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.