Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER SIX

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HELD long enough for us to actually get off Earth and aboard a ship built entirely in orbit, and at least 60% from materials harvested from the private enterprise asteroid mines. We got mates’ rates, as far as I could work out, because the Frog God meant Opportunity to a wide range of people, both scientific and commercial. The private investors wanted to be in at the top, but they wanted to do it without breaking from their various home governments, and so a really specific public-private partnership was set up with the stated aim of poking the Frog God in the appropriately-sized eye. The crew was twenty-nine people, split between the Expedition Team, the Mission Team (because apparently going inside the Frog God itself was somehow not the mission) and the Overlap Team, in which position of miscellanea you’d find yours truly. I was also one of the pilots, although space piloting is one of those situations where they should really equip you with a dog, so your job is to feed the dog and the dog’s job is to bite you if you touch any of the expensive equipment. That’s unfair to my colleagues and me, of course, since it’d be us saving the ship if something went wrong, but as matters fell out, everyone else had done their jobs well enough that our position at the helm was something of a formality.

The other pilots, for posterity, were Janisha Ushah, Magda Proshkin and John Hamilton – four of us to do a job that didn’t need one of us, but then redundancy is important when you’re in space, because you can’t just pop out to space-Tescos if you forget something. I spent most of my awake-time with Magda, who had the most space-time of all of us, had the best reflexes of anyone I ever met, and was stark raving crazy in a quiet way. She would explain at great length and in seven languages that the spaceship we’d seen drifting near the Frog God was Russian, and that the Soviet space program had sent an expedition to the Frog back in the 1980s, as its last covert attempt to overshadow the US Moon landings. The expedition had failed, which meant the Kremlin had buried all trace of it, but she swore blind that her people had got there first, and that we would find that someone had kept the red flag flying out there, possibly still gripped in the dry, dead hand of a cosmonaut.

Our ship was the Quixote. There had been a fight over the name, but Madrid ended up with the casting vote, and Santiago got proposed and shot down for don’t-mention-the-Reconquista reasons. I suspect there was the sort of committee meeting involved where everyone’s first choice was someone else’s last choice, and Cervantes won out because nobody hated it and because no one had actually read the book. We were lucky to avoid the good ship Spacy McFrogface, frankly.

Once the slingshot was successful and we were zipping off towards the outer solar system at the hoped-for ridiculous speeds, it was time to start the duty rota for real. It was a long, long way to the Frog God, a fair chunk of a human lifespan, and we’d spent it in semi-hibernation, a cold sleep that would keep our bodies and minds ticking over in a very low gear so that mankind’s ambassadors to the stars wouldn’t be all grey and wrinkly when we arrived. It was tested tech – all the rage if you were rich as balls back home and felt death’s fingers clutching for you, and way better than all that frozen-head-in-a-jar cryogenics from last century. Of course, we’d been repeatedly awoken from that state to take turns being the skeleton crew, and that wasn’t quite as tested, but again they got it right, and while you felt like warmed-over shit when they levered you from the tank, nobody actually died.

Actually, Gerde Hoffmeier from the Mission Team died, but that was a heart condition nobody had picked up, just one of those things. We got to do the space funeral thing, solemn videos for everyone back home, whilst simultaneously not having to worry about there being some systemic problem that might pick us off one by one.

And things went wrong, and time passed, and there were a couple of small wars back home that meant various members of the crew were technically blood enemies for months or years at a time, but it’s very hard to sustain that kind of nonsense when you’re zipping through the asteroid belt with Mars behind you and Jupiter ahead, and no government had managed to get a political officer on board. The only bit of rampant nationalism was Eda Ostrom, a geologist, who taught everyone Danish through sheer force of personality and taking double shifts, so that her native tongue was our lingua franca by the time we arrived. The rest of the long-running edutaintment was Jain Diaz from the NASA contingent teaching us considerate use of pronouns with sufficient patience and determination that ze even had the most hardcore Russians respecting hir life choices. Ze was an indicator of just how much looser things had got in the States after the fighting, which I suppose is some small consolation. By the time the interplanetary satnav told us we’d reached our destination, then, we were fully up on nonbinary etiquette and everyone’s messages home were peppered with incomprehensible Danish slang.

And eventually, a generation or so later, we arrived. I want you bear that in mind, when thinking about my later trials and tribulations. We all knew this was a life-mission when we set out. Nobody was clock-watching and knocking off at five. When we returned home, everyone we knew save the youngest babes would be dead, or else availing themselves of the same cold storage as us to stave off their malignant cancers. We were the heroes of our peers when we set out. On our projected return, we would be the heroes of our grandchildren.

I got woken late, having done a long shift only five years before. They woke all of us, of course, once they were sure we had indeed arrived, that the celestial calculations had been on the mark, that all the series of ludicrous chances and risks we had taken had fallen into place, one after another like dominoes in reverse.

Our instruments were picking up the Frog God – and it was big enough that we could see it from the cupola (indeed it was more visible than it should have been, given that you could barely pick the sun out of the starfield this far out). What we also had was Mara, which had ended up caught in the Frog’s gravitational pull without, of course, being able to orbit the damned impossible thing, and we had the ship.

Magda was to be disappointed. There were no Soviet markings, nor had it been made by human hands. But it had been made by hands, planned by a mind close enough to ours that it looked like a spaceship. It had been designed with sleek lines as though intended for a different medium to space. It had engines at the back and a compartment for crew in the front, and to me it looked like something from the pulp magazines of the 1930s. It was also very incomplete, and everything was vacuum-eroded, no new work on it for countless centuries. If you’d given it a kick your foot would have gone straight through. We had a camera drone ghost along its piecemeal flank, and everyone was very quiet and still, seeing that alien construction that was still just human enough. There were no dead cosmonauts, human or otherwise, or any indication of why construction had stalled. The fact remained that, aside from the Frog God itself, some intelligent alien presence had existed in our solar system within the lifespan of the human race; some aliens that, if they had finished their ship and travelled sunwards in search of planets, might have met with our ancestors and looked them in the eye.

Some of the Mission Team would go no further than this; they would send their drones and remote workers all over the Red Rocket – so called in deference to Magda’s mythical cosmonauts – trying to find something robust enough to reverse engineer. For me, I looked at that thing and pictured aliens less advanced than us, bumbling B-movie Martians who never quite got round to Attacking From Outer Space. But what do I know?

The Mission Team retrieved Mara too, in the hope that the fragmentary images she had sent to Earth would just be the icing on a far more coherent cake, but Mara had been screwed over badly by whatever it had been through. Just before the Expedition Team set off, I heard Halsvenger from Mission saying that they couldn’t even see how Mara had made that last transmission, given the internal and external damage.

You might be picking up a theme, by now, in matters concerning the Frog God (or, as Naish alone stubbornly maintained, the ‘Artefact’): principally, that we were woefully unprepared and didn’t understand what the hell we were doing. We couldn’t understand how the thing interacted with gravity, because it had to have cast the gravity shadow of a Neptune-sized planet to get the attention of the ESA in Madrid, and yet neither Mara nor any of the probes we sent experienced anything of that, as though it had tucked its mass away as we arrived like my cousin Carl sucking his gut in when a pretty girl walked past. Then there was that craziness of perspective, and we could confirm that was absolutely not a camera glitch in Kaveney. The Frog God was modest. You couldn’t ever see its backside, orbit as you would. That pareidolic goggling visage would face you forever, as if the thing just didn’t have any of the normal dimensions or relationships with regular space.

We would, it is plain in retrospect, have been insane to actually step inside the damn thing.

Mind you, we weren’t that nuts. We didn’t just put on our pith helmets and set out into the unknown. We had the capacity to stay out here for two full years before setting off for our vastly longer return trip (a slingshot around Neptune for acceleration had been calculated, but it wasn’t as good as using the Sun). Time enough for some tests.

The Quixote came with plenty of remotes, and we started inserting them into the Frog God’s orifices in short order. Probes sent into the vast central bowl were obliterated, signal lost and no sign whatsoever of them, either disintegrated or sent so utterly elsewhere there was no trace or peep from them. Some of the remotes sent into the other larger openings met similarly apocalyptic ends; later experience suggested they were holes into radically hostile aeromes or extreme pressures. Others seemed literally just shallow sockets that went nowhere, as if they were doors to which we didn’t have the key. I wondered, if we had been super-evolved spacefaring blue whales, say, would the larger apertures have gaped and the smaller ones remained sealed? It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking, playing mental chess with the place’s absent makers.

Soon, though – almost suspiciously soon – we had identified a conveniently human-scale opening that had within it the sweetest oxygen-nitrogen blend imaginable at a pleasant 0.91G and slightly under one normal atmosphere of pressure: the sort of rarefied air you might get most of the way up a mountain. But dark, very dark. No light in the Crypts save what you bring with you.

We explored by drone some way, with the Expedition Team assembling like schoolkids every day to get the latest. We saw the remote’s spotlights on bare stone walls, and lost in the dust of great chambers. After a few days we found a patch of carving, intricate geometric matters that might or might not have been some form of writing. After a week of cautious flying – and the loss of half our remote fleet to various misadventures – we found a section that was lit. The lamps were plainly not made by the same hands as the walls: they looked weirdly primitive, sparking industrial bulbs of blue crystal stapled crudely to the wall. More than half were dead, and several more were pulsing erratically. Intense droneage of the area found a few corkscrewing metal rods that might have been tools made for inhuman hands, given how their termini seemed to match certain parts of the lamps. Dust lay everywhere, undisturbed, and there was no other trace of the vanished lamp lighters.

We had been cooped up inside the ship for a long time by then, and with very little to do. Communications with Earth were so staggered as to make a free and frank exchange of ideas impossible, and often the different agencies back home were giving us conflicting advice. The final authority on what was to be done was Doctor Naish, that same Janette Naish who had run the briefings on the Frog God back when we were training. She had crowbarred her way onto the top spot on the Mission Team. She was the human authority on all things Frog Goddish, after all, and if she didn’t have any astronaut training at the outset, she had remedied that with a grim determination, trading her science for our skills until we met in the middle.

I do not know who the word came from, to send in the Expedition Team at last. I mean, probably it was someone on Earth; the head of the Madrid team, or perhaps even a unified front from all the various space agencies that we should stop pussyfooting around and just go in. But it’s equally possible that it was Doctor Naish on her own initiative. She was desperate to get boots on the ground in there, now the remotes had shown we could survive – and we’d be going in suited, after all. We wouldn’t be exposing ourselves to teratogens or mutagens or biohazards despite the congenial air and the home-style gravity. We weren’t stupid about things, is what I’m saying. We weren’t like those dumbass astronauts you see in films, who take their helmets off or bend obligingly low to investigate the killer monster alien eggs.

And we weren’t prepared. But then, we could have hung before the Frog God’s slack lips for a hundred years and not been prepared. The remotes did their best, seeding the near tunnels with signal routers so they could send and receive deeper within the rock, but we were going to take it from there.

And I don’t think it was strictly necessary. Not then, not immediately. We could have continued with remotes a while longer, surely. We might have triggered the traps that way, discovered the hazards that would undo us. Similarly, we might have sent a metal box to the Moon in 1969 that popped up an American flag while silently playing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ It wouldn’t have been the same. The people back at home and the people on the Quixote all wanted the same thing, me included. We wanted to set foot inside the Crypts. We wanted to make them a part of the human domain, to bring them within our compass. The true value of the Expedition Team was as a propaganda victory over the universe.

So the word came. I remember the briefing clearly. Doctor Naish standing in front of us, telling us the day had dawned.

We were going in.