“I don’t think so.”
“Because you are frightened?”
“Yes.”
“Then I am very glad to hear it. Fear is the point of this place. Fear is the last and best thing that we have.”
“We?”
“My predecessors and I. Those who came before me, the wayfarers and the lost. We’ve been coming for a very long time. Century after century, across hundreds of thousands of years. Unthinkable ages of galactic time. Drawn to this one place, and repelled by it—as you nearly were.”
“I wish we had been.”
“And usually the fear is sufficient. They turn back before they get this deep, as you nearly did. As you should have done. But you were braver than most. I’m sorry that your courage carried you as far as it did.”
“It wasn’t courage.” But then I added: “How do you know my name?”
“I listened to your language, from the moment you entered me. You are very noisy! You gibber and shriek and make no sense whatsoever.”
“Are you Teterev?”
“That is not easily answered. I remember Teterev, and I feel her distinctiveness quite strongly. Sometimes I speak through her, sometimes she speaks through us. We have all enjoyed what Teterev has brought to us.”
I had never met Teterev, never seen an image of her, but there were only two human figures before me and one of them was Lenka, jammed into immobility, strands of silver beginning to wrap and bind her suit as if in the early stages of mummification. The strands extended back to the larger form of which Teterev was only an embellishment.
She must still have been wearing her suit when she was trapped and bound. Traces of the suit remained, but much of it had been picked off her, detached or dissolved or remade into the larger mass. Her helmet, similar in design to the one we had seen in the wreck, had fissured in two, with its halves framing her head.
I thought of flytrap mouthparts, Teterev’s head an insect. Her face was stony and unmoving, her eyes blank surfaces, but there was no hint of ageing or decay. Her skin had the pearly shimmer of the figures we had seen in the second chamber. She had become—or was becoming—something other than flesh.
But apart from Teterev—and Lenka, if you included her—none of the other forms were human. The blockage was an assemblage of fused shapes, creature after creature absorbed into a sort of interlocking stone puzzle, a jigsaw of jumbled anatomies and half-implied life-support technologies. Two or three of the creatures were loosely humanoid, in so far as their forms could be discerned. But it was hard to gauge where their suits and life-support mechanisms ended and their alien anatomies commenced. Vines and tendrils of silver smothered them from head to foot, binding them into the older layers of the mass. Beyond these recognisable forms lay the evidence of many stranger anatomies and technologies.
“I’ve heard of a plague,” I said, making my way to Lenka. “They say it’s all just rumour, but I don’t know. Is this what happened to you?”
“There are a million plagues, some worse than others. Some much worse.” There was an edge of playfulness in the voice, taking droll amusement in my ignorance. “No: what you see here is deliberate, done for our mutual benefit. Haphazard, yes, but organised for a purpose. Think of it as a form of defense.”
“Against the outside world?” I had my hands on her suit now, and I tried to rip the silver strands away from it, while at the same time applying as much force as I could to drag Lenka back to safety.
The voice said: “Nothing like that. I am a barrier against the thing that would damage the outside world, were it to be released.”
“Then I don’t understand.” I caught my breath, already drained by the effort of trying to free her. “Is Lenka going to become part of you? Is that the idea?”
“Would you sooner offer yourself? Is that what you would like?”
“I’d like you to let Lenka go.” Realising I was getting nowhere—the strands reattached themselves as quickly I peeled them away—I could only step back and take stock. “She came back here to find the monkey, not to hurt you. None of us came to harm you. We just wanted to know what had happened to Teterev.”
“So Teterev was the beginning and end of your concerns? You had no other interest in this place?”
“We wondered what was in the cave,” I answered, seeing no value in lying, even if I thought I might have got away with it. “We thought there might be Amerikano relics, maybe a Conjoiner cache. We picked up the geomagnetic anomaly. Are you making that happen? If so, you can’t blame us for noticing it. If you don’t want visitors, try making yourself less visible!”
“I would, if it were within my means. Shall I tell you something of me, Nidra? Then we will speak of Lenka.”
SHALL I TELL you what I learned from her, Captain? Will that take your mind off the cold, for a little while?
You may as well hear it. It will put things into perspective. Make you understand your place in things—the value in your being here. The good and selfless service you are about to commence.
She was traveller, too.
Not Teterev, but the original one—the first being, the first entity, to find this planet. A spacefarer. Admittedly this was all quite a long time ago. She tried to get me to understand, but I’m not sure I have the imagination. Whole galactic turns ago, she said. When some of the stars we see now were not even born, and the old ones were younger. When the universe itself was smaller than it is now. Young galaxies crowding each other’s heavens.
I don’t know if it was her, an effect of the magnetic field, or just my fears affecting my sense of self. But as she spoke of abyssal time, I felt a lurch of cosmic vertigo, a sense that I stood on the crumbling brink of time’s plungeing depths.
I didn’t want to fall, didn’t want to topple.
Sensible advice for both of us, wouldn’t you say?
The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace.
But for her, so much had already happened! There had still been time enough for the rise and fall of numberless species and civilisations, time for great deeds and greater atrocities. Time for monsters and the rumours of worse.
She had been journeying for lifetimes, by the long measure of her species. Travelling close to light, visiting world after world.
If we had a name for what she was, we’d call her an archaeologist, a scholar drawn to relics and scraps.
Still following me?
One day—one unrecorded century—she stumbles upon something. It was a thing she’d half hoped to find, half hoped to avoid. Glory and annihilation, balanced on a knife edge.
We know all about that, don’t we?
Your finger is moving. Are you trying to adjust that temperature setting? Go ahead. Turn up your suit. I won’t stop you.
There. Better already. Can you feel the warmth flowing up from your neck ring, taking the sting out of the cold? It feels better, doesn’t it? There’s plenty of power in the suit. You needn’t worry about draining it. Make yourself as warm as you wish.
Look, I didn’t say there wasn’t a catch.
Turn it down, then. Let the cold return. Can you feel those skin cells dying, the frostbite eating its way into your face? Can you feel your eyeballs starting to freeze?