And there are plenty of them – at least a score dotted about in front of the entrance, of various sizes, and some decorated with orange ochre, or else with a variety of white and grey markings that are probably a rainbow to eyes seeing different part of the spectrum to me. Some have sling bags; others hold some manner of tools or weapons, all designed with very different principles of leverage than a human would worry about. They set up a hooty chorus when they see me, but I just do the Jesus pose again and give them my blessing as I clamber to my feet. Then I turn around and almost lose it.
I expect to see just the Crypt-mouth and more hill country, but the land rises in steady stages beyond the mouth, and much of it is heavily forested with plants (?) that would give giant redwoods a run for their money. The smaller ones have heavily buttressed trunks, warty with nodules. The tall ones sway and ripple, their upper boughs bearing vast leaves like kites and weird, bobbing globular balloons. The entire forest reaches up to some high-altitude air current that has all the tall trees canted over at thirty degrees to vertical.
And amongst the trees, bloated whale-sized colossi flap and glide languorously, tearing off great strips of the leaves. And doubtless something preys on them, some swift aerial pack hunter. This world obviously has a two-level ecosystem, those below that wrestle with the mechanics of stomping about under high gravity, and those above that harness the thick atmosphere to soar.
I hear another flutling right by me, and see a delegation of Pyramid People there, no weapons in view, making sinuous motions with their retractable arms. I get no sense of threat from them. Possibly they want me to come and meet their extended families who have never seen a space god before; possibly they are just wondering how I don’t fall over with only two legs.
And that is a thing, of course. I am alive and on the surface of another planet. I can breathe the air, and I’d be able to eat the local cuisine, most likely, or even make cuisine of the locals. The gravity and the atmosphere will test me, and the Pyramidites being in the stone age is going to limit any large-scale projects I might have, but I could stay here. I don’t have to go back to the dark. I could live and die the first and last and only human this world will ever know, and in a thousand years the Pyramidite archaeologists will find my bones and go nuts.
And the scraping has stopped. Even though I’ve stopped hearing it a while ago, I am vindicated in my belief that it had been grinding on inaudibly, because I know with absolute certainty that it has gone when I step out of the exit. It is a Crypts thing.
The heaviness of heart I feel is not entirely due to the gravity. I wave to them again. “Be nice to each other,” I tell them sonorously. “Look after the environment. Um…” If someone asks you if you’re a god, you should probably have some better commandments lined up. The words Don’t eat yellow snow flash into my mind and I choke them back down.
I go back into the Crypts. This place with its gravity and its crushing atmosphere, it’s nowhere human beings are likely to venture. My people will not find me here like Robinson Crusoe and his man Pyramid Pete; and I am human enough that I still want to find them. I will brave the dark and the cold, the hunger and the monsters and that damnable scritching that starts up again the moment I get inside. I will brave them, because dying alone and far from home is the worst thing.
One of the worst things, anyway. But some of the other worst things have already happened, and so I feel qualified to make the assessment.
CHAPTER SIX
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HELD long enough for us to actually get off Earth and aboard a ship built entirely in orbit, and at least 60% from materials harvested from the private enterprise asteroid mines. We got mates’ rates, as far as I could work out, because the Frog God meant Opportunity to a wide range of people, both scientific and commercial. The private investors wanted to be in at the top, but they wanted to do it without breaking from their various home governments, and so a really specific public-private partnership was set up with the stated aim of poking the Frog God in the appropriately-sized eye. The crew was twenty-nine people, split between the Expedition Team, the Mission Team (because apparently going inside the Frog God itself was somehow not the mission) and the Overlap Team, in which position of miscellanea you’d find yours truly. I was also one of the pilots, although space piloting is one of those situations where they should really equip you with a dog, so your job is to feed the dog and the dog’s job is to bite you if you touch any of the expensive equipment. That’s unfair to my colleagues and me, of course, since it’d be us saving the ship if something went wrong, but as matters fell out, everyone else had done their jobs well enough that our position at the helm was something of a formality.
The other pilots, for posterity, were Janisha Ushah, Magda Proshkin and John Hamilton – four of us to do a job that didn’t need one of us, but then redundancy is important when you’re in space, because you can’t just pop out to space-Tescos if you forget something. I spent most of my awake-time with Magda, who had the most space-time of all of us, had the best reflexes of anyone I ever met, and was stark raving crazy in a quiet way. She would explain at great length and in seven languages that the spaceship we’d seen drifting near the Frog God was Russian, and that the Soviet space program had sent an expedition to the Frog back in the 1980s, as its last covert attempt to overshadow the US Moon landings. The expedition had failed, which meant the Kremlin had buried all trace of it, but she swore blind that her people had got there first, and that we would find that someone had kept the red flag flying out there, possibly still gripped in the dry, dead hand of a cosmonaut.
Our ship was the Quixote. There had been a fight over the name, but Madrid ended up with the casting vote, and Santiago got proposed and shot down for don’t-mention-the-Reconquista reasons. I suspect there was the sort of committee meeting involved where everyone’s first choice was someone else’s last choice, and Cervantes won out because nobody hated it and because no one had actually read the book. We were lucky to avoid the good ship Spacy McFrogface, frankly.
Once the slingshot was successful and we were zipping off towards the outer solar system at the hoped-for ridiculous speeds, it was time to start the duty rota for real. It was a long, long way to the Frog God, a fair chunk of a human lifespan, and we’d spent it in semi-hibernation, a cold sleep that would keep our bodies and minds ticking over in a very low gear so that mankind’s ambassadors to the stars wouldn’t be all grey and wrinkly when we arrived. It was tested tech – all the rage if you were rich as balls back home and felt death’s fingers clutching for you, and way better than all that frozen-head-in-a-jar cryogenics from last century. Of course, we’d been repeatedly awoken from that state to take turns being the skeleton crew, and that wasn’t quite as tested, but again they got it right, and while you felt like warmed-over shit when they levered you from the tank, nobody actually died.
Actually, Gerde Hoffmeier from the Mission Team died, but that was a heart condition nobody had picked up, just one of those things. We got to do the space funeral thing, solemn videos for everyone back home, whilst simultaneously not having to worry about there being some systemic problem that might pick us off one by one.
And things went wrong, and time passed, and there were a couple of small wars back home that meant various members of the crew were technically blood enemies for months or years at a time, but it’s very hard to sustain that kind of nonsense when you’re zipping through the asteroid belt with Mars behind you and Jupiter ahead, and no government had managed to get a political officer on board. The only bit of rampant nationalism was Eda Ostrom, a geologist, who taught everyone Danish through sheer force of personality and taking double shifts, so that her native tongue was our lingua franca by the time we arrived. The rest of the long-running edutaintment was Jain Diaz from the NASA contingent teaching us considerate use of pronouns with sufficient patience and determination that ze even had the most hardcore Russians respecting hir life choices. Ze was an indicator of just how much looser things had got in the States after the fighting, which I suppose is some small consolation. By the time the interplanetary satnav told us we’d reached our destination, then, we were fully up on nonbinary etiquette and everyone’s messages home were peppered with incomprehensible Danish slang.