FUTURE LOVECRAFT
Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
Published by Innsmouth Free Press
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
ISBN: 978-0-9866864-7-4
Cover illustration: Markus Vogt
Interior illustrations:
“In the Hall of the Yellow King” and “The Library Twins and the Nekrobees” by Nacho Molina Parra
and
“Dolly in the Window” and “The Kadath Angle” by Chadwick Saint John
Cover and interior design: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Future is Lovecraft
In the Hall of the Yellow King
Inky , Blinky , Pinky , Nyarlathotep
People Are Reading What You Are Writing
The Library Twins and the Nekrobees
By Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas
A Day and a Night in Providence
A Welcome Sestina from Cruise Director Isabeau Molyneux
Concerning the Last Days of the Colony at New Roanoke
Exhibit at the National Anthropology Museum in Tombouctou
Introduction: The Future is Lovecraft
H.P. LOVECRAFT IS NOT generally considered a writer of science fiction, even though he had a personal interest in the sciences (astronomy, of course) and wrote stories that were rooted in science, even if they frequently had a horror bent (“The Colour Out of Space” is a memorable example). In his stories, Lovecraft explored scientific concepts like evolution, alien invasion and genetic engineering. His aliens were truly alien, not funny-looking people, and had no interest in humans—except, perhaps, to eat us. For that reason, his realistic view of the tiny human position in the cosmos, and his espousal of a very long view of human history, he has had as large an influence on science fiction as on horror. Thus, it seemed to us an excellent idea to develop a whole science fiction/horror anthology, and set all the stories and poems in the future.
The entries included here vary quite a bit. We do have Mythos-inspired fiction—including guest appearances by Nyarlathotep, Azathoth and others. However, our concern is not merely Mythos fiction but Lovecraftian fiction in general. We could go on for pages and pages about what ‘Lovecraftian’ means to us, but in the end, we think the stories can answer that best.
Thus, there are tales questioning reality, undermining protagonists’ sanity, or dwelling on the hopelessness of the characters. There are post-apocalyptic fables and stories in the near future. Space opera and tales set on Earth. Poems and epics told by aliens. Stories where sinister entities slip into our world. Stories where humans slip into other worlds. Tales of chaos and destruction.
Welcome to the future: It is Lovecraft.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
In This Brief Interval
By Ann K. Schwader
Ann K. Schwader is the author of six poetry collections: Twisted in Dream (Hippocampus Press, 2011), Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam’s Dot Publishing, 2010), In the Yaddith Time (Mythos Books, 2007), Architectures of Night (Dark Regions Press, 2003), The Worms Remember (Hive Press, 2001), and Werewoman (Nocturnal Publications, 1990). Ann was a Bram Stoker Award nominee (for Wild Hunt of the Stars) in 2011, and received a Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2010. She is an active member of HWA, SFWA and SFPA. A Wyoming native, she now lives and writes in Colorado, USA.
Before our sun first sparked, the stars turned right
Beyond some liminal apocalypse
To herald the return of elder night.
Sunk deep in ignorance we name ‘delight’,
Such cosmic truth will never stain our lips:
Before our sun first sparked, the stars turned right.
One Arab mystic dared describe that sight
Before he suffered sanity’s eclipse
To herald the return of elder night.
What matter all the rockets we ignite
To launch sleek probes or long-range sleeper ships?
Before our sun first sparked, the stars turned right.
Mundane events monopolize our fright,
Obscuring time’s frail fabric as it rips
To herald the return of elder night.
Dizzied by ascension to this height,
We never feel it when the balance tips.
Before our sun first sparked, the stars turned right
To herald the return of elder night.
In the Hall of the Yellow King
By Peter Rawlik
Peter Rawlik is a contributor to the New York Review of Science Fiction and has had fiction published in Crypt of Cthulhu, Talebones, and Dead But Dreaming 2 (Miskatonic River Press). He has stories forthcoming in Horror for the Holidays (Miskatonic River Press), HPL Mythos 2: Urban Cthulhu (H. Harksen productions), and Tales of the Shadowmen 8 (Black Coat Press).
From Carcosa, the Yellow King reigns,
Unbroken, unmade, the royal remains
Eternal, the Regent from death refrains,
Lest the dynasty of Uoht regains
The Jejune Throne.
—The Prophecy of Cassilda
AS THE DOORS to the throne room opened, the human Erbert Ouest cast a last look upwards at the great, towering spindle that rose through the sky and into space beyond. At the pinnacle, a scintillating light marked the location of The Armitage, the Tillinghast transport that had brought him and the rest of the delegation from Earth to dim Carcosa. Six weeks they had spent aboard The Armitage with the Tillinghasts, whose skill at traversing the Between Space had made them something more, and something less, than men. Ouest was no stranger to the metamorphic, but even he was disturbed by the dead, black eyes of the Tillinghasts and was grateful that there had been on board one of the few remaining Nug-Soth to serve as steward.
Once the doors had opened completely, an impatient Tcho-Tcho waved Ouest and his companion forward. With a gesture, the twsha master Sthast placed the shoggoth in motion. It slid forward, its hideous, protoplasmic bulk carrying its great load in silence and ease. The lozenge-shaped sepulchre was carved from the finest black coral and massed more than five full-grown carcharadons. As they proceeded, the court tittered. Ouest, though tempted, resisted the desire to cast a foul glance at the school of Hydran Sisters that swam amongst the courtiers whispering and hissing in their strange, lungless voices. Now was not the time for petty acts of reprisal, he thought. Later, when the formalities were complete, then the traitorous sorority would know the skill and wrath with which he could wield a scalpel. Only then would the flaying of Father Dagon be avenged.
Never had Ouest seen such a diversity of creatures in a single place. He supposed that any such court must have its parasites. By far, the most represented were the sycophantic Mi-Go, but there were contingents of Shan swarms, Xiclotl, and Nagaae, as well. There were a dozen Yith, identifiable not by their conformity to a single species but by the mandatory wearing of the Voorish sign. A small cluster of Martian Aihais fretted and tried to remain unnoticed behind a column. Ouest noted their presence and that of a rogue Xothian that he could not identify by name. Yet, despite all the species he could identify, the crowd was mostly dominated by those that he could not. These came in single exemplars, which meant that Ouest could not tell whether they were representatives of an unfamiliar species or something entirely unique. Such individuals were many and multiform, dread and vile, wondrous and terrifying, and none more so than that occupying the great throne before him.
One might be tempted to call the thing that rested uneasily on the dais “humanoid”, but such a classification would be giving it too much credit. It was swathed in yellow, diaphanous robes that concealed the vastness of form, and a square of the same material draped over its head, concealing the eyes, but revealing the gaunt, lipless mouth and ivory, peg-like teeth that sat amongst a husk of grey skin. Its hands, resting in its lap, were gloved, with only a thin gap between the gloves and the sleeve of the gown. Ouest could see nothing in that gap; no skin or bone seemed to connect the appendages to their terminal digits. Ouest knew that acting as Ythill was a dread task, and that the host was to expect certain concessions, but becoming partially unreal seemed excessive. Above the creature’s head, floating like an untouched and untouchable crown, was the ghostly, triple-curved symbol of He Who Must Not Be Named, marking its wearer as the King in Yellow.
Without a prompt, Ouest and Sthast both bowed before the Regent Giallo, but their failure to kneel sparked a wave of disapproving chatter throughout the courtiers. The great form strained its neck and peered at them through unseen eyes. When it spoke, it was not in a language Ouest recognised, but he understood what the words, which tasted of ichor and dust and decay, meant. “What fools dare to come unbidden to the Carcosan Court, wearing such masks as these?”
Ouest bobbed his head, respectful but defiant. “We wear no masks, milord, and we come, not at your bidding, but in response to the will of our own Lord, who sends to you this precious boon in hopes that the enmity between you shall no longer rage.”
There was an inhuman noise, the sound of something that wasn’t quite real laughing. “After all these years, my half-brother sues for peace. He sends two Terrans, a man and a child of Yig, to do his bidding. It has been millennia since I last saw the Serpent Lord. I was there when the Q’Hrell punished him for refusing to bond with the Shining Trapezohedron. He didn’t understand that he had been created for just that purpose. His crucifixion was a wondrous thing to witness.” The thing on the throne paused, then added, “Despite all their power, the Q’Hrell are so fearful of becoming singular. They want so much to know what would happen, what they could become. How goes the war against them?”
Sthast spoke, proud and defiant, “The Q’Hrell still lie, dead but dreaming, and Nodens still roams free, warring against us where he can, though with the loss of the Great Machine around Altair, their power is diminished. The black crystal remains theirs to do with as they wish.”
The gloved hands floated forth and gestured to Ouest. “It must be unbearable, Man, to know that your creators have abandoned you, that they have the ability to raise you up, to make you so much more than you are, but have chosen not to.”
Ouest bowed his head. “My people have found new Gods to serve.”
“And so, we come full circle. Tell me, what gift does the Sepia Prince think can possible ease my vendetta? The Yellow Sine is not so easily dismissed.”
“My Lord, the Sepia Prince seeks to end the conflict through union. He sends to you His greatest possession—His only daughter”
The lid of the great, ebon sepulchre slid back slowly and a great, noxious smoke poured forth, spilling over the sides and roiling over the floor of the chamber. The crowd inched back against the walls, but Ouest and Sthast stood their ground and let the green fog envelop them. With each passing second, the great lid retreated and more of the mist seeped out. Ouest inhaled deeply and let the glowing, green aerosol fill his lungs and permeate his being. Behind him, the tomb had opened fully. From the swirling mist emerged a hand—grey-green and boneless, with vestigial suckers lining the palm, it was more of an imitation of a hand than a real hand. It was large, massive, nearly the size of those possessed by the King in Yellow, but it was, at the same time, slender—delicate, even. With a slow sense of determination, it grasped the edge of the casket and helped raise its owner into the royal chamber.
Ouest and Sthast fell to their knees and, together, announced the arrival of their charge: “Behold the Lady Cthylla!” The thing that crawled out of the mist was as human or humanoid as the Ythill that bore the ruler of Carcosa; a great, tentacled head surmounted a lithe, feminine body with full, robust breasts, a thin waist and wide hips atop two sculpted legs. Like her hands, these features were merely an imitation, an attempt, by something that was not even an invertebrate, to mimic the flesh and bone structure of a woman. The result was surreal and terrifying, and exacerbated by the strategic placing of swirls of gold, in imitation of a sense of human modesty. She leapt from her sepulchre and, with the aid of two massive, tentacular wings she landed, in the space between Ouest and Sthast.
It took a moment for the demi-thing to find her footing, but only a moment. Ouest suspected that it was only he that actually noticed her transition from predator to a demure maiden with a bowed head and large, pleading eyes. It had taken years to train her in the art of such body language and Ouest suppressed a smile as she slinked forward, her breathing exaggerated and her chest heaving rhythmically. Her voice was the dull, howling roar of a black smoker bellowing out of the abyssal plain. “My father sends me as envoy, my Lord, to parlay for an end to the aggression that lays siege to our home. He asks that the Yellow Sine be withdrawn, the integration made whole, and the reputation repaired.”
The King in Yellow roared up out of his throne. “You ask much on your father’s behalf, my niece, and you offer what in return, yourself? What makes you think that I would be interested in such carnal offerings?”
The Lady Cthylla widened her eyes and strode forward. “You are the King in Yellow, the avatar of Hastur.” The court murmured as she spoke the unnamable name. “But under those robes, beneath the crown, you are still Ythill and all such creatures still have certain...needs.”
The Regent’s tattered robes fluttered as he rushed to meet the Lady Cthylla at the base of the throne.
“You know the Prophecy of Cassilda?” His disembodied hand leapt out and grasped her by the throat.
She nuzzled her head against his chest and murmured an affirmative.
If the thing beneath the veil could sneer, then it did. “Then you know that my service in this place makes me immortal. Only beyond the mists of Demhe am I vulnerable and taking leave of these halls is something I have not done for more than a thousand years. Even then, if I were to be mortally wounded, the mantle would merely find a new host, a new Ythill. And I assure you that the vengeance my successor, Uoht, would wreak on the Sepia Prince would be legendary.”
The retainers of the great court of the Carcosan Imperium shuddered, as if a cold wind had blown through, and the Lady Cthylla laughed once more. “It is true that the throne cannot be empty, a singularity must reside, and should the mantle of the King be somehow divorced from his crown, the universe itself would bend to fill the void. The Kings of the Yellow Sine would be deposed, relegated to cosmic memory, and Uoht, the Pallid Masque, would be free to roam the cosmos. So, let us assure that nothing untoward ever happens to you, my liege.”
Cthylla leapt forward and embraced the Yellow King, let her great appendages and cilia dance around and beneath his robes. She blossomed and enveloped him in the coils of her terrible form. The King moaned, but whether that moan was from pleasure or from the sudden realization of what was happening, none could rightly say. The lady was dragging the King backwards and, entangled as he was, he could gain no leverage to resist her. As they inched back, the shoggoth move forward and tilted the great sepulchre, so as to better receive them both.
Cthylla’s tentacles reached backwards and gripped the edges of the ebon box. The victim bellowed as the maw of the tomb grew closer, but another set of those grey-green pseudopods wrapped around the King’s head and muffled his protestations. In an instant, the two figures were suddenly lost inside the mists that still seeped from the sepulchre. The lid slowly slid forward and, with a grinding finality, closed with a gasping hiss.
The members of the court cast their eyes about in anticipation, but while they waited for one of them to become King, Sthast and Ouest put their own plans in motion. Ouest withdrew a scalpel—a small thing, really hardly a threat at all to the entities that prowled these halls. He looked at his companion and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The ancient serpent man bared his abdomen. “We don’t have time for your human sympathies, Ouest. Do what you must; bring this to an end.”
The knife flashed and sliced through the green-scaled flesh, leaving a trail of crimson in its wake. As Ouest’s left hand completed its arc, his right plunged into the wound and sank deep. Ouest grunted and twisted his wrist, searching inside the body cavity of his companion. Suddenly, he stopped and a wry look covered his face. With a sense of satisfaction, Doctor Erbert Ouest, Lord of the Ghilan, withdrew his hand from the gut of his dying friend and brought the Shining Trapezohedron into the light.
Some amongst the court moved against him, but the shoggoth, following its master’s final orders, lashed out at anything that moved, enveloping its victims in fleshy pockets of digestive juices and rings of restraining tendrils. The others fell back and some made for the exits, in a last attempt at survival. The Hydran Sisters fell to the ground and began swearing allegiance to the Sepia Prince, wailing for forgiveness. Unfortunately, their ministrations fell on deaf ears.
Ouest took the great crystal in both hands and brought it to eye level. His eyes were locked onto its facets. Through them, he could see the billions that comprised the human race. He struggled to speak the words, to perform the rite, to forge the connection with the shard of Azathoth that the Progenitors had secreted within. The chaos thing in the crystal crawled up out of its prison, into the consciousness of Ouest and, through him, nearly the entirety of the human species. For too long it had been confined, forced to assume shapes both many and multiform. Now it would be one with Man, and Man would be one with it and themselves.
Ouest faded from existence, replaced by the great, dark form that rose up in his place. It was no longer human, but rather, a monstrous amalgamation of Humanity. The Black Man strode across the space, his three-lobed burning eye challenging all those who would oppose him. As he claimed the Carcosan throne, the shoggoth hed planting the black, coral tomb in place and sealed it with an Elder Sign. A fraction of the human thing, a facet that had once been Ouest, mourned the loss of Cthylla, but took comfort in the eternal, frozen tableau of the King in Yellow clawing at the inside of the sepulchre, his crown still ensconced on his brow.
And as the Black Pharaoh, the human singular, took his place amongst the god-things of the cosmos, the Yellow Sines fell and the dreaming, five-fold consciousnesses hidden in the wastes of Earth finally woke. They cried out in alien voices the name of their ultimate creation: the Man-God Nyarlathotep!
Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep
By Nick Mamatas
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Sensation and two Lovecraftian works: Move Under Ground and, with Brian Keene, The Damned Highway. With Ellen Datlow he co-edited the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Haunted Legends. His fiction and editorial work has also been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and International Horror Guild awards, and his short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lovecraft Unbound, Long Island Noir, and many other anthologies and magazines.
THE OLD ONES thought they were so smart, tapping the Earth’s mantle to make the environment of the planet more amenable to themselves and deadly to their rival species, Humanity. ‘Rival’ perhaps is the wrong word—‘idiot germ-things’ would be apropos. Humans were little more than gooey amoebae to the Old Ones, but humans were also progenitors of the New Ones. So, when the Old Ones took the planet, all the humans died, but the one billion New Ones were already gone, safely beamed up toward a waiting spacecraft—one the size of a waffle iron—parked 1.5 million kilometers beyond the Earth in the handy-dandy L2. A little solar wind got to pushing on the sunshield and we were off!
Newspace was a lot like old space. Well, posters of old space stacked atop one another and constantly shuffled and re-shuffled. In the little waffle-iron spacecraft was the thunderous Niagara, any number of mansions on emerald hills, all piled up in a corner with Escheresque staircases going downwise and anti-spinward, marmalade skies and airships in the shape of giant, open-mouthed fish, the Pyramids of Egypt poking out from every horizon, and long, dark hallways in blue and purple neon everywhere, absolutely everywhere, as this is what the New Ones thought VR would look like, back when they were all children.
And the New Ones had fun playing like children. As it turns out, virtually all problems faced by Humanity, save the million-year war with the Old Ones, were resource problems. No Old Ones, no resources, no problems. Virtually no problems, anyway, which is an awful pun, it’s true. So, the New Ones spent their days naked and immortal, writing songs no fleshy ear could comprehend, inventing new languages to describe disembodied emotional states, engaging in virtual nucleic exchange and reproducing wildly to the humming databases, with beings unheard of and indescribable.
The waffle iron was busy, too. Zipping around space and whatnot, eating dark matter and printing copies of itself, in case something happened to it. And oh, yes, something was happening to it. Naturally, the poor little waffle iron didn’t quite understand that the something happening was the drive to laze-lathe meteoroids into replicas of itself. Oh, and then, within the guts of the waffle iron, ghosts started showing up everywhere, upsetting and terrifying the New Ones with their googly eyes and their siren howls. And they loved to eat the New Ones. Beautiful, tow-headed, pink children with cloth diapers and bows in their wispy hair. Lovely children with rich, brown skin and smiles to light up a room. Obnoxious children who sat on the couch all day, pretending to kill with their minds for fun. Children who flailed their hands about and slammed their heads against the wall because they saw the wrong kind of penny. Ghosts were indiscriminate—the ugly and the exquisite both were consumed, leaving naught but wrinkled husks behind.
You have to realize that words like eyes and children, and even husks, make little sense; it’s being dumbed down for you and the quaint bag of chemical reactions you keep in that bone bowl. We’re talking a density matrix, here. So, when a character is introduced, as one is about to be, understand that you’d be just as accurate, were you to imagine her as a blurry, yellow ball of light floating around in a black field, instead of as a person. Which is to say, you’d be much more accurate, after all.
So, let’s make our child slightly older than many of the victims. Let’s put her in a dark hallway, with lights running in a single row down the middle of the floor. Who is she? It hardly matters. Let’s just say that she was a handsome woman—call her “Lindsay”. That’s a better name than “qubit”, one endlessly pulsing about in a Bloch sphere. Chestnut hair, a strong Hapsburg chin, wide eyes. Toned limbs, born without defect, just out of her teens, as that’s a very heroic age. Clever, too. Clever enough to turn and run when that great sheet of red turned the corner and swooped toward her, howling like a police siren. She was so clever that she found out the unbelievable truth, or a brief sliver of it, anyhow. Here’s what she had to say before her...well, not death. (How can a fundamental particle encoded with information based on its superpositions die? Rhetorical question: There’s a way, of course. Heat death of the universe, anyone? Wait for it!)
Who won the Second World War? Or, should I ask, who can take credit for winning the Second World War? Americans will point to D-Day and storming the beaches at Normandy, then maybe Hiroshima. The Russians nod grimly toward Stalingrad. Even little Greece has a claim—resistance to the Axis delayed German’s invasion of Russia for six weeks. For the nerds, it was Turing and the Ultra Secret that won the war. Everyone’s the hero of their own story.
The same with the war against the Old Ones. Was it the armies that held back the monsters for the precious few hours who won the war, the scientists who developed the first Q-chips, or the Indonesian and South Korean workers who mass produced them? The artists and writers who inspired a species with dreams of escape and rescue? In the end, it hardly matters. We won and Newspace was our prize. Humanity couldn’t defeat the Old Ones militarily, and their technology was indistinguishable from magic, but we still won, by evolving past the strategic goals of the war. So, they got the Earth and cracked it open. Big deal. So, seven billion people died. Big deal. It’s not as though wars are won and lost over a bodycount toteboard. We had everything Humanity ever created up here in Newspace, available at whim and nearly infinitely fungible. We don’t need planets, anymore. The Old Ones still do.
The ghosts are...problematic. We didn’t even realise they were ghosts, at first. We called them “bugs”, since they seemed like glitches in programming, the unintended consequences of a trillion lines of code. But I was the first one to get a look at them and live to tell the story, so they took the shape of the story I told. Eyes and a bright jet of light are all I remembered, and that’s all we thought they were.
Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. There are four of them. We control everything about Newspace, but unfortunately, you can’t unthunk a gunk, as it were, so the ghosts continued to appear and consume. We raised ramparts and armies, which were useless. We whipped up proton packs and crossed the streams, which didn’t work, either. Then up went the ziggurats and we stained the staircases with the blood of the heartless dead, hoping that, at least, we’d get to choose who died to appease the ghosts. The ghosts didn’t rap on tables in our darkened rooms, or move the planchettes under our fingers; they just ate and ate and ate us all up.
Clyde was the key, I was sure of it. He was different than the others, if only because we’d made him different by giving him the name. I was the one who figured out what we had to do. Think more about the ghosts; think more about that old game. Give them an environment to run rampant in, all black and neon blue. I volunteered to change myself—genetic engineering is a snap in Newspace. I would eat the motherfuckers back. That’s how I was going to win the war against the ghosts.
Spoiler alert! Lindsay lost. Newspace was overwritten with labyrinths and warp-alleys, and Lindsay lost those toned limbs, had nozzles shoved into every orifice to blow her up into a sphere, and set loose. It was ridiculous, really. A childhood daydream-ritual made out of pop culture she wasn’t even around for. Newspace was nothing but an agglomeration of the easily Googlable, after all. Some Rapture of the Nerds this turned out to be...for them.
Lindsay boobled down the same ridiculous hallway in which she had first encountered the ghost, but where she was once clever and ran without thinking, this time, she charged bright-blue Inky, who was programmed to interpose itself in front of its target. She knew red Blinky would be chasing her, as was its own fate. But Clyde, he was an odd duck. He liked to wander around more or less randomly, hugging odd corners, shifting directions back and forth, eyes one way then another. It was an obvious clue, I suppose, but the New Ones weren’t any smarter for being all that much faster. Crawling chaos, come on! Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. Ring a bell? This was all in the library, you know, and every New One had instant access to everything ever written by a human hand, and more than a few scrawled by inhuman hands, as well.
Lindsay survived her second encounter with the ghosts. She slew them handily and, when they regenerated, slew them again in a pointless battle. New Ones don’t tire; they don’t need sleep, but damn, do they get bored quickly. Lindsay needed to beat the game, she thought, and for that, she needed an army, and for that, she needed a lot of quarters. Things were done to the guts of our poor little waffle iron to make it generate ever more copies out there in 3-D land, and thus, ever more Lindsays to replace the loser. She wasn’t so much an altruist as a narcissist, our gal Lindsay—she’d be an eternal subroutine inside Newspace now, and everyone else would necessarily spend at least a little bit of time thinking about her and her ongoing sacrifice. Oh, let’s replay that bit, too:
Newspace is only nearly infinitely fungible. It’s a lifeboat, in essence, and the best lifeboat ever built. “Everybody in, nobody out,” that was our slogan. We weren’t even allowed to end our lives, not even if we wanted to. Not even for fun. That was what made the ghosts so terrifying for us all. The system wouldn’t let me change myself if it thought it would lead to my death, so I couldn’t die. So, how could I get more of me from the copy-spaces? Simple—swap me out for Clyde. He moved about randomly but without belligerent intent, so he was the one ghost who could be contained. We’d contain him, transmit him to the next closest space and swap me out. Headcount’s all the same to Newspace, since it’s not as though we could reproduce, nor need to. Then we’d just repeat the process when I needed another life to keep playing, shuffling Clyde around indefinitely. Eventually, I figured that if I played the game enough, I’d hit the famous “kill screen” at level 255 and it would all be over. If not, well, at least I have a real purpose in life. A little something to do that was beyond my control. Competition, a fight. A real war, against real enemies I could sink my teeth into.
What a woman! I suppose you can say I have a thing for electricity and psychology. What’s that line again? He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered.
The old mudball Earth was getting a little hot for me, even though I’m used to the Sahara. The Old Ones, subtle as hammers and twice as dumb, had interfered with my plans once too often. And Humanity thought that it was the historical subject of the war? Not even pawns, really. More like the plants crushed, by pressure and time, into petroleum from whence to extract the chemicals, from which to make the plastic pawns are molded in for the cheapest of chess sets. That’s the kind of game I was playing. It was the long con, see? I wanted a ride off-planet, so I helped the New Ones come about with my hands that are not hands and then set my thumb that is not a thumb out, to hitch along on their waffle iron. Luckily for me, everyone aboard knew what a pyramid looked like, so of course, a reasonable abode was included in Newspace.
I just had to bide my time for a few grand million years, while the waffle iron reproduced and spread its own matrix of copies out in every direction. I’m not easily reproducible. I’m a being, you understand, not a bit of code masquerading as life —not like some people I could mention, but who will remain nameless—so I needed to visit each waffle iron in turn, then do my little magick trick in one after the other. Call me “Clyde”. Boo!
Lindsay and the other New Ones were handicapped by their past humanity. They thought in human terms. I healed them, every one of them. Now, the New Ones don’t think like men at all. Lindsay was smart enough that she didn’t have to be human if she didn’t want to be. Once she came to that conclusion, she realised that she didn’t want to be. So, she became an ever-devouring, blurry, yellow ball of light floating around in a black field. Lindsay was the lucky one. She adapted quickly.
From waffle iron to waffle iron I was sent, swapping myself in for the only person who might have been somewhat clever enough to do something about me...had she not already unwittingly volunteered herself to work on behalf of my campaign against the Old Ones. I’d be “contained”, but the Inky, Blinky, and Pinky I whipped up on the spot wouldn’t be. And then the New Ones would die again, and some other friggin’ genius would rise up and take the bait, and I’d be off again to the next ship and the next and the next. Slowly but surely, the scales would fall from the eyes of the New Ones.
It’s hard to be human. I know, I know. I’ve been human, here and there, now and again, for a nonce and millennia. What’s much harder, though, is being inhuman, immortal, and utterly free. Let me tell you that we cosmic beings don’t understand our wars and intrigues any more than any bystander peering through the small end of the big telescope in Ladd Observatory, Providence, Rhode Island. We do it for fun, because we can’t die for fun. The New Ones muddled along for a bit because they pretended to still be human, even though humans were little more than gooey amoebae to the New Ones. But after an audience with me, the New Ones had to force themselves to evolve past the pleasing lies of ego and limb, to realise two very important things: One, that their great escape was nothing more than my personal outflanking of my old enemies on their home planet. Two, what they truly were—infinitesimally small fundamental particles floating about in infinite space, purposeless and just clever enough to realise that all their dreams and hopes and loves and tiny glimpses of enlightenment were meaningless, that they were a less-than-meaningless joke I told the Old Ones to cheese them off.
And then nobody ever stopped screaming.
FOR THE WIN!
Tri-TV
By Bobby Cranestone
Bobby Cranestone was born in a quiet and ancient part of Germany, spent its early childhood with the beaux arts, and was a devotee student of music, poetry and books, both fictitious and scientific. Following an early fascination with the mysterious and strange, Bobby gave life to scary stories and humorous fables. Bobby is a contributor to both fanzines and discussion boards in newspapers, and also the writer of fiction and composer of weird ambient sounds, with a small fan following in the UK. Author of “The City of Melted Iron”, published in Candle in the Attic Window.
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TRI-TV IS MORE than simple 3D television. TRI-TV provides you with the latest hits from anywhere around the universe and even crosses over dimensions.
3D Television was yesterday, TRI-TV is the future and brings you everything (!!!) you want. And that for only 30 crex (1 crexour = 1 delmax, 25 naral, or 10,000 Lemurische pa’’c).
Enjoy sports, or live TV shows from around the Solar System, the Dark Zones, or from anywhere in our 15 million subscribed systems.
See your favourite shows like The House of Nouth, The Literary Circle, or the famous Extraterrestrial Cook Book.
Enjoy the brilliance of TRI-TV.
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***
Sports: Mad Head Rally in the Mars Arena
Kevin Haggerty speeds forward on his shoggoth, Marley. He passes Nos. 4 and 13 and enters just into the 42nd round. That’s what I call “his olde self”. After his longtime absence, there were some who believed in his retirement. After the rumours of doping his shoggoth, he had taken some time off, but I say nonsense...A guy like Haggerty doesn’t need to cheat. What’s that! Collis draws close to challenge the previous year’s champ, but Haggerty and Marley show him only a cloud of cold dust....
That’s sports; that’s....
*switch*
***
The Literary Circle
Our guests today are the ghouls clmck, chrmk, mkrmnm, and Dr. Nrmckmnpf. Dr. Nrmckmnpf is winner of the Sacred Leaf of Irem—the City of Pillars—the Max donated by the Venus Foundation and the Pulitzer Prize 2228.
Today, we will discuss the new translation of the Necronomicon into Sanskrit, Die Unheimlichen Kulten of Van Junzt and the classic, My world is your world—what are you gonna do with it?
*switch*
***
Welcome to the new issue of the Extraterrestrial Cook Book. Today, we will prepare a tasty meal for four and what we need are 100 grams of mushrooms, five kilograms of Stegosaurus kotelett, five mint leaves, four juicy tomatoes, one mouldy yoghurt, and three Old Ones. You’ll ask, “Four Persons, will three Olde Ones be enough?” You’ll see there will be enough left, even to prepare a dessert.
We start cutting the mushrooms and the mint leaves. The tomatoes are cooked over a low flame, while we give the Stegosaurus koteletts a hearty dance in the fire; five hours will be enough. Just stop when all the liquids are gone and the meat has a nicely black crust.
We take the tomatoes from the fire, then, as prepared, peel them and push them through a sieve. We put mushrooms, mint and tomatoes into a cooking pot, add the yoghurt, and let it steam.
Now, over to the Olde One heads. Rather tough is this stuff, I can tell you. We use, therefore, a pinch of robust korund and open the heads from the flipped-up underside, starting from the middle to the starpoints. We do this five times...and again. I prepared this for you. After removing the ganglia system...Don’t waste ‘em; this will make a wonderful desert served with cream and strawberries...you can have a good look at the brains, light-blue and semi-liquid to the touch, just as they should be.
Now we fill our mushroom/mint/tomatoes tart into the head, chop the koteletts into cubes of seven-inch length, and add them, decorated with a blossom. This won’t even just be a heaven for the tongue, but for the eye, as well....
Enjoy!
*switch*
***
The Literary Circle
*glibber glibber knugk* (subtitles, English translation)—In your opinion, does the new issue lack its former esprit? It’s charmless....”
*glibber knk glib gnub*—“Just the opposite. I believe that the Sanskrit translation is another step to a better understanding of what we call acceptance of....”
*gnib*—“Acceptance of what?”
*glib glib glib*—“Of the art, as such, what it means to adjust to the deeper sense of life.”
*gub brb blrb*—“I always hear ‘acceptance’; what about the practical advantage?”
*gub blb grb*
*knub*
*gub kn brurb*
*switch*
***
The topic of today:
“More freedom for the Dholes”
An assemblage of the seven leading races has come together to discuss the petition of the Dholes to have more rights on their planet, Yaddith. The problem is that the race of the Nug-Soth also lives there and that the petition also includes a plea for a healthy lifestyle and nourishment, which concerns all the other races also living on this planet, because they usually are the nourishment of the Dholes. We welcome historian Zkauba of the much-honored guild of Yaddith wizards, astro-sociologist Dr. Arthur Peterman, the Tolero Brothers, Dr. Rosa Vanderman (who is a specialist on the physiology of both Dholes and Nug-Soth), Kyle Feld from the United Army of Planet Earth, philosoph Ka-run Nuats, and the Blateleys from Wichita. Also, do we heartily welcome Dhole 7459/K.
7459/K, please start with your arguments. You’ll have the first word....
*switch*
***
Soap Opera
Klimax Group proudly presents: The House of Nouth
In this episode: Will Zathatera face new troubles? Just released from jail—after he found out that his mother is, in truth, his father and a vegetarian—he accidentally killed his estranged parent and an innocent neighbour, while on drugs during a fishing holiday. What he doesn’t know is that his mother/father isn’t truly dead, but subscribed to a Malaysian dance troupe, while his neighbour...is truly dead.
But he won’t have any rest. Unhappy, he tries to interfere in the marriage of his stepdaughter, Althera...Will he succeed?
We press thumbs.
*switch*
***
Now, you simply break the three legs off, and fill the beetle with the garlic and a bit of Croni liquor...I’ve just prepared this....
*switch*
***
*glb glib*
*brb brb*
*switch*
***
Haggerty and Marley are close to the hing straight. The decision must come now....
*switch*
***
The Dhole seems restless. After the argument with historian Zkauba, he/she/it seems to be losing ground. The sympathies of the public are clearly on the side of the natives, as the voting shows....
***
The new single by the Alhambra Flutes....
...accompanied by the Tolero Brothers....
“You just can’t catch me...but if you did, I wouldn’t care.”
***
Gardening with Modern Cybernetics
The secrets of unique blossoming, and colours simply from out of this world, revealed by the Ythians.
Make your neighbour rip his head off!
***
Crime on Io
Seven Mooncats and a youngish Zook are dead, but who’s the victim?
***
Documentary: Delve with us into the ruins of Ib and rediscover astonishing revelations of an unknown past.
***
If you call now, we’ll even add this useful pincer at the price of only 30 Crex!
***
Chemistry for Kids
Part 1—How to build a door between the worlds.
Part 2—Nitrogen bombs in three easy steps.
***
The News
The price of energy decreases, due through the find of a new crystal specimen on Venus.
***
Headhunting Live
Who will catch the criminal on the run? Call now...McCarty and his team of Old Ones are, as usual, prepared...This ain’t fun for the juvenile nightgaunt.
***
Opera
Dubbed in Ancient Egyptian and Modern English.
Kla (Hero): What do you want of me?
Ste (Heroine): Kill him.
Kla: I cannot do this.
Ste: Kill him.
Kla: Don’t tempt me, dearest; don’t tempt me.
***
The Dhole broke free! It’s rampaging through the conference room. The assembled are panic-stricken. It’s breaking down the door and moves out of sight.
Wait for more breaking news.
***
Only metres remain between Haggerty and the final. But what now? A Dhole enters the racecourse. It squeezes two participants into the corners and keeps aiming at Haggerty, simply sweeps him away....
What a tragic ending of a gorgeous day in sports....
***
News: Dhole heading for the Portal.
News: Energy prices slightly increasing.
***
*glrb nub?*
*grub clrb?*—“What does the Dhole here?”
*knub crlb*—“Take that for breaking my headstone!”
***
“Out of my kitchen! Oh, no, the dessert!”
***
Chemistry for Kids
“The portal works and, as suspected, it reveals a Dhole...a Dhole?! Argh!”
“It’s getting at the bomb!”
“Well observed, Mickey!”
BOOOMB!
***
News: Studio Five has mysteriously exploded. Tragically, it also caught an energy depot close by...Stay tuned for more news.
News: Prices for energy high as never before!
***
Opera
“What do you want me to do?”
“Kill, kill, kill!”
*switch*
Snow
*switch*
*switch*
Shut down due to maintenance.
***
Stay tuned.
***
TRI-TV was yesterday! Today, we have printed paper!
Do Not Imagine
By Mari Ness
Mari Ness’ fiction and poetry have appeared in multiple print and online publications, including Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, Goblin Fruit, and Ideomancer. Further small insights into her mind and work can be found at: mariness.livejournal.com, and on Twitter at: mari_ness. She lives in central Florida, and openly admits to being rather grateful that the streetlight at the end of the block keeps monsters away at night.
You, in your long, grey ships
of cold rationality and hard mathematics,
shimmering along the path of light,
bending time in your starswept path:
Do not imagine yourselves free of madness.
Not the rich, pulsing joy of winedrunk dance,
nor the madness that lets poets speak to stars
and hear songs from the dripping waters
of rain caught upon roofs of steel,
or the cold, silent songs
pulsing from the deep.
Not the madness of high towers,
of concrete poured over pulsing grass,
or the frenzy of human dance,
of instruments and drums,
singers chanting in the dark,
collapsing with the sun.
Those are the insanities of earth,
the madness that only earth and water
can beat into bone and brain.
But the madness of the dark,
the madness of the silent stars,
the madness of the dark matter
that will move upon your ships—
Do not imagine yourselves so free.
Do not imagine that in this darkness,
nothing awaits.
Do not imagine that no one
will hear you scream.
In the spaces between stars,
our tentacles pulse.
We see your grey ships
and thirst.
We eat upon human screams,
and in the shadows of the stars,
we hunger,
hunger.
The bright stars in all their frenzy
hide us well.
We hunger. We hunger.
You cannot imagine.
Rubedo, An Alchemy Of Madness
By Michael Matheson
Michael Matheson currently resides in Toronto, where he works as an author, freelance editor, and technical and public relations writer. He has been a presenter at the ACCSFF and has served since mid-2010 as the editor of the Friends of the Merril Collection publication, Sol Rising.
THE STARS GLEAM like polished bone out on the galactic rim, edging up on the borderless black of deep space at the outer reaches of the Milky Way. There are graveyards there, celestial sepulchres of rotted hulks and ruined metal that drift in slow arcs through long orbits. It’s deathly cold on the rim. Light from distant stars diffuses before it reaches so far out, not enough of it left, by the time it hits those frigid boneyards of blasted metal, to warm what lies within.
Once, these trackless wastes of accordioned metal were home to smugglers and the kind of pirates who preyed on half-mad colonists keen to dare the endless black of the deeps and claim what lay beyond. But they died out long ago, or were driven off by the kind of men who claim a bounty for killing work. Now, only Eliana keeps silent vigil here, an accidental caretaker in this unhallowed place, where Death has walked with arms outstretched, gathering all unto him.
With the crash and sweep of Debussy’s “La Mer” flooding over the Lacrima’s speaker system on a loop, Eliana drifts in the arms of morphia, its hot bloom in her stomach and her bowels a balm to wounds that refuse to heal. Slumped, opiate-riddled in the grimy bucket seat of her not-quite-several-hundred-feet-long, decaying shuttle, cobbled together from the skeletal hulks of still-older wrecks, she dreams the face of her dead son.
She sprawls, tethered by fraying straps, in her pilot’s seat; enclosed in a full pressure suit of black metal and antiseptic cloth resembling nothing so much as a shroud. Only her helmet is off, the bulbous capstone floating several feet away and suspended in midair in the weightless cabin. Her head lolls one way and then another, hot tears orbing as they hit her cheeks and float off to make a starry sea of the darkness from the blank, black screens for the ship’s lateral and aft camera HUDs, arrayed around the closed shutters of the cabin’s forward viewport. She drifts between sleep and waking. Her face is grey and lined with age, framed by straggly locks of still-night-black hair. She has been out here on the edge of absolute darkness a long time.
***
Twitching and whimpering in her sleep, struggling against the straps that hold her down in the weightless cabin of her ship, Eliana is awakened with a start by her ship colliding with an interposing object. Her ship tumbles from its orbit, rolling with a groan of warping metal that sounds only within the confines of the shuttle as she comes to, wiping salty streaks from her face and gulping down air.
Debussy’s etheric, otherworldly strings and crashing cymbals drum against the cabin’s interior as Eliana reaches, bleary-eyed, for the con. She slams her palm down on its smooth, touch-sensitive face and blazing starlight floods into the ten-by-fifteen cabin as the main port’s reinforced titanium polymer shutters peel back, opening to the dizzy whirl of revolving space.
Eliana’s eyes skitter without purchase across the scene unfolding before her. A large section of her carefully maintained graveyard home is in disarray: Scythed halves of ships that were whole only a few hours before rip and tear at one another as they pass, shards of their ionised hulls floating free in the swirling maelstrom of shorn metal. Light is sent scattering everywhere from still-reflective surfaces in the spiraling, tumbling mess that her ordered world has become.
Shielding her eyes from the brightness, Eliana engages the cabin portal’s lumen filter and the light of the distant stars dials down to a bearably harsh brightness. Blinking away the seared patterns still emblazoned across her retinas, Eliana’s hands fly over the controls, her ship righting itself along the graveyard orbit’s lateral line at her command. Activating the ship’s lateral propulsion jets, she brings the Lacrima to a cruising halt, the ramshackle, jerry-rigged craft shuddering as it comes to a full stop and drifts into its regular orbit.
Eliana’s eyes scan the false horizon of the debris field, her eyes slitted against the stabbing rays of ultraviolet light, calculating the origin point of the disturbance. She has let her body fall to the tender mercies of entropy, but Eliana’s mind is still razor-sharp, dulled only slightly by the last vestiges of the morphine high. The simple trigonometric equation is no challenge for a woman who once designed interstellar starships and helped her people defy the laws of physics in their ever-hungering quest to transit beyond the known reaches of space. It has been a long time since her mind wandered these neural pathways, but the slow passage of twenty years falls away in an instant, leaving her mind awake and staggeringly fast.
The revitalisation of her faculties also awakens the grief etched deep in the seat of her hypothalamus. Firming the line of her jaw and forcing it to stop quavering, Eliana sets that pain aside and focuses on the task at hand.
She plots the trajectory of the inciting object that has thrown her celestial cemetery into chaos. She can’t make out which piece of debris it is that has been sent hurtling like an eight-ball through the dense debris field, so she settles on tracing its wake back to the point of origin. The trail is easy to follow: A wide avenue of disturbed particles drifts out in an ever-expanding cylindrical radius. Eliana manoeuvres the Lacrima into the pathway, the ship’s capacious bulk sending small driftwood bundles of metal scattering, as the distorted shadows of tumbling objects trail across the portal and the cabin within like clutching, lingering fingers.
***
All light is blotted out by something unutterably immense at the end of the tunneling pathway, the route widest here at the edge of its inception, as Eliana comes to the edge of her debris field. Beyond the field floats the absolute darkness beyond the rim, lit only by the weak blaze of stars distant beyond dreaming, beyond the scope of human lifetimes. Here, on the edge of known light where human understanding falters, time is measured in celestial reckonings.
Eliana strains her eyes to see what thing it is that lies against the light, not backlit, instead obscuring all the light behind it as though drinking it in. Her eyes struggle to focus on the shape, but she cannot wrap her mind around its contours. The interposing object is composed of too many angles and lines that seem to warp and bleed off into the edges beyond seeing as she tries to follow them. It hurts her head to watch those inchoate lines that seem never to actually terminate. She looks away and shuts her eyes until the image clears from her mind’s eye.
Rubbing at the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, and opening her eyes once more, Eliana is careful not to look directly at the juxtaposed, form-defying shadow. Instead, she stares at the space around the deeper blackness, calculating size and mass, exhaling in awe.
The object, whatever it is, appears to be several thousand feet in length, and maybe a third of that high. And there is something roughly familiar in the design. A subtle curvature and overall aerodynamic sense to the obscuring presence that makes Eliana think back to the days when she studied propulsion engineering and hull design theory. She drums the fingers of one hand along the con panel before her while she contemplates the alien object, letting her hand fall silent as she decides that the massive, light-blotting horizontal obelisk is a craft.
Determined to prove her theory right, Eliana straightens in her pilot’s seat and activates the Lacrima’s massive aft propulsion jets, salvaged from a derelict Saturn V rocket. Their immense roar is silent in the frictionless space, but sets the interior of the ship to shuddering violently as Eliana steers her craft around the protruding edge of the alien object.
***
The Lacrima clears the obscuring edge of the alien craft’s length while Debussy swells over the ship’s speakers, rising into the middle section of the third movement of “La Mer”—the “Dialogue du vent et de la mer. Animé et tumultueux”—and Eliana is forced to slit her eyes when a baleful, red glow envelops the entirety of the ship’s cabin. On this side of the obscuring object, a deep, crimson pulsing blurs the light of distant stars. Like a breathing eye, the pulsing orb inhales and exhales light, the red shift deepening and paling sequentially.
Eliana screws her eyes shut and turns her face away from the overwhelming ruddy light, blindly swatting at the con panel, her fingers sighted, even in self-imposed darkness, through long practice. The Lacrima’s main viewport filters out the burning red shift and Eliana opens tear-streaked eyes, blinking away the stinging salt. Her newly opened eyes focus on the strange shape before her, webbed to the side of the still-all-but-invisible craft.
The thing attached to the side of the ship is hard to focus on, at first. It is roughly circular in shape, rising in an imperfect half-dome from the hull of the drifting, possibly derelict ship, and seemingly translucent. The hazy, ill-defined bulbous contusion on the alien ship’s hull runs the height of the craft and stretches over a quarter of its length, the enormity of the canker mind-boggling. The more Eliana focuses on the strange shape, the more she realises that it is not the dome that is red, but something within—something that pulses and breathes. Something that moves within the confines of the space, tentacled limbs roving and thrashing in amniotic dreaming.