Published 2019 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-196-1
Copyright © 2019 Adrian Tchaikovsky
Cover art by Gemma Sheldrake
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
This book is a work of fiction. Names. characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CHAPTER ONE
TODAY I FOUND something I could eat and something I could burn to keep back the darkness. That makes today a good day.
I don’t know what it was or where it came from. Like me, it had been wandering the passageways of this crypt for who knows how long – and how long has it been, anyone? No day and no night and I’ve nothing left with power to tell the time, and so my life becomes one long greyness, punctuated by increasingly erratic periods of sleep. I don’t need to sleep like I used to. Or I need to sleep in some other way, maybe some way that I can’t achieve. Every waking is building up a sleep-debt inside me that my poor human physiology can’t satisfy. Maybe when I change my mind completely I’ll be back in balance. For now: anxiety, tremors, mania, paranoia, hyperventilation. Or sometimes no ventilation. That’s probably worse, but then the air in here is so variable. Seriously, you wouldn’t want it in your lungs if you had any option.
But the thing, the thing I found that brightened my day and filled a hole: it was twice as long as me, but it had been dead a long time and that must have shrunk it a bit. The air in this part of the Crypts is very dry. Its outer layers had gone brittle and crispy and I thought there mightn’t be anything of substance to it, but when I flaked them off, there was meat underneath, dry and chewy but meat nonetheless. It had a dozen many-jointed legs, and I snapped them off and piled them up, a camp fire just like my old scoutmaster taught me, and I used one of my shonky little jury-rigged pieces of nonsense to spark it into flames. The air here is dry, but it’s short on oxygen too, I can feel it from the way I slow down: breathing, moving, thinking. Hard to get a fire lit. And it’s so cold here, cold pretty much anywhere you go in the Crypts. I managed it, though. I got everything heated up enough that a guttering little flame caught, and then I huddled over it, trapping the fire between my body and the stone walls until a meagre ration of warmth had no choice but to leach into me.
The flesh of the creature tasted like sour dust. I was eating proteins evolved light years from Earth on some planet where twelve-legged, five-metre worm people live, but these days my microbiome is omnivorous to say the least. I twisted and groaned as all the little workers in my gut got to grips with the new repast. I used to be lactose intolerant, if you can believe it. I used to hurl if I ate cheese, and fart like a trooper if I had too much white bread as well. Now my diet is a catholic one, in the sense of ‘all-embracing’ rather than ‘fish on Fridays.’
The outermost layer of the dead thing was a sheath that was made, not grown, though it was as disintegratingly friable as the skin within. I tried to ignore the fact. I tried to tell myself the creature was just one more animal denizen of the Crypts, another species seeded here, to evolve or die out. And plenty of them have evolved, believe me. The Crypts have been here for a long, long time – millions, billions of years. Things have grown to love it here. I am not one of those things, although it seems to me I have been here for a long time. In human terms, months is a long time to be somewhere as terrible as this. I think it has been months. I hope it’s not been years. But the lack of light and – well, I said about the sleeping, and I’m beginning to think that time is shonky here too. After all, some part of this godforsaken place is giving the laws of relativity a good shafting.
My name is Rendell; Gary Rendell. I’m an astronaut. When they asked me, as a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “astronaut, please!” all filled with thoughts of Aldrin and Tereshkova. And though space exploration had been the domain of machines for quite a while, we did have a new crop of astronauts now, off bleeding their lives into the red, red sands of Mars so that, in a generation’s time, a cabal of rich guys could turn up and live off what they built. But that wasn’t the astronaut I wanted to be. I wanted to go into space. I wanted to set foot on alien worlds.
And I have. I’ve done all that. I’ve met aliens, sentient aliens. I’ve seen spaceships. I’ve breathed the venomous air of a planet on the other side of the universe. I’m probably the most travelled human being in the history of human beings travelling, if indeed that category is still the appropriate one with which to conjure me. I just didn’t think there would be so much getting lost and eating corpses. They never told me that at astronaut school. They never told seven-year-old Gary Rendell how he might be huddled in front of a fire that’s dying for lack of O2, gnawing on desiccated chunks of long-dead alien explorer. If they’d brought that up, I might have said “train driver” instead.
The next day I move on, leaving my fellow explorer half-eaten behind me. I’m not sure what killed him. I call him ‘him,’ because that’s the knee-jerk if you’re a manly fellow like me. I call him Clive, in fact. Clive, of the species Clivus, from Clivesworld. Nobody else is here; I get the naming privileges. Clive wandered these passageways, lost like me. He had no breathing apparatus that I could see, although I’m only guessing at what part of him actually breathed. Possibly Clivesworld is somewhere nearby, some arid, low-oxygen world crawling with caterpillar-men who got out into space with some trick other than combustible fossil fuels and then found the Thing. The thing we found out past Neptune. The thing we all find, when we go far enough. The Crypts.
And Clive and his brood-mates or brethren or clone-kin were very excited, in their caterpillar way. They entered the Crypts just like we did, and maybe the rest of the Clives did better and found somewhere useful. Maybe they’re living the high life with firm trading agreements with the Steves and the Debbies from across the universe. But my Clive didn’t have a good time. My Clive wandered off or got separated, went space-mad, or gave himself to the Crypt gods. He found a dry, dry corner and he coiled his bulk up and died, and sometime later an Earthman named Gary Rendell came along and ate quite a large chunk of him.
But I’m getting sentimental. This isn’t anywhere useful to me. The atmosphere’s wrong and, unless Clive wandered in from a different aerome, then Clivesworld is no fit destination for my fellow humans. So I head away, trekking the dark, constantly relighting the charcoal ends of Clive’s limbs as the dead air snuffs them out, because the Crypts are cold and the Crypts are dark, although most everything else varies.
One day later – meaning: after I’ve slept again, although my personal sense of time suggests those periods are becoming more and more spaced out, but I will go quite mad if I cannot call things days and hours and minutes even if the words have no meaning outside my skull and so – one day later, I cross the invisible boundary into another aerome. The world smells faintly of something like lavender, and my lungs prick up their ears because the oxygen content is up, and also because there are several elements that humans would not normally want to be importing in bulk into the delicate, vulnerable linings of their pulmonary cavities. My lungs are omnivorous too, though. After all, what sort of a cautionary tale would Der Fliegende Holländer be if he could just drown?
I think I used to talk to you because it kept me sane, but we’ve rather moved past that stage in the relationship, don’t you think?
But I’ve got a gut full of slowly digesting alien flesh and I can feel my metabolism shaking off the dust now I’ve got richer air to burn. And my eyes twitch and squint past the suddenly resurgent flame of my Clive-leg torch, because there’s light ahead, real light. Not starlight, not sunlight, not firelight, but actual light, such as is made by sentient entities with a sophisticated technology. Most of the Crypts are dark as midnight, a horror of endless cold corridors cut in the stone where every step could see you into a trap, a drop, some peculiarity of physics, a reversal of gravity, a sudden drop in pressure or a toxic aerome.
Or the maw of a monster.
Because it’s like Dungeons and Dragons in here, and you ever know a crypt without monsters?
And we split the party, and that’s where the trouble started.
CHAPTER TWO
THE KAVENEY PROBE was sent to look for planets.
What counts as a planet – what bits of dead cold rock out there are and aren’t planets – is a topic that continually amuses astronomers and planetary geologists. Hours of fun. Is Pluto? Or is it just a dwarf planet, and therefore not eligible for club benefits? And if not Pluto, what is Planet Nine from Outer Space, and what about Planet Ten? The Newtonian dance of everything else says they’re there, or maybe, probably, but you try finding even something as large as a planet in something as large as the outer solar system.
Anyway, some jokers in ESAC, Madrid, and some other jokers in the British Space Agency, still gamely cooperating despite everything, reckoned there was something odd going on out in the Kuiper belt, on past Pluto where Planet Nine was supposed to go for its winter holidays. I remember sitting through the math later on, along with the other expedition hopefuls. Why put us through it when, by then, we had a good idea of what Kaveney had actually found, I don’t know, but the ESA obviously wanted us to ace the theory part of the test later on. I understood it at the time and then it mostly fell out of my head the moment I left the room, because it was obviously yesterday’s news. Can’t remember the details now except that years of careful measurement had determined that the solar system’s Newton’s Cradle was swinging kind of funny out that way and the prime candidate was the orbit of one of those elusive far-out planets yanking gravity’s chain.
So they proposed, and they got the funding, and they finally got a probe out, name of Kaveney, booted out of Earth’s own gravity the old-fashioned way and then slung around the sun towards the far reaches of the solar system at speeds that would shame the old Voyager. Able to catch up to the poor, long-lost thing and say ‘Hi,’ in fact, had they sent it off on the right trajectory. And Voyager would have replied with some whalesong and per aspera ad astra in braille, which wouldn’t have been terribly edifying.
Prescient, though. You’d be surprised how many alien species around here are big on touch, not sight. The Crypts hold one less terror for them, I guess, though still plenty terrors enough.
But let’s get our feet back on the ground before we get our heads in the air. The Kaveney, zipping off past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, spending another few years crossing the interplanetary gulf, cocking a snoot at Pluto, still sitting on the doorstep of the Planet Club with a tear in its eye as it holds its ‘membership revoked’ letter. And, because the people at the BSA and ESA and the lead team in Madrid were not fools and could do maths, eventually it got to where it was supposed to be and opened all its glittering eyes to the void to take a look.
I don’t need to tell you, Toto, a lot happened back on Earth during the years the Kaveney was in transit. We nearly had a big war. Actually, we nearly had two. We were daggers drawn in Europe over bloody fish, if you can believe it. Then, just as things looked as though they were cooling and people were putting the death toys back in the box with the skull on it, everything kicked off in the US with the Neo-Apartheid crowd and all those secessions that never quite happened. Scary AF both times, believe me. I was training in Poland when the European boom was going down and I remember being evacuated from Warsaw with a dozen other students, without warning, still in our dressing gowns and slippers. Because they thought that was going to be It, right then, and apparently someone’s first thought was “Save the trainee astronauts!” And a lot of people died or lost their homes, some of them because of the actual war and others because the war was a useful excuse to go kick your neighbour for being gay or Jewish or Croatian or whatever issue your ancestors have traditionally kept the knife sharp for, but It never quite came. We kept going up to the rooftop and we kept getting talked down from it.
The Stateside business was scarier, even though it was Over There. Things kicked off all over, the way I heard: citizen militias, lynching, little towns and churches and cults just declaring they didn’t recognise anyone’s government, not one side nor the other, and everyone’s got roomfuls of guns, so they were able to underline their political preferences with a lead pencil if they so chose. There’s one Reuters report, you know the one, where Julia Habez just gets shot as she talks to us, and the last thing you see is her lying dead in the dropped camera’s view as all hell cuts loose. And there was that base commander with the nukes, too, straight out of Doctor Strangelove, and we all held our breath. As though that would have helped.
And Mars One was rolling on, despite the kit that kept crapping out and that whole dome that just failed, and I remember thinking about what the Martian colonists must have thought, catching all that news fifteen minutes late and wondering if they were going to be the sole surviving representatives of mankind by the time the next bulletin came.
It’s the Martian guys I feel sorry for, really. They put in so much damn work, risked their lives – lost their lives, nine of them – and none of them with much of a chance to ever get home again. And they were building the future, everyone on the project sincerely believed it. Except it was the wrong future. What Kaveney found would render all their toil pretty much obsolete.
But right then, those valiant Martians were our best shot at the future and, when Kaveney finally got all the way out, the response amongst its chief scientists was one of abject panic, because there was nothing there. Years in the making, years in the travelling, and nothing but comet dust and a faint cosmic whiff of disappointment. Three quarters of the team were convinced that their instruments, or Kaveney itself, were faulty. The remaining quarter, who were mostly the senior scientific staff with long publication histories, decided that they had in fact made a bold new discovery: some dark matter maybe, or a new subatomic mass-related particle, the Higgs Midshipman. Anything to explain why everything was acting as though there was a planet-sized mass lurking out there, and Kaveney just couldn’t see it.
That was the problem, of course: the Kaveney was looking for a planet, and even though space is very big, planets are still donkeys we expect to pin the tail on two times out of three, especially something reckoned to have ten times the mass of Earth. Or not, because the more they looked at their initial figures, the more nothing quite added up. I’m not saying it was brown-lab-coat time over in Madrid, but I reckon a lot of eminent astronomers were getting a collective sinking feeling in their stomach when they contemplated the next funding review.
Then
Kaveney began sending back pictures all by itself.
Of course, the idea had been for the probe to take images of Planet Nine (unless it was Planet Ten) in due course, but those initial images had shown that there was no planet out there, and so they’d stopped taking pictures and started testing for errors in the code. They almost missed the new images when they came in. It was only because the Supermassive Array picked up some anomalies during a test sweep that anyone realised that Kaveney was trying to tell everyone something.
You’ve all seen the images, or at least the most spectacular ones. Right then, there was a lot of noise and relatively little data. Everyone was just baffled because nobody had told Kaveney to start taking new holiday snaps. And they kept coming, and all the signals telling the probe to knock it off were having no effect at all. “It started getting creepy,” is how Janette Naish described it to me after she left the Madrid lab to come brief us astronauts. Naish was one of the lead researchers on the Kaveney project, a Scottish boffin who called the Oort Cloud the “Oowert Clide” and wore a Doctor Who scarf for press conferences. Once the news broke, she went on to elbow out all the others for the chief spot on the manned mission, the one I signed up for.
It wasn’t her who actually made sense of the new pictures, or at least the ones that showed anything at all. In amongst all that contradictory spectroscopy, gravitic data and actual visuals was the thing that was going to change everything, hidden in the data, dark against the dark of space. One more piece of clutter in the outer solar system, amidst the comets and the dust.
Enrico Lossa was the very junior member of the Madrid team who spent weeks cleaning up the images until he found himself confronted with it. Then everyone else spent weeks trying to reinterpret what Kaveney’s instruments had detected to make it something mundane and uninteresting, because that’s how science works, and none of them wanted to turn up on TV saying “Aliens!” like a maniac and get laughed out of the discipline. So they did their level best not to see what they were seeing, and they got in other scientists to prove them wrong, and only then, when all other options had been exhausted, did they go public with it.
Walking to Aldebaran Page 1
