Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories

by Alex Shvartsman

  He was wrong.

  Her name was Maria. Nothing else in the world mattered to him as much as her smile. He saw her face whenever he closed his eyes, and her slender form haunted his dreams. He walked around in a daze, thinking only of her, his longing physically painful. Maria liked him well enough, but she had other suitors.

  His most intense competition was with Dimitry, and Fyodor was losing. Rumor had it that Dimitry was getting ready to propose. The thought of letting Maria slip away was unbearable.

  For the first time in nineteen years, Fyodor made a trip to the lake, and he asked for another miracle. It was June 21, 1941. On the following day the Germans invaded.

  As the fifty-six year old Fyodor stood on the lake’s shore for the first time since the Second World War, he reflected that the most dangerous thing in the world was love.

  It was love for his father that had caused him to seek supernatural help as a young boy. His wish was fulfilled, but he had to pay dearly. A bargain he would not have agreed to beforehand.

  It was love for Maria that pushed him to return, and though he’d suspected the price would be high, in his wildest dreams he did not imagine it would be so enormous. The death and suffering he saw during the war was only a prelude to years of guilt, knowing that he was the cause of so much misery.

  He came back from the war in ‘45. Dimitry never did. Maria and Fyodor were married a year later. It wasn’t an easy life, but it was a good one. Fyodor wanted desperately to share his story with Maria, but he loved her too much to burden her conscience.

  Love for his father. Love for Maria. And now a love for their son forced him to seek out the golden fish for the third time. Vladimir was a smart young man, but too outspoken for his own good. A careless proclamation, an inappropriate joke, or simply bad luck saw to it that KGB agents came to the house in the dead of night and whisked Vladimir away. His fate was undecided as yet, but precious few men arrested for political reasons were ever released. Although things had improved since Stalin’s time, a convict rarely survived a sentence of more than a year or two in the north.

  “Please hear me,” Fyodor addressed the lake. “I beg of you another miracle. Not for myself this time, but for my son. He is an innocent man, wrongly accused, and all I want is for the investigators to realize this.

  “I’ve asked miracles of you in the past for selfish reasons, and you punished me by making sure that the price was too high. But not this time. If any bargain is to be struck, I will pay for it. Take my life. Do with me what you will, but know that if you wish to cause pain to anyone else, I will not accept your help. Vladimir wouldn’t want to be saved at the expense of anyone else’s involuntary suffering.”

  Fyodor stared at the perfectly still water, willing the magical fish to appear.

  “Come on,” he shouted. “You’ve already taken my childhood and my happiness. Now accept the damn bargain and take my life!”

  Fyodor stumbled as he suddenly lost his balance. A sharp pain like a lightning strike inside his head brought him to his knees. As the world spun around him, Fyodor thought he saw the lake’s waters swell up and a large silver fish with specks of gold glittering on its scales staring at him with sad, knowing eyes.

  The funeral was a brief affair. Despite living in the same village all of his life, Fyodor had made few friends. Fewer still were willing to walk all the way out to the lake in the rain.

  “Your grandfather was a prickly one,” said Kostya, an ancient and nearly blind man who’d braved the bad weather despite having one foot in the grave himself. “He was obsessed with this sorry puddle. No wonder he asked to be buried here.”

  “Yeah, it was strange,” admitted Sergey. “You know, he chose the very spot where he had that massive stroke.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Kostya said. “He was a miserable bastard afterward, half his body paralyzed, unable to speak coherently, all that memory loss, too. That’s not a life. I would have probably offed myself, in his place. But no, he stuck around to see his seventy-fourth birthday. Every day he spent hours to make his way out to this spot and mutter something at the lake.”

  “He loved this place,” Sergey said.

  “I’m not so sure,” replied Kostya. “He was drawn to it, yes, but somehow I don’t think he loved it.”

  The two of them stood in silence over the fresh grave as the raindrops disturbed the lake’s otherwise still surface.

  “Only one good thing ever happened for him here. When he survived the stroke, they let your dad go. Vladimir was sent home to take care of his war hero father instead of being shipped off to Siberia. Guess that makes you lucky too, for being born,” the old man chuckled.

  “He must have loved it,” Sergey insisted. “I think he used to come here to watch for fish in the water. He was trying to tell me something about the fish in the lake, toward the very end, but he didn’t have the strength.”

  “Fish? Bah.” Kostya snorted dismissively. “Ever since they built the factory upriver in ‘71 it’s been dumping chemicals right into the stream. There’s been nothing alive down there for the last twenty years.”

  The old man patted Sergey’s shoulder and turned to begin a slow walk back to the village.

  This story originally appeared in the Fish anthology.

  This was an ambitious story for me in terms of scope. The protagonist is born in 1917, on the day the Bolsheviks asserted power (and the earliest iteration of the Soviet Union is born) and dies in 1991, on the day the Soviet Union is dissolved. From the civil war era childhood, to World War II, and beyond, Fyodor’s difficult life mirrors the experience of the Russian people during that era in history.

  Is this story a fantasy, a modern retelling of Alexander Pushkin’s version of “The Fisherman and the Fish” fairy tale? Or is Fyodor’s obsession with the magical fish merely a delusion coincidental to the events in his life? I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide.

  THE TAKE

  I move through the aisles slowly, with the casual gait of a bored shopper who’s there to kill fifteen minutes while his spouse is trying on shoes across the street. Someone not likely to make an actual purchase and, therefore, ignored by the salespeople. I disregard the flashy displays of electronics piled up high, and the enticing discounts. Instead, I study the cameras, the location of the clerks, and the security tag detector equipment by the exit.

  It helps to think of something else when you’re in a high stress situation; keep one’s mind occupied so as not to get overwhelmed by anxiety. I choose to concentrate on how much I hate Charlie Tan.

  Back in the day, I used to be an actor. Not a big Hollywood star, but someone with a string of small credits, perhaps on the verge of a real break. Along comes Tan with his invention—a way to record and share memories like you would a digital photo. Tan gets a Nobel Prize and many longwinded editorials about how he changed the world, and I get my career yanked out from under me.

  I walk over to the shelf housing the RealFeel players. They’re packaged in small boxes, each the size of a hardcover book. The ones with the record option, like the one I’m wearing, are much more expensive and kept behind glass. The basic player models are out in the open, perfect for what I need, and somehow fitting.

  When it comes to home entertainment, RealFeel is impossible to beat. Take a guy who’s climbing Mount Everest, and have him wear an RF recorder. It will capture everything—the smell of crisp, fresh mountain air, the excitement and danger of the long climb, the camaraderie of your fellow adventurers and, finally, the thrill of reaching the summit. Then an experienced editor will take out the inconvenient parts—the frostbite, the muscle aches, and the fear. Just like that, you’ve got a blockbuster memory that any couch potato can experience for the price of a pack of smokes. Who would bother to watch another movie or play, after that? And what’s an unemployed actor to do?

  I slide a pair of slim RealFeel packages into the outer pockets of my coat. They’re spacious pockets, and their sides are lined with material that bloc
ks the signal from the RFID security tags. No one seems to have noticed. So far, so good. I make my way toward an exit, walking slower than I would like. My heart is racing. To my knowledge, I’ve never done this before.

  Just as I’m moments away from getting out, a pair of large men appear from an unmarked door. They head toward me. I increase my pace, but they nod to the security guard sitting by the entrance and he gets up to block my way.

  “Come with us, sir,” says one of them in a quiet, firm manner. When I hesitate, the other one moves in closer, invading my personal space. He’s a head taller than me, and quite a bit wider.

  “Better for you if you don’t make a scene,” he rumbles.

  They usher me into a small room, away from the sales floor. I keep imagining how, in a few moments, I might be on the ground, with both of them kicking in my ribs. The shorter one extends his hand and just stares at me until I fumble with my pockets and hand over the stolen gadgets. He collects them without comment.

  “Wait here,” says his partner. “The Police will be along shortly.”

  “I can explain,” I tell the security men. “I’m recording an RF experience of a first-time shoplifter. The items were to be paid for afterward, my producer is in a van outside. He has all the paperwork.”

  The market demands new experiences all the time. Two types of memories sell best. One is something done by a true expert in their field: an NBA star playing ball, or a grandma drawing on her sixty years of experience to bake an amazing apple pie. Those you can’t fake. The other best-selling memories are those of a first timer. Your first time seeing the Grand Canyon, your first time learning how to swim. Or your first time shoplifting at an electronics store. Recording petty theft isn’t exactly blockbuster material, but money’s tight and I take what work I can find.

  I don’t know if I’ve ever shoplifted before. I have no memory of that because that’s how Billy, my producer, wants it. There’s an RF hack that lets you erase any memory, any experience, permanently from your mind. Your first kiss gone forever, so that you can record your next one and bring thousands of voyeurs along for the ride. You can’t falsify mastery, but novelty is easy to fake.

  It takes a little while, but Billy sorts everything out with the store manager. He has a notarized letter filed with a lawyer, stating what we are doing, and some money in Escrow to pay for anything I might steal. This doesn’t make it legal, exactly, but it helps. Billy pays some sort of a fine and works his magic to make sure there are no criminal charges.

  Afterward, we are in the van, wearing RealFeels and going over what I’d recorded. Billy isn’t pleased. I point out that an experience of being caught for the first time may be worth something, too.

  “We’ve already got that from your previous takes,” Billy says. “Now I need a memory of you jacking some stuff and actually getting away with it. I’m tired of explaining this escapade to the rent-a-cops. And you better believe the bribes are coming out of your pay.” Billy pulls out an RF tricked out with the memory wipe hack. “Let’s get you reset and try the shopping center on West Street next.”

  I curse Charlie Tan’s name one more time, and prepare myself for erasure.

  This story originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

  You might recognize the similarities between the RF device in this story and the Memory Eater technology from “Seven Conversations in Locked Rooms.” That’s because this story was originally written for the Memory Eater anthology. It came close, but the editor had ultimately passed, so I removed the Memory Eater reference and the story sold on its second outing.

  There is a science fiction blogger named Charles A. Tan, but I wasn’t aware of that when I wrote the story. Jonathan, the editor at Daily Science Fiction, had asked me about it and whether I wanted to change the character’s name. Instead, I e-mailed Charles a copy of the story and asked if I could use his name, and he graciously agreed.

  The technology described here will likely exist one day soon. Scientists are already making headway in learning how to read and interpret brain activity. In fact, there was a study out of UC Berkeley published 9/22/2011 (only weeks after I wrote “The Take”) about using brain imaging to record the images recalled by one’s brain. There’s a long way to go from that to an over-the-counter RealFeel machine, but it’s a step in the right direction.

  THE DRAGON SHIPS OF TYCHO

  The sundown on Tycho was magnificent. The planet’s star was three times the size of Sol and its disc blotted out most of the skyline. It hung so low you could almost reach out and touch it from atop the hill where Dr. Jenkins and the rest of the human delegation waited. Its glare cast a reddish glow over the valley, making the otherwise green foliage appear as it might in late autumn. And as it set in the west, the light of Tycho’s star caused the hundreds of dragon ships to cast long, serpentine shadows across the valley below.

  “This is ridiculous.” Colonel Philip Samuels ground a cigarette butt into the mud with the heel of his freshly shined parade uniform boot. He immediately reached into the pack for another. “They are over an hour late at this point. People, I think we’ve been stood up.”

  “They’ll show,” said Meredith Nakamura, “because they said they would. The Seelan are very particular about honoring their agreements. Punctuality on the other hand isn’t among their strong suits. They have—how shall I put this—a rather limited understanding of the concept of timekeeping.” Nakamura, the ranking Diplomatic Corps official on this mission, was dressed in a ludicrously expensive Chanel pantsuit. She wore her outfit with enough confidence to make it seem perfectly appropriate despite the rugged surroundings.

  “How in hell do you build sophisticated warships and yet become confounded by the mere idea of a pocket watch?” Samuels grumbled staring at the exotic vessels docked in the distance.

  “Add it to the long list of Seelan mysteries,” said Nakamura. “Perhaps Dr. Jenkins will live up to his stellar reputation and figure it out for us.”

  Everyone looked at Ethan Jenkins, who already felt out of place surrounded by all the military and diplomatic brass. His heart’s deepest desire at that moment was for a patch of Tycho’s ubiquitous mud to open up and swallow him whole.

  “As I keep saying,” Jenkins mumbled, barely loud enough for the others to hear, “I really don’t see how I could be of assistance. I have no experience with this sort of thing.”

  “You’re too modest,” said Nakamura. “You became a professor of xenoarchaeology at Yale by age thirty and a Nobel laureate for advances in the field of extraterrestrial psychology at thirty five. Your resume for this mission writes itself.”

  “All that work was theoretical,” said Jenkins. “Examining the relics of extinct races, profiling species based on their millennia-old tombs—all from behind a desk. Why, I can count on one hand the number of living, breathing aliens I’ve actually met.”

  “Bogeys aren’t too welcome on the home world these days, not with the war on,” Samuels nodded.

  Perhaps if xenophobes like you weren’t in charge, more aliens would visit Earth, Jenkins thought. Who knows, maybe we wouldn’t be at war. He had the good sense not to say such things out loud.

  “They’re coming!” Lieutenant something-or-other from Samuels’ entourage pointed toward the path.

  A procession of twenty or so Seelan made its way unhurriedly up the hill. They were humanoid in shape, but lumpy and almost featureless. It was as though someone began to sculpt a clay figure of a man but got interrupted before molding any of the finer details and the clay dried up unfinished. They wore simple tunics and carried no weapons. For an advanced race they displayed no gadgets, not even something akin to a pair of eyeglasses among the bunch. They probably have bionic implants, Jenkins thought.

  The only exception was a large metal cube brought along by four of the Seelan. They carried it on two long beams which reminded Jenkins of the Ark of the Covenant from an old Indiana Jones movie. Unlike the elaborately decorated Ark, their cargo was as fea
tureless as the Seelan themselves—a perfect silver cube with no writing, indentations or even scratches that Jenkins could see. His professional curiosity piqued, Jenkins looked around, hoping for some hint of the cube’s meaning from his companions—but it was clear from their expressions that the artifact was as much a mystery to them as all things Seelan.

  When the Tycho natives finally reached the hill’s summit they lined up opposite a dozen men and women who had been waiting for them there. The cube was gently lowered to the ground by its haulers. They placed it on top of the carrying sticks, keeping the surface clear of the mud. Only then did one of them speak.

  “I am envoy,” said the lead alien in a surprisingly melodic voice. “I communicate with you for the Seelan.”

  “Greetings, envoy” said Nakamura. “Are you the fleet commander?”

  Jenkins noted that Nakamura did not bother to present herself or any of her companions by name. Unlike Jenkins, who got shanghaied into this mission at the last minute, Nakamura had dealt with this species in the past, however briefly. Jenkins trusted the diplomat to observe whatever protocols were deemed appropriate in the Seelan culture.

  “I am not,” the Seelan half spoke half sang. “I am tasked of learning your speech and design comprehend of Seelan and Hu-man.”

  “Our word for that is interpreter,” offered Nakamura.

  “Which one is the fleet commander then?” said Samuels. “We’ve been waiting around too long to chitchat with underlings.”

  Jenkins winced at the Colonel’s faux pas. It was a boneheaded move, a show of typical disdain Earth’s military brass tended to feel toward non-humans. An attitude developed over decades of easy conquests, rapid expansion and absolute technological dominance. An attitude which, for the first time in Earth’s spacefaring history, humans could no longer afford.