For both of them that meant the reaction was clear—it was time to move on. To search out—or hunt down—the KSpace crew. At the very least to find out what it knew. The idea that they might listen to Sandra Channarong and turn around and leave wasn’t given a moment’s consideration.
She had her own reason to keep going. She needed to know if she was right.
She’d formed a theory when she saw the tendrils emerge from Stevens’s body, watched them crawl across the walls of Wanderer’s reentry module. She needed more data, more evidence before she could be sure, though. Before she thought she could unlock 2I’s big secret.
So they moved on. By foot, now, across the yielding substance of the island. ARCS’s map showed they weren’t far now from the structure that Jansen had seen on her first visit to 2I—it was less than two kilometers from where they’d stopped to rest. An easy walk. Theoretically.
Hawkins didn’t bother putting his helmet back on. What would be the point? He’d already breathed in the air of 2I. Been exposed to its poisons. Instead he clipped it to one of the D rings on the hard part of his suit and let it dangle there. He ejected the half-used oxygen cartridge from the life-support pack on his back and gave it to Rao. He didn’t need it anymore. He had two spares as well, which he gave to Jansen to put in her pack.
Then he set off, at a pace Rao had trouble matching. Each step across the rubbery ground was a challenge in keeping her balance, in not falling down. Sometimes she failed, but at least the landing was soft. Occasionally she would look back and check on Jansen. The older woman was having the hardest time of any of them. Something had happened to her—maybe she’d been injured when they were in the water. Rao had asked Jansen if she was all right, and the older woman had said she was fine. Yet now she was struggling to keep up. She was limping, dragging her left leg, staggering along as best she could. Rao could hear her breathing heavily over the radio, hear her curse under her breath when she missed a step or the ground rippled under her and she went sprawling.
Yet every time Rao turned around, Jansen was still back there, her lone helmet light still visible. There was no telling how long she could keep this up, but she clearly refused to ask anyone to slow down on her account.
The surface of the island rose before them—a gentle, almost imperceptible slope, but soon Rao felt it in her calves and her thighs. She checked ARCS’s map at one point and saw that they were in the middle of one of the huge domes that covered much of the drum’s interior surface. She resigned herself to a long climb, and let her mind free to think about what she was seeing, trying to understand it—
Until she heard something, out in the dark, and her blood turned to ice.
“What was that?” she gasped.
Hawkins turned in the direction she was pointing. His lights swept across the unbroken plain. They revealed nothing.
“What?” he demanded. “What did you hear?”
Rao forced herself to close her eyes. To listen for it again. If it had just been in her head—
No.
There it was again. A sound very much like waves crashing on a beach. Except where waves crashed and then receded, crashed and receded, this just kept going on and on. Getting louder.
“I hear it, too,” Jansen whispered.
Hawkins took a few steps toward the sound. Adjusted his suit lights, pointing them in various directions.
Rao tried to put words to it. To imagine what could be making that noise. A kind of moist rustling sound. A sound like… like…
She thrust her tongue against the dry soft palate of the roof of her mouth. Her tongue rasped against the dehydrated skin, stuck and then pulled free. It made a terrible dragging sound, and if you magnified that sound a million times, and if you heard it from a distance…
Something was moving out there. Something enormous was dragging itself across the surface of the dome. Heaving its incredible bulk along the soft, rippling ground.
“It’s getting louder,” Jansen said, coming up beside her. Rao was surprised how much reassurance she took from just having another human being that close. Until Jansen spoke again.
“Closer,” she said.
The ground under their feet rippled. Not with the rhythmic pulses they’d grown used to, but with something like an elastic earthquake, a rubbery wobble. Rao dropped to one knee. It was that or fall on her face. Jansen crouched beside her.
Hawkins kept his footing, though he had to put his arms out.
“Growing pains,” Jansen said. “This place is still changing. It’s just the sound of some new bizarre thing sprouting in the dark.”
For a long time Hawkins said nothing. He just stared out into the darkness. Even through the loose fabric of his deflated suit, Rao could see the tension in his muscles. If something came barreling out of the darkness toward them, he would stand his ground.
It didn’t happen. Eventually the sound grew softer. Whatever it was out there, it headed away from them. Deeper into unknown territory.
Hawkins gave it another minute, holding up one hand for silence. Rao slowly helped Jansen stand back up.
“All right,” Hawkins said, finally. “Move out.”
A thick tendril crossed the ground in front of them. It looked as if it had sunk into the soft ground. Ahead of them it branched off into a thicker, muscular-looking conduit as thick around as Jansen’s bicep.
“Careful,” Hawkins said.
There was no way forward except to step over it. It didn’t move, didn’t rise up to attack Jansen’s legs.
Neither did the next one they found, which was as thick as her thigh. Or the bundle of tendrils they found beyond that, as big as her waist.
“We’ll have to climb,” Hawkins said, when they saw what lay ahead and above them. The tendrils—the size of water mains now, some a meter in cross section—piled up on the slope of the island, running over and across each other, braided together, meeting in swollen nodes where the branches grew into one another.
Rao reached out one tentative hand and laid her palm against the thick, trembling mass of them. Hawkins started to bark an order, but Jansen stepped up and touched one of the giant tendrils herself.
She could feel liquid flowing through it, a spasmodic current. A pulse.
Rao grabbed a tendril and hauled herself up onto the pile. She found her footing, found another foothold. Climbed up, not stopping.
Hawkins grumbled but followed after her, sure-footed as a goat.
Jansen sighed. There was nothing for it. She reached up, grabbed a tendril, and pulled herself up.
Walking had been a nightmare. Her knee wasn’t broken, but there was no pretending she could shake off whatever damage had been done. With every step she had felt the patella of her bad knee grating against the bones beneath. Every time she lifted her foot a fresh stab of pain had jabbed upward through her body. She had managed a kind of shuffling walk that kept her knee as straight as possible. Now that wasn’t an option.
She felt her whole leg turn to jelly, the knee joint giving up altogether. She swung the useless leg around, braced it between two of the thick tendrils. Used her arms to pull herself up, with a little grunt.
Soon her breath was coming in fast pants, and stars burst behind her tightly closed eyes. She found her way up by feel, barely aware of where she was, or why she was doing this. Knowing only that she had to go higher. Farther.
At one point she slipped, having tried to put weight on her bad leg. The knee just wouldn’t hold, and she started to fall, and her arms flailed out, trying to find something to grab on to. A strong hand grabbed her wrist and dragged her up, held her up until she could get her feet placed, until she could support herself.
She opened her eyes and saw Hawkins staring down at her, his face perfectly neutral.
“Thanks,” she gasped.
He nodded and let her go.
It wasn’t much farther to the top. They came to a place where the slope of tendrils ended, to a semiflat plateau, and Jansen knew they’d
reached the top of the island. Its crest. This was their destination. It had to be.
She let herself breathe for a moment. Then she looked up.
Standing at the summit of the island was the structure. The thing she’d seen so long before, the thing they’d been searching for. She could make out very little of it except as a dark shape against deeper darkness. A vast looming tower of shadow, rising high above her—
Then it lit up.
A faint purple glow swept across its surface, so dim she thought maybe there was something wrong with her eyes. A brighter spot appeared in the midst of the glow—and then a hundred lightning bolts crackled across the structure’s surface, with an angry buzzing noise as if a hornet had flown right into her ear.
“Shit!” Rao shouted. Then, a moment later, when the total darkness had returned—“Sorry.”
Jansen didn’t blame her for the outburst. This was what she’d seen, back on her first excursion into 2I. The light, the only light in the entirety of the drum. The light that had drawn her here.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Again.”
The structure failed to comply with her desires.
She needed to see more. She needed to see this thing close up. She had two flares left. This was why she’d brought them.
She lifted a flare up high over her head and fired it into the dark air. It hissed and spit and sparked as it flew toward 2I’s axis, toward its distant, unseen ceiling. Its light was immediate and intense, a red glare that cast long, long shadows. It let her see the thing she’d come so far to reach. The thing that was supposed to make all of this worthwhile.
The structure rose above her, hundreds of meters tall and nearly as big around.
The brief glimpse that she’d had gotten of it, right before Stevens was attacked, had given her a very poor idea of what it actually was. Not that seeing it close up was much help.
It was generally egg shaped, and covered in a thick trellis of tendrils. They emerged from countless pits on its surface and formed a net of thick limbs that hung down all around it, a tent of branches that plunged into the surface of the island and disappeared into its substance. The tendrils didn’t move, but inside that cage the structure itself was constantly trembling. Every few seconds it convulsed, not with a great spasm but with a weak sort of shaking, as if it were having trouble supporting its own weight. Big as it was, even that faint pulse was enough to rock the entire island. This had to be the source of the tiny tremors they’d been feeling ever since they washed up on the island’s shore. This close, however, they shook the entire mound of tendrils, threatening to send the three astronauts tumbling back down. It was all Jansen could do to hold on.
“Oh hell,” Hawkins said.
She clambered upward. She wanted to reach out and touch it, prove to herself it was real.
She was terrified to be anywhere near it.
But she had to keep going. What else was left to her but this? The things that had driven her so far, the hope of finding the KSpace crew, the need to make contact with 2I, even just her desperation not to let Roy McAllister down or to look weak in Hawkins’s eyes, her need to keep Rao safe—those impulses wouldn’t let her stop now.
She struggled upward, hand over hand, until she could almost reach out and touch the structure’s worn, gray side.
The things they’d seen emerging from the water, the bubble mounds and the hand-trees and the arches, had all looked brand new. Jansen had watched them construct themselves out of nothing, and they’d had a slick, just-finished quality to them. The structure inside the net of roots was different. It looked old.
Extraordinarily old. Ancient.
Its surface was a dull bluish-gray, riddled with cracks and eruptions. Near its top—as far as her light would stretch—it looked as if it had cracked open and some dark fluid had run down its side, like lava from the cone of a volcano.
“Jansen. Stay back.”
She barely heard him. She was too busy studying it, waiting for it to pulse again. When it did, her whole body convulsed as she tried desperately to hang on. A shock wave rumbled out through the air all around her, trying to rip her off the side of the hill and throw her out into the darkness.
“Jesus,” Hawkins said. “Jesus, that hurts.”
He wasn’t wearing his helmet—he must be feeling those pressure waves in his eardrums, in his head.
He grabbed her and pulled her back. Together they went tumbling down the slope of thick tendrils until they were shielded from the pulse, the beat of the thing.
“What is this thing? What’s it for?” Jansen asked. She had to hear it said out loud, the thing she already knew. She turned around and looked for Rao. In the fading light of the flare the astrobiologist’s suit looked covered in blood.
Behind and above them, over the sheltering bulwark of the giant tendrils, another flare of lightning erupted across the structure’s surface, and Jansen ducked involuntarily as the air crackled and buzzed.
“I think it’s—I think it’s exactly what it looks like,” Rao said.
Jansen couldn’t see her face through her polycarbonate faceplate. The last flickers of red light were dancing there, glinting and guttering out.
“I think this is… a heart.”
GENERAL DANVERS KALITZAKIS, UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE: Back on Earth—that got our attention.
The three of them hurried back down the slope, away from the throbbing thing. Hawkins didn’t let them stop until they were back down on the surface of the island, on the rubbery soil. They dropped to the ground in the shelter of one of the biggest tendrils, where he was protected a little from the pulsing air that made it impossible to think. He needed to think. He needed answers. He grabbed Rao’s arm and turned her to face him. “What do you mean, a heart?”
Rao pulled her arm out of his grasp. “It’s surrounded by huge tendrils—like the big veins and arteries around our hearts. We can feel it pulsing—”
“What are you saying?” Jansen interrupted feverishly.
Rao swallowed. This wasn’t something you said lightly, not if you were an astrobiologist with a reputation to consider. “Look, you would need to do a lot of experiments, collect a lot of data to even think about proposing this, back in my lab. Just saying it out loud, people would laugh at you. Not so much because it seems impossible but because you haven’t done the basic work to prove it could be possible. So when I say it’s just a theory, that’s a wild overstatement. This is an idea. A hunch.”
She made the word sound like a profanity.
“Tell me anyway,” Hawkins said.
Rao threw her arms up in the air. “2I is alive.”
“Alive?”
Jansen took a step toward her. “You’re saying this ship is… it’s biomechanical. All the stuff we’ve seen, yeah, the bubble mounds and the hand-trees and… and everything. It’s not made from metal and circuitry. It’s grown. Grown in a vat somewhere. Right?”
“No,” Rao said. “That’s not it. I’m saying 2I, itself, is one giant organism. This isn’t a starship. It’s a… a living thing. An animal.”
“Horseshit,” Hawkins said.
“Hear her out,” Jansen protested. “We brought her here for a reason.”
“The big clue was the tendrils. Jansen, you saw them attack Stevens, because that’s what you were primed to see—what we all thought was going to happen. We saw the tentacles of some wild animal trying to devour our—our friend. But it makes so much more sense if you see them a different way. If you actually look at them… because they look exactly like veins and arteries, just enormously larger than we’re used to. They weren’t growing to catch Stevens, they were growing because this thing needs a circulatory system. It’s simple vascularization. You see it in any growing organism, the blood vessels grow first. Just like if you were going to build a city the first thing you would do is put down the roads and the power lines.”
“This is a starship. It was built by somebody,” he insisted. She was asking him to mak
e a huge perceptual shift, to rethink everything he knew about 2I. Even if she was right, he needed time to catch up. To process what this meant. “I can’t explain why we haven’t seen the crew. But there has to be a simpler explanation. Occam’s razor says—”
Rao didn’t let him finish. “I know! It sounds crazy! But try looking at it from the other direction. You said it yourself—if someone built this ship, where are they now? And why would they put so many resources into a project like this, then just abandon it? But if you look at 2I as an organism that has adapted to a very unusual environment—deep space—well, it starts to make sense. I’ve argued this through in my head a dozen times, looking for a more parsimonious explanation, but I keep coming back here.”
Jansen turned in a slow circle. Staring at the tendrils that crisscrossed the ground around them. “Those are… veins? Arteries?”
“Both,” Rao said. “I think. You can’t draw perfect analogs between alien physiology and anything we have names for, but… they’re a circulatory network. They definitely carry oxygen and water and probably nutrients. And I think they might serve as 2I’s nerves, too.”
“Or it’s all just horseshit!” Hawkins roared. He rubbed his sore head. His glove caught on the bandage across his forehead. He tore it off and threw it away—he had stopped bleeding, and the thing was just annoying him.
“You know what your problem is, Rao?”
Rao reached to touch his head, but he knocked her arm away.
“You overthink things,” he said. “You take them apart and… and by the time you’re done, you don’t know anything…”
“I’m a scientist,” Rao told him. “My job is to think about things.”
The woman just could not get the point. She was so lost up her own ass… her own mental ass… Hawkins shook his head. He would think of a better metaphor later. Right now—
“I need actual answers, Rao. I need a definitive answer I can act on. I swear to God, if you just shake your head at me…”
“This whole time,” Rao said, “we’ve been looking for aliens. We never stopped to think that the alien was right in front of us. This,” she said, gesturing at everything around them, “is the alien.”
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