And then it ate me. The bit I was standing on retracted like a frog’s tongue and yanked me down into the guts of the thing, and the petals closed over my head.
If I’d been playing the odds, this would be just one more of the predators that had evolved to survive the Crypts, and I would have been as dead as Joe and Katarin and the rest. It wasn’t a monster, though; it was a machine. I’d go further than that, in fact. It was a Machine. The Machine. It was the Mother Machine that said, bring me your hungry, your unwilling exiles, and I shall give them what they most desire, and they shall be born anew from my jagged, knife-edged womb.
Or that’s what it probably said, my dear old Mum, but frankly I was too busy screaming to really appreciate the poetry of it. Like a true mother, in fact, it was probably telling me it was all for my own good, but I was being torn apart and so it was hard for me to appreciate it. I thrashed and fought, but it’s hard to do that without skin, and with your guts unspooled like a dead cassette tape. I tried to beg for life, and then for a quick death, but Mother was playing washerwoman with my lungs and so I was unable to put my point across as eruditely as I wanted. And I tried to pass out, but she wouldn’t let me. She was telling me what she was doing, in an alien notation I couldn’t ever understand or even remember, but it was very important to Mother that I hear it. When my ears were torn off, she just spoke her wisdom into my brain.
I mean, I could go on, Toto, but I reckon you get the idea by now. Reassembly was even worse, to be honest, but this kind of torture-porn can be a drag, and I don’t want to dwell. I’d rather look on the bright side, because it really was all for the best, just as if I was a kid who had to wear a brace for a bit to get those straight teeth. And probably the Mother Machine didn’t understand about things like consciousness and pain and going goddamn crazy forever because something’s peeling your skin off and thrusting fingers between every fibre of your muscles; I mean, why would it?
So let’s skip forward to the moment of my second birth, when I emerged into that octagonal chamber again, just the same old Gary Rendell, mostly. I wasn’t covered in blood or ichor or blue slime. I didn’t have wings or talons. I didn’t even have eyes that could see in the dark, because this dumbass here didn’t mention that little problem to Mother. Can you imagine? I might have had these feeble human eyes poked out by a godlike alien device, and I missed my chance.
I stood there, shucking off the few rags of spacesuit left to me, looking for the scars that I knew should be there, but weren’t. The Mother Machine’s craftsmanship is second to none. I’d been remade at a cellular level, maybe even a molecular level. And I would be able to go find my lost kin even if I had to walk forever to do it.
I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I would never starve, never suffocate or be poisoned (and no, I didn’t ask for those, but I think it’s all part of the hunger thing, or else it was on special offer or something, buy one invasive body modification, get one free).
And that, Toto, is how I got to be the man I am today: hard work and determination and an alien machine that flayed me alive so I could be the best that I could be.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I MEAN: YES…
I mean, okay, confession time, I am overdoing the naïve and tragic monster here. I am not Hercules at home with the family, after all, and while the Mother Machine might have made me Herculean, it didn’t drive me quite so obliviously mad as that. I could make a lot of excuses: I’ve not been well, it was an off day, haven’t been sleeping, all that, but I can’t fool myself and I can’t fool you, Toto. I can’t really pretend that I just went off after the rest of the goblins without putting two and two together.
I’m going to keep calling them goblins, because one thing human ingenuity is good at is an infinite capacity for self-delusion.
I sense I’m losing audience sympathy, Toto. After all, surely I’m meant to have that big scene now where I hold up those name tags in my bloody hands and scream at the gods for tricking me. I mean, this is grade-A anagnorisis territory, as much as if I’d killed my father and married the Mother Machine. Howl, howl, howl! as the man says. And somewhere a masked chorus sings about reaching too far, tragic flaws and hubris.
But really, hubris? Me? Gary Rendell from Stevenage? Not exactly Prometheus, am I? I never stole anything from the gods. They turned up like Greeks, arms full of gifts and wanting to know how they could help. I can’t be blamed, can I, for saying I wanted to get back to the others, to go home? And so it becomes a little more Monkey’s Paw than Homeric ode. I made a perfectly well-meaning wish and there were unintended consequences. Mistakes were made, but innocent ones. I’m not at fault. Don’t blame me.
And I still hear them, that irresistible mental thread that cuts through my brain like fishing line and draws me towards them. It hurts, that tug. It won’t let me rest. Scritch, scritch, scritch all the time inside my skull as their thoughts bombard me like particles in an accelerator.
There’s a pack of them just round the corner, I realise. I can hear them clatter and rattle with their tools and devices, but more than that I can hear their buzzsaw minds flaring with fear. And I should go, I know I should. I should be the noble savage and return to my land so as not to corrupt the civilized visitors with my mores. I mean, I can dress it up as diplomacy as much as I want but I’m covered in the blood of Carswell P and Proshkin M,
which would probably count as a faux pas at most diplomatic functions. Should I hold out my arms for a hug to show this modern Prometheus just wants to be loved?
And, oh, the fear! The frenetic squabbling panic of them as they try to get their gear packed up before I arrive, except I’m just round the next corner, listening. That fear, the keenest, scritchiest cicada-call of them all, except now my body reacts a bit differently. Now my body has had a taste of that fear, and the soft, easily-digestible tissues that house it. My stomach growls a demand of its own and my salivary glands are working overtime. If they didn’t want to be eaten, they shouldn’t be so delicious.
I make a last lunge for dignity. I am Gary Rendell, astronaut. I was born on Earth too many decades ago. I was lost from the Expedition Team too many months or weeks or centuries ago. I will wave my humanity like a flag, drape myself in it. I will beg forgiveness from the goblins. And I only ate two of them.
And so I round the corner. I want to stand straight like Washington crossing the Delaware, but somehow the corridors are too cramped for that, forcing me to maintain my bestial stoop, my shoulders brushing the ceiling. I hold up a hand: Hi, kids, minotaur-in-training here, how’s that maze working out for you?
There are five of them here, and they’ve been stripping something from the walls, metal strips some previous travellers laid down. There are lights here, like watery cats-eyes, but most of them are dead because the goblins are vandals and are taking away the machinery that powered them, like scrap dealers going down the street for any old iron. Don’t they realise how precious these little islands of light are? Ghastly little destructive creatures.
But still, I keep one hand up in friendship. “Hey, there!” I tell them brightly. “Now, I know this looks bad…”
One of them has a cutting torch, and he takes advantage of my loquaciousness to go for me with it. The name on his badge is Li L and some characters I don’t know, which suggests the Chinese crew contingent ended up on the Expedition Team whether they wanted to or not. Li L is definitely going for it with that cutter, though, and my hand of friendship ends up with a big old burn across the palm, which doesn’t hurt anywhere as much as I thought it would. One of the others is backing him up with a gun, an actual honest-to-goodness chemical propellant firearm, and apparently it’s monster season because they let me have it with the entire magazine over Li L’s shoulder.