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!