Walking to Aldebaran

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The worm monsters probably sense it and steer well clear, leaving me to trudge through the darkness, one hand trailing along the cold wall. Exploring the Crypts is always a joy, you understand. Any moment I might walk over the edge of an indeterminate drop, or into an aerome filled with vacuum or acidic gas, or – which is what happens – into an area where the pressure must be two atmospheres and the gravity is likewise uncongenial.

  I drop, hands and knees, and for a moment I can’t breathe, to go with the not-seeing. The air around me is pleasantly oxygenated with a hint of pine freshness, but it’s thick as soup and clenched about me like a fist. I fight it as I’d fight a snake coiled about me, buttressing my ribs against it, forcing the thick medium into my airways and bloating my lungs with it. My breathing becomes very slow, but there’s plenty of goodness in each breath, and my metabolism actually speeds up. I feel my bones creak, my muscles pulled taut by the effort of not just collapsing into a puddle. But I’ve pulled more Gs than this on the simulator, and I’ve breathed worse air too. Slowly I force myself to my feet, head swimming and eyes feeling as though someone strong has their thumbs pressed against my corneas.

  I stumble, but after three lurching steps I’m walking again, and my eyes see a faint glow ahead, another tenanted space, or perhaps one left fallow after its illuminators passed on. The Crypts are older than we have words for, after all, and they stretch everywhere. Long before the Madrid team sent Kaveney to investigate their gravitic anomaly, the Crypts were sitting there in a super-Plutonian orbit, made by hands we will never know, but for purposes clear to every species that comes across them. They are roads through the great dark without, just as there are roads through the lesser dark within. They let us walk to all the other stars.

  And so I walk. It feels like less of a privilege now I’ve been alone for what must be months and barely recognise myself in the mirror. Still, here I am, amongst the stars. Where exactly? There is no ‘exactly.’ The Crypts go everywhere, and the distances I have to trudge, while a long trek by the standards of a weekend jogger, are trivial compared to the vast cold reaches outside. The Crypts are an artificial phenomenon which let matter, energy and information thumb their collective nose at relativity, and do it unchanged, without all that infinite-mass nonsense that approaching light speed entails.

  You just put one foot in front of the other.

  I reach the lights. They look bioluminescent to me: rubbery globes lukewarm to the touch, containing swirling medusae-looking things. Plenty are dead at the bottom of each lamp, meaning that these things must likely need, and be receiving, regular maintenance. Soon after, I reach the caves. The lamp-lighters didn’t bother to set their living lanterns deeper into the Crypts than their immediate home area, so either they don’t explore or their explorers carry portable lamps and don’t want to leave the universe’s most obvious trail for any sighted hunter to follow.

  There are caves here, though, and that’s a shock because the Crypt-builders didn’t do caves – these have been carved out from the black stone, and by hand, not machine. The work is crude but effective and I can see the rounded scars of the tools they used. High-G creatures with a profound understanding of leverage, I infer.

  Anyway, the locals have hacked out three smallish caves, and inside each is a scene that lazy archaeologists would readily characterise as “for ritual purposes.” There are more lamps – no candles or anything with a naked flame, but then the atmosphere is a bit oxygen-happy. There are stones, rounded as though polished by water and of several shades in the red-pink-orange spectrum. Then there are icons, or stelae, or obelisks. They are made from the rubble and dust of the Crypt stone itself, I reckon, moulded together into shapes by some process that hasn’t used visible cement or other glue. They’re narrow but not pointed at the top, broader at the base, and without other fancy projections, and they’re carved, but I can’t make anything of it. The lines go in and out of the cracks between pieces of stone, and the overall artistic effect is lost on me.

  I back out of the cave, feeling baffled – it all looks a bit home-craft-store as far as the artefacts of a spacefaring civilisation go – and find two locals staring at me.

  That sorts out what the icons are supposed to be, for the locals are also narrow at the top and broader at the base, their hides a gleaming green-black. They have four tubular legs like the stubby paws of tardigrades, and there are various orifices towards the front lower edge of their bodies. Constellations of opal fragments are scattered across their upper reaches on all sides, and my guess is that they serve as sense organs.

  Oh, and they’re about a metre twenty, tops, so: tubby little obelisk guys. I dub them the Pyramid People because when I was training I skipped the lectures about naming aliens.

  They’re very agitated to see me, fluting and hooting at each other, sounds that come in like little blarting foghorns in the dense atmosphere. I wave at them and they produce an array of extending arms from some of their larger orifices, threatening me with sharp obsidian-looking stones.

  We have a bit of a stand-off then. I just stand there, creaking slightly in the gravity, and they carry on a complex warbling conversation like the Spanish Inquisition trying to interrogate a woodwind section. Every so often I wave and say ‘Hi’ again. Eventually I sit down with my back to the wall and my knees drawn up, and inadvertently end up the sort of shape and size they’re comfortable dealing with. With a final series of basso profundo trills, they waddle off. I might have been told to stay put or asked to follow, and there’s no interspecies body language that lets me know which. So I follow. I might be British, but I’ve been lost in a space labyrinth for an age and I’m done with waiting.

  They obviously don’t have many worries about the dangers of an unknown alien (me), because they just go straight past the other caves towards a steadily warmer light source until I’m looking at a gateway out of the Crypt. I’m looking at their world.

  Somehow, the Crypt terminal is actually planetside for them. They didn’t have to claw their way out of their high-G gravity well to go and find some distant big dumb object. They just wandered over the next hill, one day (that whole view was dominated by hillsides) and found a great black opening beckoning them. How that even worked, what with the screwy gravity of the Crypts, I couldn’t begin to guess. But then, ‘couldn’t begin to guess’ is very much the slogan for exploring the Crypts.

  I go over and just stare out. Hillside, as I say, and mostly greenish for once, though nothing like grass, just a carpet of what looks like veiny cactus, and here and there a profoundly phallic projection, endowed with a powerful tumescence to overcome the local gravity. Except this is actually just me misinterpreting what life on a high-G world is actually like, as I discover when I step through.

  And of course I step through. To feel the breeze! The sunlight on my skin! Oh, how good it must feel, how rejuvenating!

  The two Pyramid People flutle and witter at me, but I just walk past and out into the new world, heedless of their sharp rocks. I come out, open my arms beatifically to the world, and then spend about ten minutes bucking and gasping under the effect of the atmosphere, because it is considerably denser out here than in the Crypts. As I choke, I spare a moment for the Pyramidites who must have had a major light-headed rush when they stepped in, if that was even a thing for their physiology.

  And there are plenty of them – at least a score dotted about in front of the entrance, of various sizes, and some decorated with orange ochre, or else with a variety of white and grey markings that are probably a rainbow to eyes seeing different part of the spectrum to me. Some have sling bags; others hold some manner of tools or weapons, all designed with very different principles of leverage than a human would worry about. They set up a hooty chorus when they see me, but I just do the Jesus pose again and give them my blessing as I clamber to my feet. Then I turn around and almost lose it.

  I expect to see just the Crypt-mouth and more hill country, but the land rises in steady stages beyo
nd the mouth, and much of it is heavily forested with plants (?) that would give giant redwoods a run for their money. The smaller ones have heavily buttressed trunks, warty with nodules. The tall ones sway and ripple, their upper boughs bearing vast leaves like kites and weird, bobbing globular balloons. The entire forest reaches up to some high-altitude air current that has all the tall trees canted over at thirty degrees to vertical.

  And amongst the trees, bloated whale-sized colossi flap and glide languorously, tearing off great strips of the leaves. And doubtless something preys on them, some swift aerial pack hunter. This world obviously has a two-level ecosystem, those below that wrestle with the mechanics of stomping about under high gravity, and those above that harness the thick atmosphere to soar.

  I hear another flutling right by me, and see a delegation of Pyramid People there, no weapons in view, making sinuous motions with their retractable arms. I get no sense of threat from them. Possibly they want me to come and meet their extended families who have never seen a space god before; possibly they are just wondering how I don’t fall over with only two legs.

  And that is a thing, of course. I am alive and on the surface of another planet. I can breathe the air, and I’d be able to eat the local cuisine, most likely, or even make cuisine of the locals. The gravity and the atmosphere will test me, and the Pyramidites being in the stone age is going to limit any large-scale projects I might have, but I could stay here. I don’t have to go back to the dark. I could live and die the first and last and only human this world will ever know, and in a thousand years the Pyramidite archaeologists will find my bones and go nuts.

  And the scraping has stopped. Even though I’ve stopped hearing it a while ago, I am vindicated in my belief that it had been grinding on inaudibly, because I know with absolute certainty that it has gone when I step out of the exit. It is a Crypts thing.

  The heaviness of heart I feel is not entirely due to the gravity. I wave to them again. “Be nice to each other,” I tell them sonorously. “Look after the environment. Um...” If someone asks you if you’re a god, you should probably have some better commandments lined up. The words Don’t eat yellow snow flash into my mind and I choke them back down.

  I go back into the Crypts. This place with its gravity and its crushing atmosphere, it’s nowhere human beings are likely to venture. My people will not find me here like Robinson Crusoe and his man Pyramid Pete; and I am human enough that I still want to find them. I will brave the dark and the cold, the hunger and the monsters and that damnable scritching that starts up again the moment I get inside. I will brave them, because dying alone and far from home is the worst thing.

  One of the worst things, anyway. But some of the other worst things have already happened, and so I feel qualified to make the assessment.

  CHAPTER SIX

  INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HELD long enough for us to actually get off Earth and aboard a ship built entirely in orbit, and at least 60% from materials harvested from the private enterprise asteroid mines. We got mates’ rates, as far as I could work out, because the Frog God meant Opportunity to a wide range of people, both scientific and commercial. The private investors wanted to be in at the top, but they wanted to do it without breaking from their various home governments, and so a really specific public-private partnership was set up with the stated aim of poking the Frog God in the appropriately-sized eye. The crew was twenty-nine people, split between the Expedition Team, the Mission Team (because apparently going inside the Frog God itself was somehow not the mission) and the Overlap Team, in which position of miscellanea you’d find yours truly. I was also one of the pilots, although space piloting is one of those situations where they should really equip you with a dog, so your job is to feed the dog and the dog’s job is to bite you if you touch any of the expensive equipment. That’s unfair to my colleagues and me, of course, since it’d be us saving the ship if something went wrong, but as matters fell out, everyone else had done their jobs well enough that our position at the helm was something of a formality.

  The other pilots, for posterity, were Janisha Ushah, Magda Proshkin and John Hamilton – four of us to do a job that didn’t need one of us, but then redundancy is important when you’re in space, because you can’t just pop out to space-Tescos if you forget something. I spent most of my awake-time with Magda, who had the most space-time of all of us, had the best reflexes of anyone I ever met, and was stark raving crazy in a quiet way. She would explain at great length and in seven languages that the spaceship we’d seen drifting near the Frog God was Russian, and that the Soviet space program had sent an expedition to the Frog back in the 1980s, as its last covert attempt to overshadow the US Moon landings. The expedition had failed, which meant the Kremlin had buried all trace of it, but she swore blind that her people had got there first, and that we would find that someone had kept the red flag flying out there, possibly still gripped in the dry, dead hand of a cosmonaut.

  Our ship was the Quixote. There had been a fight over the name, but Madrid ended up with the casting vote, and Santiago got proposed and shot down for don’t-mention-the-Reconquista reasons. I suspect there was the sort of committee meeting involved where everyone’s first choice was someone else’s last choice, and Cervantes won out because nobody hated it and because no one had actually read the book. We were lucky to avoid the good ship Spacy McFrogface, frankly.

  Once the slingshot was successful and we were zipping off towards the outer solar system at the hoped-for ridiculous speeds, it was time to start the duty rota for real. It was a long, long way to the Frog God, a fair chunk of a human lifespan, and we’d spent it in semi-hibernation, a cold sleep that would keep our bodies and minds ticking over in a very low gear so that mankind’s ambassadors to the stars wouldn’t be all grey and wrinkly when we arrived. It was tested tech – all the rage if you were rich as balls back home and felt death’s fingers clutching for you, and way better than all that frozen-head-in-a-jar cryogenics from last century. Of course, we’d been repeatedly awoken from that state to take turns being the skeleton crew, and that wasn’t quite as tested, but again they got it right, and while you felt like warmed-over shit when they levered you from the tank, nobody actually died.

  Actually, Gerde Hoffmeier from the Mission Team died, but that was a heart condition nobody had picked up, just one of those things. We got to do the space funeral thing, solemn videos for everyone back home, whilst simultaneously not having to worry about there being some systemic problem that might pick us off one by one.

  And things went wrong, and time passed, and there were a couple of small wars back home that meant various members of the crew were technically blood enemies for months or years at a time, but it’s very hard to sustain that kind of nonsense when you’re zipping through the asteroid belt with Mars behind you and Jupiter ahead, and no government had managed to get a political officer on board. The only bit of rampant nationalism was Eda Ostrom, a geologist, who taught everyone Danish through sheer force of personality and taking double shifts, so that her native tongue was our lingua franca by the time we arrived. The rest of the long-running edutaintment was Jain Diaz from the NASA contingent teaching us considerate use of pronouns with sufficient patience and determination that ze even had the most hardcore Russians respecting hir life choices. Ze was an indicator of just how much looser things had got in the States after the fighting, which I suppose is some small consolation. By the time the interplanetary satnav told us we’d reached our destination, then, we were fully up on nonbinary etiquette and everyone’s messages home were peppered with incomprehensible Danish slang.

  And eventually, a generation or so later, we arrived. I want you bear that in mind, when thinking about my later trials and tribulations. We all knew this was a life-mission when we set out. Nobody was clock-watching and knocking off at five. When we returned home, everyone we knew save the youngest babes would be dead, or else availing themselves of the same cold storage as us to stave off their malignant cancers. We were th
e heroes of our peers when we set out. On our projected return, we would be the heroes of our grandchildren.

  I got woken late, having done a long shift only five years before. They woke all of us, of course, once they were sure we had indeed arrived, that the celestial calculations had been on the mark, that all the series of ludicrous chances and risks we had taken had fallen into place, one after another like dominoes in reverse.

  Our instruments were picking up the Frog God – and it was big enough that we could see it from the cupola (indeed it was more visible than it should have been, given that you could barely pick the sun out of the starfield this far out). What we also had was Mara, which had ended up caught in the Frog’s gravitational pull without, of course, being able to orbit the damned impossible thing, and we had the ship.

  Magda was to be disappointed. There were no Soviet markings, nor had it been made by human hands. But it had been made by hands, planned by a mind close enough to ours that it looked like a spaceship. It had been designed with sleek lines as though intended for a different medium to space. It had engines at the back and a compartment for crew in the front, and to me it looked like something from the pulp magazines of the 1930s. It was also very incomplete, and everything was vacuum-eroded, no new work on it for countless centuries. If you’d given it a kick your foot would have gone straight through. We had a camera drone ghost along its piecemeal flank, and everyone was very quiet and still, seeing that alien construction that was still just human enough. There were no dead cosmonauts, human or otherwise, or any indication of why construction had stalled. The fact remained that, aside from the Frog God itself, some intelligent alien presence had existed in our solar system within the lifespan of the human race; some aliens that, if they had finished their ship and travelled sunwards in search of planets, might have met with our ancestors and looked them in the eye.