The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  He made no attempt to put numerical odds on that.

  McAllister touched his device to end the call. He dropped instantly out of virtual space and back into his own body, which was, at that moment, in an elevator descending into the ground under JPL.

  The elevator arrived, and he stepped out into the little lobby of the neutrino telescope, then out onto the enclosed catwalk. The display in the middle of the room showed the same scene he’d watched before he left for the night—figures in space suits trudging across dull, pale ground.

  Charlotte Harriwell was lying on the floor, her coat rolled up under her head as a pillow. She stirred as he came in, then sat up and straightened her clothes and her hair. “McAllister,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She laughed. “I didn’t think I would actually fall asleep.”

  He smiled to show her it was fine. She hadn’t left the chamber since he’d shown her Taryn Holmes’s remains, and he doubted she would leave even if he asked her to. Which he had no intention of doing. She worked the same job for KSpace that he did for NASA, which meant neither of them would feel easy again until their astronauts were safe. Which needed to happen sooner rather than later. Parminder Rao’s suit batteries were down to 7 percent charge. While Hawkins and Jansen had been conserving power by not running their life-support systems, they didn’t have much more. Maybe that would be enough for them to meet with Foster and then escape through the secondary airlock. Maybe.

  He touched his device and asked one of his assistants to bring down breakfast for two. He wasn’t going anywhere until this was resolved.

  She opened the map of 2I’s interior in an AR window. “They’re getting close to the south pole,” she told him. “Another hour or so and they’ll reach Foster.”

  He nodded. Foster. So much relied on what the man had to say. If he had truly found a way to communicate with the alien—

  Otherwise: 40 percent.

  McAllister reached into his coat pocket and took out a sleeve of antacids. He kept his eyes on the meaningless video displayed above them.

  “Come on, Hawkins,” he said, softly.

  Except—in his head it wasn’t Windsor Hawkins he was really counting on.

  No, in his mind, in the irrational part of him, it was Sally Jansen he prayed for. She might not be in charge of the mission anymore, but if anyone could pull this off… Come on, Sally. Prove that I was right all those years ago. Give me something better than forty percent.

  On the side of Charlotte Harriwell’s head, the dragon snorted smoke through its nostrils in two long, dark plumes.

  “End of the road,” Channarong said. “It’s just up from here.”

  Rao had been lost in a hypnotic trance of walking on the tops of the bone arches, watching her feet. For hours no one had said anything, or if they had—she hadn’t heard it.

  This damned place. It got in your head, the darkness, the strangeness… She looked around, trying to figure out where they were.

  The arches of bone came together in a common nexus just ahead, three different paths converging where the tall pylon of the buttress rose from the drum’s floor. An orange rope hung down from the darkness above them, a way up. Channarong must have left it behind the last time she came this way.

  The cage—and the brain—were right above them. Maybe another kilometer up, another kilometer toward the axis of 2I. This was it.

  Before they climbed up, though, Rao needed to see something. She had heard something, a squirming, wet sound coming up from below. She was pretty sure she knew what was down there—what she would see. Still she leaned over the edge, peering down.

  “Ms.—Ms. Channarong? Can you bring your light over here?” Channarong went to stand next to her and pointed the big flashlight down into the shadows below.

  Worms covered every inch of ground, filled all the space she could see below them. Countless worms—some no bigger than elephants, swarming and crawling over one that had to be as big as an ocean liner. Channarong’s light couldn’t illuminate all of that one at the same time. They were moving constantly, their legs moving up and down like a million pistons, their teeth spinning pointlessly. Some of them gnawed at the bones that supported the cage. Many were just running back and forth, as if desperately looking for something to eat.

  It was a boiling cauldron of life. A sea of motion. It felt so wrong, so different from the vast desert silences they’d crossed to get here. There was a desperate animation to them, a surging, insatiable need that drove them. Rao could feel it even from their position in the heights.

  “They want something. They want what’s in the cage,” Hawkins said. He looked up at Rao with a question in his eyes.

  She nearly flinched. She caught herself before she could totter over the edge into that ocean of legs and teeth. “The brain—” She shook her head. “They want—no. No. I don’t want to speculate—”

  Hawkins was on her in a flash, looming over her, reaching out as if he would grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “Tell us,” he hissed.

  “It’s all right,” Jansen said. “You’re the only one of us who understands what we’re seeing. Go ahead, Rao.”

  The astrobiologist’s shoulders slumped, but she knew she had no choice. They needed to hear this, if she was right. They needed to get it. “I think… the cage isn’t there to protect against collisions, or asteroid strikes, or—it’s not for exterior threats. It’s to keep the worms away from the brain. It can’t last forever. They’ll chew through these buttresses and get to it, but… they don’t eat the bones, we know that, and—the cage is there to make sure that whatever is inside the cage gets eaten last. That would make sense if it’s a brain, you would want to keep that running right up until the last possible second.”

  “The worms,” Jansen said. “They’re eating 2I alive. What are they, some kind of parasite?”

  “Oh no,” Rao said. “No. Not at all. Parasites evolve to take advantage of the weaknesses of an organism, the places it can’t defend itself. No, 2I evolved for this. We saw how fast it grows—it’s constantly growing new tissues, new flesh to feed the worms.”

  “It wants to be eaten?” Jansen asked.

  “Of course. It wants its children to grow and prosper.” She could see horror erupt across Jansen’s face, a crawling, rippling disgust. She understood.

  Hawkins needed it explained more clearly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Matriphagy,” Rao said. “It’s common in spiders and nematodes back on Earth. It’s a good strategy if all you’re concerned about is passing on your genes. And it’s not like there’s anything else out here for the children to eat.” She gave him a cold smile. She felt dizzy, suddenly, and she needed to sit down. She put her hands on the sides of her helmet. “They’re larvae,” she said.

  Hawkins squatted down to stare her in the face. “We saw their eggs, their cocoons—”

  “They’re larvae. They’re 2I’s young. It gave birth to them, and now it’s letting them eat its flesh. Whatever it is that 2I wants, it doesn’t plan to live to see it. But the worms will. It’ll die, but the next generation will be strong in its multitudes. It will die, and its young will chew their way out of its corpse.”

  The buttress was different from the other bone pylons Rao had observed. It was made of the same long, tough fibers, but they were woven together much more closely here. She could almost see herself reflected in the smooth surface. There were no caves or ridges—nothing they could have used as hand- or footholds. Instead they used the climbing gear, the same motorized ascenders they’d used to climb down into 2I’s interior.

  As her ascender pulled her smoothly, slowly toward the top, she kicked off the side of the pylon. Too hard—she went flying outward on the rope, having forgotten to make allowances for the low gravity. She counted thirty seconds before she came swinging back to catch herself with her feet. They were getting very close to the axis here. She thought of ARCS, who had flown most of the way across 2I’s length by sticking to that imaginary l
ine where there was no gravity at all. She knew it had stopped reporting a while before. Had something in the cage grabbed it out of the air, like a bird in flight?

  She was getting near the top of the buttress when she noticed that the bone, normally colorless and homogeneous, had turned into something like marble. There were dark veins running through its pale surface—almost literally. The veins were tendrils, the circulatory system of 2I. Brains needed a lot of blood flow, a lot of oxygen. She had no doubt the whole cage would be webbed with the tendrils that had killed Stevens and Holmes, that covered every square centimeter of the drum.

  She activated the brake on her ascender as she neared the top, her lights showing her a smooth curve of bone and then nothing, just dark air. She climbed hand over hand for the last few meters. Lifting her weight was no problem—in fact, she had to slow herself down so she didn’t just overshoot the top and go flying past. When she reached the top of the rope she found it tied off to one of KSpace’s pitons. It made her think of when they’d first entered the drum, sliding down orange ropes through the cone, through the black sludge. They’d come nearly eighty kilometers since then. Not such a long distance, truly, but it felt as if she’d been in the dark for a lifetime now. She knew it had changed her, made her more confident, tougher—and changed her in other ways, too, she was sure. Ways she wouldn’t truly understand until she was back in the light and the open air of Earth. How could anyone come through a passage like this the same person who had left?

  Hawkins reached out a hand to help her up. She didn’t need it, but she didn’t brush him off. Jansen and Channarong were nearby—Rao had been the last one to come up the rope. The others were all standing, looking south, away from her. She could feel their impatience and their anxiety. She shared it.

  Yet she had to take a good look around before they proceeded. She would never have this chance again. To stand inside the skull of a creature from another star.

  Channarong’s light bounced as she walked, revealing only glimpses of what surrounded them, but slowly Rao built up a mental image. The cage was no more than a kilometer across. It was made of concentric rings of bone—she could see them nested before her, nearly as thick as walls, with only a little dark air showing between.

  There was a sort of floor underneath them, a platform of slick bone about ten meters across that formed a walkway running straight forward. Looking up and around she saw similar platforms every sixty degrees around the circumference—so six of them in total. Clearly they weren’t there for her benefit. They were simply longitudinal supports, designed to hold the concentric rings of the bars of the cage in place.

  Directly ahead, in the direction of the south pole, was some enormous organ, vaguely blue in color. It formed a ring around the imaginary axis, a thick band of flesh that clung to the bony bars of the cage. She was certain it was 2I’s brain. Theory, hypothesis, conjecture—it couldn’t be anything else. She was suddenly desperate to see what it looked like, and she raced ahead of the others—until she stepped on something that crunched under her boot and stumbled, falling forward with comical slowness to catch herself with her hands.

  She looked back and saw that the thing she’d stepped on was a memory stick. Looking around her, she saw others like it. They littered the floor here. There must have been hundreds of them, just discarded and left to lie where they’d fallen.

  Channarong came up beside her and grabbed the stick up in her hand. She held it to her light and Rao could see that its case was cracked but the sliver of memory glass inside was still intact.

  Jansen took it from her and slotted it into the receptacle on the front of her suit. She played the contents for everyone to hear.

  AUDIO FILE TRANSCRIPT (1)

  Willem Foster: In the dark she lived a quiet life, a cold and slow time where thoughts stretched out over the length of light-months. Each breath an eon.

  The file ended there. Just a few seconds of audio. In the recording Foster’s voice was soft as a feather tickling her ear. It sounded as if he had barely whispered the words, spoken them at the edge of audibility, then boosted the volume after the recording was done. The vowels almost disappeared. Each sibilant reared up and struck like a cobra.

  Rao found another stick and picked it up off the floor. She slotted it and saw that it contained just one small audio file.

  AUDIO FILE TRANSCRIPT (2)

  Willem Foster: She knew another world once. A place of deep gorges and salty tide pools under an orange sun. She doesn’t understand the concept of orange, of course. She felt that sun in terms of magnetic flux, she felt its radiation burning on her skin. That world is gone now. I don’t know how far away it was, but… it’s gone.

  Rao’s lights stabbed straight ahead, toward the great fleshy ring of the brain, but still she could make out only a vague sense of motion, as if the brain were rippling, waves sloshing back and forth through its mass. She moved quickly now, exactly like Armstrong on the moon, each step a shuffling leap that took her five or six meters forward at a time. She had to fight to keep her balance.

  Behind her Jansen picked up another memory stick from the litter of them on the floor, slotted it, played the file.

  AUDIO FILE TRANSCRIPT (3)

  Willem Foster: It isn’t talking, what we do. There is no barrier here, no self, no I, no ego. We shade into one another, indivisible.

  Rao barely heard the words. She was close to the brain now. Close enough to hear it rustling. An eternal, busy, fluttering sound, and she knew it was a sound she’d heard before. It had been quieter, then, less hectic. But it was exactly the same sound that she’d heard in the forest of the hand-trees. Yet where that rustling had been the gentle stirring of leaves in a forest canopy, this was the sound of trees being lashed by a windstorm. A constant din of activity, a roar of white noise.

  The hand-forest they’d seen near 2I’s heart had been a kind of ganglion, a cluster of nerve cells. This was the very center of 2I’s central nervous system. Its prime mover, its intelligence.

  AUDIO FILE TRANSCRIPT (4)

  Willem Foster: She feels the pull of Earth’s gravity the way we feel love. The way we rush to embrace a lover. She feels the sun in the wind that catches in her wings, cheering her onward. After the long, cold time in the deeper dark, everything she feels now is so sudden, so large, so powerful. She would weep constantly, if she had eyes.

  The brain was made of hands. Hands only slightly larger than her own, countless hands exactly like the fruit of the hand-trees she’d seen before, except so many more of them—and instead of sprouting from branches, here the hands grew from other hands, which emerged from the palms and wrists and backs of still other hands—in their profusion, in their myriads, they were constantly moving, gripping each other, grasping and releasing, fingers extended only to be grasped by other hands. The motion of them never stopped, and it moved so fast it was hard to follow. As her lights played over the surface of the brain, it felt as if she were looking at some impossible circular river that flowed from itself back into itself. A circle of hands, grasping and releasing, grasping and releasing, endlessly touching, briefly holding, touching, gripping, grabbing—

  “That’s enough!”

  AUDIO FILE TRANSCRIPT (5)

  Willem Foster: She subsists on dust and hydrogen. Her children need meat.

  “Enough,” Hawkins shouted. “I don’t want to hear any more of these recordings! Where the hell is Foster? Is he here?”

  “Yes,” Channarong said.

  “Foster? Come out and show yourself!” Hawkins shouted into the rustling noise of the brain. “Let me see you.”

  Channarong brought her light around and pointed it straight ahead, to where the platform they stood on met the fleshy ring of the brain. Foster was sitting there. He’d been right there the whole time.

  CHARLOTTE HARRIWELL, KSPACE VICE PRESIDENT OF CREWED OPERATIONS: Oh no. Oh God, no.

  LOSS OF SIGNAL

  Sandra Channarong went over to him and took a water bot
tle from her belt. She laid it by his feet, then reached over to straighten the orange romper he wore. It was a pointless task. The garment hung on Foster’s emaciated frame in deep, shadowy folds. There wasn’t much left of him—his arms and legs were just skin hanging on bones like sticks.

  He half sat, half slumped against a pile of backpacks and rolled-up blankets. His hands lay on the ground, unmoving. His head was tilted back, his face pointing upward, toward the axis, his mouth slightly agape. Jansen could see the dry, black nub of his tongue. It moved as she watched. He was still alive.

  One of his hands reached for the water bottle and slowly, painstakingly brought it up to his lips. He took a sip of the water and swirled it around in his mouth.

  Jansen stepped closer. Even though she didn’t want to. Her singular suit light caught his face, the sharpness of his cheekbones. She didn’t want to look at this. She didn’t want to see it.

  Tendrils rose from the ground behind him, snaky arteries that connected to the mass of the brain. They climbed up the bedrolls and backpacks, branches anchoring them in place. Then they climbed up the sides of his head, over his temples, growing thicker. Fatter.

  Two of them, two thick tendrils, plunged into his eye sockets. There was a little dried blood crusted around them where they entered. A third, thinner tendril curled in through his right nostril. She saw it throb. Pulse with life.

  His eyes. His eyes were—

  They’d been replaced.

  Jansen knelt down beside him, on the other side from Channarong. She pushed her hand against her mouth. It was the only way she could keep from crying out.

  Foster set the water bottle down very carefully, as if he was afraid of spilling it. Then he picked up something else—a voice recorder. A stubby cylindrical device with a microphone grille on one end and a slot for a memory stick on the other. He pressed it right against his thin lips and whispered. Jansen couldn’t hear what he said over the susurrus of the brain behind him.