Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WELL NOW, MY little mind parasites. Caught you bloody red-handed, haven’t I?

So I go round the corner, and they’re even smaller than I thought, wretched spindly gremlins that barely come up to my waist. Fragile, too; they don’t walk these goddamn halls in their hairy birthday suit like I am. It’s silver suits and goldfish bowl helmets for them, and little lamps and torches everywhere because the mind-whisperers are scared of the dark. Even as I make my appearance, a butt naked demon king from the world’s worst panto, their voices keen in my head like swarms of locusts, like giggling imps, like the ghosts of the wronged dead. I almost think I hear the names of my vanished comrades amongst the chitter: Martino, shaken not stirred, Aanbech, Rendell. They know my name. The bastards know my name.

I want so much to stomp them into jam, to grind my heel on all that whispering and scritching until there’s nothing but a stain on the stone, but I am a man. Am I not, still, a man? Am I not a thing of reason, Toto?

What’s that, Toto? Kill them all? But no, I shall be merciful, if they only tell me why they torment me so.

I try to ask them. It comes out like a roar, but then I’ve been roaring inside since the scritchy started up, pacing about the bars of my psychic cage unable to act against my torturers. Now the lion is on the streets and he’s bloody pissed off, I can tell you. You rattled my cage, little goblin men. You hissed and whispered your glottals into my cerebellum and now I’m going to going to going to –

No. No, I will not. Not yet. Give them a chance. Let them explain. And so I ask again even as they cling together. I spit out interrogatives in English and Danish past the jut of my teeth. I see their pasty little faces go white and their mouths open and shut, but no sound comes out of their stupid helmets and the scritchy just gets louder and louder, a shrilling chorus in my brain.

“Just shut up!” I say to them. “Just stop, just, just, I’m not going to be able to stop myself, just stop doing it to me and I’ll go, I will! Just – stop! What’s that?” That slack circle of a mouth opening and shutting meaninglessly, a goldfish in the bowl. I grab one of the goblins. I shake the other one off and then I take the one I’ve got and dash it against the wall to break that helmet and let the words out. Only when I’ve done that, there aren’t any more words, just a lot of blood and shards of skull and greasy greasy grey that coats my hands. And although this one’s dead and no longer broadcasting its cicada song, the buzzing chitter from the other one grows louder and louder until I feel they’ve got a sawblade against my skull and are trying to do to my brain what I just did to their friend’s.

“Is that all you’ve got?” I bellow, or try to, but it just sort of comes out like a slobbering froth of sound. The remaining goblin is trying to scoot away from me, her suit scraping on the floor. The torch she dropped is turned on her now, like an interrogation. Her pale, terrified face, eyes wide with horror, a dash of blood across the clear dome of her helmet like a smudge of dirt on the cheek of a Dickensian orphan. Quite artistic, really, couldn’t have done it better if I’d planned it. And she’s screaming so loud and I want to tell her that (a) I can’t hear her and (b) you can make yourself deaf like that, ’cause I remember just how those helmets are. Maybe she’s begging, as well; you know, for her life. That’s the sort of thing goblins do just before they stab you in the back, isn’t it?

Yes, Toto. Yes, it is.

But I am a man. I am civilized. I am humanity’s ambassador to the stars. All right, I killed one of them, and that probably means some awkward paperwork back at the embassy, but it was an accident. I was attempting to establish a line of communication. Not my fault they don’t have robust diplomatic channels, after all.

So I try harder this time. As the other goblin cowers and screams silently – moreover, as the keening of her mind saws into me with all her grief and fear – I just flick the front of her helmet, just thumb and forefinger, like I was killing a fly. I expect a crack, but the industrial-toughness plastic shatters and quite a lot of it goes into her face and eye, but at least I can hear her now. At least we’ve established the possibility of dialogue.

“Just get out of my head,” I roar reasonably. “Stop it with the scratchy-scritchy stuff. I can’t be having with it.” I accept that, to an impartial observer, this may come across as a little less urbane than I intend, but with mind parasites surely it’s the thought that counts.

But she’s still screaming, and now there’s more blood and eye everywhere and she doesn’t seem interested in any kind of détente. I pick her up and explain my point of view to it, lay out my grievances and suggest some sort of dispute resolution, shaking the goblin for emphasis in lieu of bullet points. Surely we can get round a table and settle our differences like civilized monsters? At some point during this process she stops screaming and gives up on the mediation process.

The sudden cessation of sound is blissful. The near-absence of scritch-whisper is little short of divine. No false alarms this time, I can genuinely blame goblin mind-worms for all of my troubles. I sit down, feeling emotionally exhausted. It’s hard, Toto, it really is hard to survive, a lone human being lost in the Crypts for months or weeks or years. Sometimes you have to take pleasure in the simple things.

Speaking of which, my stomach reminds me I have dead goblins rapidly cooling, and maybe I shouldn’t encourage the horrible monsters of this place by leaving good food around the place.

I consider just bolting them, but the suits look problematic, like eating tinfoil and cling-film. I strip them off, or at least I tear the suits away, shredding them. I keep the name tags, though. The first goblin was Carswell P and the second Proshkin M, which is a weird coincidence when you think about it.

Being the rational human, I should probably ponder a bit, but my stomach is jabbing me urgently, so I decide that post-prandial cogitation is the order of the day and wolf them down.

And my, are they good! You’ve got to remember, I’ve been a long, long time with my modified gut fighting a dozen different alien biologies, proteins evolved in the light of other stars, means of storing energy less and more efficient than a little belly fat, weird sugars that’ll do more than rot your teeth. I mean, there are only so many places molecular chemistry can go if you’re built around the carbon atom, but a lot of those places are far from Earth. But these goblins, oh, man, these goblins. I never had anything that went down so smooth. They’re made of stuff my microbiome tore into like it was pork chops and sausages. No long hours of aching and nausea as my stomach tries to conquer yet another unfamiliar biochemistry. You’d think the goblins had been made to be eaten. The only problem is how tiny they were. I crunch those two up like popcorn and they barely touch the sides.

But there are more of them out there. I can hear their whispering. It’s not maddening yet, not now I’ve worked out my issues a little, but I can feel it rising again. I can feel them out there, the delicious little noisemakers. I’m going to register a complaint with the neighbours, Toto. If they won’t invite me to their noisy little party, then I’m going to crash it and empty the buffet.