Walking to Aldebaran

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The conspiracy theorists had a field day, of course, but right then, there really was no piece of batshit paranoid craziness they could think up that was weirder than what was actually out there.

  It wasn’t actually a face. That was just everyone’s pareidolia kicking in. We had not, as a matter of fact, found the sacred effigy of the Galactic Frog God. But it did look sort of froggy, so I can understand the confusion.

  Mostly it was that colossal orifice that made up the front and centre of what we were seeing, a circular hole the size of the Moon facing directly, somewhat too conveniently, towards Kaveney, rimmed with what looked like black basalt, except of course the freezing reaches of the outer solar system are not known for their igneous volcanism. On either side, left and right, were what might be parsed as eyes, smaller holes set in their own dark, smooth sockets, but each one still most of the size of southern France. Around these there was some sort of fuzz of additional structure visible, and Kaveney’s amateur photography showed a maddening suggestion of detail – carvings, or vast figures or the like – but the resolution was just not good enough. The artefact was huge – bigger than the Moon, smaller than the Earth but punching way above its apparent size in terms of gravitational disturbance – but it was still a long way from Kaveney.

  There was a lot of discussion right then, not just the Madrid team but a whole raft of the world’s keenest minds. The consensus was to repurpose the baby probe Kaveney was carrying, which had been intended to split off and dive into Planet Nine, collecting valuable data all the way down to its fatal crash landing. They downloaded a fairly significant patch to the thing’s software and sent it hurtling off towards the object.

  I should say, the manned mission was already being planned. We knew we’d have to go there. We were looking at something made, and made on a planetary scale. It was the most significant discovery in the history of history and every astronaut and scientist on the planet wanted to be on the ship when it took off. I thought I was so lucky, when I made the grade. So lucky.

  So.

  So.

  Lucky.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT’S NOT EARTHLIGHT, the light I’ve found, but it’s made-light. There are things like flowers, radially symmetrical petalled extrusions budding from the walls, but they’re made of what looks like glass and copper.

  Does that mean they can’t be living things as well? No, it does not. I have walked in the company of a creature that looked as though it didn’t have an atom of carbon in its entire structure, and yet didn’t look like a machine. Didn’t register my presence either, just plodded on through the Crypts with all the verve and enthusiasm of a condemned man on the way to the gallows. I was too ephemeral for it, made of airy stuff like hydrocarbons and water. Or else it didn’t like me and was hoping I’d go away. I didn’t go away but I did need to sleep, and by the time I woke up it was long gone. But I digress.

  The flower lights are too regular: each identical to its neighbour, and strung in a pattern – not a straight line like I’d have done it, but a sine wave that either serves some opaque engineering function or else was aesthetically pleasant to the makers. At the near end of the waveform there is a new flower growing, a tiny replica of its full-size siblings, suggesting that whoever set up these lamps intended them to grow throughout the Crypts eventually, which is a nice thought and shows both more altruism and longer-termism than humans would traditionally be guilty of. It also means that whoever I might meet in this lighted section is likely not the light-makers. We all live in the corpses of each others’ expeditions here. The Crypts are very, very old, and most of the aeromes provide an environment where decay happens slowly, if at all. Clive might have lain slowly desiccating for centuries before I snacked on him.

  I proceed into the lit area, keeping my ears pricked for sounds of locals. Or not locals, not really. There are locals, the aforementioned fauna that has adapted to this most challenging of all environments save space itself, but what I’m more likely to find here are fellow travellers. Some species with a visual sense, perhaps, that values the free sensory lunch the little flowers bring. These passageways are likely to be a favoured thoroughfare for things perhaps not wholly unlike me. Being able to see, after all, must bring some sort of common worldview, at least as close as me and a cat, say. Me and a shark? A horsefly? Ah, but there’s more to it than that. Exceptions abound, but most wanderers in the Crypts are species that have developed a certain level of technology, which implies an understanding of the mechanics of the universe, which are more or less universal after all, or why do we call it ‘the universe’? Except, of course, that the rule is most severely proved by the exception of the Crypts themselves – proved in the sense of ‘tested until it breaks’ – because the Crypt-builders made physics their bitch.

  But there are lights here, and so I press on in the hope that I might meet something I can look in the eye and call brother.

  You might wonder why I’m not more careful about these first contact situations, Toto. Have I never watched Alien, you ask? What about the Prime Directive? Well, Toto, I’m an old hand at these close encounters by now. And it’s true, some of those encounters went straight to the fourth kind, and I still have the scars of alien weapons on my poor abused hide, but the loneliness is worse, Toto. The loneliness is what killed Clive, I think, and has done for so many others. And I’m an open-minded guy. I can take third eyes and extra elbows; just make them a little like me, enough that I can feel like I’m getting somewhere close. Because somewhere in the Crypts, somewhere in all these twists and turns, there are other humans, and humans like light and one atmosphere of pressure and Earth standard gravity and an oxygen-rich atmosphere, albeit maybe not one so viciously toxic as the one I’m currently coughing my way through. Just a polite little cough, you understand, because toxicity isn’t the problem it used to be for me. Just the sort of cough you’d use to indicate to your racist uncle that he should stop telling that anecdote at Sunday dinner. But a cough nonetheless.

  Then I hear the patter of feet from up ahead. I go through the equivalent of smoothing my hair and shooting my cuffs, standing out in the open in a nice non-threatening pose, although doubtless there are species around here for which standing upright on two legs triggers some uncontrollable fight-or-flight response. Just let them be like me, I think. I’ll even let them shoot me a bit, just as long as they’ve got fingers to pull the trigger.

  My ears are already giving the lie to all these fond fancies when they appear ahead of me at the far end of this corridor. There’s a T-junction there, lit both ways, and I hear way too many feet that tap far too lightly on the stone floor. I brace myself for the invasion of the centipede monsters, but instead I get something indeterminate. I don’t know if I’m looking at the living or at their mechanical servants.

  There are about a dozen of them, all identical by any examination I can make of them, all some way short of my waist as far as height is concerned. They are eggs; metal and synthetic eggs tip-tappering along on four jointed legs that stick straight out from some sort of hub on their underside before arching down like fingers. Tucked underneath and slightly towards the front, there is a symmetrical array of folded arms, big ones on the outside and progressively smaller towards the centre-line, like someone unpacked a cybernetic Matryoshka. My eyes are good, but I get the sense the arms go smaller than I can see. Perhaps there are atomic-scale ones in the centre, able to fabricate artisanal molecules like the ultimate hipsters.

  They see me. I don’t know what part of them has eyes, but they stop and tilt a bit to get a good look. They don’t all stop in unison either, each one coming to its own individual halt, which makes them more relatable. I look right back, trying to work out if they’re machines, or little vehicles with miniature Crypt-onauts inside. Maybe the innards reflect the outwards and they’re eggs in eggs. Maybe if I opened them up, I’d just find more layers of shell, eggs all the way down. But I’m not going to open them up. Plenty of bad news in this pla
ce without going stirring up more of it.

  I am disappointed, though. They’re not exactly the humanoid aliens all the SF shows taught you to expect, and frankly the philanthropic principle can go take a flying leap. I’ve seen a fair cross-section of species that have made it as far as the Crypts (and often, like Clive, no further) and there’s no galactic God out there making all life in His image.

  The Egg Men tap forward cautiously, no doubt scanning me with ranked arrays of instruments built into their shells. They are not natives to this aerome; they’ve thought Crypt-delving through, or at least their makers have. They take their own environment with them, not just in a flimsy suit but in comfy vehicles that do their walking for them. I wonder about opening them up again, though just idly. Maybe they’re aquatic, goldfish bowls on legs out to explore the universe. Maybe they’re colonies of hive-creatures. Maybe inside each egg is a crunched up human-like alien after all, like some spacefaring embryo or medieval homunculus. I’m not going to open them up. It might cause offence. I’ll just have to live with my curiosity.

  No, seriously, Toto, I’m not.

  After our mutual eyeballing, one of them comes forward and flashes some lights at me, and I wave back and say “Hi” and give them my name. I don’t understand them. They don’t understand me. At the same time, we both understand each other. The Egg Men and me, we’ve been around the block a few times. We know the deal with the Crypts. They recognise me as a fellow traveller, and I return the courtesy. When they set off – down the branch of the T that neither they nor I came from – I follow them, my big lazy strides keeping up with the frenetic little tinkling of their tiny feets. Probably they are gossiping about their new travelling companion through some medium I can’t pick up, even though I strain all my senses.

  They work to some rest cycle far quicker than mine. Every few hours, at my best guess, they’re stopping, organising themselves into a perfect circle, half facing in, half facing out. I assume this is some carefully-worked-out process to allow some of them to rest while the others stand watch. Alternatively, maybe it passes for Egg Men Fun Time, and I’m seriously missing out on the thrilling possibilities of standing around in a circle. Maybe they’re all curled up in their shells reciting epic poetry to each other or watching Egg-porn. I try to catch a nap while they’re still, but they never stay still for long and I don’t want to get left behind.

  Then we go out of the lit area, outpacing the growth of the star-flowers, and I realise they didn’t have to be visual creatures at all. They might not even have known they were passing through a lit area. Most things I’ve met have eyes of some sort – after all, eyes evolved independently maybe twenty times just on Earth alone, so they’re obviously a Good Thing. If there’s light, there’s likely eyes, unless your basic bodyform just doesn’t have anything it can convert into photoreceptors. But some places, there’s no light. There are dark worlds out there. There are thriving civilizations that have evolved in the depths of crushing, lightless seas.

  But then the Egg Men put on their torches, each one throwing clear white light in all directions, and it’s obvious they like light even more than I do. I end up striding along in the middle of them, something they plainly prefer because it means I’m not casting a great shadow into their field of view. They are constantly almost underfoot, but they’re nimble and their reactions seem faster than mine, even now, and they seem to like huddling close. Rather late, I realise that my sheer size – to them I’m a giant – is valuable to them. I’m a huge bipedal monster, but I’m their bipedal monster. We have achieved a weird sort of symbiosis. They bring the light and I, Gary Rendell of Earth, bring the muscle. Two-fisted space action!

  From a dark corridor, we come to a dark chamber, a huge empty box of poison air within the stone into which a dozen different passageways feed. The lamps of the Egg Men venture forth into the dust-glittering air and fail to make much of the far side.

  The walls are carved, as they often are in these chambers. The carvings aren’t all the same, in different rooms, but I’ve seen this style before, most certainly I have. It’s the style I think of as the Makers. I’ve no evidence these carvings were actually incised by the unimaginable hands that created the Crypts, but... my gut says so. Not a scientific appraisal, nothing that Doctor Naish would approve of, but it’s become almost an article of faith. The carvings are sinuous, floriate, branching but not uniform. Everywhere you look it’s plain you’re seeing some part of a larger whole, except you can never appreciate the whole – it’s never quite there, as though even the entire room is just a fragment of some huge image, and if we could just see it in its entirety, Toto, we’d understand it all.

  The Egg Men begin crossing the chamber, and this is where the Crypts start messing with us, because the gravity in there is about half what it was in the passageway, and the aerome changes too – more oxygen and a crapton of methane, the sort of volatile mix that puts you off smoking. I have to take a few deep breaths before I got the fart smell out of my nose, and by that time the Egg Men are halfway down the wall, taking deliberate single steps and clinging on like flies somehow. I just jump down, and that turns out to be a mistake, because there’s an environmental boundary about halfway so that one moment I’m floating down like Alice down the rabbit hole, and the next I’m yanked sideways at what feels like 0.75G to crash into the far wall, which is now a floor. The Egg Men stop their careful descent, probably grateful that the Big Dumb Alien has just given them advance warning of some physics assholery ahead. I pick myself up and check that nothing’s broken.

  The Egg Men are going to rappel it, apparently. They dig little hooks into the wall and then leap out into space until the gravity shift catches them, then just descend down their lines like silver spiders. They get most of the way down when the local resident wakes up to their presence and decides to have a go.

  I see it unfold itself from the far wall. Most of the Crypt fauna are low-energy ambush predators, capable of lying dormant a long time between meals. This one had been camouflaged amongst the carvings, long worm body clutched to the wall, terminating in a horrifying assemblage of hooked arms about a saw-edged mouth. I see no sensory organs at all, but it plainly knows exactly where everything is and fancies eggs for dinner.

  I holler like a madman, but the Eggs don’t react, and possibly they don’t actually hear things at all. So I end up legging it along the floor, wincing already because somewhere there’s a gravity break that is going to faceplant me into the far wall. My running around gets the Egg Men on high alert and some of them obviously see the worm thing as it uncoils towards them. The ones closest to the ground cut their lines and drop, trusting to their cradle of metal legs to cushion the wall. Others just speed up, spinning and jolting on their lines.

  The worm thing strikes, long before I can get anywhere useful. One of the Eggs disappears into that clutch of arms, and I think for a moment the metal shell will defeat the beast. The crack of the casing sounds like a gunshot, though, and a moment later the worm is shedding jagged sections of Egg-shell as its smaller arms clear out whatever was inside. They are organic, those Egg Men. I never do get a good view of them or see what shape they were, but the worm obviously relishes the taste, because it’s back for more almost immediately.

  But I have got close by then, and some new sense tells me I’m about to cross over. I turn it into a jump, aiming to strike the thing’s bloated body just behind the head. My personal maths is way off, though, and I ended up landing hard next to its tail. The worm reaches for another Egg Man, which is spinning madly on the end of its thread. In response, the Egg goes on fire, a crackling red nimbus dancing across its shell to ward the monster off. The worm doesn’t care, crunching the luckless Egg Man up as though the energy discharge is nothing more than a piquant little mustard on top.

  I am not a brutal man. Fit, yes – you don’t get to be an astronaut without being in shape, and since the Crypts got hold of me I’ve become considerably more robust than any number of
gym hours could have made me. I never went in for martial arts or boxing or any of that stuff, though. I’d have said I was a pacifist, in fact.

  But now there is a monster eating my Egg-friends and I’m not having it. I shimmy up that worm’s body like a monkey, shouting every obscenity I can think of, because a man’s got to have a war cry, and because I’m scared out of my wits. Those arms could tear me into confetti in moments, and I’m only lucky that the thing apparently prefers Eggs.

  I have a knife. It wasn’t intended as a knife, but it’s a sharp shard of metal about forty centimetres long and I’ve wrapped some plasticky stuff about one end to hold it with.

  Out comes that knife when I get towards the worm’s head end. In goes the knife, slicing into that pallid sac of a body.

  I think I go a bit mad, then, Toto. I honestly think the strain of wandering alone in these Crypts is getting to me, and sometimes an outlet for your frustrations comes along, and sometimes that outlet is a gigantic worm monster, and you just go for it.

  Later, and we’re camped on the floor of the big chamber. The Egg Men are doing something complex, passing pieces of the shells of their dead friends around. It’s not hard to overlay a human interpretation of grief or remembrance onto it, and there’s no behaviourist here to tell me not to anthropomorphise, so that’s what I’ll call it. They pass bits to me and I try to handle them with the same thoughtful reverence before passing them back. I’m still covered in worm-entrails, because it’ll be a while before I find a decent shower in this place. The worm’s body is strewn weirdly across two gravity planes. I’m eating some of it.