Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER ONE

TODAY I FOUND something I could eat and something I could burn to keep back the darkness. That makes today a good day.

I don’t know what it was or where it came from. Like me, it had been wandering the passageways of this crypt for who knows how long – and how long has it been, anyone? No day and no night and I’ve nothing left with power to tell the time, and so my life becomes one long greyness, punctuated by increasingly erratic periods of sleep. I don’t need to sleep like I used to. Or I need to sleep in some other way, maybe some way that I can’t achieve. Every waking is building up a sleep-debt inside me that my poor human physiology can’t satisfy. Maybe when I change my mind completely I’ll be back in balance. For now: anxiety, tremors, mania, paranoia, hyperventilation. Or sometimes no ventilation. That’s probably worse, but then the air in here is so variable. Seriously, you wouldn’t want it in your lungs if you had any option.

But the thing, the thing I found that brightened my day and filled a hole: it was twice as long as me, but it had been dead a long time and that must have shrunk it a bit. The air in this part of the Crypts is very dry. Its outer layers had gone brittle and crispy and I thought there mightn’t be anything of substance to it, but when I flaked them off, there was meat underneath, dry and chewy but meat nonetheless. It had a dozen many-jointed legs, and I snapped them off and piled them up, a camp fire just like my old scoutmaster taught me, and I used one of my shonky little jury-rigged pieces of nonsense to spark it into flames. The air here is dry, but it’s short on oxygen too, I can feel it from the way I slow down: breathing, moving, thinking. Hard to get a fire lit. And it’s so cold here, cold pretty much anywhere you go in the Crypts. I managed it, though. I got everything heated up enough that a guttering little flame caught, and then I huddled over it, trapping the fire between my body and the stone walls until a meagre ration of warmth had no choice but to leach into me.

The flesh of the creature tasted like sour dust. I was eating proteins evolved light years from Earth on some planet where twelve-legged, five-metre worm people live, but these days my microbiome is omnivorous to say the least. I twisted and groaned as all the little workers in my gut got to grips with the new repast. I used to be lactose intolerant, if you can believe it. I used to hurl if I ate cheese, and fart like a trooper if I had too much white bread as well. Now my diet is a catholic one, in the sense of ‘all-embracing’ rather than ‘fish on Fridays.’

The outermost layer of the dead thing was a sheath that was made, not grown, though it was as disintegratingly friable as the skin within. I tried to ignore the fact. I tried to tell myself the creature was just one more animal denizen of the Crypts, another species seeded here, to evolve or die out. And plenty of them have evolved, believe me. The Crypts have been here for a long, long time – millions, billions of years. Things have grown to love it here. I am not one of those things, although it seems to me I have been here for a long time. In human terms, months is a long time to be somewhere as terrible as this. I think it has been months. I hope it’s not been years. But the lack of light and – well, I said about the sleeping, and I’m beginning to think that time is shonky here too. After all, some part of this godforsaken place is giving the laws of relativity a good shafting.

My name is Rendell; Gary Rendell. I’m an astronaut. When they asked me, as a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “astronaut, please!” all filled with thoughts of Aldrin and Tereshkova. And though space exploration had been the domain of machines for quite a while, we did have a new crop of astronauts now, off bleeding their lives into the red, red sands of Mars so that, in a generation’s time, a cabal of rich guys could turn up and live off what they built. But that wasn’t the astronaut I wanted to be. I wanted to go into space. I wanted to set foot on alien worlds.

And I have. I’ve done all that. I’ve met aliens, sentient aliens. I’ve seen spaceships. I’ve breathed the venomous air of a planet on the other side of the universe. I’m probably the most travelled human being in the history of human beings travelling, if indeed that category is still the appropriate one with which to conjure me. I just didn’t think there would be so much getting lost and eating corpses. They never told me that at astronaut school. They never told seven-year-old Gary Rendell how he might be huddled in front of a fire that’s dying for lack of O₂, gnawing on desiccated chunks of long-dead alien explorer. If they’d brought that up, I might have said “train driver” instead.

The next day I move on, leaving my fellow explorer half-eaten behind me. I’m not sure what killed him. I call him ‘him,’ because that’s the knee-jerk if you’re a manly fellow like me. I call him Clive, in fact. Clive, of the species Clivus, from Clivesworld. Nobody else is here; I get the naming privileges. Clive wandered these passageways, lost like me. He had no breathing apparatus that I could see, although I’m only guessing at what part of him actually breathed. Possibly Clivesworld is somewhere nearby, some arid, low-oxygen world crawling with caterpillar-men who got out into space with some trick other than combustible fossil fuels and then found the Thing. The thing we found out past Neptune. The thing we all find, when we go far enough. The Crypts.

And Clive and his brood-mates or brethren or clone-kin were very excited, in their caterpillar way. They entered the Crypts just like we did, and maybe the rest of the Clives did better and found somewhere useful. Maybe they’re living the high life with firm trading agreements with the Steves and the Debbies from across the universe. But my Clive didn’t have a good time. My Clive wandered off or got separated, went space-mad, or gave himself to the Crypt gods. He found a dry, dry corner and he coiled his bulk up and died, and sometime later an Earthman named Gary Rendell came along and ate quite a large chunk of him.

But I’m getting sentimental. This isn’t anywhere useful to me. The atmosphere’s wrong and, unless Clive wandered in from a different aerome, then Clivesworld is no fit destination for my fellow humans. So I head away, trekking the dark, constantly relighting the charcoal ends of Clive’s limbs as the dead air snuffs them out, because the Crypts are cold and the Crypts are dark, although most everything else varies.

One day later – meaning: after I’ve slept again, although my personal sense of time suggests those periods are becoming more and more spaced out, but I will go quite mad if I cannot call things days and hours and minutes even if the words have no meaning outside my skull and so – one day later, I cross the invisible boundary into another aerome. The world smells faintly of something like lavender, and my lungs prick up their ears because the oxygen content is up, and also because there are several elements that humans would not normally want to be importing in bulk into the delicate, vulnerable linings of their pulmonary cavities. My lungs are omnivorous too, though. After all, what sort of a cautionary tale would Der Fliegende Holländer be if he could just drown?

I take a deep breath. I am a connoisseur of atmospheres. Oxygen, yes, mmm, good oxygen, a fine vintage. Nitrogen and methane, yes, very good, carbon monoxide slightly overdone, and I don’t appreciate the sulphurous bouquet. I don’t know about you, Toto, but this probably isn’t contiguous with Earth, or anywhere that Dorothy might have gone. More suitable for the Tin Woodsman, but we have to keep going, don’t we? I talk to Toto – if you hadn’t guessed, you’re Toto – I talk to you, Toto, because the Crypts are dark, like I said, and my own voice, croaky as it is, is soothing to me. When the echoes come back, I can pretend that I’m Toto and you’re Gary Rendell, and we’re having a fine old conversation.

I think I used to talk to you because it kept me sane, but we’ve rather moved past that stage in the relationship, don’t you think?

But I’ve got a gut full of slowly digesting alien flesh and I can feel my metabolism shaking off the dust now I’ve got richer air to burn. And my eyes twitch and squint past the suddenly resurgent flame of my Clive-leg torch, because there’s light ahead, real light. Not starlight, not sunlight, not firelight, but actual light, such as is made by sentient entities with a sophisticated technology. Most of the Crypts are dark as midnight, a horror of endless cold corridors cut in the stone where every step could see you into a trap, a drop, some peculiarity of physics, a reversal of gravity, a sudden drop in pressure or a toxic aerome.

Or the maw of a monster.

Because it’s like Dungeons and Dragons in here, and you ever know a crypt without monsters?

And we split the party, and that’s where the trouble started.