Words Beyond the Veil
There comes a point in many death metal songs when the down-tuned guitars begin to play a simple mid-tempo riff – it’s almost a chugging noise – and the music turns… visceral. Standing there, shoulder to shoulder in a crowd, the volume near-deafening, the music seems to beat a sense of unity into those present. A single organism, at one with the music – those with their gazes fixed on the stage; those too in the maelstrom of moshers, spinning and colliding and roaring together.
Then the riff abruptly shifts into something far more complex. The time-signature alters. The drummer hammers out blastbeats at inhuman speed, and the singer attacks his lyrics in a guttural growl.
Something like that came over me as I put my gloved hands to the alien artefact’s side.
I can’t explain it. I knew I floated a hundred metres from the Orion crew module, and yet I could feel myself back at one of the many gigs I’d attended during my twenties. The memory of that concert was over-powering.
I pulled my hands away. A click sounded in my earphones, followed by a voice:
“Hey, Mike? You okay?”
It took me a moment to respond. “Fine, Val; I’m fine.” I shook my head, as if to dislodge the ghostly riff I could still hear. “Why?”
“You kind of zoned out there for a while,” she said.
“I did?” I blipped my Manned Manoeuvring Unit through ninety degrees to look at Stone, but the sun reflecting off her visor made it impossible to see her face. “For how long?”
“Nearly a minute.”
According to my Helmet-Mounted Display, everything was in the green. It wasn’t a fault in my spacesuit then, some sort of hallucination brought on by an interruption in the oxygen supply. I focused a moment on the hum of the pumps in my backpack – which both reassured me and reminded me of the spacesuit’s comforting protective embrace. As I calmed, I watched the graph of my heartbeat on the HMD slowly subside. And that, in a positive feedback loop, relaxed me further.
So I reached out again, and laid both gloves against the side of the artefact.
Once more, I felt that sense of one-ness, an alignment with, and brought on by, the pummelling assault of the musicians. After no more than a handful of bars, the tempo changed, the singer growled out his words, and the complexity of the guitar parts hinted at sense, yet still seemed to elude it…
I lifted my hands.
I knew that song. I recognised the band, and I still listened to them. In fact, I had all of their albums on my phone in the crew module. And yes, I’d seen them perform live a number of times.
I can’t explain why death metal appealed to me, or why I still listened to it. I’d imagined that as I grew older my taste in music would mellow with the years. Instead, the reverse happened. After a childhood listening to radio-friendly rock, at university I’d discovered extreme metal – black, death, doom… Death had drawn me in, and I’d been introduced to its various sub-genres: technical death, brutal death, melodic death, progressive death, death/doom…
But what did my taste in music have to do with an alien artefact found in the Kordylewski Clouds at the Earth-Moon L5 point?
#
When the artefact was first detected, everyone thought it was an alien derelict. Telescopes showed a cylinder some five hundred metres long and thirty metres in diameter, with a rough unfinished appearance. It had no visible means of propulsion, no visible anything. Spectrographic analysis hinted at exotic matter in its construction. Which was why I’d been included in the team sent to investigate it. My field was exotic physics. I was also a qualified astronaut, having spent two tours on the International Space Station performing experiments with inconclusive results.
I remember peering out one of the Orion CM’s horizon windows as we closed on the L5 point after a three-day trip from Earth, and feeling a crushing sense of disappointment. The mysterious object in the Kordylewski Clouds wasn’t an alien spacecraft. The cylinder was hollow; it was a piece of space junk. This mission wasn’t going to be humanity’s first contact with an alien species. True, the artefact’s presence implied the existence of another civilisation somewhere out there; but it seemed we would not be meeting its builders.
And who knew how old this piece of junk was? It might have been drifting through space for billions of years before being captured by the Earth-Moon L5 point.
Neubeck – Colonel Ed Neubeck, USAF; mission commander – was as disappointed as the rest of us. More so, perhaps. I could at least investigate the properties of the material from which the “space junk” was constructed. But Neubeck thought of himself as a throwback to the heady days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. He’d been a test pilot at Edwards AFB before joining NASA. As far as he was concerned, he was the living embodiment of the “Right Stuff”, and he wanted his page in the history books. It made him insufferably arrogant. Since launch, he’d been dictatorial, brooking no disagreement to his orders, and sublimely uninterested in discussion.
Admittedly, he was good at his job – more than that, he was a gifted pilot. If there was a crisis and Neubeck was in charge, you actually stood a better chance of coming out of it alive. But I didn’t like him, and the feeling was mutual.
Val Stone, the other pilot, scared me a little. She brought an unnatural, and frightening, focus to whatever she did. Often, she treated people like pieces of equipment. She also had an annoying habit of always being right – although she took her time figuring things out. I suspected she suffered from mild Asperger’s or OCD.
The final member of the crew, and the reason why for me the four of us didn’t qualify as “amiable strangers”, was Xiang Yu, a computer science and communications specialist from San Francisco. He and I had shared a tour on the ISS, so we knew each other. It was a “space friendship” – we didn’t mix on the ground, but in LEO we’d hung round together. Figuratively and literally.
The four of us were the first humans to leave Low Earth Orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
#
Stone and I returned to the CM, where Yu and Neubeck waited. We parked our MMUs in an open bay of the Service Module, and worked our way hand over hand along the cable, past the wing-like solar arrays, to the inflatable airlock. I entered the tube first, landing feet first on the inner hatch, and then pushing shut the inflated plug which served as the outer hatch. I waited patiently for the airlock to fill, while the song I’d heard ran round and round inside my head. I even found myself nodding in time to the beat – although not too much, or I’d bash my chin on the lip of my helmet.
The inner hatch swung out…
As soon as I saw Neubeck’s face, I knew Stone had spoken to him on another channel. He was furious.
I unlocked and pushed up my visor.
“You’re a goddamned flake, Ross,” Neubeck snapped.
He might be commander of the mission, but that didn’t give him the right to speak to me like that. I was a civilian, even if he wasn’t.
“Oh shut up,” I replied.
Yu quietly helped me get out of my spacesuit, undogging the rear hatch so I could squirm out.
“I didn’t know it was going to do that,” I continued as I pulled my legs from the spacesuit’s hard upper torso. “We know the bloody thing’s alien, so how can we know what it would do?”
Neubeck opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. He glowered at me. “Do what?”
I took my spacesuit from Yu, pushed it across the crew module’s interior to the storage lockers below the mission specialists’ seats. Behind me, I heard the hatch open and shut to let in Stone. Neubeck followed me to the lockers.
“What the hell are you saying, Ross?” he demanded. He had a habit of looming over people, and he did it much more effectively in zero gravity. He made sure everyone was in his shadow.
“I felt something,” I told him, as I carefully pushed my spacesuit into its coffin-like storage. “When I touched the artefact. That’s what made me trance out for a moment.”
I moved across to my personal locker, yanked open the door and began rooting around inside it.
“What are you doing?” Neubeck asked.
“Looking for my phone.” I’d put it away before getting ready for the EVA.
“The hell you are. I want to know what’s going on.”
I looked back over my shoulder at him. “I heard music, all right? And I recognised it. I need to figure out what it was.”
Yu and Val drifted across to the storage lockers. It was a bit cramped with all four of us.
“What’s this?” asked Yu. “You heard music?”
So I explained that when I’d touched the alien artefact I’d been overwhelmed with a memory of a concert I’d attended years before. I’d recognised the music and wanted to identify it. I brandished my phone, which I’d just found.
#
“Tell me more,” Yu insisted.
I described the sense of unity I’d felt, how death metal always affected me in that way and how the artefact had seemed to mimic the same sensation.
“Wow,” said Yu. “That’s so weird.”
Neubeck swore. “His mix was wrong. He hallucinated. If that’s really an alien out there, it’s not going to use some goddamn devil-worshipping rock music to communicate!”
“Death metal’s not about worshipping Satan,” I said, affronted. “That’s black metal. Well, some black metal bands.”
“You’re a grown man, Ross, and you listen to that crap?”
Grown men, I thought mulishly, didn’t follow their childhood dreams and become astronauts. The whole space industry was a glorified – and hideously expensive – adventure. And I loved every minute of it.
I knew full well that Neubeck did too.
“Look,” I said, “I think I know what the song is. Maybe that’s not a piece of space junk out there, maybe it is the alien. And it’s using music to communicate. But I want to check the lyrics, to see if the song I heard was a deliberate choice.”
Yu pulled his phone from a pocket of his constant wear garment. All our phones could access the Deep Space Network and, through that, the Web. “I’ll see if I can find the words on-line,” he said.
Neubeck and Val looked at each other. The only thing missing from their expressions was the finger twirling at their temples. Still, they were pilots, and we pencil-necks had a reputation to uphold.
I plugged my comms carrier’s cable into my phone, and scrolled through my album collection. “This is it,” I told Yu, holding up the player so he could see the artwork. I identified it for him: “Worlds Beyond the Veil by Mithras. They’re a British band.”
“I prefer stoner myself,” he said, shaking his head.
It didn’t take me long to find the stretch of music that had been running through my head since I’d touched the alien artefact. The song was called ‘Psyrens’. I tracked back and forth through it. Yu held up his phone and I read through the lyrics displayed on its screen. I pointed.
“There,” I said. “Those lines.”
On stellar waves I’ve travelled And will so again
“What does that mean?” Yu asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. The artefact is an explorer, perhaps?”
#
“You’re making this shit up,” Neubeck accused.
He gave me a look of disgust, and then pushed himself to the pilots’ seats and the instrument panel. He went straight on the radio to Mission Control but he spoke really quietly and I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I could guess, however.
Aliens using death metal to communicate… It sounded completely insane. And, I suppose, Neubeck could well be right: I might have been making it up. How did I know it wasn’t confabulation on my part?
But the feeling of experiencing that music live had been overwhelming, more so even than I remembered from the Mithras gigs I’d attended all those years ago.
“So what do we do?” Yu asked quietly.
I shrugged, and had to put out a hand to prevent myself from drifting. “Go back out and listen a bit more,” I replied. “I don’t see what else we can do. It’s the only way we have of finding out what the artefact really is.”
“Neubeck will nix that in a heartbeat.”
“I don’t care.” And I didn’t. I wanted to hear that alien music again. I wanted to put my hand to the side of the artefact. I’d come here to learn what the artefact was, and I couldn’t do that cowering inside the crew module.
“I agree,” said Stone slowly. “We can’t know what Mike felt is real unless we repeat it.”
“You could try touching it too,” suggested Yu.
Stone shook her head. “No. Only Mike. We don’t know what’s happening here, and we shouldn’t risk more than one of us.”
“But I’m expendable, right?” I said, a little annoyed; but also perversely happy because it meant I’d be first. I’d be in the history books, not Neubeck.
“But how do we know if it’s real if no one else confirms it?” pointed out Yu.
Or perhaps I’d be in some psychiatric journal as a case-study.
#
Neubeck reluctantly agreed to a second EVA. So Stone and I suited up, exited one by one through the inflatable airlock, and jetted on our MMUs across the hundred metres of open space separating the CM from the alien artefact.
This time, I put both gloved hands to the side of the artefact. My head was immediately filled with blastbeats. I could hear the spacey sounds of a synthesiser, evoking galactic vistas, furious guitar-work suggesting the secret workings of the universe… I felt as though I was seeing, and had seen, other suns and worlds. Great towering columns of nebulae, tens of light-years high. The fractal swirls of galaxies. The leaping prominences of a star’s corona.
Accompanying those visions, I heard music of an intensity I’d never experienced before; and a sense of unity which made me an integral part of the sights and sounds to which I was being subjected.
I pulled my hands from the artefact’s side, and swore loudly.
Once I’d calmed down, I asked Stone how long I’d been out.
“About two minutes,” she said.
“What song did you hear?” asked Yu. “Could you identify it?”
I thought a moment. “‘Beyond the Eyes of Man’,” I replied. “Same band, same album.”
Moments later, the familiar sounds of the song came over my radio. It sounded flat and distant, despite the high fidelity of the comms channel, compared to what I’d just witnessed. I listened carefully until I recognised the part the alien artefact had played me.
Yu stopped the music and read out the lyrics:
“You hear my song It enchants your souls You are in my power I shall take you away.”
“Wow,” he said. “That’s pretty explicit.”
“In what way?”
“It’s like a galactic siren or something,” he explained. “It entices you and then sucks you in.”
“Assuming this isn’t all in Ross’s head,” said Neubeck.
“No,” I insisted. “It’s too intense, too visceral. I suppose dreams can sometimes feel real, but this is different. There’s this amazing sense of unity, like you’re at one with the band, with the audience, with everyone who’s listening to the music. You can feel it – like the way at a gig you can feel the kicks on the bass-drum as blows propagated through the air.”
“You took too many damn drugs, Ross, when you went to see these bands,” sneered Neubeck.
“Drugs weren’t part of the scene,” I snapped. Booze had been, though. But I wasn’t drunk now.
“Describe it again,” Yu asked. “I just had an idea.”
So, as I floated there in deep space, my hands no more than a metre from the grey flank of the alien artefact, lulled by the quiet comforting hum of my backpack as it pumped air and water about my spacesuit, as I hung in the void, I tried to get across to Yu and the others what death metal meant to me, how it affected me. That sense of belonging, which was purely an artefact of the music as it was played. There was no life-style attached. If fans of the music comprised a tribe or clan, it was a loose and individualistic one and its only common factor was a love of the music. But at a gig, standing before a stage while a band played, that tribe became welded into a single organism. And with music that loud, with vocals so guttural the words were often lost, a new kind of meaning was carried in the guitar parts, in the interplay of the instruments, in the sudden changes in tempo…
I let my explanation stumble to a halt, slightly embarrassed.
“Yeah, I thought so,” Yu said. “It’s sort of like networking. That sense of oneness, that could be a handshake. You know, like it sends the music as a challenge, you accept it and respond to it, and that establishes the link. And then the tune, riff, whatever, that would be the actual content of the message packets. Because they’re alien, you can’t interpret them. It’s like your brain has found a metaphor for a communication from the alien.”
“So he’s not making it up?” asked Stone.
“The music, yeah, I think so. The artefact is communicating with him, but this is how he hears it.”
“Hey, folks,” I said. “I’m still here, you know.”
I wasn’t sure I believed Yu’s explanation. Admittedly, when you study exotic matter and the like, you’re dealing pretty much with metaphors and acts of imagination. It’s not exactly a “hands on” science. But I couldn’t decide how I felt about what Yu said, if only because it meant my brain was wired in such a way that it used death metal as a metaphor for communication.
Which was sort of scary.
#
Another laying on of hands resulted in a snippet from Worlds Beyond the Veil‘s title track:
Open your eye Awaken your senses This I show you – now you shall see And it will change your world forever
There was definitely a message there. Yu had been through the album’s entire libretto, and had expressed his worry at precisely what message the artefact was transmitting.
“This is pretty martial stuff, Mike,” he said, referring to the album’s concept. “It’s like a rebellion and they call on some higher being, and he sucks them all in.”
“But the bits I’m hearing seem to be about exploring,” I pointed out.
“Or joining the artefact,” added Stone.
“Joining? How?” demanded Neubeck. “The goddamn thing’s hollow. There’s nobody in there you can join.”
He had a point. If the artefact was recruiting, it couldn’t be looking for physical recruits. Not unless what we saw here at the Moon-Earth L5 point was only part of an alien spaceship – a whole spaceship. Perhaps the rest of it existed in other dimensions?
There was only one way to find out.
This time it was:
We shall embrace the sanctity of these distant planes
The song was ‘Voices in the Void’, and the lyrics did sort of answer my question.
But if the alien ship wanted us to join its crew, how did we do so?
Where was the entrance?
#
Back aboard the crew module, I stared out of the horizon window at the artefact while in my head reverberated pounding drums, lightning-fast arpeggios, hammers and slides and pulls, the insistent growls of an invitation to travel the galaxies… I had my phone plugged into my comms-carrier and was playing the album, but it wasn’t the same. It was like looking at a photograph of a loved one who had recently died.
“I have to go out again,” I said.
I could feel it calling to me. It wanted me to join it. I only had to scroll through the lyrics of Worlds Beyond the Veil to see the message:
Come to me Children of Mother Earth
There it was, in They Came and You were Silent. I had no intention of remaining silent.
“I need to go out again,” I said.
“Not going to happen, Ross,” said Neubeck.
I looked back over my shoulder at him. He hovered at the far end of the instrument panel. Yu and Stone were across by the storage lockers. I was reminded of a photograph I’d seen years ago, taken inside the Apollo command module during one of the flights to the Moon. I forget which astronaut it had been. He had seemed a part of the machine, an integral component of the spacecraft, carefully fitted in amongst the switches and readouts and equipment. Without him, the spacecraft could not have operated; without the spacecraft, he had no function.
That was Neubeck, that was what he looked like as I gazed across the pilots’ seats towards him.
And then I knew what I had to do.
I had the hatch into the inflatable airlock pushed open before Neubeck noticed what I was doing it. I darted through and slammed it shut behind me. The outer hatch was a problem. It was an inflated plug, and air pressure within the airlock kept it sealed. It was made of Kevlar and Nomex, and too tough to pierce with a knife. Besides, I had no knife on me.
Fortunately, the atmosphere was not at sea-level pressure but at 8.5 psi. I managed to force one arm down the side of the outer hatch. It was enough to crack the seal. Air hissed out. Soon, I was gasping for breath, and the pressure was low enough for me to haul the outer hatch open.
I wasn’t wearing my spacesuit. I had about three minutes before I died. But I had to reach the alien artefact. I exhaled, emptying my lungs and directing my breath at the CM. I could feel the intense heat of the sun on my face. Rolling onto my front, I put out my hands. The moisture in my mouth, on my eyes, in my nostrils, was boiling away. My fingers and hands had swollen to twice their normal size, were turning black with burst blood vessels. I would not survive this.
I didn’t care.
My hands hit the side of the artefact.
#
The band has been playing for about ten minutes. Behind them, the backstage area is dominated by a giant holographic screen. On it, I can see, with supernatural three-dimensional clarity, a blue marble alone in the blackness of space. I know it to be my home, the home I am leaving. As I watch, that small blue planet recedes from view and disappears. Then the sun, an intense white dot, swings across the screen. It grows larger, ever larger, turning yellow, orange, red. I can see its corona, the prominences climbing up and falling, great arches of seething matter at colossal temperatures.
The alien spacecraft is leaving the Earth-Moon L5 point and falling towards the Sun for a slingshot manoeuvre. I will see the wonders of the universe on that screen, I will visit other star systems and they will be displayed up there behind the band.
The audience and I are one, brought together by the music. I feel unity and peace and expectation. The music – those inhumanly fast blastbeats, the complex guitar, the intricate bass-line, the growls of the vocalist, the abrupt changes of tempo – make me a part of something greater, an intellect vast and conjoined. A synergistic organism.
An organism of many disparate parts. I look to my left and right, and see creatures that are so strange I have no words to describe them. Aliens. Hundreds of them, hundreds of different races. And all at one with, and in, the music. A congregation of souls brought together by the band on stage, witness to the wondrous vistas displayed on the giant screen.
#
I can’t explain why death metal appeals to me, but I can explain how I knew that death was the only way to gain entry to the alien ship. It’s there in the lyrics of Transcendence, the penultimate track on the album:
The call has come to return To leave this mortal coil Return to the eternal Become as one again To remove back to spirit I cast off these chains so binding
#
All lyrics taken from the album Worlds Beyond the Veil by Mithras, and used with the kind permission of the band.
Ian has been published in the magazines Jupiter, Postscripts, Perihelion and Alt Hist, and in the original anthologies Vivisepulture, The Monster Book for Girls, Where Are We Going? and Catastrophia. His novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains won the BSFA award. It is the first book of the Apollo Quartet, along with, The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself, Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above and All That Outer Space Allows.