Flight Search

Constellations

I.

We had crash-landed on the planet. We were far from home. The spaceship could not be repaired, and the rescue beacon had failed. Besides me, only the astrogator, part of the captain, and the ship’s AI mind were left. 

Outside, the atmosphere registered as hostile to most organisms. We huddled in the lifeboat, which was inoperable but still held air. Vast storms buffeted our cockleshell shelter, although we knew from prior readings that other areas remained calm. All that remained to us was to explore, if we wanted to live. The captain gave me the sole weapon. She tasked the astrogator with carrying some tools that would not unduly weigh him down.

Little existed on the planet except deserts of snow. But alien artifacts lay in an area near us. We were an exploration team, so this discovery had oddly comforted us, even though we had been on our way elsewhere. The massive systems failure had no discernible source, and the planet had been our only choice for landfall.

The artifacts took the form of 13 domes, spread out over that hostile terrain. The domes had been linked by cables just below shoulder level, threaded through the tops of metal posts at irregular intervals. Whether intended or not, these cables and rods formed a series of paths between the domes. 

Before our instruments failed, the AI had reported that the domes appeared to have a heat signature. The cables pulsed under our grip in a way that teased promised warmth far ahead. It took some time to get used to the feeling.

The shortest path between domes was a thousand miles long. The longest path was 10 thousand miles long. Our suit technology was good: A suit could recycle water, generate food, create oxygen. It could push us into various states of near hibernation while motors in the legs drove us forward. For the captain, the suit would compensate for having lost her legs and ease her pain. We estimated we could reach the nearest path and follow it to the nearest dome … and that was it. If the dome had life support capabilities, or even just a way to replenish our suits, we would live. Otherwise, we would probably die.

We revised the estimate of our survival downward when we reached the path and soon encountered the skeletons of dead astronauts littering the way. In all shapes and sizes, cocooned within their suits. Their huddled forms under the snow displayed a serenity at odds with their fate. But when I wiped the frost from face plates, we saw the extremity of their suffering.

It is difficult to explain how we felt walking among so many fatalities. So many dead first contacts. 

We no longer had to puzzle over the systems failure. Spaceships came here to crash, and intelligent entities came here to die, for whatever reason. We could not presume our fate would be any different, and adjusted our expectations accordingly. The AI’s platitudes about courage did not raise morale. There were too many lost there in the frozen wastes. 

Here were the ghastly emissaries of hundreds of spacefaring species we had never before encountered.

The number of the bodies and their haphazard positioning hampered our ability to make progress to the dome. The AI estimated our chances of survival at below 50% for the first time. We would starve in our suits as the motors propelled us forward. We would become desiccated and exist in an elongation of our thoughts that made us weak and stupid until the light winked out. But still, we had no choice. So even in places where the dead in their suits were piled high, we would simply plunge forward, over and through them, headed for the dome. 

What we would find there, as I have said, we did not know. But we were in an area of the galaxy where ancient civilizations had died out millions of years ago. We had been on our way to a major site, an ancient city on a moon with no atmosphere in a wilderness of stars. 

Although our emotions fluctuated, a professional awe and curiosity about the dead eventually came over us. This created much debate over the comms. We had made a discovery for the ages, but our satisfaction was bittersweet. Even if we lived longer than expected, we would never return home, never see our friends or family again. The AI might continue on after we were dead, but I doubt it envied being the one to report on our discovery centuries hence. And to who?

Here were the ghastly emissaries of hundreds of spacefaring species we had never before encountered. Their suits displayed an extraordinary range, although our examination was cursory. Some even appeared to be made out of scales and other biological substances from their home worlds, giving us further clues as to their origins. 

The burial of the suits by snow and the lack of access to anything other than a screaming face or faces, often distorted by time and ice, worked against recording much usable data. This issue was compounded in those cases where the suit was part of the organism and they had not needed any “artificial skin,” as the AI put it, to survive harsh conditions. That many had died despite appearing well-­prepared for the planet’s environment sobered us up even before our own suits dispensed drugs to help our mental states. 

After a time, each face seemed to express some aspect of our own stress and terror at the seriousness of our situation. After a time, the sheer welter of detail defeated us and caused us extreme distress. The captain made the observation that even one instance of alien contact might cause physiological and mental conditions, including anxiety, stress, fatigue. Here, we were constantly encountering the alien dead of what seemed at times an infinite number of civilizations. 

We stopped recording. We recommitted ourselves to the slog toward the nearest dome. 

The captain’s drugs unit had failed, but the AI found a way to help her by turning off the heating element in select panels of her suit. Some parts of her would soon be lost to the cold, but the system would allow her to live on with some measure of comfort.

I must admit, we were just glad the screaming had stopped and welcomed her counsel.

II.

For a long time, as we labored in our spacesuits on that planet—following the path, beleaguered by snowstorms—we could not understand why we found so many dead astronauts, of so many unknown alien types, and yet no spaceships. During good visibility, our line of sight reached, unbroken, for 500 miles. Where were the crash sites? 

But one day we chanced upon an antenna sticking up out of the ground. Clumsy attempts at excavation soon revealed that below this antenna lay a vast dead spaceship of a kind we had never seen before. The gash that had opened it to the elements had laid bare its unique architecture, but also gave the illusion that the snow had spilled out of it to create the world around us rather than having infiltrated and accumulated inside over time.

Aspects of the spaceship’s texture gave the startling suggestion that it had been made of some ultra-hard wood or wood equivalent. Clambering partway up to stare at the inner compartments, we all felt the strangeness of the dimensions and proportions of the living quarters. There was no sign of the occupants. Perhaps, I suggested, they had headed for the domes. Perhaps they had even made it to the domes. I tried and failed to keep hope from my voice.

But the captain had ordered the AI to perform a materials analysis. The “snow” in this region had been contaminated by ash and tiny particles of bone. The AI estimated that more than 70% of the white surrounding us was made of the remains of vertebrate sentient life and the remnants of suits. Of invertebrates there was no telling. A thaw might bring not just the drip, drip of water but a shushing sound indicative of bone particulate in the mixture. I imagined there might even be the clink of small objects not rendered down by whatever intense heat had created the ash.

The astrogator had insisted on digging deeper into the ship, with the idea that some recognizable commonality between technologies might yield a part or parts with which he could fix our ship. The rest of us allowed this delusion for the obvious reasons. But upon his return, he held in his hands ovals of snow not much larger than the space formed by the circle between a thumb and finger. Many of them had soft indentations, as one might find in the afterbirth of reptiles from eggs. A kind of ghostly cilia-like tread appeared along the bottoms of these objects.

The astrogator did not find any technology of use to us. Instead, he discovered that the species piloting the spaceship had been so different from us as to be safely encapsuled in suits the size of eggs. Much of what had spilled into or spilled out of the gash constituted the bodies of the crew, in their hundreds of thousands. Their suits had been inadequate to the conditions. They had died en masse attempting to escape their own ship.

The AI speculated that it had been a generation ship, perhaps fleeing a planet with a dying star. If we wondered how the AI had reached this conclusion, it was because we did not want it to be true.

The captain became silent upon receiving this further news and did not speak to us for more than 100 miles of further progress. 

As we left that site, unsure exactly what we stepped upon, we also knew that since the spaceship was entirely covered by snow, it had been falling into the sediment for days or months or years. We knew then that our ship might not be visible against the horizon should we retrace our steps. The already bleak probability of rescue through visual identification of a crash site from above would be lost to us in time, even as the line of cables remained perpetually visible to the horizon. We now thought of the planet as a trap. But of what sort? 

III.

We could not be sure, but in the absence of the captain’s voice, it may have been the AI that put forward the idea of the planet’s being “duplicitous.” The phrasing concerned us, for there was a duplicity in using the planet as the subject of the spoken sentence. A sphere rotating around a sun in deep space could not exhibit forethought or premeditation or other qualities of sentience. 

The AI meant whoever or whatever had created the conditions on the planet that allowed spacecraft to be trapped and then the occupants placed in a perilous situation with no recourse. But I distinctly recall the AI using the words “the planet.” In addition to being inaccurate, this also let us know that the AI did not have any analysis available that might help us understand the agency and motivations acting upon us. 

But in a sense, the AI only voiced something I had felt for several miles: that there existed an overlay to the planet’s surface, an area or space or different landscape unavailable to us. This overlay had also not been available to any of the prior astronauts who had died here. In this area or space or different landscape existed a wealth of the usual hoped-for things: a breathable atmosphere and abundant food and water. 

While we struggled with the line through the snow and through the storms that welled up, others could see us but chose to ignore us for reasons or perhaps just for their own well-being. For hundreds, possibly thousands of years, as explorers had died here in merciless and terrible ways, there raged a sumptuous feast for the senses, as excessive as it was ancient and unending.

I cannot tell you how powerfully the AI’s words struck us, so that our mouths watered at the thought of real food and of clean, unrecycled water, of a freedom unencumbered by suits and breathing apparatus. Even at our intended destination, we would have spent most of our days aboard a small space station. This tedium would have been broken only by the arduous process of reaching the unbreathable surface and its ancient ruins of jagged black stone. 

This vision that overtook us functioned not just as tantalizing delusion. It scared us so much that we could not compartmentalize it in our thoughts. It continued to overwhelm us like a wave.

We fought for the first time, with the astrogator expressing the wish to return to the ruined spacecraft and explore nearby areas for parts, while the captain broke silence to order us to continue to make progress toward the nearest dome. The AI, which had brought us to this point, stole the captain’s silence and said no more.

For each of us, those endless white plains with no real elevation, just the metal rope and the metal posts, had become a kind of repetition that hurt the brain, and the mind with it.

IV.

About halfway to the nearest dome, amid a storm that reduced our progress incrementally and our line of sight to nothing, we came upon a peculiar tableau. 

Six astronaut suits had fallen across and around the metal rope. With the flurries of snow, it took us, even with our powerful headlamps, some minutes to determine the nature of the obstruction. The six suits had been created for a humanoid species that must have had torsos like nine-foot-long slabs, attached to six limbs, three for walking. Their heads had flared out like thick fans. All the helmets were cracked open, and curled inside were the skeletons of some other intelligent species no larger than 40 or 50 pounds, possibly warm-blooded. With no sign of the original occupants. 

After a brief analysis cut short by the conditions, we postulated that the warm-blooded species had worn breathable skin suits that, as they failed, required these intruders to seek shelter. All they could find were these six dead astronauts. Because we could discover no trace of the original occupants, the AI put forward the theory that this smaller species had eaten every scrap of the remains within the suits. 

Then they too had perished, and in time, the AI suggested, something smaller would take up residence inside those bodies, then smaller still within those, and smaller still—

At this point, the captain attempted a soft reboot of the AI using a coded question. We could hear the concern in her voice.

Yet the AI continued undeterred, suggesting that we might find this to be a common situation. It might be replicated across the planet, depending on a system’s ability to break down and process meat that had not evolved alongside the devourer for millions of years. In all likelihood, most who attempted to eat in this way died soon after, poisoned by alien flesh.

V.

The AI began to talk to us in strange alien voices at mile 700, as we labored through the snowstorm to hold onto the cables and thus the path. The AI warbled and chirped and howled and hummed and clucked. The AI spoke in voices like fossilized choruses of beasts, vast and harmonious. And in voices like dry grass spun to fire by the sun. And in voices like the dissolution of all things, darkness in the blinding white that scared me. 

At first we thought the AI was deranged. Then that the AI channeled voices from the dome 300 miles ahead. But finally, the AI managed to make known to us that these were the voices of the dead astronauts we had come across from time to time. Huddled frozen. The suits in so many shapes and sizes. That the voices of the dead were channeled through the AI, and nothing could stop them.

VI.

The snow began to betray us, as the storms created different forms of ice. Often, our arms became weary, our legs cramping, and we had to rest with greater frequency. We came to accept the solid crunch that could support our weight. We came to reject the feather-light freshness that felt effortless underfoot but could give way just as easily as if it were air. In some places, slick purple-hued ice welled up in sluggish layers as if something half-alive. In others, we discovered strange islands of elevation, with brutal curls and curves that suggested two continental shelves had clashed in that space.

As we adapted to these conditions, and as conditions worsened and still we adapted, we came to feel an illusion of competency, one that made even the astrogator temporarily cheerful. The sounds through the comms of our efforts, the deeper breathing, the occasional muffled curse, seduced us in this regard. We felt that we were becoming adroit at handling the snow. We began to believe if we could only make it to the dome, we would be saved.

Yet this uptick in morale ran parallel to, rather than intersected with, the idea of our ultimate survival.

VII.

We lost track of the distance left to us without the AI to tell us. Or the captain, in her pain, no longer thought to issue updates. But across the distance left to us came sights beyond reckoning: three giant astronauts spaced 50 miles apart. Larger than most starships, each body lay sprawled across an area larger than several fields and in very different conditions.

The first had been badly burned and was thus unrecoverable, even in terms of salvage. The astronaut had crawled or pulled itself along for some distance. It had left a long smudge of black and red across that expanse. The alien species was, as ever, unknown to us, but the five arms were sunk in the ground as if in agony. The skull had once held three eyes, and the face plate had been cracked by force so strong it resembled a meteor strike. The body was bloated, the fabric of the suit gray with a shimmer of green that came and went, linked to photosensitive skin cells. The way the flesh took up space, and how it exhibited aspects more plant than animal, made it impossible to study further.

The second was a sprawl of limbs, with the suggestion of a defensive posture. The debris of conflict flared out to the side in an incomprehensible display. The suit had an intactness that surprised us, but a similar crack in the face plate without any trace of body within. The rest of the suit had become inhabited by a wealth of other dead astronauts of varying sizes and shapes, who had sought shelter or sustenance and then become trapped or simply … given up. As the AI had predicted, we had once again encountered bodies providing other bodies with temporary sustenance and shelter.

I felt like a parasite who beheld a god. Or was the scale even more ludicrous?

But this condition was not at first evident to us, becoming apparent only after we had clambered for an hour to reach the cracked face plate and the entry hole extended like a broken archway before us.

Despite the number of remains within, and the difficulty in moving through them to explore, the captain ordered an exhaustive recon. Her pulse in the readings had a thready quality. Sometimes I felt, and the astrogator too when we took private comms, that the captain had begun to say things similar to the AI’s delusions. Yet we obeyed the order, on the chance that some internal calculation on the captain’s part meant she believed this was the only way we would survive. 

What did we expect to find in the dead body of a once-­intelligent giant? Food? Oxygen? Some cause of death? To put off the thought of our own death by seeking shelter with a death so large we could not comprehend it?

I felt like a parasite who beheld a god. Or was the scale even more ludicrous? I had trouble envisioning the way the body must have twisted as it pitched forward into that icy ground. I had trouble holding onto my own thoughts.

More and more pressure moved through my skull as I contemplated that scene. We were in the midst of something none of my kind had ever known. We might be the only ones, ever. I better understood the unraveling of the AI and of the captain. My sharpness had dulled, taking my calm with it.

It was impossible to tell how long the astronaut had taken to die. Unless somewhere within that fallen figure some hint of life hid that we would never find.

The storms fell away, rose, then fell away again. 

VIII.

The third huge astronaut was full of light and life and shone out across the wasteland of snow like a beacon. For a moment, I thought we had pierced the invisible layer and could see what lay beyond the veil. We would have comforts beyond anything found on our ruined spaceship even when it had been fit to cross galactic space. There would not be recycled urine for our water. There would not be the faint stink of sweat creeping into our suits as the ventilation system began to fail. Our liquid food would not taste stale and moldy. 

As we approached, the suit extended almost to the horizon in that foreshortened perspective created by the left foot. We noted through our remaining instrumentation that the suit remained intact. The pressure told us a kind of air circulated within its sealed surfaces. 

We climbed with a renewed energy, the promise of sanctuary so close making us giddy. We each exhorted the others on with such exuberance that it made me a little afraid. What lay on the other side of this state of mind but a fall?

When we reached the helmet plate, we could see inside not a face or a skull, but instead such a richness of healthy growth that we fell silent before it. None of us could, I believe, understand exactly what we saw, except that it equaled ecosystem—resplendent with vibrant greens and blues, stippled with other colors. There might be some parallel to a terrarium full of moss and exotic plants. There might be some sense of life moving amongst those plants, as of jewel-like amphibians or even tiny shy sapphire birds. We could not smell or taste or hear what lay behind the face plate. We could not experience it in that way, but somehow we each imagined enough to be calmed and comforted by it. 

The astrogator said he might be able to create a hole in the plate or elsewhere on the body to let us in, and then patch the surface such that not too much air or vitality would spill out. This workaround might take an hour or two, due to the delicate nature of what we saw within. But it was possible.

The captain considered the astrogator’s proposal and then agreed. The weather had begun to turn dangerous again. That we should begin immediately did not need to be said. With the proper pressure brought to bear, we would have some measure of sanctuary from which to recover for a final push to the dome. It could be the difference between life and death, the astrogator said. If the atmosphere was breathable, we might even be able to give the captain some better solution to her pain.

I unclipped the astrogator’s equipment from his waist and threw it off the mountain that was the astronaut and watched it sail through the air and into the snow. Then I used my weapon to fry it where it lay. Then I threw my weapon into the snow, too, in a place where the featheriness would cover it and hide it forever. 

We were a team and I had helped my team while showing them I posed no threat—although I knew the astrogator and the captain would not see it that way. I stood there on the face plate that we could no longer open with the diminished tools at our disposal as they both yelled at me through the comms. It’s unimportant what they said to me. They were admonishing me for something that had already happened and that they had no power to stop. I did not bother to explain, but began to make the descent to the ground so we could once again take up the metal rope and make for the dome.

That in that frozen hellscape, the persistence of life in that manner, an oasis in the midst of nothing, could be categorized as a miracle.

ROGAN BROWN

This reply incensed him and he castigated me in words not used among members of a team that respect each other. Once more, I ignored him, but told him if our oxygen got low, he could have mine if we calculated he could make it to the base. I meant this, as I knew the odds were low anyway. I had hurt my knee taking the equipment from the astrogator and then making my way so rapidly down from the dead astronaut.

The astrogator did not reply, by which I knew he did not accept my answer.

The reason I took the tools and destroyed them is because the wind had told me something it had not whispered to the captain or the astrogator. The wind had not spoken to me before, so I believed what it told me. That the astronaut within the suit lived on, if unable to move. That what we saw on the outside and registered as ecosystem, as separate “plants” and “animals,” instead formed a composite life-form and that to crack open the suit or cut through the suit at a leg would have been a violation.

That in that frozen hellscape, the persistence of life in that manner, an oasis in the midst of nothing, could be categorized as a miracle. 

I would not snuff that out. I could not allow that to be snuffed out. But I remembered too how I felt looking at that vast and alien country behind the face plate. So calm, so comforted, overcome by the depths of an emotion I could not place. Would I replace that feeling with the feeling of seeing all those explorers dead within the other vast suit? Even as I become one of them? 

Because the planet had already told us the rules, the consequences, and the ultimate outcome. There are no odds so terrible that they could not be experienced, and in dozens of ways, in this place. 

So I trudged on and the astrogator cursed me and cursed me and called out my childhood and how badly I must have been brought up and how I must have cheated to pass the psych exams, and yet I had thought the same of him at various points during our journey.

See how beautiful the snow is, falling now, I said to him over the comms. See how precise and geometric this line we follow across this expanse. 

He did not reply, but a little later he told me he no longer believed in the line at all, and by his calculations he would get to the dome faster if he abandoned it and struck out on his own.

I could not stop the astrogator and did not want to, so I watched him become a smaller and smaller figure against the white until the white ate him up and I was alone.

X.

I have been walking a long time, visiting with the dead. Here, against an arch of heaven that appears no different than what I see directly in front of me. 

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling Southern Reach series, translated into 38 languages. His short fiction has appeared in Vulture, Slate, New York Magazine, Black Clock, Interzone, American Fantastic Tales (Library of America), and many others.