Walking to Aldebaran

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Some of the Mission Team would go no further than this; they would send their drones and remote workers all over the Red Rocket – so called in deference to Magda’s mythical cosmonauts – trying to find something robust enough to reverse engineer. For me, I looked at that thing and pictured aliens less advanced than us, bumbling B-movie Martians who never quite got round to Attacking From Outer Space. But what do I know?

  The Mission Team retrieved Mara too, in the hope that the fragmentary images she had sent to Earth would just be the icing on a far more coherent cake, but Mara had been screwed over badly by whatever it had been through. Just before the Expedition Team set off, I heard Halsvenger from Mission saying that they couldn’t even see how Mara had made that last transmission, given the internal and external damage.

  You might be picking up a theme, by now, in matters concerning the Frog God (or, as Naish alone stubbornly maintained, the ‘Artefact’): principally, that we were woefully unprepared and didn’t understand what the hell we were doing. We couldn’t understand how the thing interacted with gravity, because it had to have cast the gravity shadow of a Neptune-sized planet to get the attention of the ESA in Madrid, and yet neither Mara nor any of the probes we sent experienced anything of that, as though it had tucked its mass away as we arrived like my cousin Carl sucking his gut in when a pretty girl walked past. Then there was that craziness of perspective, and we could confirm that was absolutely not a camera glitch in Kaveney. The Frog God was modest. You couldn’t ever see its backside, orbit as you would. That pareidolic goggling visage would face you forever, as if the thing just didn’t have any of the normal dimensions or relationships with regular space.

  We would, it is plain in retrospect, have been insane to actually step inside the damn thing.

  Mind you, we weren’t that nuts. We didn’t just put on our pith helmets and set out into the unknown. We had the capacity to stay out here for two full years before setting off for our vastly longer return trip (a slingshot around Neptune for acceleration had been calculated, but it wasn’t as good as using the Sun). Time enough for some tests.

  The Quixote came with plenty of remotes, and we started inserting them into the Frog God’s orifices in short order. Probes sent into the vast central bowl were obliterated, signal lost and no sign whatsoever of them, either disintegrated or sent so utterly elsewhere there was no trace or peep from them. Some of the remotes sent into the other larger openings met similarly apocalyptic ends; later experience suggested they were holes into radically hostile aeromes or extreme pressures. Others seemed literally just shallow sockets that went nowhere, as if they were doors to which we didn’t have the key. I wondered, if we had been super-evolved spacefaring blue whales, say, would the larger apertures have gaped and the smaller ones remained sealed? It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking, playing mental chess with the place’s absent makers.

  Soon, though – almost suspiciously soon – we had identified a conveniently human-scale opening that had within it the sweetest oxygen-nitrogen blend imaginable at a pleasant 0.91G and slightly under one normal atmosphere of pressure: the sort of rarefied air you might get most of the way up a mountain. But dark, very dark. No light in the Crypts save what you bring with you.

  We explored by drone some way, with the Expedition Team assembling like schoolkids every day to get the latest. We saw the remote’s spotlights on bare stone walls, and lost in the dust of great chambers. After a few days we found a patch of carving, intricate geometric matters that might or might not have been some form of writing. After a week of cautious flying – and the loss of half our remote fleet to various misadventures – we found a section that was lit. The lamps were plainly not made by the same hands as the walls: they looked weirdly primitive, sparking industrial bulbs of blue crystal stapled crudely to the wall. More than half were dead, and several more were pulsing erratically. Intense droneage of the area found a few corkscrewing metal rods that might have been tools made for inhuman hands, given how their termini seemed to match certain parts of the lamps. Dust lay everywhere, undisturbed, and there was no other trace of the vanished lamp lighters.

  We had been cooped up inside the ship for a long time by then, and with very little to do. Communications with Earth were so staggered as to make a free and frank exchange of ideas impossible, and often the different agencies back home were giving us conflicting advice. The final authority on what was to be done was Doctor Naish, that same Janette Naish who had run the briefings on the Frog God back when we were training. She had crowbarred her way onto the top spot on the Mission Team. She was the human authority on all things Frog Goddish, after all, and if she didn’t have any astronaut training at the outset, she had remedied that with a grim determination, trading her science for our skills until we met in the middle.

  I do not know who the word came from, to send in the Expedition Team at last. I mean, probably it was someone on Earth; the head of the Madrid team, or perhaps even a unified front from all the various space agencies that we should stop pussyfooting around and just go in. But it’s equally possible that it was Doctor Naish on her own initiative. She was desperate to get boots on the ground in there, now the remotes had shown we could survive – and we’d be going in suited, after all. We wouldn’t be exposing ourselves to teratogens or mutagens or biohazards despite the congenial air and the home-style gravity. We weren’t stupid about things, is what I’m saying. We weren’t like those dumbass astronauts you see in films, who take their helmets off or bend obligingly low to investigate the killer monster alien eggs.

  And we weren’t prepared. But then, we could have hung before the Frog God’s slack lips for a hundred years and not been prepared. The remotes did their best, seeding the near tunnels with signal routers so they could send and receive deeper within the rock, but we were going to take it from there.

  And I don’t think it was strictly necessary. Not then, not immediately. We could have continued with remotes a while longer, surely. We might have triggered the traps that way, discovered the hazards that would undo us. Similarly, we might have sent a metal box to the Moon in 1969 that popped up an American flag while silently playing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ It wouldn’t have been the same. The people back at home and the people on the Quixote all wanted the same thing, me included. We wanted to set foot inside the Crypts. We wanted to make them a part of the human domain, to bring them within our compass. The true value of the Expedition Team was as a propaganda victory over the universe.

  So the word came. I remember the briefing clearly. Doctor Naish standing in front of us, telling us the day had dawned.

  We were going in.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TODAY IS GOING to be one of those trying days.

  It starts with the tar trap. One moment I’m trudging along in the dark – you know, the usual – and then I hit a slick of something viscous and nasty, and I make the mistake of pressing on, and soon after that I’m labouring to move my feet at all, glued to the damn floor by some sort of disgusting ooze. It’s another thing they don’t train you for in astronaut school.

  I blame the scratching. For some time I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it, to hunt down whatever psychic bastard is doing it to me and do such things to whatever anatomy they are possessed of that they will never so much as scratch again. It has become something of an obsession, Toto, that much I allow, but it’s not as if the damn Crypts are crawling with entertainment.

  And I was getting closer, and now I’m standing here with my feet stuck in goo thinking that maybe I’m closer than I thought and the telepathic scrape-monster has a keen sideline in gluing people to the floor before it eats them, and I have just been reeled in like a fish.

  My feet aren’t going anywhere, which means that, unless I get the knife and a whole load more desperation, neither is the rest of me. Instead of pointlessly struggling and wearing myself out, I listen for the thing that is surely coming. The alternative is even more depressing, in a way: what if
I’m caught in the web of a spider long dead? This glue might remain sticky for millennia. I should patent it. I’d be the richest dead man in this whole alien horror maze.

  But no, the trap-maker is alive and well, and abruptly I revise just which is the preferable outcome. I can hear something coming towards me with agonising slowness. It is above me, inching its way along ceiling and walls with careful clicks and clacks as it reaches out and places its feet. Some large, softer part of it is scraping along, giving me the sense of something baggy and huge. Possibly it’s just going to drop on me and then absorb both me and the tar into its body over many days. That sounds exactly the sort of thing that my new life is made of.

  I have my little jury-rigged firelighter, and abruptly I can’t live without seeing the agent of my demise. It surely can’t be as horrible as my imagination is painting it. I thrust out the little sparker and flick away at it until I start to throw out little arcs of jagged light.

  The trap-maker doesn’t pause, and probably can’t see. I can see it, though, and that prompts another change of heart, because it is considerably nastier than my feeble Earth imagination had posited. Much of its substance is a coiling nest of intestines spread vine-like back along the passageway, so that what is creeping towards me is just one terminus of its distributed body. And as termini go, it is not a pretty one. There are beak-like plates there, at least seven of them, opposed to one another and boasting serrated edges. Even that’s not enough for the discerning intergalactic predator, because it has lashing barbed feelers as well, and coiled things that look a bit like scorpion tails, and fuck-off enormous fangs surely loaded with every kind of agony-inducing venom imaginable. It looks as though it got into God’s desk after school and nicked off with every single nasty toy confiscated from the fallen angels. It writhes towards me along the ceiling, various spiked parts of it clicking and clattering against the stone. It’s in no hurry. It’s probably waited a thousand years for some dumbass Earthman to come along and wake it up.

  A fairly large part of me is suggesting I use my knife on myself, rather than let myself be gradually disassembled by that appalling toolkit. No doubt Hamlet thought the same way when he did that To Be Or Not To Be speech, you know, whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of etcetera or let yourself be eaten by a Swiss Army knife from space.

  The rest of me, though, including that part that largely got spliced into me by that godforsaken Mother Machine (spoilers!) and has left me so very enduring and determined, is having none of it, Hamlet bedamned. I get out my knife. It seems like pissing into the hurricane compared to all those sharp edges the approaching monster has, but I have something it doesn’t. I have human ingenuity.

  A few minutes pass as it inches closer, its mouthparts twitching in hungry anticipation. Human ingenuity is drawing a blank. Captain Kirk would have thought of something by now, I’m sure, but I have no red-shirted confederates to feed to it. There’s just me and my useless human brain.

  Then I begin to feel a stinging sensation around my feet. I have bare feet, I should say. Inexplicably, the space boots provided by NASA didn’t hold up to months trekking about on a hard surface under a variety of gravities. Now my bare feet feel like they’re on fire, the sticky tar about them fairly bubbling with acidic secretions. Because of course this is what happens, and the slime will dissolve my legs while its maker snacks on my head. This is exactly what happens when you go into space and I can’t think why I ever wanted to get out of Earth’s atmosphere in the first place.

  It’s still just stinging, so far, so I strike a spark to see what’s actually going on. What I see is the sticky stuff receding from my toes in a wash of toxic-looking bubbles, and abruptly I can move again. Wherever I place a leathery sole, the alien goo just shrivels away. I am doing this, or at least my body is – I seem to have less and less say in what it can do and when it does it – I am sweating vitriolic solvent through my pores. That is apparently just one more thing the Machine gave me.

  I look up at the intestine monster inching overhead and a shock of wrath fills me. Going to eat me, were you? Think you’re so highly evolved, with your traps and your stupid number of different mouthparts? Well, you picked on the wrong Earthman, baby! I duck past the thing’s blindly questing head, snapping sparks from my lighter to show where it is, and then I’m beneath the glistening cables of its appalling body.

  Human ingenuity is still sleeping on the job. What steps up to bat is sheer rage. It’s not just the justifiable anger I might feel towards a hideous monster that’s tried to eat me, it’s all of it: it’s being lost in this godforsaken place for so long, it’s the scritchy scratchy whispering which even now is scraping in my head like a cheesegrater. It’s the gravities and pressures, the cold, the dark, the hunger and most especially all the goddamned monsters that make this place even more miserable than it needs to be.

  I reach up with a roar of fury and grasp two handfuls of slippery cables, and I pull. I haul the thing down bodily from the ceiling, rip it from the stone like tearing ivy from a wall, leaving a pattern of wet suckers behind. I pull its substance taut between my knotted hands and I tear and rip. I get my foot on its thrashing, clattering head and I pull cables of gut from it, pop, pop, pop! I tear open individual coils with my bloody teeth, is what I do. I stamp on it and I wring it, I crush and I tear. I forget I ever had a knife, or any tool. All the tools I need are my body and my rage.

  Some time later I come back to myself, covered in ichor. I have followed the coils of the thing to its heart, a great bloated body with half a dozen ropy arms leading off down various corridors. I’ve utterly disembowelled it, and when a thing’s mostly made of bowels that’s quite the undertaking. I am victorious. I am savage. I beat my chest and bellow like an animal.

  After that, listening to the echoes of my whooping bounce back to me from the walls of the Crypt, I have the grace to feel somewhat embarrassed. I am British, after all, and I feel my behaviour may have crossed some subtle line of etiquette. Let us never mention this again, Toto.

  Once my adrenaline (or whatever I have in its place now) has ebbed to more socially acceptable levels, I am left with that cursed scritching still making a home for itself in my skull. I’d thought this beastie was to blame, a telepathic lure into its nasty sticky trap. Apparently it just had the bad luck to be between me and whatever is actually tormenting me. Still, I feel the Crypts are a marginally better place without it, so no regrets, right?

  I flex my arms. They look beefier than Gary Rendell’s used to be, and Gary was a fit bloke, believe me. And Gary’s me, of course. I mustn’t forget that, only sometimes it can be hard.

  I am the monster-killer. I am what the monsters in the dark are scared of, or would be if any of them had enough of a brain to be scared with. I am the thing the Crypts cannot kill, and something out there is fucking with me. That strikes me as a bad policy decision on its part and I am going to track it down and register a complaint with extreme prejudice.

  With that resolution, this rough beast slouches off towards where the scritchy is strongest, casting about like a hunting dog at each crossroads and intersection. Sometimes the gravity crushes me. Sometimes the atmosphere is poisonous. Always there is the cold and the dark, but now I have a purpose. Someone’s trying to ruin my day and I am going to return the favour, Toto, of that you can be sure.

  IT’S NOT LONG before I see light ahead, a clear green-white illumination that flickers occasionally like nothing in nature. I had been thinking about telepathic monsters, native fauna of the Crypts that have evolved alongside countless travellers until they were able to pierce any alien skull with their infuriating hook. This is something else, though: a traveller like me. Is it the source of my torment, or is it just another innocent bystander? I feel a rush of anger, as though dismembering the trapper barely tapped my vast reserves of fury, but I fight it all down. I am an ambassador for Earth, after all. I have walked with the Egg Men and the Pyramid People and a dozen other sent
ient races. None of whom I have been able to communicate with, it’s true, but so far I’ve not killed anything that hasn’t tried to kill me.

  This rage is a new and disturbing facet to my personality, and I suspect it’s here to stay. I take some deep breaths and relax my muscles, willing the sensation to sink back down to where it came from. I feel it recede, but not very far, like a predator just beyond the reach of my campfire, growling softly to itself. It’s as much as I’m going to get from it, I know. Time to put my best face on and my best foot forward, and go and meet the neighbours. Maybe they’ll let me borrow the lawnmower. And by lawnmower I mean instantaneous teleportation device that can get me home, because some bugger’s got to have come up with one, surely, somewhere in the universe.

  Except, of course, if they had, they’d never be here. They’d not need to walk the long roads between the stars by foot.

  So, all very calm and collected, I approach on my bare tiptoes, creeping to each corner and peering round, seeing that corpselight radiance grow steadily stronger. Then I come to a chamber – I see the walls widen out, and the light throwing shadows there, some still, one moving.

  I don’t know why the Crypts have these larger chambers. Many of them are lairs for monsters, which know these places are oubliettes for travellers to end up in, but I’m assuming that ‘zoo dungeon storage’ was not their original purpose. Some but not all have the floriate Maker sculpting on the walls. Others have been repurposed by latecomers, home away from home for some alien civilization that has left only its broken artefacts and its dust. Whatever their purpose, walk long enough in these dark halls, and you’ll find the walls opening out about you, the brief illusion of space and freedom, before you realise it’s just another part of the same damn maze.