Then Kaveney began sending back pictures all by itself.
Of course, the idea had been for the probe to take images of Planet Nine (unless it was Planet Ten) in due course, but those initial images had shown that there was no planet out there, and so they’d stopped taking pictures and started testing for errors in the code. They almost missed the new images when they came in. It was only because the Supermassive Array picked up some anomalies during a test sweep that anyone realised that Kaveney was trying to tell everyone something.
You’ve all seen the images, or at least the most spectacular ones. Right then, there was a lot of noise and relatively little data. Everyone was just baffled because nobody had told Kaveney to start taking new holiday snaps. And they kept coming, and all the signals telling the probe to knock it off were having no effect at all. “It started getting creepy,” is how Janette Naish described it to me after she left the Madrid lab to come brief us astronauts. Naish was one of the lead researchers on the Kaveney project, a Scottish boffin who called the Oort Cloud the “Oowert Clide” and wore a Doctor Who scarf for press conferences. Once the news broke, she went on to elbow out all the others for the chief spot on the manned mission, the one I signed up for.
It wasn’t her who actually made sense of the new pictures, or at least the ones that showed anything at all. In amongst all that contradictory spectroscopy, gravitic data and actual visuals was the thing that was going to change everything, hidden in the data, dark against the dark of space. One more piece of clutter in the outer solar system, amidst the comets and the dust.
Enrico Lossa was the very junior member of the Madrid team who spent weeks cleaning up the images until he found himself confronted with it. Then everyone else spent weeks trying to reinterpret what Kaveney’s instruments had detected to make it something mundane and uninteresting, because that’s how science works, and none of them wanted to turn up on TV saying “Aliens!” like a maniac and get laughed out of the discipline. So they did their level best not to see what they were seeing, and they got in other scientists to prove them wrong, and only then, when all other options had been exhausted, did they go public with it.
The conspiracy theorists had a field day, of course, but right then, there really was no piece of batshit paranoid craziness they could think up that was weirder than what was actually out there.
It wasn’t actually a face. That was just everyone’s pareidolia kicking in. We had not, as a matter of fact, found the sacred effigy of the Galactic Frog God. But it did look sort of froggy, so I can understand the confusion.
Mostly it was that colossal orifice that made up the front and centre of what we were seeing, a circular hole the size of the Moon facing directly, somewhat too conveniently, towards Kaveney, rimmed with what looked like black basalt, except of course the freezing reaches of the outer solar system are not known for their igneous volcanism. On either side, left and right, were what might be parsed as eyes, smaller holes set in their own dark, smooth sockets, but each one still most of the size of southern France. Around these there was some sort of fuzz of additional structure visible, and Kaveney’s amateur photography showed a maddening suggestion of detail – carvings, or vast figures or the like – but the resolution was just not good enough. The artefact was huge – bigger than the Moon, smaller than the Earth but punching way above its apparent size in terms of gravitational disturbance – but it was still a long way from Kaveney.
There was a lot of discussion right then, not just the Madrid team but a whole raft of the world’s keenest minds. The consensus was to repurpose the baby probe Kaveney was carrying, which had been intended to split off and dive into Planet Nine, collecting valuable data all the way down to its fatal crash landing. They downloaded a fairly significant patch to the thing’s software and sent it hurtling off towards the object.
I should say, the manned mission was already being planned. We knew we’d have to go there. We were looking at something made, and made on a planetary scale. It was the most significant discovery in the history of history and every astronaut and scientist on the planet wanted to be on the ship when it took off. I thought I was so lucky, when I made the grade. So lucky.
So.
So.
Lucky.
CHAPTER THREE
IT’S NOT EARTHLIGHT, the light I’ve found, but it’s made-light. There are things like flowers, radially symmetrical petalled extrusions budding from the walls, but they’re made of what looks like glass and copper.
Does that mean they can’t be living things as well? No, it does not. I have walked in the company of a creature that looked as though it didn’t have an atom of carbon in its entire structure, and yet didn’t look like a machine. Didn’t register my presence either, just plodded on through the Crypts with all the verve and enthusiasm of a condemned man on the way to the gallows. I was too ephemeral for it, made of airy stuff like hydrocarbons and water. Or else it didn’t like me and was hoping I’d go away. I didn’t go away but I did need to sleep, and by the time I woke up it was long gone. But I digress.
The flower lights are too regular: each identical to its neighbour, and strung in a pattern – not a straight line like I’d have done it, but a sine wave that either serves some opaque engineering function or else was aesthetically pleasant to the makers. At the near end of the waveform there is a new flower growing, a tiny replica of its full-size siblings, suggesting that whoever set up these lamps intended them to grow throughout the Crypts eventually, which is a nice thought and shows both more altruism and longer-termism than humans would traditionally be guilty of. It also means that whoever I might meet in this lighted section is likely not the light-makers. We all live in the corpses of each others’ expeditions here. The Crypts are very, very old, and most of the aeromes provide an environment where decay happens slowly, if at all. Clive might have lain slowly desiccating for centuries before I snacked on him.
I proceed into the lit area, keeping my ears pricked for sounds of locals. Or not locals, not really. There are locals, the aforementioned fauna that has adapted to this most challenging of all environments save space itself, but what I’m more likely to find here are fellow travellers. Some species with a visual sense, perhaps, that values the free sensory lunch the little flowers bring. These passageways are likely to be a favoured thoroughfare for things perhaps not wholly unlike me. Being able to see, after all, must bring some sort of common worldview, at least as close as me and a cat, say. Me and a shark? A horsefly? Ah, but there’s more to it than that. Exceptions abound, but most wanderers in the Crypts are species that have developed a certain level of technology, which implies an understanding of the mechanics of the universe, which are more or less universal after all, or why do we call it ‘the universe’? Except, of course, that the rule is most severely proved by the exception of the Crypts themselves – proved in the sense of ‘tested until it breaks’ – because the Crypt-builders made physics their bitch.
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.