Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER EIGHT

DOCTOR NAISH GOT us all together in one room; the entire crew, even those whose turn it was to sleep. She and the Mission Team had studied Mara’s records and the data from our diminishing fleet of drones, and they had received the delayed thoughts of the various scientists back on Earth. She had looked at the facts and prepared a theory that fit them, which the Expedition Team would get to test.

Of all the people who should have been sleeping right then, Doctor Naish looked as though she was top of the list, a world away from the cheerful, telegenic science communicator who’d been on everyone’s TV screens. From the look on her face, I half expected her to just shout “Fuck knows!” at the top of her voice in her broad Scottish accent and throw her tablet across the room.

We floated there in front of her, holding on to various straps and handles. Those of us scheduled to actually go on the expedition wore expressions indicating various stages of constipation, because we’d been given all manner of bone tablets and muscle stimulants to prepare us for being in gravity again, and our bodies weren’t appreciating the tune-up. Everyone else just looked tired and ill-tempered, because space is full of panic and boredom in random allotments, and it gets people’s backs up eventually.

“The Artefact,” said Doctor Naish, rubbing at her eyes. She still refused to call it the Frog God. “What we see out there isn’t the Artefact, not really. It’s just… the tip of the iceberg, is the phrase I’ll be using for the press back home. And the rest of the iceberg is… not in the universe as we know it. We know it’s very large, but it’s folded almost entirely outside normal space. All we have are its doorways. Plural; the Mara’s images are unequivocal, and one of our drones also recorded some similar footage. Similar but not the same, because there was a different starfield and no planet.”

She gave us a blank stare as though unsure for a moment who we were or why we were there. She’d been pushing herself far too hard, and now the only answer she had was scientific nonsense. Only the actual fact of the Frog God floating out there stopped everyone laughing at her.

“We don’t know how it interacts with normal space. We’ve all seen how you only ever see the same facing, no matter the angle. It seems likely that the Artefact has several such exits, maybe hundreds, thousands. We have images of two and one of those plainly includes a planet with a spacefaring civilisation in advance of ours. It may therefore be that the Artefact’s gates only become active in planetary systems where such activity is detected; and it’s proposed that an inactive gateway wouldn’t be visible or detectable by any means, folded away out of sight. Or they may just be everywhere and we got lucky that there’s a gate near us. Or perhaps the Drake Equation comes up with four aces every time and there’s space aliens everywhere.

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