That was when Mara came back.
The mini-probe just popped out of the artefact as though sneezed out of the Frog God’s nostril. It was still transmitting, but erratically. Its onboard computers were scrambled, unresponsive to any instructions. It fell away from the artefact, fast enough to escape the anomalous gravity, vomiting out a weird montage of images one after another as though it had been bursting with news it just couldn’t wait to tell us.
Lossa and Naish and the rest went over those images with a fine-tooth comb. So did the live team. So did everyone else’s scientists and live teams. There were a lot of corridors in various sizes, some cavernous, some claustrophobic (as best as anyone could judge the scale); there were lamps in the darkness; there was what looked like a statue, far larger than Mara, of something many-limbed and serpentine and seemingly headless, worked in pale stone and towering against a wall busy with spiralling sigils. There was another door, opening elsewhere.
The Mara had only a single image of it to show us, but that was the one that went a hundred times around the world, as soon as it was released. You could see the black stone edge of the circular opening, and beyond it a starfield – when we launched, people were still trying to identify what stars, where in the galaxy that might have been – and, clipping into the image, the unmistakable radiance of a planet gleaming in another sun’s light. We saw clouds and seas and the unfamiliar outlines of continents, and there was a great deal of scaffolding and structure large enough to be silhouetted against it, hanging in orbit. Mara’s positioning suggested a vantage point closer to that planet than our Moon was to Earth. The natives, whoever and whatever they were, hadn’t had to go as far as we did.
Nobody quite dared draw the obvious conclusion for a surprisingly long time. I think most of the science teams were thinking it. Doctor Liu of the Chinese National Space Administration finally bit the bullet and proposed, in a press conference notable for its restrained understatement, that the artefact was one end of a wormhole. Never mind the dark corridors, the statue, all the rest. Somewhere in there was a gate to another world.
We all expected this to just double everyone’s crazy paranoia, but it turns out there’s a limit. There were a few high-profile firings in the upper echelons of a few governments, and we all reckoned the space-ex-hungry industrialists pulled all the strings they’d spent their money on, and suddenly everyone was talking to one another. This was bigger than individual nations, was the message. This was as big as the entire Earth.
We launched – the select multinational team – not long after.
CHAPTER FIVE
AFTER PARTING COMPANY with the Egg Men, I hear the sound for the first time.
I wake to it, sleep having finally come for me, for all that I seem to need little rest now. It’s not that I don’t value sleep when it comes: I fall into its arms like a lover, despite the monsters that roam here, despite the travellers who might wish me ill. In dreams, I’m back on Earth again. I’m consorting with other human beings. I lift a pint in the pub, I watch the footie, I turn up stark naked and unprepared for vital astronaut exams. My dreams are so quotidian it makes me weep to wake from them into the darkness of the Crypts, hundreds of astronomical units from home, and simultaneously much further still.
So, waking is never welcome, but this waking is worse because there is a sound, so insidious that it is almost a tactile sensation. It is a whispering and a chittering, a fluttering and a scratching, and I feel it as if it is scrabbling at the inside of my skull.
Which is possible. I sit up quickly, clapping a hand to my left eye, the anomalous sound seeming to come from that side of my head. It feels as though someone is scraping their nails down the chalkboard of my brain – faint, distant, but impossible to ignore.
I start looking about, but it’s dark here, like every part of the Crypts that some wayfarer civilization hasn’t tried to make more festive. I try to pin down where the sound is coming from. My left. I turn one-eighty degrees. Now it comes from my right. Misdiagnosing, I roar and flail madly at the ceiling, trying to reach whatever noisemaking goblin is squatting there. I bruise my hands against the stone, which here is a bare few centimetres above my head. I reach about, scrabbling against the seamless floor. Nothing. By now the sound is louder, scrape, scrape, scrape against the nerves of my teeth so that I clamp my hands against my ears to blot it out. And that doesn’t work because the sound isn’t coming from nearby, isn’t coming from outside at all. Covering my ears just means I’m locked in my skull with that scrape, scrape, scrape, that whisper, whisper, whisper, as though a host of tiny people with shrill little voices are conspiring on my shoulder.
I start blundering about in the dark. Normally, I know which way I’ve been travelling through some sense I have no name for, but now, all sense of where I am has been driven out by that infernal scratching. I stagger one way, bouncing from the walls. The sound is louder, as though I have gone infinitesimally towards the source, despite it originating within my head. I flee the other way, finally tripping over my own feet in a blindly-sensed crossroads. It is marginally further away, but I have the dreadful feeling I may never be able to escape it, no matter what halls or what stars I run to.
And then it fades, scrape, scrape, scrape, not gone but fallen below some threshold of audibility, leaving me with a sense like tinfoil on a filling that it’s still there, still scratching away. I wonder if it’s a parasite gnawing on me. That seems the sort of thing that would come to live in the Crypts with the rest of the low-energy waiting-game monsters. But if I was genuinely carrying around a little living cargo, it wouldn’t have grown closer or further, surely. So instead, perhaps, it’s an attack. Perhaps some dark-lurker is trying to attract me or drive me away. Perhaps it’s the mating display of some telepathic horror and I’m just an inadvertent recipient.
But something in me feels intent and malice behind that scrape and whisper. There was an irregular rhythm to it that felt like language to me. That was why it woke me. All sounds are not received equal, in the auditory centres of the brain. We can sleep through thunderstorms that sound like the end of the world, and yet the distant throb of music might wake us, or the laughter from next door’s discreet garden party. Human sounds, living sounds, sounds of intelligent purpose, these things stand out as signal against all the noise of the cosmos. This scraping and skittering had just enough of that hallmark to break me from sleep. Something out there was trying to insinuate its alien words into my brain, and I don’t think I want to hear what it has to say.
I’m awake now, though, despite the unconventional alarm clock. Time to get going. My gut is half-full of worm meat, which is proving a challenge to digest, meaning I’ll be sluggish and bloated for a while yet. The worm must have been as omnivorous as my new microbiome, so you’d think that it and my digestive system would see eye to eye, but apparently not. I’ll just have to keep plugging away at it until I feel the need to crap out whatever parts of it I simply can’t stomach. It won’t be much. I’ve not passed anything bigger than a rabbit dropping for what feels like a month.
That’s probably more information than you want to know. Sorry, Toto.