Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER TWO

THE KAVENEY PROBE was sent to look for planets.

What counts as a planet – what bits of dead cold rock out there are and aren’t planets – is a topic that continually amuses astronomers and planetary geologists. Hours of fun. Is Pluto? Or is it just a dwarf planet, and therefore not eligible for club benefits? And if not Pluto, what is Planet Nine from Outer Space, and what about Planet Ten? The Newtonian dance of everything else says they’re there, or maybe, probably, but you try finding even something as large as a planet in something as large as the outer solar system.

Anyway, some jokers in ESAC, Madrid, and some other jokers in the British Space Agency, still gamely cooperating despite everything, reckoned there was something odd going on out in the Kuiper belt, on past Pluto where Planet Nine was supposed to go for its winter holidays. I remember sitting through the math later on, along with the other expedition hopefuls. Why put us through it when, by then, we had a good idea of what Kaveney had actually found, I don’t know, but the ESA obviously wanted us to ace the theory part of the test later on. I understood it at the time and then it mostly fell out of my head the moment I left the room, because it was obviously yesterday’s news. Can’t remember the details now except that years of careful measurement had determined that the solar system’s Newton’s Cradle was swinging kind of funny out that way and the prime candidate was the orbit of one of those elusive far-out planets yanking gravity’s chain.

So they proposed, and they got the funding, and they finally got a probe out, name of Kaveney, booted out of Earth’s own gravity the old-fashioned way and then slung around the sun towards the far reaches of the solar system at speeds that would shame the old Voyager. Able to catch up to the poor, long-lost thing and say ‘Hi,’ in fact, had they sent it off on the right trajectory. And Voyager would have replied with some whalesong and per aspera ad astra in braille, which wouldn’t have been terribly edifying.

Prescient, though. You’d be surprised how many alien species around here are big on touch, not sight. The Crypts hold one less terror for them, I guess, though still plenty terrors enough.

But let’s get our feet back on the ground before we get our heads in the air. The Kaveney, zipping off past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, spending another few years crossing the interplanetary gulf, cocking a snoot at Pluto, still sitting on the doorstep of the Planet Club with a tear in its eye as it holds its ‘membership revoked’ letter. And, because the people at the BSA and ESA and the lead team in Madrid were not fools and could do maths, eventually it got to where it was supposed to be and opened all its glittering eyes to the void to take a look.

I don’t need to tell you, Toto, a lot happened back on Earth during the years the Kaveney was in transit. We nearly had a big war. Actually, we nearly had two. We were daggers drawn in Europe over bloody fish, if you can believe it. Then, just as things looked as though they were cooling and people were putting the death toys back in the box with the skull on it, everything kicked off in the US with the Neo-Apartheid crowd and all those secessions that never quite happened. Scary AF both times, believe me. I was training in Poland when the European boom was going down and I remember being evacuated from Warsaw with a dozen other students, without warning, still in our dressing gowns and slippers. Because they thought that was going to be It, right then, and apparently someone’s first thought was “Save the trainee astronauts!” And a lot of people died or lost their homes, some of them because of the actual war and others because the war was a useful excuse to go kick your neighbour for being gay or Jewish or Croatian or whatever issue your ancestors have traditionally kept the knife sharp for, but It never quite came. We kept going up to the rooftop and we kept getting talked down from it.

The Stateside business was scarier, even though it was Over There. Things kicked off all over, the way I heard: citizen militias, lynching, little towns and churches and cults just declaring they didn’t recognise anyone’s government, not one side nor the other, and everyone’s got roomfuls of guns, so they were able to underline their political preferences with a lead pencil if they so chose. There’s one Reuters report, you know the one, where Julia Habez just gets shot as she talks to us, and the last thing you see is her lying dead in the dropped camera’s view as all hell cuts loose. And there was that base commander with the nukes, too, straight out of Doctor Strangelove, and we all held our breath. As though that would have helped.

And Mars One was rolling on, despite the kit that kept crapping out and that whole dome that just failed, and I remember thinking about what the Martian colonists must have thought, catching all that news fifteen minutes late and wondering if they were going to be the sole surviving representatives of mankind by the time the next bulletin came.

It’s the Martian guys I feel sorry for, really. They put in so much damn work, risked their lives – lost their lives, nine of them – and none of them with much of a chance to ever get home again. And they were building the future, everyone on the project sincerely believed it. Except it was the wrong future. What Kaveney found would render all their toil pretty much obsolete.

But right then, those valiant Martians were our best shot at the future and, when Kaveney finally got all the way out, the response amongst its chief scientists was one of abject panic, because there was nothing there. Years in the making, years in the travelling, and nothing but comet dust and a faint cosmic whiff of disappointment. Three quarters of the team were convinced that their instruments, or Kaveney itself, were faulty. The remaining quarter, who were mostly the senior scientific staff with long publication histories, decided that they had in fact made a bold new discovery: some dark matter maybe, or a new subatomic mass-related particle, the Higgs Midshipman. Anything to explain why everything was acting as though there was a planet-sized mass lurking out there, and Kaveney just couldn’t see it.

That was the problem, of course: the Kaveney was looking for a planet, and even though space is very big, planets are still donkeys we expect to pin the tail on two times out of three, especially something reckoned to have ten times the mass of Earth. Or not, because the more they looked at their initial figures, the more nothing quite added up. I’m not saying it was brown-lab-coat time over in Madrid, but I reckon a lot of eminent astronomers were getting a collective sinking feeling in their stomach when they contemplated the next funding review.

Then Kaveney began sending back pictures all by itself.

Of course, the idea had been for the probe to take images of Planet Nine (unless it was Planet Ten) in due course, but those initial images had shown that there was no planet out there, and so they’d stopped taking pictures and started testing for errors in the code. They almost missed the new images when they came in. It was only because the Supermassive Array picked up some anomalies during a test sweep that anyone realised that Kaveney was trying to tell everyone something.

You’ve all seen the images, or at least the most spectacular ones. Right then, there was a lot of noise and relatively little data. Everyone was just baffled because nobody had told Kaveney to start taking new holiday snaps. And they kept coming, and all the signals telling the probe to knock it off were having no effect at all. “It started getting creepy,” is how Janette Naish described it to me after she left the Madrid lab to come brief us astronauts. Naish was one of the lead researchers on the Kaveney project, a Scottish boffin who called the Oort Cloud the “Oowert Clide” and wore a Doctor Who scarf for press conferences. Once the news broke, she went on to elbow out all the others for the chief spot on the manned mission, the one I signed up for.

It wasn’t her who actually made sense of the new pictures, or at least the ones that showed anything at all. In amongst all that contradictory spectroscopy, gravitic data and actual visuals was the thing that was going to change everything, hidden in the data, dark against the dark of space. One more piece of clutter in the outer solar system, amidst the comets and the dust.

Enrico Lossa was the very junior member of the Madrid team who spent weeks cleaning up the images until he found himself confronted with it. Then everyone else spent weeks trying to reinterpret what Kaveney’s instruments had detected to make it something mundane and uninteresting, because that’s how science works, and none of them wanted to turn up on TV saying “Aliens!” like a maniac and get laughed out of the discipline. So they did their level best not to see what they were seeing, and they got in other scientists to prove them wrong, and only then, when all other options had been exhausted, did they go public with it.

The conspiracy theorists had a field day, of course, but right then, there really was no piece of batshit paranoid craziness they could think up that was weirder than what was actually out there.

It wasn’t actually a face. That was just everyone’s pareidolia kicking in. We had not, as a matter of fact, found the sacred effigy of the Galactic Frog God. But it did look sort of froggy, so I can understand the confusion.

Mostly it was that colossal orifice that made up the front and centre of what we were seeing, a circular hole the size of the Moon facing directly, somewhat too conveniently, towards Kaveney, rimmed with what looked like black basalt, except of course the freezing reaches of the outer solar system are not known for their igneous volcanism. On either side, left and right, were what might be parsed as eyes, smaller holes set in their own dark, smooth sockets, but each one still most of the size of southern France. Around these there was some sort of fuzz of additional structure visible, and Kaveney’s amateur photography showed a maddening suggestion of detail – carvings, or vast figures or the like – but the resolution was just not good enough. The artefact was huge – bigger than the Moon, smaller than the Earth but punching way above its apparent size in terms of gravitational disturbance – but it was still a long way from Kaveney.

There was a lot of discussion right then, not just the Madrid team but a whole raft of the world’s keenest minds. The consensus was to repurpose the baby probe Kaveney was carrying, which had been intended to split off and dive into Planet Nine, collecting valuable data all the way down to its fatal crash landing. They downloaded a fairly significant patch to the thing’s software and sent it hurtling off towards the object.

I should say, the manned mission was already being planned. We knew we’d have to go there. We were looking at something made, and made on a planetary scale. It was the most significant discovery in the history of history and every astronaut and scientist on the planet wanted to be on the ship when it took off. I thought I was so lucky, when I made the grade. So lucky.

So.

So.

Lucky.