The Medusa Chronicles (3.18-21)
Arc three is titled "Return to Jupiter." I guess we're going to get to the actual "medusa" part of "the medusa chronicles." How that ties in with Adam's people hiding out in the Oort cloud for the interceding few decades, I suppose we'll find out.
Anyway, before that we have another interlude. Looks like a continuation of the previous one, detailing the Icarus Incident that marks the point of departure of the story's timeline from our own. I'm still not sure how the details of that incident are relevant to Falcon's story, but maybe these interludes are leading up to some big reveal that will recontextualize all the history following it.
Interlude II: November, 1967
It's been six months since astronauts Seth Springer and Mo Berry were consulted about the Icarus situation. Now, the two of them - along with a third astronaut, George Sheridan - are at NASA's Florida launch facility, watching the Apollo-2 prepare for takeoff. After the shitshow that was the Apollo-1 launchpad fire, and the need to make sure it has its shit together before tackling Icarus, this timeline's Apollo-2 is a crewed mission meant to test all the technology (in other words, it plays the same role that Apollo-7 did in real life the following year). If all goes well, the Icarus project will be undertaken by the third Apollo launch and its Soviet counterpart.
As he watches the rocket and wait for the launch, Springer whines about the music one of the reporters has playing loud enough for everyone to hear. He seriously does not get why everyone is so obsessed with this "Beatles" band, and wishes that the kids these days would stick to proper music like the kind he was raised on.
On one hand, I kind of agree that most of the Beatles' discography is pretty samey and forgettable and it's really just a short list of songs that everyone remembers them for. On the other hand: 1) I'm saying this with the benefit of exposure to half a century's worth of artists who were influenced by the Beatles, and 2) the specific song that Springer is bitching about is "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds." So. Yeah. Not very sympathetic to Springer's position here.
Berry rises to the occasion of defending one of the actually really good Beatles songs, but the argument is cut short by Sheridan reminding them that they'll all be very lucky if they can still whine about music by this time next year. That gets their attention back to the launch.
For everyone even tangentially connected to the space program, 1967's "summer of love" has more accurately been the summer of crunch. Every high-prestige university physics department in NATO has been deputized to help plan this project, and NASA's budget has had at least one zero added to the end of it as they crash-manufacture rockets to the new, highly experimental, spec. In order to maximize the chances of deflecting Icarus, the plan is to intercept the asteroid at a distance of about twenty million miles from Earth. Four times as far away as the moon that the Apollo and Soyuz lines were originally meant to reach.
They're going to try unmanned rockets acting as essentially very long ranged nuclear missiles first, but with the computers and automation of the day being as primitive as they are...well, the odds of it working aren't great. They're going to have six rockets done in time to have any hope of repelling Icarus. The last couple, if they launch, will be meant to intercept the asteroid at a close enough range that a) they'll be able to pack enough air and food for a manned mission, and b) a manned mission will be absolutely neccessary to plant the nukes with the precision required at that point. And, with the low margins of error and high chances of accident, it's very likely that the crew won't be coming home again afterward.
Hopefully it won't come to that. If it does though, they're prioritizing astronauts who don't have wives or children. Springer knows that that means it will probably be him.
He always did want to be the center of attention. But this...well, it barely even feels real to him, despite its reality.
The three watch the rocket take off, due to orbit the moon and come back. Then, it's back to work with training and practice.
And that's the interlude. I'm still not at all convinced of this historical subplot's necessity, though like I said before I'm waiting to have my mind changed.
I'm amused that apparently the entire Springer lineage are all born glory-hounds, though. That's an amusingly cartoony little flourish for how grounded this story otherwise tries to paint itself as being.
I was kinda confused about which potential missions would be manned, which ones would be probable suicide missions if so, etc. Had to reread that part (actually *those parts,* since the information was kind of scattered around the interlude) a few times in order to have it straight. Aside from that, this was pretty well written and got the sense of impotent dread and uncertainty across really well. People say "damn nature u scary" about animals doing messed up things, but you really don't appreciate how fucking scary nature can truly be until you get to astrophysics.
Well. Time for a return to Jupiter in arc 3.
Like I said.
Chapter 3.18
Open aboard a ship coming in to dock at a station suspended in Jupiter's upper atmosphere. The two passengers are Howard Falcon in his latest, no doubt grotesque, sleeve, and a young Martian by the name of Trayne Springer. Man, what is it with this family, seriously? It's been nearly a full century since the end of the last chapter, and somehow these pricks are still relevant. I guess life extension does change things a bit, but even so this seems silly.
We're further in the future than James Kirk's five year mission now, and the technology has advanced appropriately. There's a casual mention of Falcon having set the hull to transparent mode so they could look at Halley's Comet during a close pass they made with it. There are several distinct genetically engineered transhuman strains adapted for life on different planets around the solar system (Trayne Springer, like his second generation Martian parents, is eerily pale and has huge bright blue eyes). It's the future even for Howard Falcon the future guy.
Anyway, Mars has kinda sorta laid claim to Jupiter, but the Martians with their low gravity-specced bodies kind of have trouble surviving within the Jovian atmosphere itself. Trayne is here with Falcon, in part, to stress-test a new power suit designed to help Martians deal with high gravity environments. If the suit lets him function without issue throughout his prolonged mission into the mid-atmosphere with Falcon, then that means Martian crews will be able to start manning the deeper stations instead of just relying on their Machine business partners to do it.
Oh, yeah, that's another thing. The Machines returned from the Oort Cloud thirty years ago and have a political and economic alliance with Mars. That just happened between the chapters. No big deal.
-____-
Really, book?
I get that we're committed to sticking with Falcon's POV, except in the historical interludes, but given his important history with the Machines I feel like Falcon would have probably had something interesting to do during their return. Wouldn't he have wanted to meet Adam (or a descendent of his, if Adam himself isn't alive any more) as soon as this happened? Hell, wouldn't Adam or his memory-bearers have probably wanted to talk to Falcon themselves? This scene could and should have been onscreen.
Even if they didn't want to give Falcon this scene for whatever reason, I think we could have traded the latest Icarus interlude for one about the first human diplomat to speak to the Machines again during their reappearance and been better off for it.
Well. Oh well. I guess the status quo is now "human and robot polities share the solar system and have a web of alliances and rivalries." It's an interesting state of affairs, but I do wish we'd seen it develop.
I wonder if the Pan Nation has expanded at all, on that topic. Are there multiple Pan Nations by now? Do they have any space or planetary colonies of their own? Do many of the human planets have simp minorities, for that matter? Hell, I wonder if we've uplifted any other animals since then. Or hell, if the simps themselves have uplifted any other animals since then, vowing to treat their own creations better than humanity treated its? I can see the simps playing (performatively, but still) loving parent to a race of solphins or soctopi or savens.
Well, later chapters will surely answer at least some of these questions. For now, as Falcon helps Springer out of his shock-absorbing landing cell and into his power suit, they do a bit of more human-centric political banter. The Martian independence movement is a powerful one at this point. EarthGov technically has authority over the entire solar system, but in practice its power has been on the decline outside of Earth itself. The cultural side of this is as visible as the political side; Springer has to make a point of using the Julian calendar for Falcon's benefit when talking about the date, even though the new Martian one comes more naturally to him. Nice touch, there.
As for what Springer and Falcon are even doing here, well, it isn't entirely clear yet, but it has something to do with the medusae. Right, they're intelligent too, the last arc explicitly reminded the reader that EarthGov considers them to be in the "nonhuman person" category along with simps and probably Machines too now. Falcon's thoughts tell us that their mission involves a specific medusa by the name of Ceto (human nickname for her, presumably. I don't think the medusae's own language is human-pronounceable), who recently sent the humans a troubling radio transmission that mentioned something called "the Great Manta." From the summaries I've read of Clarke's "Meeting with Medusa," the mantas are a Jovian animal that preys on the medusae (the story had Falcon saving the medusa he met from a pack of them, iirc). So, if a medusa is talking about a Great Manta, whether literally or metaphorically, it means something very dangerous.
If literal, it could be that some species of giant super-manta has risen from deeper in Jupiter's atmosphere to terrorize the medusae (humans have only been in touch with the medusae for two hundred years or so, so such occurrences could just be part of a five hundred year natural cycle and we'd have never known about it until now unless the medusae went out of their way to tell us). Natural or otherwise though, the medusae have alien acquaintances with airships and railguns this time so they should suffer less from such depredations than they have historically.
Of course, Ceto may be speaking metaphorically, describing some other new threat as a "great manta." In that case we may or may not be able to help. Or even willing to help, if it turns out that the problem is being caused by Martian/Machine industry within Jupiter's atmosphere or something.
I kinda hope it's the former, just so that Falcon and Springer can have a boss fight against a titanic predatory superbeast in their little airship amid the roiling storms of Jupiter. Come on, you know you want it too.
Next chapter! Continuing Falcon's second adventure in the Jovian clouds and his budding friendship with our first non-jerk Springer. Holy shit, actually Trayne Springer might be the first human of any stripe, besides Falcon himself, to not come across as instantly dislikeable. He seems kinda spoiled and pompous, being the heir to a political family and all, but still a pretty nice kid. We'll see if that holds out.
We'll also hopefully find out what the two of them are even on Jupiter to do. They can't have been the first or only ones to respond to the medusa's warning, so there must be another side to their mission as well.
Chapter 3.19
This chapter turns out to be pure white-room exposition. Exposition that would have been easy to weave into an actual story section, but this kind of jank is something that I guess I'll just have to learn to accept in The Medusa Chronicles.
Falcon has made a few visits to Jupiter since his historic first contact adventure, but this will be his first time back down into the clouds since the Machines established a presence on the gas giant. The reason for his return actually involves them, sort of. But first, this bizarre passage needs to be talked about:
Nevermind the way the text seems to downright salivate over the thought of being freed from all distractions of the flesh and becoming a pure cerebral sigma male. That's the kind of dorkiness I can just roll my eyes at a little and move on. No no. What I'm shocked by is the revelation that Falcon has now spent at least one hundred and fifty years shackled to Dhoni. Despite this very paragraph reminding us that even the new human life extension tech isn't as good as Falcon's cybernetic longevity, Hope fucking Dhonji is STILL somehow not only still alive after all this time, but also still - even after centuries - acting as Falcon's keeper.
She's like a lich. Clutching her skeletal fingers onto Falcon and feeding on his life force to survive the passing of ages.
Anyway.
The return of the Machines thirty years ago didn't go nearly as badly as it could have, but it didn't go nearly as well as you'd hope either. The sudden, prolonged shutdown of the Kuiper ice mines really did a number on the solar economy, and the recession lasted decades and held up entire colony projects by even longer. It also, predictably, caused a big spike in tensions as sub-polities within EarthGov had to compete for water and volatiles from other sources. This was a major factor in Earth's loss of power over the other planets, especially water-hungry Mars, resulting in the united government's current feeble state. So, Earth was still pretty butthurt about this when the Machines showed themselves again. Not exactly inclined to be friendly. However, the Martians needed all the industrial help they could get, and they successfully lobbied the government into rubber-stamping their own regional authority's alliance with the AI's. And, with Machine help, Mars and its own Jovian colonies are getting things back on track in terms of terraforming and development. A lot of people on a lot of other planets dislike this.
Falcon had happened to be on one of the Jovian moons when the Martians announced their big PR stunt. They're going to send an experimental high-pressure vehicle deep into Jupiter in the hope of exploring its hidden surface, deep below the thousand of miles of opaque stormclouds and crushed into a burning hot vice by the gas giant's gravity. The project is being sold as the fruit of human-Machine cooperation (though reading between the lines it seems like it's mostly just the Machines' work with some Martian bells and whistles taped to it), and also as Mars coming into its own as a contributor to the sum total of human knowledge and discovery. Naturally, EarthGov wants a celebrity representative to attend the probe's departure down into the storms. Falcon was nearby, and had both a celebrity status involving Jovian exploration AND historical ties to the Machines in their early days (though they don't realize nearly how much, lol). So, he was a natural choice.
At the same time, Falcon had been wanting to see what those creepy transmissions from Ceto the medusa were all about (why has no one else looked into this yet?), and decided that this would give him a good opportunity to do that as well once he's already down in the Jovian atmosphere. Meanwhile, Trayne Springer was already coming down to act as a representative of his important political family at the event, and when he heard about Falcon's plans for an excursion into medusa territory he asked to come along so he could test his new grav-suit. Falcon and Springer seem to have known each other a bit before this, so it didn't come totally out of the blue.
I have a bad feeling about this. Not sure why. Just too many unknowns converging at once.
Chapter 3.20
Trayne Springer ended up suffering some medical complications after their rapid descent into Jupiter's atmosphere after all, holding him and Falcon's itinerary up for a few more days while his fancy new suit reacted to the problems and eventually got them under control. Interestingly, after dealing with the initial shock of entering this high-grav environment, Martians like Trayne actually adjust more easily to longtime stays here than baseline Terrans do. Even though the Martians need to adapt to six times the gravity they're used to, as opposed to the Terrans' 2.5 times. The reason being that - while they aren't synth-bodied like Falcon - the Martians are dependent on various smaller cybernetic implants and biochemical manipulations by default, so they can recalibrate the mods that are already in place. Terrans usually have to undergo body modification from scratch. Interesting.
Well, for now Trayne is functional enough again that he can walk around inside of their airship and eat solid food, which is better than he's been since their "landing" in the cloud layer. Landing is really the wrong word. Their slowing to a stop? Skying? Clouding? Clouding. Their ship clouded in Jupiter's atmosphere, yes. Their ship, the Ra, has also finished reformating itself from orbital drop mode into Jovian airship mode, so they can fly around and meet up with the various entities they're supposed to meet up with at will. At least the wall panels with the option to do so are all set to transparent mode, so they have fun looking out at the surreal, multicolored cloudscape, Falcon pointing various biological and meteorological phenomena out to Trayne, as they wait.
No word on how long until the probe launch is supposed to happen, but I imagine they made sure to come down well in advance in case something like this happened. Also, the description of the Ra as this spherical aerogel-ballasted sky bathyscaph divided into habitation and engineering levels by a mesh floor, and Springer's suit steaming and hissing as he moves around it, gives this whole thing an incredible retro pseudo-steampunk vibe that I love. Like, it almost evokes Jules Verne more than Arthur Clarke.
There's one scene where Trayne admits that he's been a Jupiter enthusiast for a while, and that he read Meeting With Medusa a whole bunch of times before ever meeting Falcon and trying to impress sempai in person. Prompting...this:
It's a cool visual, and a nice moment between them, but my eye is drawn to the assertion that Falcon is a showman by nature and always has been. Like, is that actually how the writers think they've characterized Falcon up to this point? It's really a mind screw.
Eventually, they reach the target they were moving toward. It's within sight of Jupiter's "eye." The big red spot. Apparently, while the constant storm within the spot itself is inhospitable to life, the peripheries of it are the most bioproductive part of the entire gas giant on account of the storm causing an upwelling of nutrients that have sank into the lower atmosphere. These vertically-deep storms are a very important part of the Jovian nutrient cycle, and as the biggest and most persistent storm the red spot sustains the Jovian equivalent of the Amazon Rainforest or Great Barrier Reef along its edges. Among the many life forms that thrive around this region are the medusae, and they're just now coming within sight of one. Ceto, the elderly female medusa who's been sending out disturbing signals about the coming of the Great Manta, is moving toward them right now.
And that's a chapter.
I loved the environmental prose in this one. Really felt like it was describing one of those all-time-classic scifi movie scenes that's due to be referenced and parodied and paid homage to in decades' worth of media to come.
That said, it was also a pretty long chapter without much of anything happening in it, and while much of the prose is awesome planet and retro-airship description there's also a lot of dry futzing around not really doing anything with the characters. I think this chapter would have been better if it ditched that, and then continued onward to include part of the conversation with Ceto. I've noticed that this book has a bad habit of putting a whole bunch of chapters that consist of telling you what's about to happen without anything actually happening yet. It's not good pacing even when those chapters are short and snappy, and it's even worse when they're long and dragging like this one. Even if there were some great visuals within it.
Anyway, we're meeting a medusa. It's about time this sequel starting doing sequel things, you know? Let's see how it goes.
Chapter 3.21
Ceto is a big one. The medusae are big by default, but she's one of their elder matriarchs, which makes her one of the largest specimens known. Well over two kilometers across. The region of sky she's grazing in is a "snowstorm," where masses of hydrocarbons thrown up by the red spot and then baked into solid, fibrous masses by the sun come raining back down again like oily pink snowflakes. Swarms of creatures of all descriptions, ranging from around cat sized to around horse sized, are catching these hydrocarbon flakes in their membranes and using them as fuel for photo or anemo synthesis. These phytoplankton-analogues, in turn, are being strained from the air by Ceto's literal forest of tentacles spread out below her ballast disc.
They look like jellyfish, but ecologically speaking they're basically whales. All the way down to being much more intelligent and social than you typically expect from grazing herbivores. Just, they're also about as many times the size of a humpback whale as Jupiter is times the size of Earth.
As Falcon pores over the communications interface and tries to have a two-way conversation with Ceto without too much lag (difficult, even with state of the art computer assistance. Medusae communicate using a weird mixture of acoustic and radiological signals, and their minds work in a fairly alien way to begin with, so it's always a bit of a task. As he works, Falcon explains to Trayne that Ceto, nicknamed after the mythological mother of the Gorgons, owes her status in medusa society to her reproductive history. Like the siphonophores they somewhat resemble, medusae are colonial superorganisms whose constituent organisms include some distinct species that need to breed independently. Ceto's immense body serves as the environment for this, and she's budded off countless newborns using the genetic input of countless other medusae over the course of her nearly thousand years of life.
Falcon doesn't explain if medusa matriarchs are born for their role, or if any sufficiently large and healthy medusa can take on that role, but in any case they have high status in medusa society. When it's time for them to spin around and launch newborn buds off their sides using centrifugal force like some kind of fucked up video game monster, the entire rest of the tribe spreads out around the matriarch and offspring to draw away predators during this vulnerable period, even if it means sacrificing themselves as bait to keep them sated.
Trayne Springer doesn't know much about Earth biodiversity, as evidenced by his next question. A question that makes ME raise a lot of questions of my own, and its answer from Falcon likewise.
First off, I'm just going to attribute Trayne's failure to know what baleen whales are to his being a Martian. However, if he's a Jupiter enthusiast who's studied Falcon's first contact with them, how could he possibly not already know this about the medusae? Even assuming that the medusa classification of "nonhuman person" has come under scrutiny recently for whatever reason, they still must be pretty high up there in the spectrum of animal intelligence. There's no way that that much could be in doubt.
Second, why is this the first time we're hearing about how callous Martians supposedly are?
Third, why the hell is this the first time we're hearing about how even-more-callous the Machines supposedly are? And, like...this bit is from Howard Falcon's own perspective, right? And he's the one who, last that we know, empathised with the machines and saw them as, frankly, *better* than humans. When did he change his mind about them? What caused him to change his mind about them? They've been back from the Oort Cloud for a long time now, so plenty of things might have happened to make him feel this way, but what were those things?
Even moreso than before, I feel like we should have had an interlude - if not a full multi-chapter arc - about Falcon's first reunion with the Machines after their reappearance. There's clearly a LOT that's missing.
Well, anyway. Either the Machines have changed for then worse over the last century, or Falcon at least thinks they have. Which, well. Considering their origins, it's not too surprising. Hopefully they've been getting better rather than worse since they formed their partnership with the Martians and are learning that cooperation is better than domination, despite EarthGov doing everything it possibly could to point them in the opposite direction in the last arc.
On a less critical note, Medusa culture is interesting. Their outlook makes me think of sort of a more pessimistic version of Daoism. And, apparently the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact was a near extinction level event for them. I guess they're only found in one quadrant of Jupiter, then? Granted, that quadrant overlaps with at least part of the red spot, and if its boundaries are their main population center than I guess that does track.
Falcon is lucky to have flown around in the one particular region of Jupiter that he did back in the original story, then.
Or maybe he's just exaggerating, and he meant that it was a near extinction event for this regional population of medusae rather than the entire species. Like, maybe there are smaller "nations" of them that live around the edges of smaller upwelling storms, or nomadic tribes that ply the reaches between looking for random storm pockets, and the people of the red spot are/were just the most numerous. That also could be.
Anyway, Falcon finishes being annoyed at Trayne, and Trayne apologizes for being annoying. Making him the first and probably last Springer to ever do so. After working with the translator a bit more, Falcon announces that the Great Manta has returned to Jupiter. Or, to put it in human terms, the medusae are facing their first mass death event since the comet impact that Falcon just mentioned a few paragraphs ago. The "Great Manta" is apparently what they call the sudden death that kills many at once and comes from a direction you can't see it coming from. Any big natural disaster or the like would be called a Great Manta.
Hmm. Well. Let's see if she can give Falcon any more details. While I'm disappointed by the diminished probability of the Ra having to dogfight a literal giant manta ray monster through a raging Jovian thunderstorm, the problem the medusae are facing might still be something they can help out with. Falcon says that from what Ceto is saying, it sounds like this Great Manta is a result of there being *something* present within Jupiter's atmosphere that shouldn't be. It's not like last time, when the rocks fell, everyone died, and then that was that. There's a lingering hazard that's claiming lives over time.
That definitely sounds to me like the industrial projects the Machine-Martian alliance is undertaking on the planet might be the cause of the problem. Some kind of pollution or weather disruption coming from the factories. Or maybe it's just a matter of too much radio comm traffic within medusa territory causing medusae to get lost or go mad or something, like the way intense sonar activity can fuck with whales.
If that's the case, I can see why no one else would have done anything about it yet. The people running these cloud-mining facilities are probably pretty eager to interpret the medusa distress calls as referring to something OTHER than their own work.
Well. They're going to fly around some more and see if they can understand any more of the details that Ceto gives them, and then head over to a major station to attend the probe launch. Trayne mentions that Falcon's "old doctor" will be here visiting from Earth. Oh good. I was missing her. Thank god she's coming back into the story.
Strange, how non-urgently they're taking these tidings of doom. I feel like the gossiping about Dr. Dhoni and the plans for the launch ceremony should have come before the Great Manta explanation, not after it.
The wordcount for this post isn't too high yet, but the next chapter is a very long one, and I suspect that a lot will happen in it. Also, Hope Dhoni might make an appearance, and I never am at a loss for things to say about her. So, I'll split this here.
