So let’s say the place is interested in us. Let’s say it wants us to come in – but on foot, like polite visitors, not just roaring through but pacing their halls, just like I’m condemned to. Why no space-lanes, like Doctor Naish complained? Is it some ancient religion, every step cleansing our souls? Are we pilgrims on some cosmic Hajj? After all, what if we got to an exit, and it was as remote as our entry-point? It’s not as though we could lug the makings of a new spaceship all that way with sled dogs. That was the problem the Red Rocketeers ran into, after all. How long did it take them to bring their spaceship through, piecemeal and plagued by all the hazards of the Crypts? No wonder they never finished it.
Ask the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Gary Rendell of back then and he’d have given you all sorts of cheery, optimistic answers about our place in the universe and the intentions of the Crypt-lords. But I am not that man any longer. In a very real sense I am not that man, and I cannot cross that river twice because I’m in a horrible dark place that doesn’t have any rivers. My answer is that the Crypt-makers are still here. They never left. Wander far enough, deep enough, proceed in directions for which no being of regular space has names, and you may find them. Perhaps they’re dead, and they bring visitors to die here as a remembrance of the corpse of their greatness. Perhaps they watch us from the very stone, and thrill to our struggles and our pain. Perhaps they dream, and with strange aeons they will wake and wonder about all the little rats scuttling through their ventilation shafts. Because if there’s anything in the universe that Can Eternal Lie, it’s the Crypts. Some of Naish’s colleagues back on Earth even suggested they were a survival from a previous universe, anchored to ours to preserve them from destruction. Another said they were such advanced creations that they had most likely been built in the far distant future, towards our own universe’s eventual end, but their immunity to the regular laws of space set them outside time as well, existing simultaneously in all eras, alpha and omega. Clever fellow, that one.
THE INITIAL EXPEDITION Team comprised Joe Martino (USA, team leader and geologist and, as we used to say, neither shaken nor stirred), Louis Chung (USA, psychologist, evidence of how much the US had taken over the project back home), Karen Aanbech (Netherlands, engineer and zero-G ping pong champion), Gary Rendell (UK, general reprobate and responsible for driving the shopping trolley with our stuff on it), Katarin Anderova (Russia, backup engineer and communications specialist, plus backup first contact diplomat) and finally, after a lot of horse trading, Ajay Hussain (Pakistan, linguist and primary first contact specialist, who got on the team on the strength of his book about the building blocks of language vis-a-vis communicating with aliens, which was conveniently finished on the voyage and published six months before the Expedition Team went in).
I’m going to give you a spoiler here, just so you don’t get too caught up in the heroic daring of the whole business:
They all die.
Well, okay, not all of them. I’m still here, for a given value of ‘me,’ and I think Karen got clear of the initial clusterfuck, but what happened to her after that I cannot say. Probably she got clear of the Crypts and is on a nice family-run farm upstate with all the dogs and hamsters.
China, by the way, was offered a place but declined, being more interested in the Mission Team, and from my privileged perspective I salute their forethought. Oh, and having two team members with the initials KA was a colossal annoyance to the more bureaucratic members of the crew, but I will say that, when the end came, it wasn’t that which did us in.
There we were, anyway, out on the shuttle deck of the Quixote. I say “shuttle”, it was a bit more bare bones than that. There wasn’t anywhere to get in, to start with, just a frame you belted yourself onto, and some tame little engines, and a set of controls that I got to lord it over because I was the pilot. There’s a picture of us, six people and a mechanical trolley and the bulky-looking rotary-skirted drone. The group photo got sent straight to Earth with the next packet of messages, at the highest res they could afford. I’m looking slightly away from the camera, lanky Rendell G with my spacesuit still trailing hoses. Naish had just called for us to say cheese and Anderova K, the devil at my left shoulder, had instead said something unprintable in Danish which threw me off. She, of course, is grinning virtuously at the camera. To my right (your left as you look at the image), Martino J and Hussein A are giving the lens their brightest smiles, a pair of alpha males jostling elbows to be first into the history books. Chung L is on the far end, hand up so the drone appears to be balancing on his wrist. On the other end of the line is Aanbech K, putting a little distance between herself and Anderova K as though it’ll help distinguish their initials. She’s not looking at the camera either and half her face is hidden in the goggles she’s running diagnostics with, because she was, frankly, terrified of getting stuck out there if something fritzed out. And she was right to be, of course, but back then everyone else had begun to believe we basically had a mandate from God, Frog or otherwise, to go claim the Artefact in the name of science and human endeavour. That’s the thing about something as contradictory as the Frog God – simultaneously vastly outside our ken and yet built at a scale that invites us to stride in like the prodigal son expecting his fatted calf. Either it reinforces your insignificance or it makes you the centre of the universe, and all of us except Aanbech K had gone for Option B.
I wanted them to take another picture, but Naish was out of patience and said we had to catch our window. That was a lie; the Frog God wasn’t going anywhere, and it didn’t matter how much we tried to orbit it, we’d still be staring it in the face. Mind you, what would I have done with another chance to record my last moments in human company for posterity? I don’t imagine I’d’ve had the forethought to stand there second time round looking like Munch’s The Scream, and that’s just about the only appropriate farewell I could have given.
We piled on the shuttle, and Karen insisted on everyone running suit diagnostics again, while she did the shuttle itself. Everything was fine. We told her not to worry; we were only about to step beyond all human experience, I mean, what was there to worry about? Then everyone else cleared the bay and we rolled off on rails to the big airlock, waited until it was evacuated, and then pottered off into space. I will confess, whatever I trained to be an astronaut for, it was not piloting that crappy little shuttle. It was about as exciting to handle as the little pretend rocket on a merry-go-round.
We swung close to the Red Rocket, which had not exactly been on the schedule but I’d lost a bet with Magda Proshkin. Close, here, still meant fifty klicks, but our HUDs magnified the image until we felt we’d had a good look. Some had speculated it was only the last in a series, and that its creators had visited Earth in prehistory, the ancient astronauts of the conspiracists. The people who said that sort of thing never saw the vessel in the flesh. It was so charmingly retro, a bit clumsy, more the work of Marvin the Martian than a chariot of von Däniken’s space gods.
Then Naish was chewing me out for wasting fuel, and I took us to the little eye of the Frog God marked out with beacons. There was nowhere to park – isn’t it always the way? – but Captain Joe took a line over and secured us to a ring that the remotes had screwed with considerable effort into the stone. Everyone piled off and I ghosted the shuttle in until it was actually resting on the rim of the Frog God’s eye. It should sit there forever, just as the Red Rocket had hung out there forever, because Newtonian physics was wiser than we were and wouldn’t touch the Artefact with a barge pole for fear of not getting an equal and opposite reaction.
This eye was about four metres across. Our suit lamps revealed a square stone passageway leading off, twisted into a spiral like a goat’s crumpled horn. By now I had the trolley off the shuttle and was ready to go in like an airline flight attendant in a spacesuit.
We went in. That was when things went a little wrong; just a little. Basically, we went in from three sides, but we all ended up crashing together on the same down, as
though no matter where on the eye’s ring you entered, it was the same place. Karen ended up sitting on the trolley, Ajay stepped on the remote, and Louis took Joe’s elbow in the back of the helmet and went forward, somehow ripping open his suit.
The suit had all sorts of failsafes, but most of them were designed to ward against vacuum, and we were very much surrounded by atmosphere right then, and weak-kneed under most of a G of gravity. There was a horrible moment when Louis was just crying out, sure he was about to die, and everyone else panicked.
The tear was over his thigh, and we got the rest of his suit isolated. He was bleeding a bit, and if there was anything nasty in the atmosphere it would have got into his system. We had a grim, rapid-fire discussion with the Mission Team over whether to abort. Louis himself put a stop to that, summoning all his American frontiersman spirit and saying he felt fine. In any other situation, he would have been back on the bus faster than you could snap your fingers, but nobody can snap their fingers in a spacesuit, and nobody wanted to delay any more, and he said he felt fine, didn’t he?
This isn’t going to be the thing that screws us over, by the way. I’m just spinning the wheels of false suspense. Louis Chung was fine right up until he died.
We laboured off into the dark, the beams of our lamps seeming more and more inadequate as the shadows gathered about us.
CHAPTER NINE
I’VE SLEPT AGAIN, and when I wake some of the bruises are still there. That metal thing hit like a bloody train. I’d like to say I gave as good as I got, but that seems unlikely. Nevertheless, I won. It took to its iron heels and left me in possession of the field, not that I really want it. And I still have the food bar. I eat the rest of it, enjoying nutrition that my microbiome doesn’t have to dismantle with the care of a bomb disposal technician. The wrapper I keep, though. The wrapper, with its sad little handwritten amendment, is home. It’s from a place and time when people knew what a Denmark was and cared about it. The iron hunchback can’t know, nor would the Egg Men or the Pyramid People, or any of the rest of them, for all they’re still our fellow travellers. I feel like, in coming out here, we’re bleeding our culture, the humanness of us, out into the void. How can what we are survive contact with the Crypts?
I say this with considerable authority. What I am – was – has not survived contact with the Crypts either.
So I wake, and it should be a slow, blissful thing, but in reality that damn scritchy-scratchy has been ramping up and ramping up, and now it’s like cicadas in my brain, like circular saws against the inside of my skull. So while my body wanted to stay unconscious and regenerating, instead I leap up and stare around, convinced that they are right around the next corner, beaming their tormenting nonsense into the very chambers of my brain. I’d eat humble pie with every conspiracy theorist in the world if they’d only lend me one of their tinfoil hats right now.
I prowl about the chamber and then beyond it, sloping down the corridors of the pan-galactic tomb, sniffing out where the scritch is marginally louder. Its creators are nowhere to be found, not in an hour’s search, but I know they’re closer. Is it the Iron Hunchback doing this to me, turning up the gain on my pain because I put a foot through his fire? Or is he just another distraction, another station on the road to my cross? Except, when I end up at my destination, I am going to eat Pontius Pilate’s heart to make this cursed sound stop.
There are more words in it now, or almost-words. I hear the sibilants and plosives of conversation, but without meaning. It means I can never grow used to it, as I might to cicadas or sawblades. The part of my brain that craves human contact is having its balls constantly flicked in a hundred different ways. I feel as though the sound is homing in on the greatest possible annoyance, infinitely impossible to ignore. Much more of this and I’ll never sleep again, never have a moment’s calm, not even be able to hear my own thoughts. I’ll end up dashing my vaunted human ingenuity out against the walls, and doubtless that’s when they will creep out from the shadows and feed, licking my cerebral fluid from the cold stone.
I ache all over. For my first few hours of hunting I chalk it all down to the Iron Hunchback and our bout of fisticuffs, but I truly do not remember him doing a number on those parts of me that are aching now. I realise that the fight, and perhaps the battle with the intestine-monster before, has led to my body going through another series of changes. It’s Lamarckian evolution in action: push me and my body pushes back, my muscles rearranging themselves, my bones warping to squeeze out another few percentage points of efficiency. It should be agony, except the constant chatter in my head eclipses it all. Mere physical pain is a welcome distraction.
I’m making good headway, as far as I can tell; at least the voices in my head are getting louder, so that every time I turn a corner I think I’m about to confront the Iron Hunchback or whatever goddamn psychic parasite is boring into my mind. What I don’t reckon on is finding a patch where the Crypts have broken down.
Now I don’t know for sure that’s what’s happened, but this isn’t the first time I’ve run into this kind of malarkey and my gut feeling is that it is absolutely not business as usual. The Crypts are unfathomably ancient (and/or contiguous with every moment in the universe’s existence) and they have no visible moving parts, and so we were thinking of them as a perfect constant, a structure superseding time and space. I guess nothing’s perfect, though. The last time it was a leak, a region where the atmosphere was vanishing away in some direction I couldn’t even understand. How that might end, left long enough, I didn’t want to wait around and find out. Probably the leak would seal itself somehow and the equilibrium of the Crypts would be restored, or else surely even miniscule irregularities would have destroyed the place by now. We are things of a human scale, though. Maybe the Crypts are indeed crashing down around us, just so slowly as to be imperceptible.
That was nothing, however, to this piece of japery.
What happens is that the gravity breaks. I’m loping along a corridor, feeling my way through the dark, fingers trailing along the walls, and then abruptly down isn’t beneath my feet but in front of me, somewhere along that long, long passageway. I haven’t gone over a cliff so much as the world’s become one, and instantly I’m hurtling my way towards terminal velocity, the air ripping past me.
I’ve got no idea how long the drop will be before a fatal impact with what had been the far wall. I’ve a brief sense of open space as I zip through a larger chamber, and then into a thankfully matching passageway across the far side. I’m curled into a ball by this time, braced for an impact that even my strengthened body can’t survive. This goes on for several seconds, time for reflection. I hurl my arms out, my legs, brushing the walls/floor/ceiling, trying to slow myself. I’m already going too fast and all that happens is I lose some skin from my fingertips. Probably I’m screaming.
Then I hit, but instead of a hard surface it’s a… nothing. I plunge past the nothing like I’m entering deep water, then slow to a stop, reverse and bob back past, like a cork leaping to the surface. Then I oscillate up and down a few times, finding my level. There’s a gravity shift here, from which both directions are up. I’m caught between them, and I might as well be at the bottom of a pit.
But I’m not squished, and that scritchy fussing in my head is even louder. I just lie there, suspended between two ups, and collect my scattered thoughts.
There’s nothing in this boundary between gravities that I can get purchase on – it’s just a discontinuity in one of the universe’s fundamental forces, you know, nothing special. I’ve had this before, indeed I have profoundly unfond memories of it, but that doesn’t help me now I’m caught between.
So I stretch out, arms and legs at their fullest extent, and I can get my hands against one wall, my feet on the opposite side, so that I’m no longer just hanging in the gravity doldrums but supporting my weight, my entire body strung out in the void.
Can I do this? I ask, because it seems impossible, but it’s this or han
g forever midway down this passageway until my half-mummified flesh serves only as a lure to hungry monsters.
I move one foot.
I move one hand.
So far so good.
I move the other foot.
I move the other hand.
My body twangs with the strain, but it’s a strong body, and I swear I can feel it getting stronger, in that specific way that will let me get away with this nonsense. But after all, I was walking across the galaxy just a moment ago. Now I’m walking up a wall, held in place only by the constant and gruelling extension of my poor abused limbs.
I move my right foot again.
I move my left hand. My right trembles and I feel my knees shake.
Left foot.
Right hand. I’m not two steps up from the gravity plane. An indefinite number still to go.
Right foot.
Left hand.
Etcetera.
I swear, by about the hundredth step, it’s getting easier. My muscles have reconfigured to assist this ludicrous mode of movement, making me wonder just what other indignities I could possibly get used to.
Right foot.
Etcetera.
And then I realise the scritchy-scratch is getting further away and I free a hand to fumble around. One of the walls is absent, a passageway leading to my nemesis. I’ve got there at last.
The relief is almost fatal. There’s a moment when my unnaturally taut body twitches and I slip, vividly recalling that long drop back to the gravity plane. I flail madly and my skinless fingertips catch the edge of the passage, leaving me hanging by one aching arm, shrieking as even my augmented muscles tear.
Walking to Aldebaran Page 7