“Only the blazing light of the sun weakens the skull. I fear the coming of night.
“The others? Oh yes, they feel the thing now, and they know it calls forth another of its kind. Soon will be the time of the great dying, the mass entombment, the sacred and profane interment of all that walk above the land. The time of the skinturning is at hand, may God help us all.”
The final entry was of a broken, stick-thin old man whose back was bent and whose hair had gone a shocking white. One eye was closed, the other wide but glassy.
“There is no escape. With great, pitiful futility, Dr. Pelan and the others have sent out a distress call. That which waits in ravening darkness only laughs. Soon will come the night, the night that lasts five Earth days. When the sun again rises, we shall all be dead. The signs of the coming of Yiggrath, the unborn and undying, the endless, deathless shade from the black seams between time and space, are many. There is a curious red haze in the sky and branching green lightning at the horizon. The winds are hot and dry, the winds of pestilence, the breath of the embalmer. No one can be sure of anything now. As another darker, malefic dimension intersects with our own, electronics and machinery fail. Time is turned back upon itself, so now is yesterday and five minutes ago is two weeks hence. The spacetime continuum is tearing open, and I alone can see what is waiting to creep out.”
After a long pause, “It is full dark out now. Yiggrath comes. I hear the others out there, the crew of Starlight Station. They are driven to a mad frenzy, screaming and crying out, shrieking in the night like animals being butchered as they fall into the hands of the living god. And out the window . . . yes, it is Yiggrath rising high and black and diabolic above the station. His horns brush the dark, spiral holes between the stars.
“It comes! It comes!
“Inside, oh God, oh god, the hour of the skinturning . . .”
“Shut that damn thing off!” Riger ordered.
“That’s it,” Kang said. “That’s all there is.”
* * *
They were getting out, back to the Bartholomew and up to the Cosmo. Riger wasn’t going to bother searching for anyone else. They needed to come down here with a large search party. There was no way he could handle it with four men, and why the hell didn’t Sealander have those fucking lights on yet?
As he hurried Doc Kang down the corridor and down the metal steps to the first level, he tried to call the Cosmo. That static, that damned static. It was as if there was no ship up there. All he was getting was the drone of the planet itself, the echo of atmospheric electrical activity.
Then he heard Captain Cawber.
“Cosmo!” Riger cried. “This is Riger! We’re coming back up, sir. What’s going on down here is more than we can handle.”
He expected Cawber’s usual stern rebuttal, but what he got was much worse. “All right,” the captain sighed. “Go in, but go in careful.”
What in the hell?
“Captain? Captain? Are you reading me?”
“Keep your eyes open, mister. God knows what kind of mess you’re going into.”
This was the transmission from earlier, after the crew landed with the Bartholomew. What was this? What kind of sick fucked up joke was this?
“Time is turning back upon itself just as Henley said it would,” Kang mused. “Now, we’ll be delivered into the hands of the living god.”
Riger wanted to hit him.
Something was happening. Reality—the reality he had long known—was disassociating itself from Starlight Station. He felt a hot, bright sort of delirium open inside his head as time became elastic, stretching and sagging and reinventing itself. Now, the corridors were too long, stretching into black, stark infinity. He felt that if he followed them, if he ran blindly down them in some hysterical terror, he would fall off the rim of the universe and plunge into the ravening darkness. Yes, it was here, it was now, it was happening. He could feel the physical parameters of the station begin to alter, squeezing him from all sides, the walls oozing and bubbling, the angles in the corners warping, intersecting, splitting open to reveal sinister, eldritch vistas beyond time and space.
“We don’t belong out here,” Kang said, his face pale as spilled milk behind his helmet bubble, his eyes huge and white like goose eggs. “Out here in these awful spaces where darkness is endless and insanity takes physical form. Do you see that, Riger? Don’t you see the terrible, horrendous mistake we’ve made by exploring deep space?
“It wasn’t our idea at all! From the very crude beginnings of Sputnik and the Gemini missions, we were summoned into space, driven into it like herd animals, compelled to come out here!” He reached out for Riger, clawing at him. “Don’t be a fool! Open your eyes and see, really see! It’s always nightfall out here and and and seven . . . this planet is a trap! We followed the dark creek into the black black . . . eight . . . river which spills into the ocean of stars and now we see the malign shapes that hide behind them like a child behind a blanket! Here, flesh and matter and time and cold intellect intersect and and and—” He began to shake, trembling and jerking, thumping against the wall. Like Pelan, vibrating. “The . . . the coordinates . . . eight point three point one-five-seven point nine-three . . . oh God, oh God, oh God . . . here now, it blossoms! The stars are stripped away and the blackness of the cosmos opens like a great, hungry mouth and five . . . five . . . five . . . six . . . seven three . . . point nine-three-one squared . . . point six point six point six point six six six SIX SIX SIX SIX SIX—”
Kang’s voice became a funneling scream as he vibrated madly, and there was a deafening, fleshy pop as he exploded inside his suit like a tick burned with a match. He bounced off the walls, hit the ceiling, and fell at Riger’s feet, the inside of his helmet filled with a bubbling, sloshing red mire of macerated tissue and blood.
Riger ran.
He got on the comm and called, shouted for Sealander again and again, but there was no response. Just that static squealing in his ears, louder and louder, shrilling, screeching, making him cry out. He ran toward the entrance, and there was Wise, waiting for him.
“Wise!” Riger cried. “Wise!”
Then his hands were on him, and he could feel the soft give of the man’s lizard skin, and Wise pitched over, his suit breaking open, and what was inside splashed over the floor.
That’s when Riger knew.
That’s when he really knew. Wise was sprawled there on the floor in a soup of his own anatomy, a husk of pulp and raw wet matter. He had been birthed from his e-suit like a slimy fetus from an infected placenta, wearing the globular jewels of his organs on the outside, wrapped in the moist pink tentacles of his intestines. The turning, the skinturning. It was how the living god received his worshippers, how Yiggrath welcomed them into his church—he turned them inside out
Riger stumbled out into the poisonous atmosphere of Gamma Eridani 4, standing and falling, rising and tripping on rubbery legs.
This is . . . this is . . . this is the hour of the turning.
He looked up and screamed, for Yiggrath had come. He/she/it towered above him, a glossy, obsidian-black gargoyle rising a mile or two or three into the hazy, flickering auroral, neon-slashed sky. Its jagged, spectral wings spread from horizon to horizon, its titanic body flickering and sparking with a soft blue lambency. The rising spires of its horns seem to brush the clouds. It grinned down at him, snout opening like a monstrous bi-valve that could swallow the stars.
Riger did not scream. He was struck dumb with awe at the cosmic horror of the creature, of Yiggrath, the unborn and undying, the hyper-relativistic nightmare, the multi-dimensional living god that threaded the galactic magnetic field like a needle.
Bathed in its frozen shadow, everything around him began to spin and whirl, pulled inside out and broken into a blazing cyclonic storm of energized particles like droning phosphorescent corpse-flies that seemed to move around him and through him at light velocity and perhaps beyond until he was certain his head would split open like a jelly-
filled gourd. And then, then, as his mind sucked into a black hole inside his cerebral cortex, he saw an enormous, endless plain of glittering stars forming chains and pulsating nebula and nightmare constellations that no man had ever seen and lived to tell of.
And as his eyes seemed to explode from his head, his voice rambling on and on and on—eight . . . eight point three point one-five-seven point nine-three—he saw the transgalactic gulf and its throbbing pulsars and glowing strata of stars split wide open, coming apart like a jigsaw puzzle in an alien spectrum of light, and he saw worlds, a million-billion dead worlds blackened into cinders in some geometrically perverse, impossible anti-space where multifaceted triangles and polygons and trapezohedrons hopped like frogs and a milky, writhing incandescence crawled, a monstrous worm a hundred light years in length. And as his voice screamed out the coordinates of his own approaching destruction with a sort of manic and rapturous mad glee—five . . . five . . . five . . . six . . . seven three . . . point nine-three-one squared . . . point six point six point six point six six six SIX SIX SIX SIX SIX—he knew what Yiggrath wanted him to know: that the universe, the third dimension, was all synthetic—it was a simulation, a twisted vision, a hallucination that the beast had dreamed and now had grown bored with.
This is what Yiggrath wanted Riger to understand, the lurid joke inside the punchline hidden in the hysterical cackling iridescent chaos of known space, the seed it planted in his head as his skin began to turn.
Tim Curran is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, Hag Night, Skull Moon, The Devil Next Door, Doll Face, Afterburn, House of Skin, and Biohazard. His short stories have been collected in Bone Marrow Stew and Zombie Pulp. His novellas include The Underdwelling, The Corpse King, Puppet Graveyard, Worm, and Blackout. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh & Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, as well as anthologies such as Shadows Over Main Street, Eulogies III, and October Dreams II. His fiction has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian. Find him on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/tim.curran.77
The Immortals
Angus McIntyre
Illustrated by Luke Spooner
The hall is vast and empty, the vaulted roof lost in shadow above. The polished black marble of the floor reflects a line of huge columns, lit only by a glimmer of daylight that enters through the louvres of half-hidden windows.
It is a space built to impress, but the man who walks through it is not impressed. In his long lifetime, he has seen thousands of such places, places built both to dwarf and to exalt their human builders. He finds their grandiosity predictable.
He follows a red light floating in the air in front of him, taking his time, refusing to be hurried. He walks with the aid of a cane that he does not need but which is part of his present aspect. Currently, he has the appearance of a man of advanced years, with a hawk-nosed face framed by a mane of white hair, broad-shouldered, his back only slightly stooped—the very model of the distinguished patriarch. He wears a maroon beret and a black uniform whose severity is broken only by a discreet line of medal ribbons.
This appearance is an affectation or perhaps a disguise. In two millennia of life, he has been five times a man, four a woman, and more besides. He has fathered more children than he can name and given birth six times. In another decade, perhaps, he may choose to be a young woman or a fragile child whose eyes sparkle with ancient wisdom or something only superficially human.
“The others are waiting for you in the hospital annex, General Montdarau,” the red light whispers. Montdarau raises thick eyebrows in mild annoyance. He has not come all this way to be chivvied by a machine.
He thinks about the word hospital. Nowadays, a hospital is a place of transformation. One enters a hospital as a caterpillar enters a cocoon, emerging a different being. Only on backward worlds does the word still denote a place where the sick and injured are made well or the dying warehoused until medicine can do nothing more for them. On backward worlds and, he suspects, here. The council would not have summoned him merely to witness a rebirth.
His measured steps bring him at last to the end of the hall. A door slides open and the red light flickers and winks out.
The open door reveals a smaller chamber. Around a catafalque of polished glass and metal, its surfaces alive with colored lights, four other beings are waiting for him. They turn as he enters, and he appreciates for the first time the gravity of the situation.
“General,” says a tall woman with iron-gray hair cut in a severe bob.
“Madam Secretary.”
At the first secretary’s elbow, a round-faced hermaphrodite in colored silks bows a greeting. For Tiril of Essen to leave their homeworld, the matter must be of extraordinary importance. Behind Tiril stands Doctor-General Kamach, next to a fluted column of brass that is the avatar of the machine-philosopher Hasdrubal.
Five makes a quorum, Montdarau thinks, but what a quorum. The five gathered here can make decisions that could change the fate of whole solar systems.
“You studied the dossier?” the secretary says.
He nods. It told him little, consisting only of the technical fiche for the starship Nerea and the biographies of each of her crew. Significantly, it did not include flight plans or astrographic data related to the starship’s destination.
Kamach gestures, and the glass and durasteel cylinder of the medical incubator tilts and swivels, a metal shield sliding down to reveal what lies within. For a second time, Montdarau hesitates.
The effects of elective surgery or genetic programming are sometimes unsettling. The wounds of war are often horrifying. Montdarau has seen both. This is worse. He knows instinctively that this is something that has been done, not chosen.
The face is still recognizably human, but the flesh has been burned and melted. The cheeks have flowed like wax, leaving blobs of flesh dangling from the scorched bone of the jaw. In places, the charred skin has split to reveal gray pustules that glisten and pulse. The mouth is open in a soundless scream, showing too many teeth. The lidless eyes—undamaged, the irises a bright pale blue—stare blankly at the ceiling.
The casing of the incubator hides everything below the collarbone—the flesh has been flayed from the man’s shoulders, Montdarau sees, and the exposed bone is etched with tiny symbols—but what is on display is bad enough.
“Captain Merrick, I assume,” he says.
“For the moment we are referring to him simply as the survivor,” Kamach says. “You will see why.”
“What did this to him?”
The first secretary shakes her head slowly. “It is unclear.”
“No recordings?”
“The starship was lost. This body was found in a lifepod. What little we know has been pieced together from his utterances and the fragmentary records in the pod.”
“Fragmentary?”
“At some point, he destroyed the pod’s data core before trying to end his own life. In the latter, he was unsuccessful.”
Montdarau nods. Like them, Captain Merrick had been an Immortal, his engineered body of extraordinary toughness and resiliency.
“We keep him sedated,” Kamach says. “For our own safety as well as his comfort. But my doctors are convinced there is little more to be learned. His mind is gone, possibly for good.”
Montdarau breathes out. “Tell me what you know,” he says.
* * *
Captain Merrick is five hundred years old, but he wears the body of a young man, robust and well-proportioned. He looks as he did at thirty-five, before he won the first of his famous series of victories. His manner is easy and natural.
His quarters are modest, a horseshoe of private chambers surrounding a formal reception room. One wall of the reception room is dominated by a mural showing a man in green coveralls nestled in the womb of a great machine. With his pale skin, blond hair, and look of capable determination, the man in the painting resembles the captain so much that for a m
oment Lysa Tallis wonders if it is intended as a portrait.
El Hombre, Controlador del Universo, her mindware informs her, adding a translation and a biographical note about the artist. The painting is not the original but a copy so ancient that it must be scarcely less valuable.
The captain extends both hands. “Welcome aboard, Academician,” he says.
She makes a formal reverence, but he answers with a counter-courtesy that erases the difference in rank.
“We don’t stand on ceremony,” he tells her. He waves his hand for the other members of the crew to come forward: Rothan, the engineer, Netts, systems artificer, and Belis, the ship’s supercargo and scientist. Like the captain, Rothan is an Immortal. Despite his gray beard and lined face, he is actually centuries younger than Merrick. The others, like Lysa, are in their first lifespan, perhaps still undecided whether to undergo the complex process of genetic editing and technical augmentation that confers full Immortality.
“You’ll meet our passenger later,” the captain says. “He has gone planetside to secure what he described as ‘essential supplies.’ Once he joins us, we will be ready to depart.”
“You are familiar with Doctor Erbach’s work?” asks Rothan.
Lysa shakes her head. “My specialization is in planetology,” she says. “Doctor Erbach, as I understand it, is a historian.”
She is not being strictly honest. As the Commonwealth’s designated observer, she has reviewed everything related to the mission. Erbach’s published work is esoteric and hard to access, but she has studied what she could find.
She is not sure it can strictly be called history. Erbach’s rambling theses span a handful of ancient disciplines, from sociology to philosophy, hermeneutics to exobiology, a rickety structure of speculation leaning heavily on disputable interpretations of paleo-archaeological data. Privately, she considers Erbach a crank. On the other hand, someone values his ideas enough to fund this mission and so give Lysa her first chance at a full observership. She keeps her judgments to herself.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 37