Walking to Aldebaran

CHAPTER EIGHT

DOCTOR NAISH GOT us all together in one room; the entire crew, even those whose turn it was to sleep. She and the Mission Team had studied Mara’s records and the data from our diminishing fleet of drones, and they had received the delayed thoughts of the various scientists back on Earth. She had looked at the facts and prepared a theory that fit them, which the Expedition Team would get to test.

Of all the people who should have been sleeping right then, Doctor Naish looked as though she was top of the list, a world away from the cheerful, telegenic science communicator who’d been on everyone’s TV screens. From the look on her face, I half expected her to just shout “Fuck knows!” at the top of her voice in her broad Scottish accent and throw her tablet across the room.

We floated there in front of her, holding on to various straps and handles. Those of us scheduled to actually go on the expedition wore expressions indicating various stages of constipation, because we’d been given all manner of bone tablets and muscle stimulants to prepare us for being in gravity again, and our bodies weren’t appreciating the tune-up. Everyone else just looked tired and ill-tempered, because space is full of panic and boredom in random allotments, and it gets people’s backs up eventually.

“The Artefact,” said Doctor Naish, rubbing at her eyes. She still refused to call it the Frog God. “What we see out there isn’t the Artefact, not really. It’s just… the tip of the iceberg, is the phrase I’ll be using for the press back home. And the rest of the iceberg is… not in the universe as we know it. We know it’s very large, but it’s folded almost entirely outside normal space. All we have are its doorways. Plural; the Mara’s images are unequivocal, and one of our drones also recorded some similar footage. Similar but not the same, because there was a different starfield and no planet.”

She gave us a blank stare as though unsure for a moment who we were or why we were there. She’d been pushing herself far too hard, and now the only answer she had was scientific nonsense. Only the actual fact of the Frog God floating out there stopped everyone laughing at her.

“We don’t know how it interacts with normal space. We’ve all seen how you only ever see the same facing, no matter the angle. It seems likely that the Artefact has several such exits, maybe hundreds, thousands. We have images of two and one of those plainly includes a planet with a spacefaring civilisation in advance of ours. It may therefore be that the Artefact’s gates only become active in planetary systems where such activity is detected; and it’s proposed that an inactive gateway wouldn’t be visible or detectable by any means, folded away out of sight. Or they may just be everywhere and we got lucky that there’s a gate near us. Or perhaps the Drake Equation comes up with four aces every time and there’s space aliens everywhere.” She kneaded the bridge of her nose. “Or they bring out the spacefarer in us, like 2001. I mean we just don’t know, do we? All I can say for certain is there was definitely some unexplained interaction between the Artefact, Kaveney and Mara. It activated them. It drew our attention to itself.”

“Hvad vil det have?” Eva Ostrom asked. So what does it want?

Naish just shrugged. “Jeg ved det ikke.” Confessing her ignorance. “Does it want anything?” she went on in lilted English. “Questions we’ll probably never answer. What does it do, though? It has a hundred entrances, scaled to different sizes. Several, including the one best suited to us, have a breathable atmosphere and conveniently survivable temperatures and pressures inside – though nobody is going to be taking their helmets off to smell the roses, right?”

No disagreement on that one.

“So what it does is this: it links distant parts of the galaxy. Or perhaps galaxies. Mara got to another star system and back in a matter of months. It’s a pedestrian underpass. We can go in, things could come out. And have done, in the past; the Red Rocket proves that. Whatever built the Artefact must have had a burning need to connect Here to There on a cosmic scale, and not just for their own purposes. We know there are different environments in there. We think there might even be… ‘roads’ of particular atmospheres linking similar planets. Or there may be no logic to it at all. Whoever built the Artefact, they don’t appear to be using it now. It’s just… there. There’s no suggestion of internal power or mechanism integral to the structure. The structure itself appears stable, and perhaps, once twisted into whatever space it occupies, its very shape holds it in place. We know so little about how such a thing might be done, it’s pointless to speculate.”

She had very plainly worn herself to the bone with just such speculation.

“The Expedition Team is on sleep shift as of the end of the briefing,” she told us all. “When your alarm goes, you’ll be going in. You’ll take every possible precaution. You’ll have the buggy to carry supplies, tents and tools. You’ll have one of the remotes, and we’ll watch you for as long as we can. Electromagnetic signals don’t carry far inside, but you’ll be setting down boosters to get it out to us. Your mission objective is first just to reach the lit area that we’ve already identified, and establish a camp there. Nothing more than that, for now. We’re going to take this very slow and very steady. No grandstanding, is that clear?”

And it was clear. We were going to be so careful. We were no fools.

And she went over every detail of the mission procedure, and every individual confirmed their understanding of it, as belt-and-braces as you like. Then, right as everyone was ready to drift off, Naish’s face kind of spasmed with sheer annoyance and she said, “You’d think, if they could build something like this, they’d have just made something big that spaceships could go through. I mean why?” And if the ancient Frog-makers had reared their hoary heads at that moment, they’d have had it from both barrels from an extremely irate Scotswoman. Wisely, they remained unknowable and absent.

NOW, DOCTOR NAISH, I’m really happy for you, becoming head of the Mission Team and all, and Imma let you finish, as the man said, but Gary Rendell is by far the most qualified Crypt-ologist of all time, by now. So I’m going to weigh in with my own thoughts on the sum total of human knowledge about the Frog God, which is suitable to be recorded for posterity on the back of a postage stamp.

I am not convinced by any of the conclusions Naish came to. I have conceived of some counter-proposals during my long, cold exile here. I mean, we see a thing we can get into and we think someone made it to let us get from A to B, right? As if we were hedgehogs, and the Makers were concerned about us getting across a busy motorway. And so they built this goddamn cosmic structure that sort of exists at the secret heart of spacetime or some damn thing, with its openings conveniently everywhere for the benefit of everyone. Except, not so bloody convenient for us, when you think about it. The Pyramid People didn’t even have to get out of the Palaeolithic to go walking to the stars. We had to get 700 AU out from orbit, which stretched our technological ability to the absolute limit. That playing field is hella unlevel, Toto, bro. I’m thinking, what if all these passageways weren’t ever intended for us, or anything like us? I mean, rats can creep about a building via the ventilation ducts, but nobody’s got their convenience in mind when designing the layout.

But, I hear Doctor Naish’s stern brogue correct me, there’s the glitches with Kaveney and Mara, the way the Crypts were so desperate, seemingly, for us to find and visit them, once we’d got close enough to register. Rank anthropomorphism that the real Doctor Naish wouldn’t have indulged in, I know, but most of us back then were definitely thinking of some design at work that had a place for us.

So let’s say the place is interested in us. Let’s say it wants us to come in – but on foot, like polite visitors, not just roaring through but pacing their halls, just like I’m condemned to. Why no space-lanes, like Doctor Naish complained? Is it some ancient religion, every step cleansing our souls? Are we pilgrims on some cosmic Hajj? After all, what if we got to an exit, and it was as remote as our entry-point? It’s not as though we could lug the makings of a new spaceship all that way with sled dogs. That was the problem the Red Rocketeers ran into, after all. How long did it take them to bring their spaceship through, piecemeal and plagued by all the hazards of the Crypts? No wonder they never finished it.

Ask the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Gary Rendell of back then and he’d have given you all sorts of cheery, optimistic answers about our place in the universe and the intentions of the Crypt-lords. But I am not that man any longer. In a very real sense I am not that man, and I cannot cross that river twice because I’m in a horrible dark place that doesn’t have any rivers. My answer is that the Crypt-makers are still here. They never left. Wander far enough, deep enough, proceed in directions for which no being of regular space has names, and you may find them. Perhaps they’re dead, and they bring visitors to die here as a remembrance of the corpse of their greatness. Perhaps they watch us from the very stone, and thrill to our struggles and our pain. Perhaps they dream, and with strange aeons they will wake and wonder about all the little rats scuttling through their ventilation shafts. Because if there’s anything in the universe that Can Eternal Lie, it’s the Crypts. Some of Naish’s colleagues back on Earth even suggested they were a survival from a previous universe, anchored to ours to preserve them from destruction. Another said they were such advanced creations that they had most likely been built in the far distant future, towards our own universe’s eventual end, but their immunity to the regular laws of space set them outside time as well, existing simultaneously in all eras, alpha and omega. Clever fellow, that one.

THE INITIAL EXPEDITION Team comprised Joe Martino (USA, team leader and geologist and, as we used to say, neither shaken nor stirred), Louis Chung (USA, psychologist, evidence of how much the US had taken over the project back home), Karen Aanbech (Netherlands, engineer and zero-G ping pong champion), Gary Rendell (UK, general reprobate and responsible for driving the shopping trolley with our stuff on it), Katarin Anderova (Russia, backup engineer and communications specialist, plus backup first contact diplomat) and finally, after a lot of horse trading, Ajay Hussain (Pakistan, linguist and primary first contact specialist, who got on the team on the strength of his book about the building blocks of language vis-a-vis communicating with aliens, which was conveniently finished on the voyage and published six months before the Expedition Team went in).

I’m going to give you a spoiler here, just so you don’t get too caught up in the heroic daring of the whole business:

They all die.

Well, okay, not all of them. I’m still here, for a given value of ‘me,’ and I think Karen got clear of the initial clusterfuck, but what happened to her after that I cannot say. Probably she got clear of the Crypts and is on a nice family-run farm upstate with all the dogs and hamsters.

China, by the way, was offered a place but declined, being more interested in the Mission Team, and from my privileged perspective I salute their forethought. Oh, and having two team members with the initials KA was a colossal annoyance to the more bureaucratic members of the crew, but I will say that, when the end came, it wasn’t that which did us in.

There we were, anyway, out on the shuttle deck of the Quixote. I say “shuttle”, it was a bit more bare bones than that. There wasn’t anywhere to get in, to start with, just a frame you belted yourself onto, and some tame little engines, and a set of controls that I got to lord it over because I was the pilot. There’s a picture of us, six people and a mechanical trolley and the bulky-looking rotary-skirted drone. The group photo got sent straight to Earth with the next packet of messages, at the highest res they could afford. I’m looking slightly away from the camera, lanky Rendell G with my spacesuit still trailing hoses. Naish had just called for us to say cheese and Anderova K, the devil at my left shoulder, had instead said something unprintable in Danish which threw me off. She, of course, is grinning virtuously at the camera. To my right (your left as you look at the image), Martino J and Hussein A are giving the lens their brightest smiles, a pair of alpha males jostling elbows to be first into the history books. Chung L is on the far end, hand up so the drone appears to be balancing on his wrist. On the other end of the line is Aanbech K, putting a little distance between herself and Anderova K as though it’ll help distinguish their initials. She’s not looking at the camera either and half her face is hidden in the goggles she’s running diagnostics with, because she was, frankly, terrified of getting stuck out there if something fritzed out. And she was right to be, of course, but back then everyone else had begun to believe we basically had a mandate from God, Frog or otherwise, to go claim the Artefact in the name of science and human endeavour. That’s the thing about something as contradictory as the Frog God – simultaneously vastly outside our ken and yet built at a scale that invites us to stride in like the prodigal son expecting his fatted calf. Either it reinforces your insignificance or it makes you the centre of the universe, and all of us except Aanbech K had gone for Option B.

I wanted them to take another picture, but Naish was out of patience and said we had to catch our window. That was a lie; the Frog God wasn’t going anywhere, and it didn’t matter how much we tried to orbit it, we’d still be staring it in the face. Mind you, what would I have done with another chance to record my last moments in human company for posterity? I don’t imagine I’d’ve had the forethought to stand there second time round looking like Munch’s The Scream, and that’s just about the only appropriate farewell I could have given.

We piled on the shuttle, and Karen insisted on everyone running suit diagnostics again, while she did the shuttle itself. Everything was fine. We told her not to worry; we were only about to step beyond all human experience, I mean, what was there to worry about? Then everyone else cleared the bay and we rolled off on rails to the big airlock, waited until it was evacuated, and then pottered off into space. I will confess, whatever I trained to be an astronaut for, it was not piloting that crappy little shuttle. It was about as exciting to handle as the little pretend rocket on a merry-go-round.

We swung close to the Red Rocket, which had not exactly been on the schedule but I’d lost a bet with Magda Proshkin. Close, here, still meant fifty klicks, but our HUDs magnified the image until we felt we’d had a good look. Some had speculated it was only the last in a series, and that its creators had visited Earth in prehistory, the ancient astronauts of the conspiracists. The people who said that sort of thing never saw the vessel in the flesh. It was so charmingly retro, a bit clumsy, more the work of Marvin the Martian than a chariot of von Däniken’s space gods.

Then Naish was chewing me out for wasting fuel, and I took us to the little eye of the Frog God marked out with beacons. There was nowhere to park – isn’t it always the way? – but Captain Joe took a line over and secured us to a ring that the remotes had screwed with considerable effort into the stone. Everyone piled off and I ghosted the shuttle in until it was actually resting on the rim of the Frog God’s eye. It should sit there forever, just as the Red Rocket had hung out there forever, because Newtonian physics was wiser than we were and wouldn’t touch the Artefact with a barge pole for fear of not getting an equal and opposite reaction.

This eye was about four metres across. Our suit lamps revealed a square stone passageway leading off, twisted into a spiral like a goat’s crumpled horn. By now I had the trolley off the shuttle and was ready to go in like an airline flight attendant in a spacesuit.

We went in. That was when things went a little wrong; just a little. Basically, we went in from three sides, but we all ended up crashing together on the same down, as though no matter where on the eye’s ring you entered, it was the same place. Karen ended up sitting on the trolley, Ajay stepped on the remote, and Louis took Joe’s elbow in the back of the helmet and went forward, somehow ripping open his suit.

The suit had all sorts of failsafes, but most of them were designed to ward against vacuum, and we were very much surrounded by atmosphere right then, and weak-kneed under most of a G of gravity. There was a horrible moment when Louis was just crying out, sure he was about to die, and everyone else panicked.

The tear was over his thigh, and we got the rest of his suit isolated. He was bleeding a bit, and if there was anything nasty in the atmosphere it would have got into his system. We had a grim, rapid-fire discussion with the Mission Team over whether to abort. Louis himself put a stop to that, summoning all his American frontiersman spirit and saying he felt fine. In any other situation, he would have been back on the bus faster than you could snap your fingers, but nobody can snap their fingers in a spacesuit, and nobody wanted to delay any more, and he said he felt fine, didn’t he?

This isn’t going to be the thing that screws us over, by the way. I’m just spinning the wheels of false suspense. Louis Chung was fine right up until he died.

We laboured off into the dark, the beams of our lamps seeming more and more inadequate as the shadows gathered about us.