Адриан Чайковский - Walking to Aldebaran

That was nothing, however, to this piece of japery.

What happens is that the gravity breaks. I’m loping along a corridor, feeling my way through the dark, fingers trailing along the walls, and then abruptly down isn’t beneath my feet but in front of me, somewhere along that long, long passageway. I haven’t gone over a cliff so much as the world’s become one, and instantly I’m hurtling my way towards terminal velocity, the air ripping past me.

I’ve got no idea how long the drop will be before a fatal impact with what had been the far wall. I’ve a brief sense of open space as I zip through a larger chamber, and then into a thankfully matching passageway across the far side. I’m curled into a ball by this time, braced for an impact that even my strengthened body can’t survive. This goes on for several seconds, time for reflection. I hurl my arms out, my legs, brushing the walls/floor/ceiling, trying to slow myself. I’m already going too fast and all that happens is I lose some skin from my fingertips. Probably I’m screaming.

Then I hit, but instead of a hard surface it’s a… nothing. I plunge past the nothing like I’m entering deep water, then slow to a stop, reverse and bob back past, like a cork leaping to the surface. Then I oscillate up and down a few times, finding my level. There’s a gravity shift here, from which both directions are up . I’m caught between them, and I might as well be at the bottom of a pit.

But I’m not squished, and that scritchy fussing in my head is even louder. I just lie there, suspended between two ups, and collect my scattered thoughts.

There’s nothing in this boundary between gravities that I can get purchase on – it’s just a discontinuity in one of the universe’s fundamental forces, you know, nothing special. I’ve had this before, indeed I have profoundly unfond memories of it, but that doesn’t help me now I’m caught between .

So I stretch out, arms and legs at their fullest extent, and I can get my hands against one wall, my feet on the opposite side, so that I’m no longer just hanging in the gravity doldrums but supporting my weight, my entire body strung out in the void.

Can I do this? I ask, because it seems impossible, but it’s this or hang forever midway down this passageway until my half-mummified flesh serves only as a lure to hungry monsters.

I move one foot.

I move one hand.

So far so good.

I move the other foot.

I move the other hand.

My body twangs with the strain, but it’s a strong body, and I swear I can feel it getting stronger, in that specific way that will let me get away with this nonsense. But after all, I was walking across the galaxy just a moment ago. Now I’m walking up a wall, held in place only by the constant and gruelling extension of my poor abused limbs.

I move my right foot again.

I move my left hand. My right trembles and I feel my knees shake.

Left foot.

Right hand. I’m not two steps up from the gravity plane. An indefinite number still to go.

Right foot.

Left hand.

Etcetera.

I swear, by about the hundredth step, it’s getting easier. My muscles have reconfigured to assist this ludicrous mode of movement, making me wonder just what other indignities I could possibly get used to.

Right foot.

Etcetera.

And then I realise the scritchy-scratch is getting further away and I free a hand to fumble around. One of the walls is absent, a passageway leading to my nemesis. I’ve got there at last.

The relief is almost fatal. There’s a moment when my unnaturally taut body twitches and I slip, vividly recalling that long drop back to the gravity plane. I flail madly and my skinless fingertips catch the edge of the passage, leaving me hanging by one aching arm, shrieking as even my augmented muscles tear.

But after all I’ve been through, I am nothing if not determined. I haul myself bodily up, and claw my way onto the level ground of the passage’s wall/floor/ceiling. Then it is indeed a wall, and I slide down to a new flat floor, re-entering the Crypts’ standard gravitic alignment. I’ve escaped the breach. I’m back in business, Toto.

I get to my feet, stooping to clear the ceiling. My limbs and back seem misshapen from all the unwarranted exercise. Probably they’ll settle back to where they were, but right now I’m strong and twisted, weirdly simian in my crouching stance. And this new tunnel seems oddly cramped and small compared to the ones I’m used to.

I put one foot in front of the other again, lurching forward.

There’s light ahead, the cold clear light of intelligent design. My head is filled with cicadas that speak with human voices, all those scraps of words grating against my inner skull, all that almost-language I can never quite make out. This close, it’s deafening.

I’m there. I’ve found the psychic aliens. I see their shadows around the next corner, dwarfish and skinny, little goblin-men trying to drive me mad with their mind-weapon. But I’m here and, if I’m mad, that was a done deal long before they started in on me.

JOE TOOK THE lead, of course. He was the sort of man that, look at him and you just about reckoned God had personally designed him with ‘taking the lead’ in mind. Katarin and Louis went after, then me with the motorised trolley with all our gear on it, then Karen and Ajay bringing up the rear. This order had been worked out in advance and had in fact been the subject of colossal international argument on the long flight over. NASA practically threatened to walk away from the project unless their man got to set first foot inside the Frog God, a latter-day Armstrong. What Joe, Louis and the other US crew would have done had that actually happened, I can’t imagine. Were we supposed to just pack them for storage in the sleep chambers until the international kerfuffle sorted itself? Anyway, Roscosmos and the ESA folded on that one, so we didn’t have to find out.

And so we trekked into the dark, our suit lamps and torches illuminating black walls, the first few metres inscribed with that ornate but maddeningly nowhere-leading floriate scrollwork, the rest just blank stone. I remember the sound of my breath in my ears, my heart rate. I remember checking and rechecking my HUD to make sure nothing was going wrong with my suit. Gravity was an unwelcome friend from the past come to slob out on our couch and watch our TV, and although all the instruments said the atmosphere was cleaner and more breathable than the air in most major conurbations, nobody was keen to try it – even Louis, who’d already been exposed to it. I can’t imagine what it was like for him, how every little tic and murmur of his body must have seemed the harbinger of some dreadful bacterial doom. Except how could there be any pathogens out here that would infect a human body? (And indeed, despite the macrofauna that infests this place, I’ve not had so much as a sniffle. Maybe some unseen mechanism scrubs the air. Or maybe I’m still incubating…)

We walked for bloody hours.

We knew we were going to. There was one of the lit areas some way ahead that the remotes had found, our base-camp-to-be. We’d all been exercising and on a cocktail of steroids, but none of it prepared us for a long hike under gravity. We had to stop sooner than anyone liked, and then after another march we had to stop again. And then, when we set off, the trolley wouldn’t work.

That was unwelcome.

Thankfully, doing complex maintenance while suited up is something we had trained for, and at least the tools wouldn’t keep drifting off. Karen and Katarin took the trolley apart and tested every single circuit and ball bearing of it, while the rest of us kicked our heels and Louis flew the remote ahead, trying to get a glimpse of the promised lights. There was nothing wrong with the trolley, except it wouldn’t work. Nothing we did could make the damn thing go. The blame for this somehow fell on me because I’d been driving it, though nobody could say what I was supposed to have done wrong.