Walking to Aldebaran

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The chambers mess with gravity too, which I’ve learned the hard way. Perhaps that’s their function, some vital engineering component that regulates the Crypts’ insane relationship with physics. This chamber is no exception. Creeping close, I feel the sickening shift in my stomach, and a flat corridor becomes a treacherous slope opening down onto a cuboid room that seemed level a moment ago, but now funnels down towards one of its corners, where a mound of detritus, shed carapaces and broken stone has collected. That’s where the camp is.

  My eyes see the lantern first, of course. It’s a rod as tall as a man, curved at the top like a shepherd’s crook. In that open loop the light hangs, supported by nothing but reaching out cracking tendrils of energy to its frame like a Van Der Graaf generator in a bad SF movie. It’s soundless, steady save for its occasional fluorescent stuttering.

  There are some packs, too. I take them for dead insects of unusual size at first, segmented bodies and stiff curved legs. Only later do I understand them as luggage.

  There is a fire. That’s the touch that really speaks to me. All that high-tech lighting, and the traveller has lit a fire in a metal bowl. Perhaps its super-advanced heater failed, but I have a sense of something ritual, something from home. It’s got a fire because the flames are pleasing to it, because they hold back the grim nature of this place in a way artificial light cannot.

  And then, at last, my eyes turn to the camp’s master, which is watching me warily.

  It’s… almost human is the phrase that comes to me. Really that’s misleading, because all I see is metal, no indication of whether there’s a living thing inside, or a colony of things, or just mechanisms and beep beep boop. It is stooped, long-armed like an ape, and there are vestigial or subsidiary limbs folded along its thorax, armoured in jointed plates like the rest of it. Its domed helm has four windows, two pointing up, two down, none at human eye level. Between the ports is a rectangular panel crammed with a row of toothed wheels that spin constantly, chattering softly back and forth. Perhaps that’s how it eats, but it seems more conversational to me. Perhaps when it meets another of its kind, they lock teeth in mechanistic communion, no tongues.

  Its limbs are oddly joined, the arms curved inwards at rest, elbows joints the highest part of them. The two legs are bandy, terminating in four-toed pads that seemed too narrow to let it keep balance.

  It’s the most human thing I’ve seen in a long time.

  Awkwardly, I let myself down, scrabbling and scraping along the carven wall until I reach the little patch of flattened rubble. I’ve horrified visions of kicking over the traveller’s fire or knocking down its lamp-staff, but none of that happens.

  “Hi,” I say, raising a hand. I’m taller than it, though it looks barrel-bodied and powerful. One of its major arms is larger than the other, bulked out by a cylindrical mechanism, but both terminate in an assembly of fingers: four, equal in size and mutually opposable.

  The firelight dances in the lower pair of lenses as it stares at me, or around me. Its clockwork mouth purrs and mutters to itself.

  “So, hey.” I lower myself down in front of its fire, trying to keep a smile on my face, for all it must mean nothing. “How’s tricks, me old mucker? Bit nippy, isn’t it? I just walked in from Aldebaran and boy are my legs tired.” My voice echoes around the chamber, almost as alien to me as to the traveller. It continues to regard me, or at least its busy mouth remains pointed in my direction. One of its small arms delves into a slot in its side and comes out with a nugget of something it adds to the fire, subtly changing the burned-dry scent of the air. Perhaps that’s communication, where it comes from. My olfactory centres do their best, but a few months in the Crypts can’t reverse the neglect of millions of years of human evolution. And besides, how would I talk back to it? Creative flatulence?

  “How’d you make a dog go woof?” I ask it, because now I’ve heard the sound of my own voice I can’t stop. “Throw it on the fire. No, that’s a cat, never mind me. Still, I guess you don’t know what a cat or a dog is anyway, so who’s to know? Hey, this is a good one, listen: is it hard to bury an elephant? Sure, it’s a mammoth undertaking. Right? Mammoth… And elephants…” It’s all coming out now, all the pent-up nonsense, stupid jokes I haven’t heard since I was eight. This is me, mankind’s ambassador to the stars. “How do they hide in the jungle, eh? Paint their balls red and climb up a cherry tree. And what’s the loudest sound in the jungle? Monkeys eating cherries, isn’t it?”

  “Monkeys,” the thing says, not from its whirring teeth but from somewhere within its chest. Whatever makes that sound owes nothing to human teeth and tongue, but it forms the word nonetheless. The echo of it hangs between us.

  “Monkeys,” I repeated. “Barrel of monkeys. Monkey business. Magic monkey. Journey to the West. Ack-Ack Macaque. Monkey can’t buy you love. No, wait, that’s wrong.”

  One of its little arms dips inside its suit again and comes out with a rectangular block, offering it to me. I take it without thinking, peeling off the wrapper with long familiarity.

  “It’s money, money can’t buy you love. Because it’s the root of all evil, or love of it is.” And I’m about to tell this alien how I don’t miss money, really, or monkeys, but I did miss love, meaning the company of my fellow humans. First, though, I bring the bar up to my lips and take a decent bite. The curiously distant flavour floods my mouth, a thousand times better than worm meat or air-dried flank of Clive, made as familiar as mum’s Sunday dinners by the long journey out here.

  I stop.

  I examine the wrapper, seeing the ESA logo there, the ingredients in English, French, Spanish and German. And Danish, written on in awkward biro.

  “Where’d you get this?” I ask.

  Scritch scratch scritch, goes the stylus in my brain.

  “That information is not permitted,” says the alien from the caverns of its chest. Only it really says something like “Du har ikke lov til at kende disse oplysninger,” because we were all speaking Danish like natives by the time we reached the Frog God.

  “Where did you get this?” I yell at it. It has met my kin. More, it has met the Quixote expedition team, unless there’s been some enormous Danish space-diaspora since I left Earth. It knows where they are, it must do.

  “Ikke tilladt,” it states, and I don’t know if it’s just echoing the words or reinforcing them. The intonation is identical.

  “No, look at me,” I gabble to it. “I’m human. I got lost. I got separated from them.” I try to indicate various parts of my anatomy to indicate just how human I am. “I need to find them, please. Tell me where – tell me…” I try to remember the Danish for all of this, because my time in the Crypts has led to me lapsing back into English and now the syntax and vocabulary is muddled in my head, infected by Spanish and German and all nine words I ever learned of Polish.

  “Tilladt,” it says, like some metal parrot. And then a sound like the whine of a power saw cutting into metal, something no human language ever knew.

  I wave the food bar at it. “Listen, mate, you do not want to mess with me right now.” And all the time that whisper-scritch in my head is growing louder and more insistent, and is it this? Is this the whisperer? How can it even get inside my head, when it looks like a weevil in a diving suit?

  Unless it’s had practice, of course. Unless peeling human minds is something it’s been doing a lot of recently.

  I stare at the food bar, focusing on that earnest biro amendment, the handwriting of Eda Ostrom who’d decided to become a Danish nationalist for a lark. I feel that, if I concentrate hard on the torn wrapper, I’d see blood there. I imagine the barrel-bodied thing crouching over dying humans, interrogating them, seeing how their bodies fit together by taking them apart. I imagine it ravaging their minds, tearing out their languages and thoughts just as it’s drilling into mine. Abruptly I know with a burning certainty that this is what happened. This thing has the hunchbacked cant of a murderer, sinister in its iron suit. My teammates came h
ere seeking peaceful contact with other stars, but creatures like this metal ape have been here for years, preying on the unwary, killing them and taking their things. It’s no better than the worm creatures.

  “What are you?” I demand of the thing. “What did you do to my friends?”

  “Aber,” it pronounces contemptuously. Apes; monkeys. It’s not just recalling my earlier words, it’s dismissing my entire species: primitives, animals.

  I can feel all that rage I had folded up so neatly bursting out inside me. For a moment, I’m holding the door closed on it, because what good can it possibly do? But the anger floods my skull, drowning out the scritchy. The chamber fills with the rising tide of a roar and the roar comes from me. I bounce the half-eaten food bar off the thing’s domed helmet and then I follow with my own aim, leaping high in the air to come down swinging. Two-fisted space action! Pow! Bam! Crunch!

  It throws me off – the angle of those curved limbs mean I end up flying ten feet in the air, but I come down with my feet braced against the slope of a wall like a goddamned interstellar ninja and jump right back at it. For a moment I have my hands about the rim of its helmet, and I’m going to open the fucker up and see if it’s a monkey or a bug monster or twelve penguins all crammed in together. Then it slaps me down with a big metal fist, and I see something light up and spin within the cylinder attached thereto. That’s just enough warning for me to get the hell out of the way before its energy cannon or whatever-the-hell carves up the air where I was crouching, leaving a great molten furrow in the stone of the Crypts itself.

  I’m not daunted; in fact I’m even angrier, every knock feeding that insane wrath within me. I get hold of the alien and lift it bodily in the air, slamming it against the wall in the hope I’ll break open its armour like an eggshell. Still in one piece, it kicks me in the jaw, catapulting me backwards, and lands on all fours. I see it snatch up its light-crook and the packs, which cling to the alien’s armour with their little legs, and lurch to my feet, bellowing hoarsely. It scuttles away, flashing away with its energy gun and drawing new, meaningless sigils in the stone.

  Even fighting mad, I steer well clear of that, and I see the thing shimmy up a sheer wall and vanish into a passageway. I make several attempts to follow, still hollering and yowling, words of English and Danish peppering my incoherent ravings. I cannot manage the slope, though, nor jump quite high enough. I am left only with the thing’s fire bowl, which I kick over, trampling the coals until the air smells only of my own burnt flesh.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DOCTOR NAISH GOT us all together in one room; the entire crew, even those whose turn it was to sleep. She and the Mission Team had studied Mara’s records and the data from our diminishing fleet of drones, and they had received the delayed thoughts of the various scientists back on Earth. She had looked at the facts and prepared a theory that fit them, which the Expedition Team would get to test.

  Of all the people who should have been sleeping right then, Doctor Naish looked as though she was top of the list, a world away from the cheerful, telegenic science communicator who’d been on everyone’s TV screens. From the look on her face, I half expected her to just shout “Fuck knows!” at the top of her voice in her broad Scottish accent and throw her tablet across the room.

  We floated there in front of her, holding on to various straps and handles. Those of us scheduled to actually go on the expedition wore expressions indicating various stages of constipation, because we’d been given all manner of bone tablets and muscle stimulants to prepare us for being in gravity again, and our bodies weren’t appreciating the tune-up. Everyone else just looked tired and ill-tempered, because space is full of panic and boredom in random allotments, and it gets people’s backs up eventually.

  “The Artefact,” said Doctor Naish, rubbing at her eyes. She still refused to call it the Frog God. “What we see out there isn’t the Artefact, not really. It’s just… the tip of the iceberg, is the phrase I’ll be using for the press back home. And the rest of the iceberg is… not in the universe as we know it. We know it’s very large, but it’s folded almost entirely outside normal space. All we have are its doorways. Plural; the Mara’s images are unequivocal, and one of our drones also recorded some similar footage. Similar but not the same, because there was a different starfield and no planet.”

  She gave us a blank stare as though unsure for a moment who we were or why we were there. She’d been pushing herself far too hard, and now the only answer she had was scientific nonsense. Only the actual fact of the Frog God floating out there stopped everyone laughing at her.

  “We don’t know how it interacts with normal space. We’ve all seen how you only ever see the same facing, no matter the angle. It seems likely that the Artefact has several such exits, maybe hundreds, thousands. We have images of two and one of those plainly includes a planet with a spacefaring civilisation in advance of ours. It may therefore be that the Artefact’s gates only become active in planetary systems where such activity is detected; and it’s proposed that an inactive gateway wouldn’t be visible or detectable by any means, folded away out of sight. Or they may just be everywhere and we got lucky that there’s a gate near us. Or perhaps the Drake Equation comes up with four aces every time and there’s space aliens everywhere.” She kneaded the bridge of her nose. “Or they bring out the spacefarer in us, like 2001. I mean we just don’t know, do we? All I can say for certain is there was definitely some unexplained interaction between the Artefact, Kaveney and Mara. It activated them. It drew our attention to itself.”

  “Hvad vil det have?” Eva Ostrom asked. So what does it want?

  Naish just shrugged. “Jeg ved det ikke.” Confessing her ignorance. “Does it want anything?” she went on in lilted English. “Questions we’ll probably never answer. What does it do, though? It has a hundred entrances, scaled to different sizes. Several, including the one best suited to us, have a breathable atmosphere and conveniently survivable temperatures and pressures inside – though nobody is going to be taking their helmets off to smell the roses, right?”

  No disagreement on that one.

  “So what it does is this: it links distant parts of the galaxy. Or perhaps galaxies. Mara got to another star system and back in a matter of months. It’s a pedestrian underpass. We can go in, things could come out. And have done, in the past; the Red Rocket proves that. Whatever built the Artefact must have had a burning need to connect Here to There on a cosmic scale, and not just for their own purposes. We know there are different environments in there. We think there might even be… ‘roads’ of particular atmospheres linking similar planets. Or there may be no logic to it at all. Whoever built the Artefact, they don’t appear to be using it now. It’s just… there. There’s no suggestion of internal power or mechanism integral to the structure. The structure itself appears stable, and perhaps, once twisted into whatever space it occupies, its very shape holds it in place. We know so little about how such a thing might be done, it’s pointless to speculate.”

  She had very plainly worn herself to the bone with just such speculation.

  “The Expedition Team is on sleep shift as of the end of the briefing,” she told us all. “When your alarm goes, you’ll be going in. You’ll take every possible precaution. You’ll have the buggy to carry supplies, tents and tools. You’ll have one of the remotes, and we’ll watch you for as long as we can. Electromagnetic signals don’t carry far inside, but you’ll be setting down boosters to get it out to us. Your mission objective is first just to reach the lit area that we’ve already identified, and establish a camp there. Nothing more than that, for now. We’re going to take this very slow and very steady. No grandstanding, is that clear?”

  And it was clear. We were going to be so careful. We were no fools.

  And she went over every detail of the mission procedure, and every individual confirmed their understanding of it, as belt-and-braces as you like. Then, right as everyone was ready to drift off, Naish’s face kind of spasme
d with sheer annoyance and she said, “You’d think, if they could build something like this, they’d have just made something big that spaceships could go through. I mean why?” And if the ancient Frog-makers had reared their hoary heads at that moment, they’d have had it from both barrels from an extremely irate Scotswoman. Wisely, they remained unknowable and absent.

  NOW, DOCTOR NAISH, I’m really happy for you, becoming head of the Mission Team and all, and Imma let you finish, as the man said, but Gary Rendell is by far the most qualified Crypt-ologist of all time, by now. So I’m going to weigh in with my own thoughts on the sum total of human knowledge about the Frog God, which is suitable to be recorded for posterity on the back of a postage stamp.

  I am not convinced by any of the conclusions Naish came to. I have conceived of some counter-proposals during my long, cold exile here. I mean, we see a thing we can get into and we think someone made it to let us get from A to B, right? As if we were hedgehogs, and the Makers were concerned about us getting across a busy motorway. And so they built this goddamn cosmic structure that sort of exists at the secret heart of spacetime or some damn thing, with its openings conveniently everywhere for the benefit of everyone. Except, not so bloody convenient for us, when you think about it. The Pyramid People didn’t even have to get out of the Palaeolithic to go walking to the stars. We had to get 700 AU out from orbit, which stretched our technological ability to the absolute limit. That playing field is hella unlevel, Toto, bro. I’m thinking, what if all these passageways weren’t ever intended for us, or anything like us? I mean, rats can creep about a building via the ventilation ducts, but nobody’s got their convenience in mind when designing the layout.

  But, I hear Doctor Naish’s stern brogue correct me, there’s the glitches with Kaveney and Mara, the way the Crypts were so desperate, seemingly, for us to find and visit them, once we’d got close enough to register. Rank anthropomorphism that the real Doctor Naish wouldn’t have indulged in, I know, but most of us back then were definitely thinking of some design at work that had a place for us.