I pick a direction from the crossroads, anything other than the way I came. Perhaps the telepathic attacker has given up and gone to find some richer meal than my poor psyche. I don’t believe it, though. Somewhere, deep inside, that scrape, scrape, scrape is still happening. Today I will be twitchy as hell and constantly on a short fuse. I pity the monster that tries it on, frankly. I am in the mood to punch a worm right in the mandibles.
The worm monsters probably sense it and steer well clear, leaving me to trudge through the darkness, one hand trailing along the cold wall. Exploring the Crypts is always a joy, you understand. Any moment I might walk over the edge of an indeterminate drop, or into an aerome filled with vacuum or acidic gas, or – which is what happens – into an area where the pressure must be two atmospheres and the gravity is likewise uncongenial.
I drop, hands and knees, and for a moment I can’t breathe, to go with the not-seeing. The air around me is pleasantly oxygenated with a hint of pine freshness, but it’s thick as soup and clenched about me like a fist. I fight it as I’d fight a snake coiled about me, buttressing my ribs against it, forcing the thick medium into my airways and bloating my lungs with it. My breathing becomes very slow, but there’s plenty of goodness in each breath, and my metabolism actually speeds up. I feel my bones creak, my muscles pulled taut by the effort of not just collapsing into a puddle. But I’ve pulled more Gs than this on the simulator, and I’ve breathed worse air too. Slowly I force myself to my feet, head swimming and eyes feeling as though someone strong has their thumbs pressed against my corneas.
I stumble, but after three lurching steps I’m walking again, and my eyes see a faint glow ahead, another tenanted space, or perhaps one left fallow after its illuminators passed on. The Crypts are older than we have words for, after all, and they stretch everywhere. Long before the Madrid team sent Kaveney to investigate their gravitic anomaly, the Crypts were sitting there in a super-Plutonian orbit, made by hands we will never know, but for purposes clear to every species that comes across them. They are roads through the great dark without, just as there are roads through the lesser dark within. They let us walk to all the other stars.
And so I walk. It feels like less of a privilege now I’ve been alone for what must be months and barely recognise myself in the mirror. Still, here I am, amongst the stars. Where exactly? There is no ‘exactly.’ The Crypts go everywhere, and the distances I have to trudge, while a long trek by the standards of a weekend jogger, are trivial compared to the vast cold reaches outside. The Crypts are an artificial phenomenon which let matter, energy and information thumb their collective nose at relativity, and do it unchanged, without all that infinite-mass nonsense that approaching light speed entails.
You just put one foot in front of the other.
I reach the lights. They look bioluminescent to me: rubbery globes lukewarm to the touch, containing swirling medusae-looking things. Plenty are dead at the bottom of each lamp, meaning that these things must likely need, and be receiving, regular maintenance. Soon after, I reach the caves. The lamp-lighters didn’t bother to set their living lanterns deeper into the Crypts than their immediate home area, so either they don’t explore or their explorers carry portable lamps and don’t want to leave the universe’s most obvious trail for any sighted hunter to follow.
There are caves here, though, and that’s a shock because the Crypt-builders didn’t do caves – these have been carved out from the black stone, and by hand, not machine. The work is crude but effective and I can see the rounded scars of the tools they used. High-G creatures with a profound understanding of leverage, I infer.
Anyway, the locals have hacked out three smallish caves, and inside each is a scene that lazy archaeologists would readily characterise as “for ritual purposes.” There are more lamps – no candles or anything with a naked flame, but then the atmosphere is a bit oxygen-happy. There are stones, rounded as though polished by water and of several shades in the red-pink-orange spectrum. Then there are icons, or stelae, or obelisks. They are made from the rubble and dust of the Crypt stone itself, I reckon, moulded together into shapes by some process that hasn’t used visible cement or other glue. They’re narrow but not pointed at the top, broader at the base, and without other fancy projections, and they’re carved, but I can’t make anything of it. The lines go in and out of the cracks between pieces of stone, and the overall artistic effect is lost on me.
I back out of the cave, feeling baffled – it all looks a bit home-craft-store as far as the artefacts of a spacefaring civilisation go – and find two locals staring at me.
That sorts out what the icons are supposed to be, for the locals are also narrow at the top and broader at the base, their hides a gleaming green-black. They have four tubular legs like the stubby paws of tardigrades, and there are various orifices towards the front lower edge of their bodies. Constellations of opal fragments are scattered across their upper reaches on all sides, and my guess is that they serve as sense organs.
Oh, and they’re about a metre twenty, tops, so: tubby little obelisk guys. I dub them the Pyramid People because when I was training I skipped the lectures about naming aliens.
They’re very agitated to see me, fluting and hooting at each other, sounds that come in like little blarting foghorns in the dense atmosphere. I wave at them and they produce an array of extending arms from some of their larger orifices, threatening me with sharp obsidian-looking stones.
We have a bit of a stand-off then. I just stand there, creaking slightly in the gravity, and they carry on a complex warbling conversation like the Spanish Inquisition trying to interrogate a woodwind section. Every so often I wave and say ‘Hi’ again. Eventually I sit down with my back to the wall and my knees drawn up, and inadvertently end up the sort of shape and size they’re comfortable dealing with. With a final series of basso profundo trills, they waddle off. I might have been told to stay put or asked to follow, and there’s no interspecies body language that lets me know which. So I follow. I might be British, but I’ve been lost in a space labyrinth for an age and I’m done with waiting.
They obviously don’t have many worries about the dangers of an unknown alien (me), because they just go straight past the other caves towards a steadily warmer light source until I’m looking at a gateway out of the Crypt. I’m looking at their world.
Somehow, the Crypt terminal is actually planetside for them. They didn’t have to claw their way out of their high-G gravity well to go and find some distant big dumb object. They just wandered over the next hill, one day (that whole view was dominated by hillsides) and found a great black opening beckoning them. How that even worked, what with the screwy gravity of the Crypts, I couldn’t begin to guess. But then, ‘couldn’t begin to guess’ is very much the slogan for exploring the Crypts.
I go over and just stare out. Hillside, as I say, and mostly greenish for once, though nothing like grass, just a carpet of what looks like veiny cactus, and here and there a profoundly phallic projection, endowed with a powerful tumescence to overcome the local gravity. Except this is actually just me misinterpreting what life on a high-G world is actually like, as I discover when I step through.
And of course I step through. To feel the breeze! The sunlight on my skin! Oh, how good it must feel, how rejuvenating!
The two Pyramid People flutle and witter at me, but I just walk past and out into the new world, heedless of their sharp rocks. I come out, open my arms beatifically to the world, and then spend about ten minutes bucking and gasping under the effect of the atmosphere, because it is considerably denser out here than in the Crypts. As I choke, I spare a moment for the Pyramidites who must have had a major light-headed rush when they stepped in, if that was even a thing for their physiology.