beliefs of these moonies?”

  “Loonies,” muttered Arista.

  “For a couple of reasons, sir. They’ve taken over the machinery of government—spending the people’s money on their religion, if you want to look at it that way. Within the last century there have been three hundred and twenty-six probes into the clouds of Jupiter. Two years from now the Kon-Tiki expedition is scheduled to send the first human explorer to Jupiter.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s a big waste, but that’s what science is, isn’t it? Cons and crazy people fleecing the public.”

  Blake let the proxmirism pass. “What if some alien thing is waiting in the clouds of Jupiter. The Prime Directive prohibits approaching it.”

  Dexter shook his head. “This is nuts!”

  “The Free Spirit are nuts,” Blake said. “That doesn’t mean they’re not right. What I’ve seen of the Knowledge looks pretty convincing.”

  “Right or wrong, they need to be stopped,” Arista put in.

  “How do you propose to do it, Redfield?”

  “I’m glad you asked, sir. . . .”

  They turned and walked back down the beach. The frigid smoke-filled wind which had been at their backs now stung their cheeks and burned their eyes and numbed their ears, and Blake had to shout over it to outline his plan.

  By the time they reached the parking lot, where a few shivering reporters still waited to hear Dexter’s next antiestablishment salvo, he was more than a convert; he was already preparing to take credit for Blake’s scheme.

  “As I’ve always said, Redfield,” he expounded, “you can’t break eggs without a loose cannon.”

  “That’s me, sir,” Blake cheerfully agreed, while Arista’s eyes rolled skyward.

  PART FOUR

  THE WORLD OF THE GODS

  XVII

  Two years later . . .

  The fueling tender blew its hoses a little rougher than it should have, spilling a quick blizzard of freezing oxygen into space. On Captain Chowdhury’s board, the numbers bounced. No alarms went off, no vital pieces were broken off, but Garuda would have to spend more fuel than it should, keeping station.

  The captain swallowed a curse. “Garuda to Sofala, that was an execrable separation. Please learn your job before you come back.”

  “It is our opinion that it is your loadmaster who needs to learn his job,” the Sofala’s captain replied sharply. “Do you insist upon arbitration?”

  Chowdhury hesitated—his mass-to-fuel ratio was only minutely on the down side—before he replied, as coolly as he could, “Leave the mouse-pushers out of it. Just go easy, will you?”

  Sofala did not deign to answer. The fuel tender slid smoothly away, climbing toward Ganymede.

  Chowdhury keyed off. He’d have to have a word with his loadmaster. Meanwhile, no harm done, and there were plenty of more important things to worry about.

  But he wondered which demon he had failed to propitiate before lifting this grandly named bus from Ganymede a month ago. What should have been a routine job, despite the hoopla about the fancy cargo—after all, all he had to do was keep his converted tug on station behind Jupiter’s little moon Amalthea—had plagued him from the start with all the accumulated glitches and gremlins and bugs he’d somehow managed to avoid in an error-free, twenty-year career, jockeying ships among the big planet’s satellites.

  The gremlin in the works was Sparta. She had shoved her PIN spines into one of the fuel-control microprocessors and messed up its timing; a second later she had readjusted it. Chowdhury’s system check would reveal nothing amiss.

  Spar
ta hovered in the shadows of the loading manifold, listening to the quick exchange between the two captains—filtering their distant voices out of all the multiple vibrations of the ship—before scurrying further back into the dark.

  She used the narrowest of access passages to climb toward her lair in one of the ship’s auxiliary power bays. From her grease-blackened face her sunken eyes shone starkly. She squeezed through the cramped shadows, finding her way by acute hearing and smell, seeing the dull red glow of Garuda’s metal guts in the infrared. She made it to her nest while the tug was still wobbling from the bad disconnect.

  In a space station or a satellite colony, whose populations often exceeded 100,000, she could easily have disappeared in the crowd—as she’d done on Ganymede Base—but in a ship with twenty-eight people aboard, her only choice was to hide. She disguised her slight but anomalous extra mass by arranging numerous little “accidents” in refueling and resupply.

  For a month, ever since Garuda had launched from Ganymede, she’d been living the life of a homeless refugee, secreting herself in the tiny space behind the AP unit service hatch. In that time she’d grown gaunt and filthy, with few opportunities to sponge her body or dry-wash her hair and none to clean her clothes. Twice she’d risked stealing bits of laundry from the recycler, substituting her own grimy underwear and coveralls. She’d filched food from stores when she could and rescued scraps from recycling; her meager diet had a high proportion of nutrients in forms others didn’t want: powdered grape drink, salted yeast extract, freeze-dried tofu chips—

  —but she carried her own supply of Striaphan, in a tube filled with hundreds of little white disks that melted like fine sugar under the tongue.

  Garuda was Kon-Tiki’s mother ship. A ten-year veteran of service in near-Jupiter space, until eighteen months ago Garuda was an unprepossessing heavy-lift tug with spartan facilities for the usual crew of three. Now its builders wouldn’t have recognized it. Garuda’s cargo holds had been replaced with a complex of crew facilities, tiny but luxurious—private cabins, dining room, game rooms, clinics, commissary—and its life support systems had been enlarged, its onboard power units made multiply redundant, its chemical fuel tanks tripled in capacity. Amidships, Garuda bristled like a sea urchin with antennas and communications masts.