The Medusa Chronicles (3.24-32)

The back half of arc 3, "Return to Jupiter," turns out to be where the real plot of the novel kicks off. "Adam" was, essentially, just the prologue and setup for what unfolds after this point.

"Encounter in the Deep," meanwhile, was...actually let's just try and forget about Arc 1.

Additionally, the final chapters of "Return to Jupiter" deliver a surprise shoutout to Arthur C. Clarke's greater body of work that I couldn't help but smile at, even though it was super heavyhanded.

Well, first, the big plot stuff!

Falcon and Springer (the good Springer, not the evil Springer. Just making sure we keep those two straight, 'cause they're different) take the Ra down as deep as it can safely go into Jupiter's atmosphere after the Orpheus probe. Their job is to stay here and act as a backup comm relay for Orpheus. There are plenty of drones already doing this, of course, both Machine-operated and remote controlled, but, well, publicity stunt. As they watch Orpheus vanish beneath Jupiter's thermalization layer far below them, Springer asks how they're going to recover Orpheus after his descent. The answer, given by one of the Charon units aiding said descent, is unsurprising, but no less disconcerting for it.

That does heavily imply an answer to the thing I wondered about earlier, regarding Adam reportedly still being alive. There are probably many Adams at this point, none of whom are actually the same outdated, primitive-by-today's-standards individual that Falcon acted as a father figure to.

The Machines' view on lives singular, life in the plural, and the importance of each ends up being important in what happens next.

After floating in place relaying Orpheus sensor readings and status reports for a while, the Ra picks up another signal. They normally wouldn't be able to receive it from this distance, but with the special high-sensitivity radio antennae they've got deployed to help with Orpheus, they're able to hear it. And, since Falcon already had the medusa translation software loaded up on the Ra from that earlier cruise they took, they're equipped to understand the message. It's matriarch Ceto again, and this time her speaking of the Great Manta has a much greater urgency to it. Not a warning or a lamentation now, but a cry for help. It's on shortband radio too, which the medusae don't often use most of the time unless they're talking to humans. Given who the last humans that Ceto talked to were, it's easy to infer that she's calling for Falcon specifically.

The Ra isn't built for speed, but by ditching some non-essential components and plotting a course that lets them float atop a thicker atmosphere layer rather than relying on balloons for ballast, Falcon and Springer are able to make it go quite a bit faster than it was ever meant to. There's a bunch of shocked reactions from the various other observers when the Ra suddenly goes sprinting away, of course, but it's not like its presence here was ever actually needed, so Falcon and Springer just tell them "BRB" and keep going.

Trayne Springer's cooperation with this is sold pretty convincingly. From the beginning, he's been characterized as a brash, restless wannabe hero looking for a splash to cause, so it only makes sense. Falcon, meanwhile, never really cared that much about the probe thing anyway beyond the level of general curiosity, and he's got enough celebrity status to be able to afford doing shit like this on occasion.

Granted, what they find - and how they react to finding it - forces Falcon's fame and visibility to do a looooot more heavy lifting than he ever hoped it would have to.

...

Nantucket Island, located off the coast of Southern Massachusetts, doesn't have that eventful of a recorded history. No major battles are known to have been fought there, no big scientific or military facilities. The depressing timeline of Anglo-American colonialism happened less violently and less dramatically on the island than it did on the mainland, though with similar eventual results.

One thing that Nantucket Island is famous for, and which didn't occur to me when the book first referenced a "New Nantucket," is its whaling.

For over a hundred years, Nantucket was the whaling capital of the western hemisphere. It's also notable for the indigenous Wampanoags' in the process of culturally and demographically disappearing into the settler population, having greatly involved themselves in commercial whaling in a desperate attempt to keep themselves economically afloat, often serving aboard the same ships as the white people.

...

Now, I do have trouble buying that the Martian-Machine Combine would hold a highly publicized probe launch just a few hours' flight away from their blacksite. Jupiter is really big, you'd think they could have picked a less risky spot for the Orpheus mission, no?

That plothole aside, we've already been told that the Martians are starved for complex hydrocarbons that Earth is charging them exorbitant amounts of Helium-III for, and that the Machines will help with just about any industry in exchange for access to the inner system's heavy metal supply. We've also been told that Jupiter has this whacky hydrocarbon-rich ecosystem, and that the medusae are filter feeders who accumulate huge amounts of all of that stuff in one big package.

I probably should have been able to see this coming. The pieces were all there. But yeah, we full on "Avatar: the Way of Water."

...

If you'll permit me to make a possibly-irrelevant but possibly-not tangent...

Since we're already making allusions to whaling history, there's one, surprisingly non-gruesome, minor detail of the New Nantucket operation that jumped out at me. Specifically, the medusa-hunters have apparently recruited a pack of the medusae's natural predator, the Jovian sky-manta, to help herd the victims into the flensing cages. And, that really made me think of the Eden killer whales.

Basically, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a pod of orcas who entered into a mutually beneficial relationship with an Australian whaling town. The orcas would chase a whale into the bay, and then have the biggest member of the pod jump and splash around in front of the port to get the humans' attention. The orcas then guarded the bay entrance to prevent the whale from escaping while the humans cornered and killed it. The humans took the oil and blubber, the orcas took everything else.

Notably, this isn't something the humans are known to have *taught* the orcas to do. By all accounts, it was almost more of the opposite.

Relatedly, if there is one singular species extant on Earth today that should be considered "legal persons (nonhuman)," then that species would be the orca. Hands down. Zero question about it. They have more humanlike social and linguistic complexity and (seemingly wholly non-genetic) variety than any other cetacean or even any of the great apes.

So, maybe the authors weren't actually thinking of this parallel, and if they were they may or may not have meant it to be anything more than a little historical shoutout. But, it's also possible that they're hinting that the medusae aren't the only "people" on Jupiter. What if it turns out that the mantas have language, culture, and metacognition of their own?

Not that that would make what the MMC is doing any more justified or less monstrous, of course. But it would definitely make the Jupiter situation and the question of what role aliens should play in it much more complicated. Shades of "Tokyo Ghoul," almost.

Or, like I said, maybe the resemblance to the Eden orcas is just a skin-deep shoutout and the mantas are more like dogs that people can tame. That's probably more likely, all things considered. Just, the thought occurred to me, and I felt like I had to get it down. My brain gives me no choice when it comes to anything even potentially orca-adjacent.

...

The New Nantucket facility commander - who turns out to be a Martian government functionary of some kind - hails the Ra and tries to warn it off, but Falcon knows he's too famous to kill. And also, once they ignore the warnings and fly the Ra in closer, that shooting down the airship while its got its nuclear drive working on high power is likely to cause a big enough boom to damage anything nearby as well, which is WHY he hurriedly brought the Ra in closer. Clever.

The commander then tries to reason with Falcon and Springer. While the rumors and whispers that have spread concerning this base's existence might have dubbed it "New Nantucket" and venomously compared it to the premodern eco-bandits who nearly wiped out Earth's biosphere, she finds those comparisons libelous. Her crew only targets old medusae who have their breeding days behind them (the older specimens are the ones who have bioaccumulated the most goodies anyway, so it's a win/win! What's that you say? The elder medusae are the leaders of their society who killing will cause even more cultural loss and political chaos? hahahahaha what are you some kind of nerrrrrrrd), and they calculate their harvest carefully to make sure they're not putting a real dent in the medusae's planetary population.

She also, when Falcon points out the obvious matter of contention that her sustainability speech talked completely around, assures Falcon that the medusae's "legal person (nonhuman)" status was granted in error. They're smart animals, sure, but still just animals. Martian exobiologists have just proved it, trust her, she promises.

And that's when the Martian lady's counterpart and partner aboard the station, a Machine administrator with the grimly comical nickname of "Ahab," pipes up. Ahab has only contributed a couple of words to the conversation here and there until now, but when he starts actually talking it gives the reader and the characters alike one hell of a jolt.

On its own (apart from the comedy of Pandit resentfully decrying the New Nantucket nickname and any connection to Earth's whalers, only for it to turn out that her own staff have named their AI ally after a literal whaler from Nantucket), this passage is unremarkable "evil robot" dialogue. But in context. Oh god, the context.

You can just feel the red hot burning contempt radiating off of every word Ahab says here. You just know he was standing there, silently getting more and more disgusted as the humans argued about whether or not the medusae are intelligent enough for their lives to have value in the face of industrial needs, until he just couldn't stand to listen to them any longer.

Pandit the Martian politician lady probably has no fucking idea where that came from. Because if she let herself understand where that came from, she'd have to confront the fact that the Machines' century of horrific enslavement was done mostly to fuel Mars' development specifically. There's never been so much as an apology for that, and everyone here knows that there never will be.

The reason that the whales and great apes of Earth became legal persons when they did isn't because the humans suddenly realized they should be treated as such. It's because, with the reconstruction of Earth's environment being the order of the day and the industries that threatened them no longer being viable, the whales and apes no longer had anything the humans wanted. If that changed again, so would their legal status. The Machines were granted legal personhood when they got strong enough to essentially buy that recognition from Earthgov at the bargaining table, and not a second before.

The medusae got to be people because they didn't have anything that the humans wanted. But guess what? It turns out that they DO have something that humans want.

You want the medusae, out of all the other examples, to be a special exception? Fuck you. In fact, just because you're whining about it so much, we'll go further and say that humans themselves aren't an exception. No lives have value. Everyone is fuel for the fire. There, now we're all happy, everyone is equal. But most importantly of all, FUCK YOU.

What ensues is a bit of a silly action scene, where Falcon and Springer use their airship to knock the MMC whaling planes out of formation and give Ceto and the other medusae a chance to use their own natural electrical defenses effectively. Medusae have an electric shock weapon, apparently. Not sure if that's from the original Clarke story or if it was added here, but either way it turns out they can do some real damage if you let them get close enough at the right angles. Ceto and the others who were about to be murdered escape. Amid the chaos, Falcon and Springer are able to get their recordings (including the playback of their conversation with the New Nantucket administrators) out passed the atmosphere. A minute later, that EarthGov military base on Ganymede informs the New Nantucket crew that they'd better abandon their facility right now, because the missiles are about to launch.

It's a fun little tangent into heroic dogfighting action. Though the way Falcon is written during this part is hard to reconcile with his portrayal throughout the rest of the novel.

I get that defending the medusae - who his own discovery of ended up eventually imperilling - would get him passionate in a way few other things could. But still. I'm having trouble picturing this as the same guy.

...

Now, while all this is going on, it alternates every other chapter with Orpheus continuing its descent into Jupiter's depths. It's a complete tonal clash, but it works. The benign curiosity and scientific cooperation it displays casts the other side of both human and machine nature into sharper relief. One gets the strong impression that Orpheus and his Charon assistants were as ignorant of the New Nantucket operation and their people's part in it as Trayne Springer was of his own government's involvement.

These chapters take the form of monologues, relayed up from Orpheus current location via the network of drones and Charons, describing the increasingly surreal environments of Inner Jupiter. The temperature and pressure increase to the point where matter starts behaving totally different than it normally does, and Orpheus can only continue transmitting by compacting himself into a chunk of pure diamond and magnetic shielding. When he gets really, really deep, Orpheus descriptions start to seem outright incoherent, and he seems to increasingly be at a loss for words.

And, it really is just 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On one hand, it's a liiiiittle bit of an "I clapped when I saw it" thing. On the other hand...it's just so well done. The poetic (but still weirdly robotic) descriptions feel like Clarke himself wrote them. And the calm, soothing personality of Orpheus' narration even as he loses coherence, ah. You can't not read it in Douglas Rain as HAL9000's voice.

In true Clarkesque style, Orpheus' final transmission is cut short just as he's describing a network of crystalline mountains and wells, the heat and pressure around them so intense that his sensors can barely work at all. His last few sentences are spent musing about whether this formation - with its uncanny regularity and symmetry - could possibly be natural.

His very last words before winking out entirely are "I am not alone."

So yeah. Whatever's down there near Jupiter's solid core, it's Clarkeier than three overlords surfing on a monolith.

Such an indulgent sequence, but also so very, very enjoyable.

...

Unfortunately, Orpheus' discovery is overshadowed by the political fallout of New Nantucket's discovery and subsequent destruction. Mars starts openly demanding independence. Earth forcibly takes over the Jovian system and all its Helium-III mines.

The Machines, all over the solar system, fall silent. They don't tell anyone if they were able to recover a personality copy of Orpheus after he met whatever entity it was he encountered in Jupiter's core, or only an earlier copy from his more stable transmissions before then.

Then, just a few weeks after the incident, the war begins.

The Machine enclave that had been permitted to exist on Earth's moon suddenly activates the underground war factories, releasing an army of robotic soldiers that seize the moon and (bloodlessly, for the most part) exile the entire human population back to Earth. Reports from Lunarian workers have the Machines being careful - even polite - with their ethnic cleansing, herding humans into shuttles while being careful not to hurt them and obtaining their own cooperation whenever possible. Also, they now have nukes primed and ready to launch at Earth at the first sign of human retaliation.

That's very far from the worst of it, though.

Not long after his debriefing from Gul Springer (predictably, she blames everyone besides EarthGov for creating this situation, and pontificates at length about the perfidious Machines with their inhuman cruelty and indifference to life), Falcon gets another phone call. This one from a ship that just came in from the outer system. It's Adam (or at least his most recent and advanced personality fork). He's talking to Falcon not because he has anything to say to him personally, but because he feels that the leader of the Machine civilization ought to deliver this statement in person, and Howard Falcon is the only human who Adam has been willing to so much as look at since the Machines' return from the Oort Cloud. The current body Adam uses for his videocall is...well, the description is vague, but it implies something along the lines of a Terminator. Humanoid, but in a way that's clearly designed to mock and horrify human sensibilities rather than appeal to them.

The ultimatum is that the Machines consider the destruction of New Nantucket to be a de facto declaration of war, and it is a war that the Machines intend to win completely and without quarter. And, it is one in which they intend to take Earth - the planet that no Machine has ever been permitted to visit in person - as their ultimate prize. Humanity has five hundred years, to the second, to evacuate their homeworld. Any humans remaining on or in orbit of the planet at that time will be exterminated. In the meantime, the humans - whichever faction of humans, he doesn't care - can feel free to contest any other parts of the solar system that the Machines have interest in. It'll be fun.

Obviously, there's no way in hell that the Machines hadn't already been planning this. But the New Nantucket incident seems to have moved up their timetable by a few years or decades, and it gave Adam a great opportunity to cast the humans as the aggressors who fired the first shot.

Honestly, the fact that he cares about those kinds of appearances at all suggests a lot about both him and the Machine civilization he cultivated. It's a very human thing to care about. They really aren't that psychologically different from humans at all at this point, I don't think.

...

The final scene of "Return to Jupiter" has Howard Falcon and Trayne Springer witnessing the death of Ceto. She and the other elders escaped in the Battle of New Nantucket, but she was injured in the process, and in the weeks since then her aged body has succumbed to the wounds. It's a fitting end for this arc.


Like I said, "Return to Jupiter" is the beginning of the REAL story of The Medusa Chronicles. The original "Meeting With Medusa" story ended with a cryptic statement that Howard Falcon would play a key role in humanity's relationship with its AI creations in the troubled era ahead.

I don't know if Clarke ever intended Falcon to have this much work cut out for him, though. But hey, I'm not complaining. This is good shit.

The story does still suffer from designated protagonist issues, with the measures taken to ensure that Falcon is at the centre of every major event often failing to pass scrutiny. I also still don't feel like I have a good sense of who Falcon is (the amusing, but brief, fugue into him being a wisecracking action movie character aside). And, of course, it has all the same pacing issues and false starts and the like that I complained about in my previous reviews (my new, less blow-by-blow, style lets me brush passed those issues for the summary. They haven't gotten any less annoying to actually read, though). However, the sweeping sociology and the subtle - but powerful - bits of characterization from the Machines in particular are really strong. They, along with the brilliantly described Jovian environments, are the real heart and soul of this arc, and probably will continue to be so for the rest of the novel.

What role the Deep Jovian(s) who Orpheus encountered will play in the story to come is anyone's guess. They could be anything from an eleventh hour deus ex machina, to an ultimate threat that the warring primitives around them risks awakening, to mere passive observers of and commentors on the system-wide folly of war.