Адриан Чайковский - Walking to Aldebaran

But there are lights here, and so I press on in the hope that I might meet something I can look in the eye and call brother.

You might wonder why I’m not more careful about these first contact situations, Toto. Have I never watched Alien , you ask? What about the Prime Directive? Well, Toto, I’m an old hand at these close encounters by now. And it’s true, some of those encounters went straight to the fourth kind, and I still have the scars of alien weapons on my poor abused hide, but the loneliness is worse, Toto. The loneliness is what killed Clive, I think, and has done for so many others. And I’m an open-minded guy. I can take third eyes and extra elbows; just make them a little like me, enough that I can feel like I’m getting somewhere close. Because somewhere in the Crypts, somewhere in all these twists and turns, there are other humans, and humans like light and one atmosphere of pressure and Earth standard gravity and an oxygen-rich atmosphere, albeit maybe not one so viciously toxic as the one I’m currently coughing my way through. Just a polite little cough, you understand, because toxicity isn’t the problem it used to be for me. Just the sort of cough you’d use to indicate to your racist uncle that he should stop telling that anecdote at Sunday dinner. But a cough nonetheless.

Then I hear the patter of feet from up ahead. I go through the equivalent of smoothing my hair and shooting my cuffs, standing out in the open in a nice non-threatening pose, although doubtless there are species around here for which standing upright on two legs triggers some uncontrollable fight-or-flight response. Just let them be like me , I think. I’ll even let them shoot me a bit, just as long as they’ve got fingers to pull the trigger.

My ears are already giving the lie to all these fond fancies when they appear ahead of me at the far end of this corridor. There’s a T-junction there, lit both ways, and I hear way too many feet that tap far too lightly on the stone floor. I brace myself for the invasion of the centipede monsters, but instead I get something indeterminate. I don’t know if I’m looking at the living or at their mechanical servants.

There are about a dozen of them, all identical by any examination I can make of them, all some way short of my waist as far as height is concerned. They are eggs; metal and synthetic eggs tip-tappering along on four jointed legs that stick straight out from some sort of hub on their underside before arching down like fingers. Tucked underneath and slightly towards the front, there is a symmetrical array of folded arms, big ones on the outside and progressively smaller towards the centre-line, like someone unpacked a cybernetic Matryoshka. My eyes are good, but I get the sense the arms go smaller than I can see. Perhaps there are atomic-scale ones in the centre, able to fabricate artisanal molecules like the ultimate hipsters.

They see me. I don’t know what part of them has eyes, but they stop and tilt a bit to get a good look. They don’t all stop in unison either, each one coming to its own individual halt, which makes them more relatable. I look right back, trying to work out if they’re machines, or little vehicles with miniature Crypt-onauts inside. Maybe the innards reflect the outwards and they’re eggs in eggs. Maybe if I opened them up, I’d just find more layers of shell, eggs all the way down. But I’m not going to open them up. Plenty of bad news in this place without going stirring up more of it.

I am disappointed, though. They’re not exactly the humanoid aliens all the SF shows taught you to expect, and frankly the philanthropic principle can go take a flying leap. I’ve seen a fair cross-section of species that have made it as far as the Crypts (and often, like Clive, no further) and there’s no galactic God out there making all life in His image.

The Egg Men tap forward cautiously, no doubt scanning me with ranked arrays of instruments built into their shells. They are not natives to this aerome; they’ve thought Crypt-delving through, or at least their makers have. They take their own environment with them, not just in a flimsy suit but in comfy vehicles that do their walking for them. I wonder about opening them up again, though just idly. Maybe they’re aquatic, goldfish bowls on legs out to explore the universe. Maybe they’re colonies of hive-creatures. Maybe inside each egg is a crunched up human-like alien after all, like some spacefaring embryo or medieval homunculus. I’m not going to open them up. It might cause offence. I’ll just have to live with my curiosity.

No, seriously, Toto, I’m not.

After our mutual eyeballing, one of them comes forward and flashes some lights at me, and I wave back and say “Hi” and give them my name. I don’t understand them. They don’t understand me. At the same time, we both understand each other. The Egg Men and me, we’ve been around the block a few times. We know the deal with the Crypts. They recognise me as a fellow traveller, and I return the courtesy. When they set off – down the branch of the T that neither they nor I came from – I follow them, my big lazy strides keeping up with the frenetic little tinkling of their tiny feets. Probably they are gossiping about their new travelling companion through some medium I can’t pick up, even though I strain all my senses.

They work to some rest cycle far quicker than mine. Every few hours, at my best guess, they’re stopping, organising themselves into a perfect circle, half facing in, half facing out. I assume this is some carefully-worked-out process to allow some of them to rest while the others stand watch. Alternatively, maybe it passes for Egg Men Fun Time, and I’m seriously missing out on the thrilling possibilities of standing around in a circle. Maybe they’re all curled up in their shells reciting epic poetry to each other or watching Egg-porn. I try to catch a nap while they’re still, but they never stay still for long and I don’t want to get left behind.

Then we go out of the lit area, outpacing the growth of the star-flowers, and I realise they didn’t have to be visual creatures at all. They might not even have known they were passing through a lit area. Most things I’ve met have eyes of some sort – after all, eyes evolved independently maybe twenty times just on Earth alone, so they’re obviously a Good Thing. If there’s light, there’s likely eyes, unless your basic bodyform just doesn’t have anything it can convert into photoreceptors. But some places, there’s no light. There are dark worlds out there. There are thriving civilizations that have evolved in the depths of crushing, lightless seas.

But then the Egg Men put on their torches, each one throwing clear white light in all directions, and it’s obvious they like light even more than I do. I end up striding along in the middle of them, something they plainly prefer because it means I’m not casting a great shadow into their field of view. They are constantly almost underfoot, but they’re nimble and their reactions seem faster than mine, even now, and they seem to like huddling close. Rather late, I realise that my sheer size – to them I’m a giant – is valuable to them. I’m a huge bipedal monster, but I’m their bipedal monster. We have achieved a weird sort of symbiosis. They bring the light and I, Gary Rendell of Earth, bring the muscle. Two-fisted space action!

From a dark corridor, we come to a dark chamber, a huge empty box of poison air within the stone into which a dozen different passageways feed. The lamps of the Egg Men venture forth into the dust-glittering air and fail to make much of the far side.

The walls are carved, as they often are in these chambers. The carvings aren’t all the same, in different rooms, but I’ve seen this style before, most certainly I have. It’s the style I think of as the Makers. I’ve no evidence these carvings were actually incised by the unimaginable hands that created the Crypts, but… my gut says so. Not a scientific appraisal, nothing that Doctor Naish would approve of, but it’s become almost an article of faith. The carvings are sinuous, floriate, branching but not uniform. Everywhere you look it’s plain you’re seeing some part of a larger whole, except you can never appreciate the whole – it’s never quite there, as though even the entire room is just a fragment of some huge image, and if we could just see it in its entirety, Toto, we’d understand it all.