Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER TWELVE

I HELD ON to my helmet for far longer than I should. For quite a while I sat in the lit section, trying to call the Mission Team, or Karen, or anyone. After getting nothing but dead air, I jury-rigged the receiver so I could search frequencies, scanning for any kind of communication at all. Sometimes I felt there were patterns to the white noise, like whales passing beneath choppy water, but I never got anything. The stone of the Crypts and the general electromagnetic fritziness of the place makes long-range communications nigh on impossible. But when I finally realised it was move or die, I took the helmet with me, dangling from my hand like a teddy bear for the whole first [period between sleeps] of my odyssey. The battery was going anyway, and the red lights on the HUD weren’t even touching on how fucked I was, but I couldn’t abandon it even though it was just dead weight.

I could have taken off the suit, too, but the Crypts were too damn cold, no matter how clumsy it was.

Sometimes I called out, until the echoes of my own voice curdled into something nasty and I began to think that the only thing worse than being alone might be not being alone. Soon enough my throat was too dry, though. I’d worked my way through all the water the suit had salvaged from all the water my body had profligately pissed away, and I reckoned I was probably on the fourth time round. The rancid stuff I was drinking was like an old friend, like a guest who turns up and doesn’t know when to go.

I found a second lit patch surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the faint glow of the last had faded. I’d been blundering about in that pitchy dark when my fingers found tooled grooves in the stone. Following them a short distance, I saw a grey light ahead. It came from a single orb, weirdly un-luminous, sheened with mother of pearl. It had been set right in the floor by some alien race who presumably never stubbed their toes or tripped over things. You could put your hand to it, and there would be no silhouetting, no sense of actual light coming from it, and yet it bathed the passageway in a flat grey-white radiance for fifteen metres either way.

I remember just standing and staring, the helmet dropping from slack fingers (faceplate badly scratched, but who really cared at that point?) This was alien. This was the most alien thing I’d ever encountered. Save perhaps the Crypts themselves, and they were alien on such a mad scale you couldn’t really appreciate it. The lights in the previous section, taken as a whole, had they really been so different to those lights my neighbour Steve had put out in his garden one Christmas and just left there forever? Not so much. This would have shut Steve up about his water feature and his chrysanthemums, though. And it was there, untended and abandoned in the depths of this black maze, and so was I.

That was the big red sign on the HUD, metaphorically speaking. That was when I appreciated just how screwed I was. I was never going back. I was lost in a labyrinth that might be as big as the galaxy. Alien feet had trodden this very corridor, and I had no evidence that their owner had ever found its way out either. I had less and less water with each turn of the glass, and I had no food at all. Fleeing for my life, I’d not thought to grab any. All I had in inexplicable profusion was breathable air.

I slept by the alien marble, practically curled around it. I cast no shadow in its light. Perhaps it created illumination by exciting the molecules of the walls or something. Perhaps I was hoping its creators would choose this moment to return and change the bulb. I awoke, no less lost or alone, and knew the choice wasn’t move or die at all. It was move or stay still, and either menu option came with a side order of die.

This is where the indomitable human spirit comes in, because rather than staying with that weird but still comforting light, I walked off into the dark. Some optimistic neuron in my brain which had never heard of statistics was telling me that to stay still was certain death, to move on was only nearly-certain death, because I might find something. The Crypts were vast, and who knew what was around the next corner?

I don’t know how long I walked in the dark, trailing a hand along the wall to keep my bearings. Actually it can’t have been long, because I didn’t have any food and my stomach was far more conservative in outlook back then. A few days, maybe, enough that the water in my suit had given up touting itself as anything other than it was and now tasted proudly of pure piss in a bag. Oh, and enough for me to discover that the breathable air I was so rich in was also not a given in my new home. In the utter dark I managed to walk straight into a very different aerome. The gravity was higher, which meant that between one step and another I fell flat on my face, and the air was utterly without oxygen. Thankfully it wasn’t actually toxic, but the CO2 levels must have been off the scale, or maybe it was chock-full-o-nitrogen, but I was asphyxiating instantly, hauling in lungfuls of useless pulmonary roughage with no nutritional value whatsoever.

I didn’t consciously remedy this situation at all, but my body took over and I scraped and kicked and elbowed my way backwards until my head passed through the invisible boundary and I could breathe again. I rolled over and jack-knifed until I was faceplanted into the stone with my arse towards the ceiling, belching like a seven-year-old comedian because some of what I’d been inhaling was far heavier than Earth air, and I needed gravity to help it on its way out of me. My higher brain functions, meanwhile, were happily tumbling over the thought of What if that had been chlorine or cyanide or…

I probably cried a bit, too. I remember doing a lot of that around then. I should have looked on the bright side. Death by cyanide gas would have been far more merciful than starving.

A day or so later there was another lit section. This time it was a slime trail, phosphorescent enough to read by, and at the end of it was a corpse, limbless, eyeless, mostly just a leathery lump fringed with whiskers. It had metal rings punched in its skin, though, and a handful of baffling artefacts hung from them. How it might have used them, what they were for, I couldn’t say. I had found the remains of a fellow explorer, though, one more wanderer in the dark that had got so far and no further.

I think that was when I started to talk to myself, Toto. I addressed the dead alien, said some words, and somehow the words didn’t stop and they’re still coming now. I was my only company, after all. Even the croaky rasp of my desiccated voice was better than no voice at all.

It happened soon after. How soon? No idea, see previous issues with timekeeping. I came to a chamber lit by a half-dozen globes dangling from the ceiling on silken threads. I looked up in panic, but there was no leathern monster lurking there. Instead the walls and floor were all inscribed with that strange vegetal ornamentation I have remarked on. The patterns flowed irresistibly downwards, having a definite direction, for all that they had no beginning or end. They rolled in from every wall in that octagonal room and converged in the centre of the floor, where rested a flower.

Well, not a flower, not really. A rosette of stone, a design of radial symmetry like petals folded in upon themselves over and over at every scale from larger than me to smaller than I could see, fractalling into infinity.

I should say, the Crypt-makers were very fond of rectangles and squares, save at the actual entrances to their domain, where perhaps some extra-dimensional geometry required perfect circles. The corridors are square-sectioned, the halls are rectangular blocks of absent stone. That chamber was the only place I saw in the whole circus that didn’t obey the rule. Of course, I didn’t know that then. I wasn’t the galaxy-class Crypt-ologist I am now.

So I went in. I trod the winding path of the dendritic carvings, which seemed to twist and uncurl all around me when I wasn’t looking. Of course, I was starving to death and I’d been traumatised and alone for a week, so unaccountable movement in the corner of my eye was nothing to remark on. I just approached that rosette because it was there, because it was a landmark in an architectural desert. I stood on it, right there in the centre, staring about me as though waiting for the Mission Team to leap out and yell “Surprise!”

The globes began to descend from the ceiling, and of course it was the movement of the light that made the carvings seem to undulate like tentacles, or the throat of a peristalsing giant. I thought I was going to die, but instead of bolting or railing or begging, I just stood. I had crossed a line, inside my head. My indomitable human spirit had clocked off. Just do it, I thought, not in the trainer slogan sense, but because I was ready for the end.

Beneath my feet, the stone shifted.

I was lifted up, turned slowly about, the globes and the glistening walls circling me. Below, all the petals were opening, a great ripple of many-leaved movement as the flower opened. I revolved, arms out like a benevolent deity, like a sad clown in a musical box. Beneath me was a throat, a serrated oesophagus edged with spiny leaves. I should have been horrified, but it seemed weirdly beautiful to me, that all this alien splendour was devoted to the humdrum act of making an end of Gary Rendell, formerly of Stevenage but now very definitely of no fixed abode.

Something spoke to me, or I think it did. Maybe it was me talking to myself. I mentioned that was a thing by then, right? But I will report my impressions, like a good astronaut. It seemed to me that I was being asked a question by something vast, which could never become small enough to understand my answers. I gave it meaning, though; painted it with humanity enough to decide it was asking what I wanted. What was I after, coming in here with dead space-mollusc on my boots, crying to myself about how hard it was? Didn’t I know there were kids who’d kill to be an astronaut slowly dying in an alien maze? What, basically, was my problem?

And so I told it. I told it what I missed most. I told it about hunger and how my belly felt like a raisin and I was so weak I couldn’t walk another step, could barely stand up another moment. And I told it about loneliness, about humanity being a social animal not meant to be so dreadfully apart from others of our kind. I probably burst into tears again, knowing me. I mean, here I was having the first human contact with an unimaginable alien intelligence, and it was kind enough to ask how I was. No wonder I was overwhelmed with emotion. Best first date ever.

And then it ate me. The bit I was standing on retracted like a frog’s tongue and yanked me down into the guts of the thing, and the petals closed over my head.

If I’d been playing the odds, this would be just one more of the predators that had evolved to survive the Crypts, and I would have been as dead as Joe and Katarin and the rest. It wasn’t a monster, though; it was a machine. I’d go further than that, in fact. It was a Machine. The Machine. It was the Mother Machine that said, bring me your hungry, your unwilling exiles, and I shall give them what they most desire, and they shall be born anew from my jagged, knife-edged womb.

Or that’s what it probably said, my dear old Mum, but frankly I was too busy screaming to really appreciate the poetry of it. Like a true mother, in fact, it was probably telling me it was all for my own good, but I was being torn apart and so it was hard for me to appreciate it. I thrashed and fought, but it’s hard to do that without skin, and with your guts unspooled like a dead cassette tape. I tried to beg for life, and then for a quick death, but Mother was playing washerwoman with my lungs and so I was unable to put my point across as eruditely as I wanted. And I tried to pass out, but she wouldn’t let me. She was telling me what she was doing, in an alien notation I couldn’t ever understand or even remember, but it was very important to Mother that I hear it. When my ears were torn off, she just spoke her wisdom into my brain.

I mean, I could go on, Toto, but I reckon you get the idea by now. Reassembly was even worse, to be honest, but this kind of torture-porn can be a drag, and I don’t want to dwell. I’d rather look on the bright side, because it really was all for the best, just as if I was a kid who had to wear a brace for a bit to get those straight teeth. And probably the Mother Machine didn’t understand about things like consciousness and pain and going goddamn crazy forever because something’s peeling your skin off and thrusting fingers between every fibre of your muscles; I mean, why would it?

So let’s skip forward to the moment of my second birth, when I emerged into that octagonal chamber again, just the same old Gary Rendell, mostly. I wasn’t covered in blood or ichor or blue slime. I didn’t have wings or talons. I didn’t even have eyes that could see in the dark, because this dumbass here didn’t mention that little problem to Mother. Can you imagine? I might have had these feeble human eyes poked out by a godlike alien device, and I missed my chance.

I stood there, shucking off the few rags of spacesuit left to me, looking for the scars that I knew should be there, but weren’t. The Mother Machine’s craftsmanship is second to none. I’d been remade at a cellular level, maybe even a molecular level. And I would be able to go find my lost kin even if I had to walk forever to do it.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I would never starve, never suffocate or be poisoned (and no, I didn’t ask for those, but I think it’s all part of the hunger thing, or else it was on special offer or something, buy one invasive body modification, get one free).

And that, Toto, is how I got to be the man I am today: hard work and determination and an alien machine that flayed me alive so I could be the best that I could be.