Free The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter Page B

Bhaskar’s much anticipated Neutrino Symphony. Bhaskar was the most celebrated composer of the age, and her pieces had grown increasingly ambitious and conceptual. The Neutrino Symphony promised to be the crowning glory of an already feted career: a piece of music conceived for a unique and awesome musical instrument, around whose sheer, shining flanks the guests were assembling when Falcon had arrived.
    The setting itself had been stunning. Falcon made his way from his own small, solo aircraft towards a great icy amphitheatre, itself several kilometres across. In the middle of the long Antarctic night, it was like looking into some vast open-cast mine, brilliantly lit. And within this pit was a tremendous cube of ice, each of its faces no less than a kilometre tall. The guests had mostly arrived by helicopter and hovercraft, before making their way down a series of zig-zagging ramps—some used small carts or scooters—to the base of the monstrous cube, where they were utterly dwarfed. All this to a terrifying accompaniment of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna , piped at shrieking volume.
    Huddled in their furs and layers of electrically-warmed insulation, the guests gathered on viewing platforms, with drinks and canapés served from bars made of solid ice and outlined in neon light. Breath pulsed out in white gouts, and people stomped booted feet and clapped mittened hands against the chill, their talk and laughter echoing back from the amphitheatre’s sides. Bizarrely, Falcon spotted a solitary emperor penguin wandering through the audience as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
    But even as he joined the crowd Falcon felt only distantly a part of it all.
    The cold meant nothing to him, and the music from the loudspeakers registered as shrill and alien. Falcon was not short of company—plenty of people wanted to bag an encounter with a legendary figure, and this time there was no Matt Springer to soak up the attention—but he found the guests’ small-talk repetitive and wearying. Even the friendliest did not want to get too deeply into conversation with him, apparently for fear of the grimness of experience to which he might expose them.
    And there was a darker reaction from some others. He heard few direct insults that night, but he could fill in the blanks: that he was neither human nor machine, but an unnatural mixture. His very movements were strange, even insectile, as if, in his metal shell, he wasn’t a man but a giant upright cockroach. That he was, in short, an obscenity.
    Even then, twenty years after the Grand Canyon, Howard Falcon was used to it.
    Eventually, to Falcon’s relief, the loudspeakers fell silent and Kalindy Bhaskar walked onto a raised podium of carved ice. There was a polite ripple of applause. Falcon couldn’t see much of her face, shielded as it was by a heavy fur hood; her clothing was electric white with neon-blue hems. She looked very small, almost childlike. When she began to speak it was with an uneasy diffidence, as if she had never before addressed a formal gathering.
    Bhaskar told her guests that they were indeed about to experience the first performance of her new work, the Neutrino Symphony—but in another sense every performance would be the first. The symphony would never be quite the same each time, and Bhaskar had made rigorous legal arrangements to forbid any recordings of individual performances.
    She turned her back on the assembly and gestured up at the towering cube.
    â€œA little less than a century ago, women and men came to this place to lay the groundwork for a great experiment. The ice here was flat then, stretching away for endless windswept kilometres. They dug holes, shafts, into the ice, going down more than a kilometre: hundreds of such shafts, laid out in a precise cubical array. Into the shafts they lowered delicate devices, intricate scientific instruments, sensors designed to respond to the arrival of subatomic