Walking to Aldebaran

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 hang 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.

But after all I’ve been through, I am nothing if not determined. I haul myself bodily up, and claw my way onto the level ground of the passage’s wall/floor/ceiling. Then it is indeed a wall, and I slide down to a new flat floor, re-entering the Crypts’ standard gravitic alignment. I’ve escaped the breach. I’m back in business, Toto.

I get to my feet, stooping to clear the ceiling. My limbs and back seem misshapen from all the unwarranted exercise. Probably they’ll settle back to where they were, but right now I’m strong and twisted, weirdly simian in my crouching stance. And this new tunnel seems oddly cramped and small compared to the ones I’m used to.

I put one foot in front of the other again, lurching forward.

There’s light ahead, the cold clear light of intelligent design. My head is filled with cicadas that speak with human voices, all those scraps of words grating against my inner skull, all that almost-language I can never quite make out. This close, it’s deafening.

I’m there. I’ve found the psychic aliens. I see their shadows around the next corner, dwarfish and skinny, little goblin-men trying to drive me mad with their mind-weapon. But I’m here and, if I’m mad, that was a done deal long before they started in on me.