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.