Адриан Чайковский - Walking to Aldebaran

So I step back, spreading my hands in a shrug what-you-gonna-do? sort of a gesture, as best I can in the limited space, and grin at them, because they’re bloody game, I can tell you. I appreciate that.

I kill Li L first because he won’t get out of my face with that cutter, and between you and me it is starting to sting. I just close a hand around his weapon and his arms and clench them all into one pulpy mass with my best power handshake. Diaz J hits me in the eye then, right with the hooked part of the crowbar, and that hurts like buggery. I slam Li L down into the floor and just straight-arm Diaz in the chest, powering hir twenty feet straight backwards until ze hits a wall. That’s not enough, apparently, because ze’s trying to get up when I reach hir, though probably concussed and with severe internal organ damage. I put hir out of hir misery with another solid slap and briefly consider going after the others. Not like I wouldn’t catch up with them pretty sharpish. My stomach growls, though, and it would be a shame to charge off and have some revolting scavenger eat these delicious meats. And it feels disrespectful to Li’s and Diaz’s courage to go after the others right away. It’s not as though I won’t be able to find them when I’m done here. No, I’ll respect their bravery, and also their generous contribution to my diet.

I sit down and tuck in. Bon appetit.

SO AFTER BEING stripped down and remade by the Mother Machine, I – actually, you know the rest of it, Toto. I mean there’s more, obviously; there’s detail and circumstance, but is any of it really important? The scale of the Crypts renders us all meaningless, so does it matter precisely where I went, what obstacles I cleared, what strange faces and non-faces I met? You can pretty much construct it from all the usual snippets: seen things you people wouldn’t believe, boldy gone, sought out strange new worlds, galaxy far, far away, trying to find a way home. I am the most travelled human being in the history of the species. I have met aliens beyond your imagination – no forehead ridges or Halloween costume masks here, but hot and cold running aliens in every corner of this convoluted place. Some of them were going about business as usual, having tamed a corner of the Crypts to suit them, walking to other worlds like the Makers intended. Others were lost, like me. And I ate hardly any of them, Toto; only the ones like Clive who were dead already. It’s only since the scritchy started that my temper’s gone sour and I’ve started picking fights. I’m a man more sinned against than sinning.

And yes, the scritchy is my fault, in the end. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Monkey’s Paw surely put a finger in my eye when I wished to find my folks again. What else is it that’s letting me home in on them but the changes Mother made? And it’s not my fault they make me so angry, with their constant jabber and chatter. It’s not my fault I’m strong now, and they can’t stop me.

I’m sensing a certain criticism from you, Toto, but you’d have done the same in my position. You’re a figment of my imagination, after all. Of course you would.

But enough of the backstory. I carried you from Madrid and the launch of Kaveney all the way to the Mother Machine, the story of how I was made and remade. It’s time to bring things to a conclusion. That whispery whine in my head is still there, and although it’s far away, I know it’s the rest of them, all of them that made it into the Crypts, all those rescue parties and expeditions and scientists. I wonder who they even left on the Quixote . And what that skeleton crew did, when the Crypts finally swallowed everyone. Or perhaps most of them are still on the ship, already on their way home, and I’m only homing in on a few luckless castaways. I mean, that would be narratively more satisfying, wouldn’t it? Not from my perspective, not from those luckless sods left behind, but for those on the ship, they’d feel a real sense of achievement. They’d get the requisite sadness about those who couldn’t make it combined with the satisfaction of making it home to tell the tale. But at heart, I know, wherever they get back to, it won’t be home. Not the same river, not the same man, right?

I make my approach a leisurely one. I want to give the runners time to tell tales of the return of Gary Rendell, back from the dead, come to tell you all – I shall tell you all… what? Like the man in the poem, I’m lost for words, and not only because my means of communication has become steadily more monstrous. What, really, could I tell you? What moral lesson has all this suffering taught me? Don’t go into the Crypts? The universe is full of aliens just as dumb as you? Astronaut is delicious once you get the wrapper off?

Don’t go. I want to look back in time and speak to young Doctor Naish, or young Gary Rendell. Don’t go into space, I’d tell him; don’t send me into space, I’d tell her. There are plenty of others who want the honour. Don’t send this bright young thing from Stevenage, please. So much could be avoided.

The best way not to get mired in same-man/same-river paradoxes is not to cross the river the first time.

And then, with the buzzing of the minds now painfully clear in mine, I lounge round the corner and discover that this is the mother lode. This is the entrance/exit, the eye of the Frog God that we so recklessly stared into. I look out and see the stars, and maybe one of them’s the Sun.

There is a particular awe in coming across an exit from the Crypts. It’s a rare thing – I’ve done it maybe a half-dozen times in all my wanderings. Mostly there are just stars, the Frog God leering at a distant sun from some remote part of its solar system. Twice there was a planet hanging there, close enough that the locals would have marked the Frog God with their early telescopes, if they ever invented them. On one of those worlds I saw long strands of light across the almost sea-less surface; not the busy clusters of cities, just long strands that might have been the work of hands or some colossal natural show. There were moving lights in orbit too, though, darting between shadows that might have been dockyards, or space stations, or captured asteroids. The other world looked dead, mottled grey, hanging in the firmament like a spent bullet. Probably it had always been that way, but I couldn’t shake the thought that the Crypts sought out intelligences that might appreciate them and come walk their ways. So perhaps there had been life on that grey world, and perhaps there had been rival Frog God sects or a war over who might control the goggling visage that dominated their night sky. Perhaps they went where we so nearly went, desperate that the other guy shouldn’t get the prize.

There’s no planet now, of course. The Frog God’s out past Pluto, always has been, always will be. The starscape isn’t empty, though. The Red Rocket is there. It’s still incomplete; in fact it’s less complete than before, still in the early stages of construction. There’s no sign of the Quixote , but then I wasn’t expecting it. Looks like Naish landed quite a proportion of the ship’s compliment at the brink of the Crypts, though, so either there was a skeleton crew left on the old girl or something bad happened to her and this was all they could save. I decide on the latter. After all, they’re determinedly building the Red Rocket rather than waiting for the Quixote to reappear. And then I realise the cruellest twist of fate in all of this. Why did Magda Proshkin have the fatal luck to cross my bloody path? If not for that ill chance, then she might have built the thing herself and fulfilled her own prophecies.