Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER FIVE

AFTER PARTING COMPANY with the Egg Men, I hear the sound for the first time.

I wake to it, sleep having finally come for me, for all that I seem to need little rest now. It’s not that I don’t value sleep when it comes: I fall into its arms like a lover, despite the monsters that roam here, despite the travellers who might wish me ill. In dreams, I’m back on Earth again. I’m consorting with other human beings. I lift a pint in the pub, I watch the footie, I turn up stark naked and unprepared for vital astronaut exams. My dreams are so quotidian it makes me weep to wake from them into the darkness of the Crypts, hundreds of astronomical units from home, and simultaneously much further still.

So, waking is never welcome, but this waking is worse because there is a sound, so insidious that it is almost a tactile sensation. It is a whispering and a chittering, a fluttering and a scratching, and I feel it as if it is scrabbling at the inside of my skull.

Which is possible. I sit up quickly, clapping a hand to my left eye, the anomalous sound seeming to come from that side of my head. It feels as though someone is scraping their nails down the chalkboard of my brain – faint, distant, but impossible to ignore.

I start looking about, but it’s dark here, like every part of the Crypts that some wayfarer civilization hasn’t tried to make more festive. I try to pin down where the sound is coming from. My left. I turn one-eighty degrees. Now it comes from my right. Misdiagnosing, I roar and flail madly at the ceiling, trying to reach whatever noisemaking goblin is squatting there. I bruise my hands against the stone, which here is a bare few centimetres above my head. I reach about, scrabbling against the seamless floor. Nothing. By now the sound is louder, scrape, scrape, scrape against the nerves of my teeth so that I clamp my hands against my ears to blot it out. And that doesn’t work because the sound isn’t coming from nearby, isn’t coming from outside at all. Covering my ears just means I’m locked in my skull with that scrape, scrape, scrape, that whisper, whisper, whisper, as though a host of tiny people with shrill little voices are conspiring on my shoulder.

I start blundering about in the dark. Normally, I know which way I’ve been travelling through some sense I have no name for, but now, all sense of where I am has been driven out by that infernal scratching. I stagger one way, bouncing from the walls. The sound is louder, as though I have gone infinitesimally towards the source, despite it originating within my head. I flee the other way, finally tripping over my own feet in a blindly-sensed crossroads. It is marginally further away, but I have the dreadful feeling I may never be able to escape it, no matter what halls or what stars I run to.

And then it fades, scrape, scrape, scrape, not gone but fallen below some threshold of audibility, leaving me with a sense like tinfoil on a filling that it’s still there, still scratching away. I wonder if it’s a parasite gnawing on me. That seems the sort of thing that would come to live in the Crypts with the rest of the low-energy waiting-game monsters. But if I was genuinely carrying around a little living cargo, it wouldn’t have grown closer or further, surely. So instead, perhaps, it’s an attack. Perhaps some dark-lurker is trying to attract me or drive me away. Perhaps it’s the mating display of some telepathic horror and I’m just an inadvertent recipient.

But something in me feels intent and malice behind that scrape and whisper. There was an irregular rhythm to it that felt like language to me. That was why it woke me. All sounds are not received equal, in the auditory centres of the brain. We can sleep through thunderstorms that sound like the end of the world, and yet the distant throb of music might wake us, or the laughter from next door’s discreet garden party. Human sounds, living sounds, sounds of intelligent purpose, these things stand out as signal against all the noise of the cosmos. This scraping and skittering had just enough of that hallmark to break me from sleep. Something out there was trying to insinuate its alien words into my brain, and I don’t think I want to hear what it has to say.

I’m awake now, though, despite the unconventional alarm clock. Time to get going. My gut is half-full of worm meat, which is proving a challenge to digest, meaning I’ll be sluggish and bloated for a while yet. The worm must have been as omnivorous as my new microbiome, so you’d think that it and my digestive system would see eye to eye, but apparently not. I’ll just have to keep plugging away at it until I feel the need to crap out whatever parts of it I simply can’t stomach. It won’t be much. I’ve not passed anything bigger than a rabbit dropping for what feels like a month.

That’s probably more information than you want to know. Sorry, Toto.

I pick a direction from the crossroads, anything other than the way I came. Perhaps the telepathic attacker has given up and gone to find some richer meal than my poor psyche. I don’t believe it, though. Somewhere, deep inside, that scrape, scrape, scrape is still happening. Today I will be twitchy as hell and constantly on a short fuse. I pity the monster that tries it on, frankly. I am in the mood to punch a worm right in the mandibles.

The worm monsters probably sense it and steer well clear, leaving me to trudge through the darkness, one hand trailing along the cold wall. Exploring the Crypts is always a joy, you understand. Any moment I might walk over the edge of an indeterminate drop, or into an aerome filled with vacuum or acidic gas, or – which is what happens – into an area where the pressure must be two atmospheres and the gravity is likewise uncongenial.

I drop, hands and knees, and for a moment I can’t breathe, to go with the not-seeing. The air around me is pleasantly oxygenated with a hint of pine freshness, but it’s thick as soup and clenched about me like a fist. I fight it as I’d fight a snake coiled about me, buttressing my ribs against it, forcing the thick medium into my airways and bloating my lungs with it. My breathing becomes very slow, but there’s plenty of goodness in each breath, and my metabolism actually speeds up. I feel my bones creak, my muscles pulled taut by the effort of not just collapsing into a puddle. But I’ve pulled more Gs than this on the simulator, and I’ve breathed worse air too. Slowly I force myself to my feet, head swimming and eyes feeling as though someone strong has their thumbs pressed against my corneas.

I stumble, but after three lurching steps I’m walking again, and my eyes see a faint glow ahead, another tenanted space, or perhaps one left fallow after its illuminators passed on. The Crypts are older than we have words for, after all, and they stretch everywhere. Long before the Madrid team sent Kaveney to investigate their gravitic anomaly, the Crypts were sitting there in a super-Plutonian orbit, made by hands we will never know, but for purposes clear to every species that comes across them. They are roads through the great dark without, just as there are roads through the lesser dark within. They let us walk to all the other stars.

And so I walk. It feels like less of a privilege now I’ve been alone for what must be months and barely recognise myself in the mirror. Still, here I am, amongst the stars. Where exactly? There is no ‘exactly.’ The Crypts go everywhere, and the distances I have to trudge, while a long trek by the standards of a weekend jogger, are trivial compared to the vast cold reaches outside. The Crypts are an artificial phenomenon which let matter, energy and information thumb their collective nose at relativity, and do it unchanged, without all that infinite-mass nonsense that approaching light speed entails.

You just put one foot in front of the other.

I reach the lights. They look bioluminescent to me: rubbery globes lukewarm to the touch, containing swirling medusae-looking things. Plenty are dead at the bottom of each lamp, meaning that these things must likely need, and be receiving, regular maintenance. Soon after, I reach the caves. The lamp-lighters didn’t bother to set their living lanterns deeper into the Crypts than their immediate home area, so either they don’t explore or their explorers carry portable lamps and don’t want to leave the universe’s most obvious trail for any sighted hunter to follow.

There are caves here, though, and that’s a shock because the Crypt-builders didn’t do caves – these have been carved out from the black stone, and by hand, not machine. The work is crude but effective and I can see the rounded scars of the tools they used. High-G creatures with a profound understanding of leverage, I infer.

Anyway, the locals have hacked out three smallish caves, and inside each is a scene that lazy archaeologists would readily characterise as “for ritual purposes.” There are more lamps – no candles or anything with a naked flame, but then the atmosphere is a bit oxygen-happy. There are stones, rounded as though polished by water and of several shades in the red-pink-orange spectrum. Then there are icons, or stelae, or obelisks. They are made from the rubble and dust of the Crypt stone itself, I reckon, moulded together into shapes by some process that hasn’t used visible cement or other glue. They’re narrow but not pointed at the top, broader at the base, and without other fancy projections, and they’re carved, but I can’t make anything of it. The lines go in and out of the cracks between pieces of stone, and the overall artistic effect is lost on me.

I back out of the cave, feeling baffled – it all looks a bit home-craft-store as far as the artefacts of a spacefaring civilisation go – and find two locals staring at me.

That sorts out what the icons are supposed to be, for the locals are also narrow at the top and broader at the base, their hides a gleaming green-black. They have four tubular legs like the stubby paws of tardigrades, and there are various orifices towards the front lower edge of their bodies. Constellations of opal fragments are scattered across their upper reaches on all sides, and my guess is that they serve as sense organs.

Oh, and they’re about a metre twenty, tops, so: tubby little obelisk guys. I dub them the Pyramid People because when I was training I skipped the lectures about naming aliens.

They’re very agitated to see me, fluting and hooting at each other, sounds that come in like little blarting foghorns in the dense atmosphere. I wave at them and they produce an array of extending arms from some of their larger orifices, threatening me with sharp obsidian-looking stones.

We have a bit of a stand-off then. I just stand there, creaking slightly in the gravity, and they carry on a complex warbling conversation like the Spanish Inquisition trying to interrogate a woodwind section. Every so often I wave and say ‘Hi’ again. Eventually I sit down with my back to the wall and my knees drawn up, and inadvertently end up the sort of shape and size they’re comfortable dealing with. With a final series of basso profundo trills, they waddle off. I might have been told to stay put or asked to follow, and there’s no interspecies body language that lets me know which. So I follow. I might be British, but I’ve been lost in a space labyrinth for an age and I’m done with waiting.

They obviously don’t have many worries about the dangers of an unknown alien (me), because they just go straight past the other caves towards a steadily warmer light source until I’m looking at a gateway out of the Crypt. I’m looking at their world.

Somehow, the Crypt terminal is actually planetside for them. They didn’t have to claw their way out of their high-G gravity well to go and find some distant big dumb object. They just wandered over the next hill, one day (that whole view was dominated by hillsides) and found a great black opening beckoning them. How that even worked, what with the screwy gravity of the Crypts, I couldn’t begin to guess. But then, ‘couldn’t begin to guess’ is very much the slogan for exploring the Crypts.

I go over and just stare out. Hillside, as I say, and mostly greenish for once, though nothing like grass, just a carpet of what looks like veiny cactus, and here and there a profoundly phallic projection, endowed with a powerful tumescence to overcome the local gravity. Except this is actually just me misinterpreting what life on a high-G world is actually like, as I discover when I step through.

And of course I step through. To feel the breeze! The sunlight on my skin! Oh, how good it must feel, how rejuvenating!

The two Pyramid People flutle and witter at me, but I just walk past and out into the new world, heedless of their sharp rocks. I come out, open my arms beatifically to the world, and then spend about ten minutes bucking and gasping under the effect of the atmosphere, because it is considerably denser out here than in the Crypts. As I choke, I spare a moment for the Pyramidites who must have had a major light-headed rush when they stepped in, if that was even a thing for their physiology.

And there are plenty of them – at least a score dotted about in front of the entrance, of various sizes, and some decorated with orange ochre, or else with a variety of white and grey markings that are probably a rainbow to eyes seeing different part of the spectrum to me. Some have sling bags; others hold some manner of tools or weapons, all designed with very different principles of leverage than a human would worry about. They set up a hooty chorus when they see me, but I just do the Jesus pose again and give them my blessing as I clamber to my feet. Then I turn around and almost lose it.

I expect to see just the Crypt-mouth and more hill country, but the land rises in steady stages beyond the mouth, and much of it is heavily forested with plants (?) that would give giant redwoods a run for their money. The smaller ones have heavily buttressed trunks, warty with nodules. The tall ones sway and ripple, their upper boughs bearing vast leaves like kites and weird, bobbing globular balloons. The entire forest reaches up to some high-altitude air current that has all the tall trees canted over at thirty degrees to vertical.

And amongst the trees, bloated whale-sized colossi flap and glide languorously, tearing off great strips of the leaves. And doubtless something preys on them, some swift aerial pack hunter. This world obviously has a two-level ecosystem, those below that wrestle with the mechanics of stomping about under high gravity, and those above that harness the thick atmosphere to soar.

I hear another flutling right by me, and see a delegation of Pyramid People there, no weapons in view, making sinuous motions with their retractable arms. I get no sense of threat from them. Possibly they want me to come and meet their extended families who have never seen a space god before; possibly they are just wondering how I don’t fall over with only two legs.

And that is a thing, of course. I am alive and on the surface of another planet. I can breathe the air, and I’d be able to eat the local cuisine, most likely, or even make cuisine of the locals. The gravity and the atmosphere will test me, and the Pyramidites being in the stone age is going to limit any large-scale projects I might have, but I could stay here. I don’t have to go back to the dark. I could live and die the first and last and only human this world will ever know, and in a thousand years the Pyramidite archaeologists will find my bones and go nuts.

And the scraping has stopped. Even though I’ve stopped hearing it a while ago, I am vindicated in my belief that it had been grinding on inaudibly, because I know with absolute certainty that it has gone when I step out of the exit. It is a Crypts thing.

The heaviness of heart I feel is not entirely due to the gravity. I wave to them again. “Be nice to each other,” I tell them sonorously. “Look after the environment. Um…” If someone asks you if you’re a god, you should probably have some better commandments lined up. The words Don’t eat yellow snow flash into my mind and I choke them back down.

I go back into the Crypts. This place with its gravity and its crushing atmosphere, it’s nowhere human beings are likely to venture. My people will not find me here like Robinson Crusoe and his man Pyramid Pete; and I am human enough that I still want to find them. I will brave the dark and the cold, the hunger and the monsters and that damnable scritching that starts up again the moment I get inside. I will brave them, because dying alone and far from home is the worst thing.

One of the worst things, anyway. But some of the other worst things have already happened, and so I feel qualified to make the assessment.