The Medusa Encounter Page 17

  This is data from a Jupiter probe. A tag on the file, accessed by her objective mind, gives its designation and date. She is experiencing what the probe “experienced” through all its sensors, its lenses and antennas and radiation detectors.

  The file terminates. With a jump, like a cut in a viddie, she is inside another experience.

  An operating theater. A swirl of lights overhead. A tingle of dulled pain throughout her body, radiating from her belly to the tips of her toes and fingers. Is this herself on the table? Is she reliving her agony on Mars through some monitor’s data record? No, this is another place, another . . . patient. The physicians take their time.

  They are invisible behind their masks, but she can smell them. Not much left of the flesh and blood human under the lights, and what there is is supported by an intricate fretwork of plastic and metal . . . instruments where organs should be. Temporary support systems? Permanent prostheses?

  Jump. New file.

  Falcon. She is Falcon. She/he is testing her/his restored limbs, her/his restored sense organs. Grisly business . . . the most primitive sort of physical therapy. Her/his progress monitored by internal implants. . . .

  Again she struggles to separate her consciousness from the experience in which she is immersed. These are Falcon’s feelings, but Falcon himself does not seem to know that he has been tapped, is being recorded. They’ve put a bug in him, inside his head.

  Fascinated, she immerses herself in his therapy, the painful stretching and flexing of his patched limbs and organs—his restored and enhanced powers. Of his eyes—capable of microscopic and telescopic vision, of sensitivity to ultraviolet and infrared. Of his sense of smell—capable of bringing instant chemical analysis to consciousness. Of his sensitivity to radio and particle radiation. Of his ability to listen . . .

  He was her. But better. New and improved. Better sensors. Better processors. She felt a surge of anger, of stark jealousy.

  Jump. New file.

  Flight simulation, down into the swirling clouds of the gas giant, a planet which could only be Jupiter. Visuals and other data, lifted from probes. Supersonic winds. Hydrocarbon slurry. Temperature shifts, pressure shifts—all seen from inside Falcon’s head. And she is there, swimming in it with him.

  A hot beam of radio—

  —and then a sound, a song, a booming choir, coming right into his/her breast, bursting from it with a swelling joy and a shocking, necessary urge. For the Song is the Knowledge, and the Knowledge is that, in the end, All Will Be Well. . . . Despite and because of the sacrifice. The necessary and joyfully-to-be-contemplated Sacrifice. A voice as of that of the God of Heaven sounds all around: “Remember the Prime.”

  She gives herself up to the luxury and ecstasy of the simulation. Falcon loves it. Falcon seeks it as she does, the giving, the final surrender. . . . “Remember the Prime.”

  Then she understands. Her rage and jealousy soar as she identifies with Falcon, the one who has taken her place, the one who is made better than she.

  She breaks the link and pulls the chip from the terminal, pulls her spines from its ports, cuts all contact. She is consumed with a rage that could kill her.

  XX

  Though a whole new world was lying around Falcon, it was more than an hour before he could examine the view. First he had to check all the capsule’s systems and test its response to the controls. He had to learn how much extra heat was necessary to produce a desired rate of ascent, and how much gas he must vent in order to descend. Above all, there was the question of stability. He must adjust the length of the cables attaching his capsule to the huge, pear-shaped balloon, to damp out vibrations and get the smoothest possible ride.

  Thus far he was lucky. At this level the wind was steady, and the Doppler reading on the invisible surface gave him a “ground” speed of 348 kilometers per hour. For Jupiter, that was modest; winds of up to 2,000 klicks had been observed. But mere speed was of course unimportant; the danger was turbulence. If he ran into that, only skill and experience and swift reaction could save him. And these were not matters that could yet be programmed into Kon-Tiki’s computer.

  Not until he was satisfied that he had got the feel of his strange craft did Falcon pay any attention to Mission Control’s pleadings to hurry the checklist. Then he deployed the booms carrying the instrumentation and the atmosphere samplers. The capsule now resembled a rather untidy Christmas tree, but it still rode smoothly down the Jovian winds while it radioed torrents of information to the recorders on the ship so far above. And now, at last, he could look around.

  His first impression was unexpected and even a little disappointing, based as it was on naive personal memories of Earth. As far as the scale of things was concerned, he might have been ballooning over an ordinary cloudscape in India. The horizon seemed at a normal distance; there was no feeling at all that he was on a world eleven times the diameter of his own. He smiled and made the mental shift—for a mere glance at the infrared radar, which sounded the layers of atmosphere beneath him, confirmed how badly human eyes could be deceived.

  Now his memories were of a different sort. He saw Jupiter as it had been seen by hundreds of unmanned probes that had preceded him this far. That layer of clouds apparently about five kilometers away was really sixty kilometers below. And the horizon, whose distance he might have guessed at about two hundred, was actually almost 3,000 kilometers from the ship.

  The crystalline clarity of the hydrohelium atmosphere and the enormous curvature of the planet would have fooled the untrained observer completely, who would have found it more challenging to judge distances here than on the moon. To the earthbound mind, everything seen must be multiplied by at least ten. It was a simple business for which he was well prepared. Nevertheless, he realized there was a level of his consciousness that was profoundly disturbed—which, rather than acknowledge that Jupiter was huge, felt that he had shrunk to a tenth his normal size.

  No matter. This world was his destiny. He knew in his heart that he would grow used to its inhuman scale.

  Yet as he stared toward that unbelievably distant horizon, he felt as if a wind colder than the atmosphere around him was blowing through his soul. All his arguments for a manned exploration of Jupiter had been disingenuous, and he realized now that his inner conviction was indeed the truth. This would never be a place for humans. He would be the first and last man to descend through the clouds of Jupiter.

  The sky above was almost black, except for a few wisps of ammonia cirrus perhaps twenty kilometers overhead. It was cold up there on the fringes of space, but both temperature and pressure increased rapidly with depth. At the level where Kon-Tiki was drifting now it was fifty below zero Centrigrade, and the pressure was five Earth atmospheres. A hundred kilometers farther down it would be as warm as equatorial Earth, and the pressure about the same as at the bottom of one of the shallower seas. Ideal conditions for life.

  A quarter of the brief Jovian day had already gone. The sun was up halfway in the sky, but the light on the unbroken cloudscape below had a curious mellow quality. That extra six hundred million kilometers had robbed the sun of all its power. Though the sky was clear, it had the feel of an overcast day. When night fell, the onset of darkness would be swift indeed; though it was still morning, there was a sense of autumnal twilight in the air.

  Autumn was something that never came to Jupiter. There were no seasons here.

  Kon-Tiki had come down in the center of the equatorial zone—the least colorful part of the planet. The sea of clouds that stretched out to the horizon was tinted a pale salmon; there were none of the yellows and pinks and even reds that banded Jupiter at high altitudes. The Great Red Spot itself—most spectacular of all of the planet’s features—lay thousands of kilometers to the south. It had been a temptation to descend there, where the probes had hinted at such spectacular vistas, but the mission planners had judged that the south tropical disturbance had been “unusually active” these past months, with currents reaching over
a thousand million kilometers an hour. It would have been asking for trouble to head into that maelstrom of unknown forces. The Great Red Spot and its mysteries would have to wait for future expeditions.

  The sun, moving across the sky twice as swiftly as it did on Earth, was now nearing the zenith; it had become eclipsed by the great silver canopy of the balloon. Kon-Tiki was still drifting swiftly and smoothly westward at a steady 348 klicks, but only the radar (and Falcon’s private, instantaneous calculation) gave any indication of this.

  Was it always this calm here? Falcon wondered. The scientists who had analyzed the data from the probes spoke persuasively of the Jovian doldrums; they had predicted that the equator would be the quietest place, and it seemed they’d known what they were talking about after all. At the time, Falcon had been profoundly skeptical of such forecasts. He’d agreed with one unusually modest researcher who had told him bluntly, “There are no experts on Jupiter.”

  Well, there would be at least one by the end of the day. If he survived until then.

  Aboard Garuda, flight director Buranaphorn released his harness catch and floated smoothly away from his console. Moments later his relief, Budhvorn Im, slipped gracefully into the harness. She was a petite Cambodian woman wearing the uniform of the Indo-Asian Space Service, with a colonel’s firebirds on her shoulders.

  “So far it’s less exciting than a simulation,” said Buranaphorn.

  “That is very nice,” said Im. “Let us hope it stays that way.” She checked in her colleagues one by one as, throughout the circular room, the first-shift controllers handed off to the second shift.

  Garuda’s internal commlink crackled with Captain Chowdhury’s tired voice. “Bridge to Kon-Tiki Mission Control.”

  “Go ahead, Captain,” Im replied.

  “I’ve got a permission-to-come-aboard request from a Space Board cutter now leaving Ganymede Base. Two people to board. Their ETA is at our MET nineteen hours, twenty-three minutes.”

  “What is the reason for this visit?” Im asked, puzzled.

  “No reason given.” He paused, and she heard the crackle of a commlink in the background. “Cutter repeats this is a request.”

  “No reflection on either crew, but I would prefer not to risk misalignment during docking procedures.”

  “Shall I say you ask me to refuse permission, then?”

  “I suppose if they really want to come they will make it an order,” said Im. When Chowdhury didn’t reply, she said, “No point in antagonizing them.” Or putting Chowdhury on the line. “Please stress to the cutter’s captain the delicate nature of our mission. Also please keep me informed.”

  “As you wish.” Chowdhury keyed off.

  Im had no idea why a cutter would choose to descend upon Kon-Tiki Mission Control in the middle of the mission, but they certainly had the right to do so. And she had no real fear of a mishap. Only a docking accident—highly unlikely—would interrupt communications with the KonTiki capsule.

  It was only when she glanced at the controllers—their consoles arrayed in a neat circle before her—that Im noticed one or two faces wearing apprehensive expressions—worried looks that couldn’t be explained by the nominal status of the mission.

  Sparta’s consciousness of the dark world around her returned in a red haze of pain. She listened, long enough to determine the status of the mission. She heard Im and Chowdhury discuss the approach of a Space Board cutter. That did not concern her. It was none of her affair. Soon it would all be over.

  She scrabbled in the tube and withdrew another white wafer. It melted with exquisite sweetness under her tongue. . . .

  She isn’t “Dilys.” She is Sparta again. Inside the black tightsuit she doesn’t feel the cold, except on her cheekbones and the tip of her nose. She is a shadow in the dawn woods, her short hair hidden under the suit’s hood, only her face exposed.

  She waits in the woods for the low sun to rise, bringing the color of October to the dewy woods. The smell of rotting leaves reminds her of an autumn in New York. With Blake. When things started to split.

  The smell of leaves . . . That was what Earth had that no other planet in the solar system had. Rot. Without rot, no life. Without life, no rot. Was it really Them who had made all this messy life, started it or at least coaxed it along on Venus and Mars and Earth? On Mars and Venus life had dried up, frozen or gotten pressure-cooked, washed away in the hot acid rain or blown away in the cold CO2 wind. Only on Earth had it taken hold in its own filth.

  And now it was spreading fast, trying to keep one step ahead of itself. Rot spreading to the planets. Rot spreading to the stars.

  All this nasty stew a gift of the Pancreator—the prophetae’s peculiar way of referring to Them. Those who were out there “waiting at the great world,” according to the Knowledge—she had remembered it all, now; it had all been encoded in Falcon’s programming—and the Knowledge said they were waiting among “the cloud-dwelling messengers” for “the reawakening”—of which the prophetae were the sign-bearers. . . .

  She had been chosen by them to carry the sign, made to carry it. She had been built to find the messengers in the clouds, to listen and speak with them—with the radio organs that had been ripped out of her on Mars—to speak in the language of the signs the prophetae had taught her and whose memory they had imperfectly erased when they had rejected her.

  The sun rises. A shaft of orange light penetrates the dew-laden forest and finds Sparta’s pale eyes, striking fire.

  She resists our authority

  To resist us is to resist the Knowledge

  But the Free Spirit were those who resisted, mocking their own name for themselves. These false prophetae were trapped in their ambition and blind to their own tradition. What they could not see was that she had indeed yielded to the Knowledge, and in her it had flowered. Flowered and ripened and eventually burst, like a fig hanging too long on the branch, splitting open to expose its purple flesh, heavy with seed. They were too stupid to see that they had wrought better than they knew, too stupid to see what she had become. For Sparta was the Knowledge Incarnate.

  When she would not follow their false path, they had turned against her. They had tried to cut the Knowledge out of her head, burn it out, drain it out of her with her heart’s blood.

  She had escaped them. For these years she had slowly been reassembling herself from the torn and scorched scraps of flesh they had left to her. She was harder now, colder now, and when she had succeeded in resurrecting herself, she would do what needed doing. What the Knowledge—which was Herself—demanded.

  But first she would kill those who had tried to pervert her. Not out of animus. She felt nothing for them now, she was beyond rage. But things needed to be cleaner, simpler. It would simplify matters to eliminate those who had made her, starting with Lord Kingman and his houseful of guests.

  Then she would have time to kill the usurper, the quasihuman creature they had intended to substitute for her. This Falcon. Before he could take the wrong message into the clouds.

  From her vantage in the woods she sees a figure appear on Kingman’s terrace. The house is rimmed in light from the rising sun. Morning mist curls across the meadow grass and bracken, rendering the mansion as gauzy as a painting on a theater scrim.

  She allows the image from her right eye to enlarge on the screen of her mind. It is incredibly crisp and undistorted, better than new—Striaphan has that effect on the brain.

  The man on the terrace is the one named Bill, the one whose smell is such an odd layering of unfamiliar scents. He is staring right at her as if he knows she is here—which is impossible, unless he has telescopic vision to match hers.

  Where he stands, he looks to be an easy target. Unfortunately the shot is impossible, even with her rifled target pistol. The bullet’s gyroscopic spin, processing as it resists gravity’s arc, will have pulled it into a wide spiral by the time it reaches the terrace. At this range not even the fastest computer in the world—the one in her brain—ca
n predict where the bullet will strike, except to within a radius of half a meter.

  On the other hand, with the bullets she is using, if she catches a piece of flesh, even half a meter is as good as dead.

  But no, let Bill wait.

  Now Kingman comes out of the tall doors, wearing his shooting jacket and carrying his gun. He recoils at the sight of Bill—but though he clearly wants to avoid him, it is too late. She listens. . . .

  “Rupert, I really didn’t intend to . . .”

  “If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’ll have another go at that tree-rat. Maybe I’ll get himthis time.”

  Kingman’s voice is clipped, soft, he never looks the other man in the eye. The shotgun rests in the crook of his arm, rests there so casually it is obvious it must pain him not to raise the muzzle and blast this species of rat who stands right in front of him. But instead he turns and marches past, down the stairs to the wet lawn, and sets out across it—straight toward her.

  No dogs with him. He must consider dogs a nuisance when it comes to potting tree-rats.

  Kingman first. Let him come halfway. Then if this Bill creature is still exposed . . .

  Still she listens, to the squish and slither of Kingman’s Wellingtons across the rank grass. The sun is full behind the leaves at the edge of the woods, turning them bright red and yellow, silhouetting the tracery of their veins.

  Better to take him in the woods. Then go back toward the house, into it if necessary, taking the rest one by one. Quietly. Privately. Head shots are best.

  Kingman is in the bracken now, the stiff wet fronds of the autumn-brown fern soaking his twill trousers to the knees. The near trunks come between her and him, although now and then she can glimpse him between them, moving through the mist.

  She is still listening, tracking his progress through the bracken, on the verge of breaking her trance, stepping off to intercept him—

  —when she hears the other.