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.
CHAPTER NINE
I’VE SLEPT AGAIN, and when I wake some of the bruises are still there. That metal thing hit like a bloody train. I’d like to say I gave as good as I got, but that seems unlikely. Nevertheless, I won. It took to its iron heels and left me in possession of the field, not that I really want it. And I still have the food bar. I eat the rest of it, enjoying nutrition that my microbiome doesn’t have to dismantle with the care of a bomb disposal technician. The wrapper I keep, though. The wrapper, with its sad little handwritten amendment, is home. It’s from a place and time when people knew what a Denmark was and cared about it. The iron hunchback can’t know, nor would the Egg Men or the Pyramid People, or any of the rest of them, for all they’re still our fellow travellers. I feel like, in coming out here, we’re bleeding our culture, the humanness of us, out into the void. How can what we are survive contact with the Crypts?
I say this with considerable authority. What I am – was – has not survived contact with the Crypts either.
So I wake, and it should be a slow, blissful thing, but in reality that damn scritchy-scratchy has been ramping up and ramping up, and now it’s like cicadas in my brain, like circular saws against the inside of my skull. So while my body wanted to stay unconscious and regenerating, instead I leap up and stare around, convinced that they are right around the next corner, beaming their tormenting nonsense into the very chambers of my brain. I’d eat humble pie with every conspiracy theorist in the world if they’d only lend me one of their tinfoil hats right now.
I prowl about the chamber and then beyond it, sloping down the corridors of the pan-galactic tomb, sniffing out where the scritch is marginally louder. Its creators are nowhere to be found, not in an hour’s search, but I know they’re closer. Is it the Iron Hunchback doing this to me, turning up the gain on my pain because I put a foot through his fire? Or is he just another distraction, another station on the road to my cross? Except, when I end up at my destination, I am going to eat Pontius Pilate’s heart to make this cursed sound stop.
There are more words in it now, or almost-words. I hear the sibilants and plosives of conversation, but without meaning. It means I can never grow used to it, as I might to cicadas or sawblades. The part of my brain that craves human contact is having its balls constantly flicked in a hundred different ways. I feel as though the sound is homing in on the greatest possible annoyance, infinitely impossible to ignore. Much more of this and I’ll never sleep again, never have a moment’s calm, not even be able to hear my own thoughts. I’ll end up dashing my vaunted human ingenuity out against the walls, and doubtless that’s when they will creep out from the shadows and feed, licking my cerebral fluid from the cold stone.
I ache all over. For my first few hours of hunting I chalk it all down to the Iron Hunchback and our bout of fisticuffs, but I truly do not remember him doing a number on those parts of me that are aching now. I realise that the fight, and perhaps the battle with the intestine-monster before, has led to my body going through another series of changes. It’s Lamarckian evolution in action: push me and my body pushes back, my muscles rearranging themselves, my bones warping to squeeze out another few percentage points of efficiency. It should be agony, except the constant chatter in my head eclipses it all. Mere physical pain is a welcome distraction.
I’m making good headway, as far as I can tell; at least the voices in my head are getting louder, so that every time I turn a corner I think I’m about to confront the Iron Hunchback or whatever goddamn psychic parasite is boring into my mind. What I don’t reckon on is finding a patch where the Crypts have broken down.
Now I don’t know for sure that’s what’s happened, but this isn’t the first time I’ve run into this kind of malarkey and my gut feeling is that it is absolutely not business as usual. The Crypts are unfathomably ancient (and/or contiguous with every moment in the universe’s existence) and they have no visible moving parts, and so we were thinking of them as a perfect constant, a structure superseding time and space. I guess nothing’s perfect, though. The last time it was a leak, a region where the atmosphere was vanishing away in some direction I couldn’t even understand. How that might end, left long enough, I didn’t want to wait around and find out. Probably the leak would seal itself somehow and the equilibrium of the Crypts would be restored, or else surely even miniscule irregularities would have destroyed the place by now. We are things of a human scale, though. Maybe the Crypts are indeed crashing down around us, just so slowly as to be imperceptible.