Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER SEVEN

TODAY IS GOING to be one of those trying days.

It starts with the tar trap. One moment I’m trudging along in the dark – you know, the usual – and then I hit a slick of something viscous and nasty, and I make the mistake of pressing on, and soon after that I’m labouring to move my feet at all, glued to the damn floor by some sort of disgusting ooze. It’s another thing they don’t train you for in astronaut school.

I blame the scratching. For some time I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it, to hunt down whatever psychic bastard is doing it to me and do such things to whatever anatomy they are possessed of that they will never so much as scratch again. It has become something of an obsession, Toto, that much I allow, but it’s not as if the damn Crypts are crawling with entertainment.

And I was getting closer, and now I’m standing here with my feet stuck in goo thinking that maybe I’m closer than I thought and the telepathic scrape-monster has a keen sideline in gluing people to the floor before it eats them, and I have just been reeled in like a fish.

My feet aren’t going anywhere, which means that, unless I get the knife and a whole load more desperation, neither is the rest of me. Instead of pointlessly struggling and wearing myself out, I listen for the thing that is surely coming. The alternative is even more depressing, in a way: what if I’m caught in the web of a spider long dead? This glue might remain sticky for millennia. I should patent it. I’d be the richest dead man in this whole alien horror maze.

But no, the trap-maker is alive and well, and abruptly I revise just which is the preferable outcome. I can hear something coming towards me with agonising slowness. It is above me, inching its way along ceiling and walls with careful clicks and clacks as it reaches out and places its feet. Some large, softer part of it is scraping along, giving me the sense of something baggy and huge. Possibly it’s just going to drop on me and then absorb both me and the tar into its body over many days. That sounds exactly the sort of thing that my new life is made of.

I have my little jury-rigged firelighter, and abruptly I can’t live without seeing the agent of my demise. It surely can’t be as horrible as my imagination is painting it. I thrust out the little sparker and flick away at it until I start to throw out little arcs of jagged light.

The trap-maker doesn’t pause, and probably can’t see. I can see it, though, and that prompts another change of heart, because it is considerably nastier than my feeble Earth imagination had posited. Much of its substance is a coiling nest of intestines spread vine-like back along the passageway, so that what is creeping towards me is just one terminus of its distributed body. And as termini go, it is not a pretty one. There are beak-like plates there, at least seven of them, opposed to one another and boasting serrated edges. Even that’s not enough for the discerning intergalactic predator, because it has lashing barbed feelers as well, and coiled things that look a bit like scorpion tails, and fuck-off enormous fangs surely loaded with every kind of agony-inducing venom imaginable. It looks as though it got into God’s desk after school and nicked off with every single nasty toy confiscated from the fallen angels. It writhes towards me along the ceiling, various spiked parts of it clicking and clattering against the stone. It’s in no hurry. It’s probably waited a thousand years for some dumbass Earthman to come along and wake it up.

A fairly large part of me is suggesting I use my knife on myself, rather than let myself be gradually disassembled by that appalling toolkit. No doubt Hamlet thought the same way when he did that To Be Or Not To Be speech, you know, whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of etcetera or let yourself be eaten by a Swiss Army knife from space.

The rest of me, though, including that part that largely got spliced into me by that godforsaken Mother Machine (spoilers!) and has left me so very enduring and determined, is having none of it, Hamlet bedamned. I get out my knife. It seems like pissing into the hurricane compared to all those sharp edges the approaching monster has, but I have something it doesn’t. I have human ingenuity.

A few minutes pass as it inches closer, its mouthparts twitching in hungry anticipation. Human ingenuity is drawing a blank. Captain Kirk would have thought of something by now, I’m sure, but I have no red-shirted confederates to feed to it. There’s just me and my useless human brain.

Then I begin to feel a stinging sensation around my feet. I have bare feet, I should say. Inexplicably, the space boots provided by NASA didn’t hold up to months trekking about on a hard surface under a variety of gravities. Now my bare feet feel like they’re on fire, the sticky tar about them fairly bubbling with acidic secretions. Because of course this is what happens, and the slime will dissolve my legs while its maker snacks on my head. This is exactly what happens when you go into space and I can’t think why I ever wanted to get out of Earth’s atmosphere in the first place.

It’s still just stinging, so far, so I strike a spark to see what’s actually going on. What I see is the sticky stuff receding from my toes in a wash of toxic-looking bubbles, and abruptly I can move again. Wherever I place a leathery sole, the alien goo just shrivels away. I am doing this, or at least my body is – I seem to have less and less say in what it can do and when it does it – I am sweating vitriolic solvent through my pores. That is apparently just one more thing the Machine gave me.

I look up at the intestine monster inching overhead and a shock of wrath fills me. Going to eat me, were you? Think you’re so highly evolved, with your traps and your stupid number of different mouthparts? Well, you picked on the wrong Earthman, baby! I duck past the thing’s blindly questing head, snapping sparks from my lighter to show where it is, and then I’m beneath the glistening cables of its appalling body.

Human ingenuity is still sleeping on the job. What steps up to bat is sheer rage. It’s not just the justifiable anger I might feel towards a hideous monster that’s tried to eat me, it’s all of it: it’s being lost in this godforsaken place for so long, it’s the scritchy scratchy whispering which even now is scraping in my head like a cheesegrater. It’s the gravities and pressures, the cold, the dark, the hunger and most especially all the goddamned monsters that make this place even more miserable than it needs to be.

I reach up with a roar of fury and grasp two handfuls of slippery cables, and I pull. I haul the thing down bodily from the ceiling, rip it from the stone like tearing ivy from a wall, leaving a pattern of wet suckers behind. I pull its substance taut between my knotted hands and I tear and rip. I get my foot on its thrashing, clattering head and I pull cables of gut from it, pop, pop, pop! I tear open individual coils with my bloody teeth, is what I do. I stamp on it and I wring it, I crush and I tear. I forget I ever had a knife, or any tool. All the tools I need are my body and my rage.

Some time later I come back to myself, covered in ichor. I have followed the coils of the thing to its heart, a great bloated body with half a dozen ropy arms leading off down various corridors. I’ve utterly disembowelled it, and when a thing’s mostly made of bowels that’s quite the undertaking. I am victorious. I am savage. I beat my chest and bellow like an animal.

After that, listening to the echoes of my whooping bounce back to me from the walls of the Crypt, I have the grace to feel somewhat embarrassed. I am British, after all, and I feel my behaviour may have crossed some subtle line of etiquette. Let us never mention this again, Toto.

Once my adrenaline (or whatever I have in its place now) has ebbed to more socially acceptable levels, I am left with that cursed scritching still making a home for itself in my skull. I’d thought this beastie was to blame, a telepathic lure into its nasty sticky trap. Apparently it just had the bad luck to be between me and whatever is actually tormenting me. Still, I feel the Crypts are a marginally better place without it, so no regrets, right?

I flex my arms. They look beefier than Gary Rendell’s used to be, and Gary was a fit bloke, believe me. And Gary’s me, of course. I mustn’t forget that, only sometimes it can be hard.

I am the monster-killer. I am what the monsters in the dark are scared of, or would be if any of them had enough of a brain to be scared with. I am the thing the Crypts cannot kill, and something out there is fucking with me. That strikes me as a bad policy decision on its part and I am going to track it down and register a complaint with extreme prejudice.

With that resolution, this rough beast slouches off towards where the scritchy is strongest, casting about like a hunting dog at each crossroads and intersection. Sometimes the gravity crushes me. Sometimes the atmosphere is poisonous. Always there is the cold and the dark, but now I have a purpose. Someone’s trying to ruin my day and I am going to return the favour, Toto, of that you can be sure.

IT’S NOT LONG before I see light ahead, a clear green-white illumination that flickers occasionally like nothing in nature. I had been thinking about telepathic monsters, native fauna of the Crypts that have evolved alongside countless travellers until they were able to pierce any alien skull with their infuriating hook. This is something else, though: a traveller like me. Is it the source of my torment, or is it just another innocent bystander? I feel a rush of anger, as though dismembering the trapper barely tapped my vast reserves of fury, but I fight it all down. I am an ambassador for Earth, after all. I have walked with the Egg Men and the Pyramid People and a dozen other sentient races. None of whom I have been able to communicate with, it’s true, but so far I’ve not killed anything that hasn’t tried to kill me.

This rage is a new and disturbing facet to my personality, and I suspect it’s here to stay. I take some deep breaths and relax my muscles, willing the sensation to sink back down to where it came from. I feel it recede, but not very far, like a predator just beyond the reach of my campfire, growling softly to itself. It’s as much as I’m going to get from it, I know. Time to put my best face on and my best foot forward, and go and meet the neighbours. Maybe they’ll let me borrow the lawnmower. And by lawnmower I mean instantaneous teleportation device that can get me home, because some bugger’s got to have come up with one, surely, somewhere in the universe.

Except, of course, if they had, they’d never be here. They’d not need to walk the long roads between the stars by foot.

So, all very calm and collected, I approach on my bare tiptoes, creeping to each corner and peering round, seeing that corpselight radiance grow steadily stronger. Then I come to a chamber – I see the walls widen out, and the light throwing shadows there, some still, one moving.

I don’t know why the Crypts have these larger chambers. Many of them are lairs for monsters, which know these places are oubliettes for travellers to end up in, but I’m assuming that ‘zoo dungeon storage’ was not their original purpose. Some but not all have the floriate Maker sculpting on the walls. Others have been repurposed by latecomers, home away from home for some alien civilization that has left only its broken artefacts and its dust. Whatever their purpose, walk long enough in these dark halls, and you’ll find the walls opening out about you, the brief illusion of space and freedom, before you realise it’s just another part of the same damn maze.

The chambers mess with gravity too, which I’ve learned the hard way. Perhaps that’s their function, some vital engineering component that regulates the Crypts’ insane relationship with physics. This chamber is no exception. Creeping close, I feel the sickening shift in my stomach, and a flat corridor becomes a treacherous slope opening down onto a cuboid room that seemed level a moment ago, but now funnels down towards one of its corners, where a mound of detritus, shed carapaces and broken stone has collected. That’s where the camp is.

My eyes see the lantern first, of course. It’s a rod as tall as a man, curved at the top like a shepherd’s crook. In that open loop the light hangs, supported by nothing but reaching out cracking tendrils of energy to its frame like a Van Der Graaf generator in a bad SF movie. It’s soundless, steady save for its occasional fluorescent stuttering.

There are some packs, too. I take them for dead insects of unusual size at first, segmented bodies and stiff curved legs. Only later do I understand them as luggage.

There is a fire. That’s the touch that really speaks to me. All that high-tech lighting, and the traveller has lit a fire in a metal bowl. Perhaps its super-advanced heater failed, but I have a sense of something ritual, something from home. It’s got a fire because the flames are pleasing to it, because they hold back the grim nature of this place in a way artificial light cannot.

And then, at last, my eyes turn to the camp’s master, which is watching me warily.

It’s… almost human is the phrase that comes to me. Really that’s misleading, because all I see is metal, no indication of whether there’s a living thing inside, or a colony of things, or just mechanisms and beep beep boop. It is stooped, long-armed like an ape, and there are vestigial or subsidiary limbs folded along its thorax, armoured in jointed plates like the rest of it. Its domed helm has four windows, two pointing up, two down, none at human eye level. Between the ports is a rectangular panel crammed with a row of toothed wheels that spin constantly, chattering softly back and forth. Perhaps that’s how it eats, but it seems more conversational to me. Perhaps when it meets another of its kind, they lock teeth in mechanistic communion, no tongues.

Its limbs are oddly joined, the arms curved inwards at rest, elbows joints the highest part of them. The two legs are bandy, terminating in four-toed pads that seemed too narrow to let it keep balance.

It’s the most human thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Awkwardly, I let myself down, scrabbling and scraping along the carven wall until I reach the little patch of flattened rubble. I’ve horrified visions of kicking over the traveller’s fire or knocking down its lamp-staff, but none of that happens.

“Hi,” I say, raising a hand. I’m taller than it, though it looks barrel-bodied and powerful. One of its major arms is larger than the other, bulked out by a cylindrical mechanism, but both terminate in an assembly of fingers: four, equal in size and mutually opposable.

The firelight dances in the lower pair of lenses as it stares at me, or around me. Its clockwork mouth purrs and mutters to itself.

“So, hey.” I lower myself down in front of its fire, trying to keep a smile on my face, for all it must mean nothing. “How’s tricks, me old mucker? Bit nippy, isn’t it? I just walked in from Aldebaran and boy are my legs tired.” My voice echoes around the chamber, almost as alien to me as to the traveller. It continues to regard me, or at least its busy mouth remains pointed in my direction. One of its small arms delves into a slot in its side and comes out with a nugget of something it adds to the fire, subtly changing the burned-dry scent of the air. Perhaps that’s communication, where it comes from. My olfactory centres do their best, but a few months in the Crypts can’t reverse the neglect of millions of years of human evolution. And besides, how would I talk back to it? Creative flatulence?

“How’d you make a dog go woof?” I ask it, because now I’ve heard the sound of my own voice I can’t stop. “Throw it on the fire. No, that’s a cat, never mind me. Still, I guess you don’t know what a cat or a dog is anyway, so who’s to know? Hey, this is a good one, listen: is it hard to bury an elephant? Sure, it’s a mammoth undertaking. Right? Mammoth… And elephants…” It’s all coming out now, all the pent-up nonsense, stupid jokes I haven’t heard since I was eight. This is me, mankind’s ambassador to the stars. “How do they hide in the jungle, eh? Paint their balls red and climb up a cherry tree. And what’s the loudest sound in the jungle? Monkeys eating cherries, isn’t it?”

“Monkeys,” the thing says, not from its whirring teeth but from somewhere within its chest. Whatever makes that sound owes nothing to human teeth and tongue, but it forms the word nonetheless. The echo of it hangs between us.

“Monkeys,” I repeated. “Barrel of monkeys. Monkey business. Magic monkey. Journey to the West. Ack-Ack Macaque. Monkey can’t buy you love. No, wait, that’s wrong.”

One of its little arms dips inside its suit again and comes out with a rectangular block, offering it to me. I take it without thinking, peeling off the wrapper with long familiarity.

“It’s money, money can’t buy you love. Because it’s the root of all evil, or love of it is.” And I’m about to tell this alien how I don’t miss money, really, or monkeys, but I did miss love, meaning the company of my fellow humans. First, though, I bring the bar up to my lips and take a decent bite. The curiously distant flavour floods my mouth, a thousand times better than worm meat or air-dried flank of Clive, made as familiar as mum’s Sunday dinners by the long journey out here.

I stop.

I examine the wrapper, seeing the ESA logo there, the ingredients in English, French, Spanish and German. And Danish, written on in awkward biro.

“Where’d you get this?” I ask.

Scritch scratch scritch, goes the stylus in my brain.

“That information is not permitted,” says the alien from the caverns of its chest. Only it really says something like “Du har ikke lov til at kende disse oplysninger,” because we were all speaking Danish like natives by the time we reached the Frog God.

“Where did you get this?” I yell at it. It has met my kin. More, it has met the Quixote expedition team, unless there’s been some enormous Danish space-diaspora since I left Earth. It knows where they are, it must do.

“Ikke tilladt,” it states, and I don’t know if it’s just echoing the words or reinforcing them. The intonation is identical.

“No, look at me,” I gabble to it. “I’m human. I got lost. I got separated from them.” I try to indicate various parts of my anatomy to indicate just how human I am. “I need to find them, please. Tell me where – tell me…” I try to remember the Danish for all of this, because my time in the Crypts has led to me lapsing back into English and now the syntax and vocabulary is muddled in my head, infected by Spanish and German and all nine words I ever learned of Polish.

“Tilladt,” it says, like some metal parrot. And then a sound like the whine of a power saw cutting into metal, something no human language ever knew.

I wave the food bar at it. “Listen, mate, you do not want to mess with me right now.” And all the time that whisper-scritch in my head is growing louder and more insistent, and is it this? Is this the whisperer? How can it even get inside my head, when it looks like a weevil in a diving suit?

Unless it’s had practice, of course. Unless peeling human minds is something it’s been doing a lot of recently.

I stare at the food bar, focusing on that earnest biro amendment, the handwriting of Eda Ostrom who’d decided to become a Danish nationalist for a lark. I feel that, if I concentrate hard on the torn wrapper, I’d see blood there. I imagine the barrel-bodied thing crouching over dying humans, interrogating them, seeing how their bodies fit together by taking them apart. I imagine it ravaging their minds, tearing out their languages and thoughts just as it’s drilling into mine. Abruptly I know with a burning certainty that this is what happened. This thing has the hunchbacked cant of a murderer, sinister in its iron suit. My teammates came here seeking peaceful contact with other stars, but creatures like this metal ape have been here for years, preying on the unwary, killing them and taking their things. It’s no better than the worm creatures.

“What are you?” I demand of the thing. “What did you do to my friends?”

“Aber,” it pronounces contemptuously. Apes; monkeys. It’s not just recalling my earlier words, it’s dismissing my entire species: primitives, animals.

I can feel all that rage I had folded up so neatly bursting out inside me. For a moment, I’m holding the door closed on it, because what good can it possibly do? But the anger floods my skull, drowning out the scritchy. The chamber fills with the rising tide of a roar and the roar comes from me. I bounce the half-eaten food bar off the thing’s domed helmet and then I follow with my own aim, leaping high in the air to come down swinging. Two-fisted space action! Pow! Bam! Crunch!

It throws me off – the angle of those curved limbs mean I end up flying ten feet in the air, but I come down with my feet braced against the slope of a wall like a goddamned interstellar ninja and jump right back at it. For a moment I have my hands about the rim of its helmet, and I’m going to open the fucker up and see if it’s a monkey or a bug monster or twelve penguins all crammed in together. Then it slaps me down with a big metal fist, and I see something light up and spin within the cylinder attached thereto. That’s just enough warning for me to get the hell out of the way before its energy cannon or whatever-the-hell carves up the air where I was crouching, leaving a great molten furrow in the stone of the Crypts itself.

I’m not daunted; in fact I’m even angrier, every knock feeding that insane wrath within me. I get hold of the alien and lift it bodily in the air, slamming it against the wall in the hope I’ll break open its armour like an eggshell. Still in one piece, it kicks me in the jaw, catapulting me backwards, and lands on all fours. I see it snatch up its light-crook and the packs, which cling to the alien’s armour with their little legs, and lurch to my feet, bellowing hoarsely. It scuttles away, flashing away with its energy gun and drawing new, meaningless sigils in the stone.

Even fighting mad, I steer well clear of that, and I see the thing shimmy up a sheer wall and vanish into a passageway. I make several attempts to follow, still hollering and yowling, words of English and Danish peppering my incoherent ravings. I cannot manage the slope, though, nor jump quite high enough. I am left only with the thing’s fire bowl, which I kick over, trampling the coals until the air smells only of my own burnt flesh.