Adrian Tchaikovsky - Walking to Aldebaran

Published 2019 by Solaris

an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

Riverside House, Osney Mead,

Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-78618-196-1

Copyright 2019 Adrian Tchaikovsky

Cover art by Gemma Sheldrake

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

This book is a work of fiction. Names. characters, places and incidents are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

CHAPTER ONE

TODAY I FOUND something I could eat and something I could burn to keep back the darkness. That makes today a good day.

I dont know what it was or where it came from. Like me, it had been wandering the passageways of this crypt for who knows how long and how long has it been, anyone? No day and no night and Ive nothing left with power to tell the time, and so my life becomes one long greyness, punctuated by increasingly erratic periods of sleep. I dont need to sleep like I used to. Or I need to sleep in some other way, maybe some way that I cant achieve. Every waking is building up a sleep-debt inside me that my poor human physiology cant satisfy. Maybe when I change my mind completely Ill be back in balance. For now: anxiety, tremors, mania, paranoia, hyperventilation. Or sometimes no ventilation. Thats probably worse, but then the air in here is so variable. Seriously, you wouldnt want it in your lungs if you had any option.

But the thing, the thing I found that brightened my day and filled a hole: it was twice as long as me, but it had been dead a long time and that must have shrunk it a bit. The air in this part of the Crypts is very dry. Its outer layers had gone brittle and crispy and I thought there mightnt be anything of substance to it, but when I flaked them off, there was meat underneath, dry and chewy but meat nonetheless. It had a dozen many-jointed legs, and I snapped them off and piled them up, a camp fire just like my old scoutmaster taught me, and I used one of my shonky little jury-rigged pieces of nonsense to spark it into flames. The air here is dry, but its short on oxygen too, I can feel it from the way I slow down: breathing, moving, thinking. Hard to get a fire lit. And its so cold here, cold pretty much anywhere you go in the Crypts. I managed it, though. I got everything heated up enough that a guttering little flame caught, and then I huddled over it, trapping the fire between my body and the stone walls until a meagre ration of warmth had no choice but to leach into me.

The flesh of the creature tasted like sour dust. I was eating proteins evolved light years from Earth on some planet where twelve-legged, five-metre worm people live, but these days my microbiome is omnivorous to say the least. I twisted and groaned as all the little workers in my gut got to grips with the new repast. I used to be lactose intolerant, if you can believe it. I used to hurl if I ate cheese, and fart like a trooper if I had too much white bread as well. Now my diet is a catholic one, in the sense of all-embracing rather than fish on Fridays.

The outermost layer of the dead thing was a sheath that was made, not grown, though it was as disintegratingly friable as the skin within. I tried to ignore the fact. I tried to tell myself the creature was just one more animal denizen of the Crypts, another species seeded here, to evolve or die out. And plenty of them have evolved, believe me. The Crypts have been here for a long, long time millions, billions of years. Things have grown to love it here. I am not one of those things, although it seems to me I have been here for a long time. In human terms, months is a long time to be somewhere as terrible as this. I think it has been months. I hope its not been years. But the lack of light and well, I said about the sleeping, and Im beginning to think that time is shonky here too. After all, some part of this godforsaken place is giving the laws of relativity a good shafting.

My name is Rendell; Gary Rendell. Im an astronaut. When they asked me, as a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, astronaut, please! all filled with thoughts of Aldrin and Tereshkova. And though space exploration had been the domain of machines for quite a while, we did have a new crop of astronauts now, off bleeding their lives into the red, red sands of Mars so that, in a generations time, a cabal of rich guys could turn up and live off what they built. But that wasnt the astronaut I wanted to be. I wanted to go into space. I wanted to set foot on alien worlds.

And I have. Ive done all that. Ive met aliens, sentient aliens. Ive seen spaceships. Ive breathed the venomous air of a planet on the other side of the universe. Im probably the most travelled human being in the history of human beings travelling, if indeed that category is still the appropriate one with which to conjure me. I just didnt think there would be so much getting lost and eating corpses. They never told me that at astronaut school. They never told seven-year-old Gary Rendell how he might be huddled in front of a fire thats dying for lack of O2, gnawing on desiccated chunks of long-dead alien explorer. If theyd brought that up, I might have said train driver instead.

The next day I move on, leaving my fellow explorer half-eaten behind me. Im not sure what killed him. I call him him, because thats the knee-jerk if youre a manly fellow like me. I call him Clive, in fact. Clive, of the species Clivus, from Clivesworld. Nobody else is here; I get the naming privileges. Clive wandered these passageways, lost like me. He had no breathing apparatus that I could see, although Im only guessing at what part of him actually breathed. Possibly Clivesworld is somewhere nearby, some arid, low-oxygen world crawling with caterpillar-men who got out into space with some trick other than combustible fossil fuels and then found the Thing. The thing we found out past Neptune. The thing we all find, when we go far enough. The Crypts.

And Clive and his brood-mates or brethren or clone-kin were very excited, in their caterpillar way. They entered the Crypts just like we did, and maybe the rest of the Clives did better and found somewhere useful. Maybe theyre living the high life with firm trading agreements with the Steves and the Debbies from across the universe. But my Clive didnt have a good time. My Clive wandered off or got separated, went space-mad, or gave himself to the Crypt gods. He found a dry, dry corner and he coiled his bulk up and died, and sometime later an Earthman named Gary Rendell came along and ate quite a large chunk of him.

But Im getting sentimental. This isnt anywhere useful to me. The atmospheres wrong and, unless Clive wandered in from a different aerome, then Clivesworld is no fit destination for my fellow humans. So I head away, trekking the dark, constantly relighting the charcoal ends of Clives limbs as the dead air snuffs them out, because the Crypts are cold and the Crypts are dark, although most everything else varies.