Walking to Aldebaran

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Not bad, actually. Goes down very smoothly.

  A few Egg-rests later and we reach a corridor that ends in a wall of water. The Egg Men and I are parting company. It’s not that I can’t follow: the only reason humans can’t breathe water is there’s bugger-all oxygen in it compared to the air, and we got lazy as we evolved away from fish; and maybe this water is super-oxygenated, or maybe it has no oxygen at all. There are things living in the water, and I guess there’s probably an exit somewhere, perhaps even an on-planet one whose natives didn’t even need to get out of orbit to reach the Crypts. But this isn’t a place I’ll find humans. This isn’t a place that will lead home for me. You and me, Toto, we need to find Kansas, or at least the solar system that, inter alia, Kansas resides in.

  The Egg Men pause when they realise I’m not following. I wave, and they flash some lights at me, and we go our separate ways.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KAVENEY’S LITTLE SISTER was Mara, now reprogrammed from its original planet-crashing role to something a little less cataclysmic. By this time, the live expedition was already well into planning, and several private space-ex teams were working on converting existing tech to take human lives further than we’d ever gone before, and building all the new bits we hadn’t known we’d needed. NASA, Roscosmos and the ESA were jostling elbows as each tried to publicly look as cooperative and nation-speaks-peace-unto-nation as possible, while behind the scenes an almighty shit-show of demarcation was going on as to who got to make what decisions and who got the credit if things went well. A side effect of this departmental flag- and dick-waving meant that the “live team,” as we were known, got picked out early, meaning we all got to sit through very long lectures about Kaveney’s original purpose, among other things. We didn’t know we’d actually be going up, of course. Half of us – the older hands mostly – were constantly expecting the whole thing to be cancelled the moment public interest waned. The rest of us were still very aware that the live team was three times the size it needed to be, so most of us would get all the fun of the training without the tedious chore of actually making history out in space.

  But I made the grade, obviously. See all those lucky mes from before.

  And we were all watching when Mara kicked off from Kaveney to go take a look-see. We got daily updates. We got to see a lot of the raw data, the images before they were prettied up for the consumption of the wider public. And we shared in the horror and panic of the Madrid team when it looked as though Mara’s reprogramming had completely screwed things, because the images were nonsense.

  Actual hands-on control of Mara was impossible, of course, what with the enormous radio delay, so Mara’s onboard computer was left to get on with things. It should certainly have been capable of the first task, which was an orbit of the artefact so we could get a look at the backside of the Frog God. Except the spectroscopy and other metrics were just plain bonkers, devoid of any consistent narrative at all, and the camera images just showed that goggling face, which increasingly seemed to be laughing at us, and…

  The problem was that all the feedback suggested Mara had indeed completed a circuit. So perhaps it was a camera error; perhaps we were just getting the same picture over and over. Except examination of the images showed movement of other objects, including Kaveney, with the artefact itself as the sole unchanging point.

  Enrico Lossa, image analyst extraordinaire, decided he would shoot his career in the foot by announcing that what we were seeing was in fact an anomalous property of the object itself. Doctor Naish did her best to keep that one off the news websites, and to be honest it was an order of magnitude weirder than even the conspiracy theorists could deal with. Most conspiracies, after all, seem weird on the surface but are really an attempt to drag things down to a human scale: a flat Earth instead of the immensity of the cosmos, shadowy illuminati instead of a chaotic mess of chance, incompetence and greed.

  The artefact was… well, I was about to say the artefact was not a thing on the human scale, but that’s not true, is it? I’m wandering around inside it right now (spoiler alert) and some of it’s small and some of it’s large, but overall I reckon humans are well within tolerance for what it’s designed to accommodate. But at the same time it does things with the fundamental laws of the universe like you wouldn’t believe.

  Then Mara, in the firm belief it had carried out the first part of its mission, spent some more of its precious fuel mass to get closer to one of the vacant froggy eyes, and that was where things got weird for a whole different reason. As noted, the main body of the artefact was that huge bowl, which contained only a darkness that would yield to no instruments Kaveney or Mara had at their disposal, a void that seemed shallow at first glance, but might well have gone on into utter nothingness forever. Either side were the ‘eyes,’ but as Mara closed in, the images showed something quite different from just a huge floating frog face in space. Below the ‘left’ eye was another eye, and another and another, smaller and smaller, spiralling down to where Mara’s image resolution failed. A similar, symmetrical sequence of openings mirrored them on the far side. The artefact, it seemed, was fractal in nature.

  Over the next weeks, Mara came closer and closer to the foam of diminishing eyes. We saw details resolve, day after day. The stone surface of the artefact had been decorated erratically; in places it was pure, smooth, faintly reflective, as though it had been polished once; elsewhere there were lines and whorls, a graffiti of mathematics cut around the rims of certain eyes; and elsewhere still was my first glimpse of those piecemeal arabesques I would become so familiar with. They seemed like Celtic knots, like the unfurled foliage issuing from the faces of green men. They also silenced a small but vocal cabal of astronomers who had been holding out that the artefact was somehow an entirely natural phenomenon.

  Mara was supposed to swing around the artefact then, taking further photos of its surface as it orbited, and coming back around to rendezvous with Kaveney. That didn’t happen. There really was something screwing with Mara’s computers by that point, though it wasn’t bad programming from the Madrid team. Instead of making another circle, Mara went in.

  The last few images showed one of the eyeholes looming larger and larger, and then Mara turned, some remnant of its intended programming kicking in. We got a scan of the star field away from the artefact, including the dot of Kaveney and a glitter of stars and comet fragments. Then there was one last image – Mara turning back, the view half-eclipsed by the interior of the eye socket, the probe’s lights touching on the carvings, which ran inwards, ever inwards – then nothing. Mara was lost, and Kaveney had nothing more to tell us.

  Enrico Lossa had, by that point, been at daggers drawn with Naish, so we were all holding our breath when word came that the two of them had been closeted together for three hours and that Naish had cancelled her appointments. We thought Lossa was going to get the boot, frankly. Instead, the two of them called a video conference with the entire live team and our support and training staff. They wanted us to be the first to see.

  What we were looking at, in that briefing, was blown-up sections of two of Mara’s last images. One looked down the eye socket Mara had vanished into, the other was part of that last starfield shot.

  Last to first, Lossa had identified something against the stars, another artefact, vastly smaller (if you’ll permit the oxymoron) than our main object, but something hanging there outside the eye socket. Kaveney was able to take better pictures of it later, causing a whole new sensation when they were released, but Enrico’s coaxing of the original image showed us something that looked like a long, narrow cylinder with a pointed end and an end that was lumpy with structures, and that, in my book, is a good model for a spaceship.

  The other image, of the interior of the eye socket, was never released at the time, and Kaveney couldn’t help us with it. There was a light, though. Down in the socket, seemingly very far away, there was a light. Enrico said there was a figure as well, a humanoid figure standing
there by the lamp. Naish wouldn’t back him on that, though, and nobody else could sift it out of the static.

  After that, Old Frogface kept its secrets. Kaveney was already receding from it, and orders to fire thrusters and change course would still result in a long gap before we got any new information. All we knew was that it was out there, this inexplicable, exciting, alien thing. And of course, left to its own devices, humanity began bickering. Even as our multinational team was training, aided by decades of spaceflight experience and the latest translation software, the high-ups were throwing all our expensive toys out of the pram. Russian couldn’t get on with Europe; America couldn’t get on with China; India and Pakistan couldn’t get on with each other. We were just getting to know each other when half the team, sorted by nationality, were pulled from the program. Russia announced it was going to send its own mission, and then the US said the same, and soon enough it was just the sad old European contingent spinning about in the high-G simulators like the last kids on the roundabout.

  The breaking of that fragile sense of hope and progress: I can still remember it. Because everyone knew where we’d go, after that. To the politicos and the national security guys, the only purpose of an unimaginable alien artefact is to give some insuperable technological advantage to our side or, at the very least, to stop their side getting it. I swear I met with people who wanted to just send every missile we had past Pluto “to stop them getting their hands on it.” And the more people thought like that, the more we were prodding their side into thinking like that too. It was only a matter of time before someone suggested bombing the crap out of the other guys before they launched.

  Which was all fun and games for those intended to be on the launch pad.

  All the while, the actual preparations for launch crawled on, and Europe were ahead of the game by a narrow margin – it had been a large margin, but everyone else had more money than we did. We were going through the motions of our training, but everyone genuinely expected something vital to get sabotaged, or tanks to mass on the borders, or some bloody stupid demonstration of global ignorance to shoot us down, figuratively or literally.

  That was when Mara came back.

  The mini-probe just popped out of the artefact as though sneezed out of the Frog God’s nostril. It was still transmitting, but erratically. Its onboard computers were scrambled, unresponsive to any instructions. It fell away from the artefact, fast enough to escape the anomalous gravity, vomiting out a weird montage of images one after another as though it had been bursting with news it just couldn’t wait to tell us.

  Lossa and Naish and the rest went over those images with a fine-tooth comb. So did the live team. So did everyone else’s scientists and live teams. There were a lot of corridors in various sizes, some cavernous, some claustrophobic (as best as anyone could judge the scale); there were lamps in the darkness; there was what looked like a statue, far larger than Mara, of something many-limbed and serpentine and seemingly headless, worked in pale stone and towering against a wall busy with spiralling sigils. There was another door, opening elsewhere.

  The Mara had only a single image of it to show us, but that was the one that went a hundred times around the world, as soon as it was released. You could see the black stone edge of the circular opening, and beyond it a starfield – when we launched, people were still trying to identify what stars, where in the galaxy that might have been – and, clipping into the image, the unmistakable radiance of a planet gleaming in another sun’s light. We saw clouds and seas and the unfamiliar outlines of continents, and there was a great deal of scaffolding and structure large enough to be silhouetted against it, hanging in orbit. Mara’s positioning suggested a vantage point closer to that planet than our Moon was to Earth. The natives, whoever and whatever they were, hadn’t had to go as far as we did.

  Nobody quite dared draw the obvious conclusion for a surprisingly long time. I think most of the science teams were thinking it. Doctor Liu of the Chinese National Space Administration finally bit the bullet and proposed, in a press conference notable for its restrained understatement, that the artefact was one end of a wormhole. Never mind the dark corridors, the statue, all the rest. Somewhere in there was a gate to another world.

  We all expected this to just double everyone’s crazy paranoia, but it turns out there’s a limit. There were a few high-profile firings in the upper echelons of a few governments, and we all reckoned the space-ex-hungry industrialists pulled all the strings they’d spent their money on, and suddenly everyone was talking to one another. This was bigger than individual nations, was the message. This was as big as the entire Earth.

  We launched – the select multinational team – not long after.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AFTER PARTING COMPANY with the Egg Men, I hear the sound for the first time.

  I wake to it, sleep having finally come for me, for all that I seem to need little rest now. It’s not that I don’t value sleep when it comes: I fall into its arms like a lover, despite the monsters that roam here, despite the travellers who might wish me ill. In dreams, I’m back on Earth again. I’m consorting with other human beings. I lift a pint in the pub, I watch the footie, I turn up stark naked and unprepared for vital astronaut exams. My dreams are so quotidian it makes me weep to wake from them into the darkness of the Crypts, hundreds of astronomical units from home, and simultaneously much further still.

  So, waking is never welcome, but this waking is worse because there is a sound, so insidious that it is almost a tactile sensation. It is a whispering and a chittering, a fluttering and a scratching, and I feel it as if it is scrabbling at the inside of my skull.

  Which is possible. I sit up quickly, clapping a hand to my left eye, the anomalous sound seeming to come from that side of my head. It feels as though someone is scraping their nails down the chalkboard of my brain – faint, distant, but impossible to ignore.

  I start looking about, but it’s dark here, like every part of the Crypts that some wayfarer civilization hasn’t tried to make more festive. I try to pin down where the sound is coming from. My left. I turn one-eighty degrees. Now it comes from my right. Misdiagnosing, I roar and flail madly at the ceiling, trying to reach whatever noisemaking goblin is squatting there. I bruise my hands against the stone, which here is a bare few centimetres above my head. I reach about, scrabbling against the seamless floor. Nothing. By now the sound is louder, scrape, scrape, scrape against the nerves of my teeth so that I clamp my hands against my ears to blot it out. And that doesn’t work because the sound isn’t coming from nearby, isn’t coming from outside at all. Covering my ears just means I’m locked in my skull with that scrape, scrape, scrape, that whisper, whisper, whisper, as though a host of tiny people with shrill little voices are conspiring on my shoulder.

  I start blundering about in the dark. Normally, I know which way I’ve been travelling through some sense I have no name for, but now, all sense of where I am has been driven out by that infernal scratching. I stagger one way, bouncing from the walls. The sound is louder, as though I have gone infinitesimally towards the source, despite it originating within my head. I flee the other way, finally tripping over my own feet in a blindly-sensed crossroads. It is marginally further away, but I have the dreadful feeling I may never be able to escape it, no matter what halls or what stars I run to.

  And then it fades, scrape, scrape, scrape, not gone but fallen below some threshold of audibility, leaving me with a sense like tinfoil on a filling that it’s still there, still scratching away. I wonder if it’s a parasite gnawing on me. That seems the sort of thing that would come to live in the Crypts with the rest of the low-energy waiting-game monsters. But if I was genuinely carrying around a little living cargo, it wouldn’t have grown closer or further, surely. So instead, perhaps, it’s an attack. Perhaps some dark-lurker is trying to attract me or drive me away. Perhaps it’s the mating display of some telepathic horror and I’m just an inadvertent recipient.

  But something in
me feels intent and malice behind that scrape and whisper. There was an irregular rhythm to it that felt like language to me. That was why it woke me. All sounds are not received equal, in the auditory centres of the brain. We can sleep through thunderstorms that sound like the end of the world, and yet the distant throb of music might wake us, or the laughter from next door’s discreet garden party. Human sounds, living sounds, sounds of intelligent purpose, these things stand out as signal against all the noise of the cosmos. This scraping and skittering had just enough of that hallmark to break me from sleep. Something out there was trying to insinuate its alien words into my brain, and I don’t think I want to hear what it has to say.

  I’m awake now, though, despite the unconventional alarm clock. Time to get going. My gut is half-full of worm meat, which is proving a challenge to digest, meaning I’ll be sluggish and bloated for a while yet. The worm must have been as omnivorous as my new microbiome, so you’d think that it and my digestive system would see eye to eye, but apparently not. I’ll just have to keep plugging away at it until I feel the need to crap out whatever parts of it I simply can’t stomach. It won’t be much. I’ve not passed anything bigger than a rabbit dropping for what feels like a month.

  That’s probably more information than you want to know. Sorry, Toto.

  I pick a direction from the crossroads, anything other than the way I came. Perhaps the telepathic attacker has given up and gone to find some richer meal than my poor psyche. I don’t believe it, though. Somewhere, deep inside, that scrape, scrape, scrape is still happening. Today I will be twitchy as hell and constantly on a short fuse. I pity the monster that tries it on, frankly. I am in the mood to punch a worm right in the mandibles.