Not in words but in the language with which humankind first spoke to the universe: in immersive holographic memetics that rescripted the reader into the spirit and image of the author.
Found himself in an impossible body as inexplicable in its byzantine, fractal intricacy as was the labyrinthine sophistication of its brain. His species wore and shed bodies like clothes, leading a parallel existence inside the mirror universe of an aggregated AI. Power inseparable from godhood, yet when all mystery had been gnawed down to mere knowledge, when all pleasures had left the nerves insensate, the soul empty, they asked their foremost prophet to find God for them.
She looked out into the void and into the depths of species memory, into the boutiques of black market body-shops that would modify her in ways the collective mind would never allow, the better to secure her vision.
When she returned to show them God, the entire planet vibrated with anticipation as it had not since long before her race renounced the empty game of interstellar conquest a score of eons past. Few were told that she had had all her exterior sensory organs surgically disabled and had gone, by any standard of her senescent and libertine species, quite incurably insane.
She uttered a brutally primal ululation of mindless exultation and, before she could be stopped, committed suicide in a most barbaric fashion involving removal and devouring of her own head. Within moments, the world computer had integrated her self and become infected with her vision. Instantly, everybody on its network was stricken blind, deaf, mute, and dumb to olfactory and equilibrium stimuli. The world computer accepted a pandemic of suicides and deaths by misadventure in the ensuing panic but refused to decant new bodies. Those trapped within the world computer were made to share the prophet’s vision and the joyous shedding of decadent complexity, to join her in tearing down all science, art, philosophy, memory, until nothing remained but the essential spark that had driven them to seek, in their greedy ennui, the hand of God.
Cut off from the superficial shimmering of their world and the distracting bleatings of each other, they found the universe quivered with the stirring of gods beyond number. They felt it showering down on their blind, awakened faces from the dark spaces between the stars as a diffuse rain of cosmic obscenity too profoundly convoluted for lesser minds to unravel and perish at its implications: abominable neutrino screams of eternally embryonic gods writhing in the cores of stars and the bowels of black holes, and at the galactic core, the echoing roar of the source of all that lived, of all that was, of the blind idiot Creator early humans knew as Azathoth, which had convulsed in an ecstasy of parthenogenesis and extruded a billion galaxies . . . but which was yet a fleck of jetsam in the eye of Yog Sothoth, a mindless paroxysm that secreted bubble-universes like so many dead skin cells . . .
But loudest of all, they felt the vibration of godhead within their own flesh and knew they alone were cut off from the music of the ever-unfolding Creator . . . unless they sacrificed all that they were, all that they had achieved, all that they knew, and even knowing itself . . .
From the metaplasm of Azathoth had come all physical matter and antimatter, and in its shapeless chaos lay the divine energy that species across the universe had worshiped with varying degrees of accuracy. In the detritus of the stars, its infinite progeny gestated in cycles that measured the deaths of stars as trimesters. In unkindled gas giants and in the molten cores of terrestrial worlds, they slept and, in their dreaming, sometimes begat miracles, sometimes monsters. So many worlds where life had emerged and evolved and arrogantly clawed its way to the stars were little more than cracked eggs, where the sleeping potential to hatch a godling was squandered in mortal species that deluded themselves into thinking they were the pinnacles of creation. But if evolution had no end, it could easily turn a circle.
Besieged by a billion gods with no use for their prayers, his species eagerly extinguished themselves and emerged from the world computer’s crèches as shapeless meta-amoebas, slipped out of their last ruined cities as the climate controls failed and the mud buried all their eagerly forgotten works, and returned to the primordial soup with no regrets, resonating in blind idiot joy with the eternal echo of Azathoth birthing the universe . . .
It is arguably a harder thing to learn that one’s whole existence is built upon lies and the promulgation of lies than it is to learn how unimaginably alien is the true nature of the face of one’s creator.
Father Ivo recovered from his vision to find that the pillar of worms had merged into a single convulsing mass with no discernible axes or symmetry, no stable organs, but primitive buds of ur-organs erupting forever out of its fitfully simmering membrane, seething with the eagerness to become anything. All his work undone . . . and worse—
The long forgotten inhabitants of this godforsaken planet had regressed as far as their madness allowed, but only with Father Ivo’s genetic meddling were they awakened to their true purpose. Now, the unified thing, yet eons from its pupation into something like a god, it began to force itself into the pit in the floor.
His mind all but unhinged by what he’d seen and relived, Father Ivo could only throw open the Bible and read from it as its light skewered the shapeless monstrosity, this first begotten Nephilim of the unacceptable one true God.
The light stabbed deep into the unholy thing, and Father Ivo nearly buckled as the anti-entropic radiation was sucked out of the Bible faster than it could be produced. The abomination seemed to shrivel into itself or to succumb to the divine program and assume lateral symmetry, but a tentacle of boiling membrane thrust out at him to smash him down or snatch the Bible from his hands . . .
For a moment, he believed he’d won.
The tentacle split open and twitched as its liquid mobility surrendered to the commandments of muscle and bone. The tentacle flattened and fanned out an array of bony digits with a shorter one in opposition in awesome imitation of a human hand.
It was exactly as he imagined it . . . indeed, it might have been plucked out of his imagination, from his earlier memory of God touching Adam. Indeed, he trembled beneath the gigantic hand and closed his eyes in reflexive expectation of the bestowal of some indescribable blessing . . .
The hand fell upon him, its weight nothing like he expected, but its touch was electric upon his skin. It burned . . .
Burned . . .
He burned with invisible fire. His garments disintegrated. Face, hands, limbs, body, burned as something took him apart at a molecular level. It must be his own nanomites, the ones deployed to build the tabernacle, but they were programmed to autophage after he was completed. But they were only another living thing, in the end, and far more liable to hear the call than one who heard only the unending blather of its own voice . . .
The hand retreated back into the mother mass of the shapeless child of God as it shrank into the hole in the floor, and Father Ivo yearned to go after it, but the pit, when he reached it, proved to be little more than a crack in the floor. His body yielded to the narrowing of space with some degree of pain, but he found himself able to fit quite handily once the last remains of his skeleton were ejected out of his anus.
* * *
On the morning of the Sixth Day, Father Ivo Tsieh-Mondragon emerged from the tabernacle and looked with disfavor upon the work of his previous bodies. His memory of what had befallen him cut off shortly after he descended into the sinkhole and recovered his Bible, and the new one he had been issued forbade him in its most saturnine voice to investigate it further.
Little else remained to be done to try to salvage the mission. It was becoming harder to chastise himself for the sins of his previous bodies, but it would be his fate to be disintegrated with the tabernacle when For His Own Glory was recalled to rejoin the mothership Skycake before it migrated closer to the galactic core where it was hoped more fertile unclaimed worlds would be on offer.
Of the teeming population of meta-amoebas cataloged in the initial planetary survey, Father Ivo observed only one specimen, and none of the
progress his predecessors logged was on display, though it made such a nuisance of itself, flailing nets of sticky cilia at Father Ivo and piping from its gasping vacuoles a susurrant noise he imagined sounded like a lipless whisper.
“You not I. I am I,” the abortive amoeba rasped at him until Father Ivo was moved to squash it with his boot.
Cody Goodfellow has written five solo novels and two more with NY Times bestselling author John Skipp. Two of his collections, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action, both received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote, co-produced, and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene film Stay At Home Dad, which can be viewed on YouTube. As a bishop of the Esoteric Order of Dagon (San Pedro Chapter), he presides over several Cthulhu Prayer Breakfasts each year. He is also a cofounder of Perilous Press, a micropublisher of modern cosmic horror. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
A Dream, and a Monster at the End of It
Nadia Bulkin
Illustrated by Luke Spooner
The Remina landed on Elijah with a bump and a scrape and the certain satisfaction of its arrival having been foretold. The solar ring’s best scientists had all agreed: on Elijah’s last sail through the neighborhood, it had come closest to Sarai. It was only fair that Sarai should be the first to land upon it, the first to drill it, the first and only to mine its riches. The prodigal planet; the stranger from afar.
Sarai had eagerly awaited its return for a thousand years, committed to it songs and films and cigarette brands and about a hundred of their eldest sons’ names in this year of its perihelion, and across the solar ring, so had everyone else. Three dozen refugee communities were waiting with desperate colonization requests that the ICG would never read. Tero was waiting to capture Elijah with an arsenal of illegal push-missiles, even though Elijah wasn’t theirs to claim by any standard of interstellar law. Everyone else was waiting with telescopes because Elijah was just that beautiful, coming into habitable space like a chariot not of fire but ice.
The only one not waiting a second longer was Sarai, because fortune favored the brave in the interplanetary age.
Captain Kadan brought out the bottle of wine that he’d smuggled onboard and promised that they would open it after they made first break. “We’re going to drink it all,” he told his crew, “and then we’re going to stuff the bottle with a note that says ‘Go Fuck Yourself,’ and we’re going to throw it out the airlock and hope it hits Tero. With any luck, they’ll think it’s a message from their great-great granddaddies.”
His crew laughed.
It was easy to laugh at that overgrown planet that thought everything was theirs. Easy to laugh at all the Callers perched on the cliff, yelling nonsense at the abyss—so convinced they were that somewhere out there was humanity’s true home, some great empire that had lost track of one of their outposts. But out there had become in here, and through all the cracked mud and subterranean lakes and water vapor, there was no one yelling back. They were alone. They were alone, they were alone, they were alone; praise God, they were alone.
“Xenia is a Caller too, you know,” said Ariq, slyly.
Xenia always tried to play it down. She’d say, I grew up in a religious community on the Eastern Plains, called the Good Garden. They were believers, she’d say, but they weren’t Callers. Oh, no. They were actually the opposite of Callers: they were cautious.
“But tell him why you’re cautious,” Ariq goaded.
Xenia shrugged. “Because we don’t know what’s out there,” she replied, trying to be matter-of-fact because it was matter-of-fact, wasn’t it? They couldn’t possibly know.
Captain Kadan stared at her for a second and broke out in uproarious, hearty laughter—the laughter of a man who knows he’s fulfilling a destiny that’s been foretold. “You are a damn Caller,” he told her. “You’re just a really pessimistic one.”
Captain Kadan and Ariq left to do the honors. The captain had been waiting his whole life to drive that rig into Elijah’s face in Sarai’s name; Ariq was the one who knew how to work the machine.
“Happy hunting,” Xenia said. From the safety of the Remina, she watched their rover roll along on the SAR, the size of a small insect and about twice as vulnerable. A sense of abiding cold had seeped in from Elijah’s pale ice hills and methane lakes when she wasn’t looking, and she had the wild thought that maybe Elijah caught a cold somewhere out there at the other end of its stretched-out-rubber-band orbit? For the first time since they left Sarai—to the cheers and claps of their comrades chanting “First Break! First Break!”—she wished she hadn’t agreed to this detail. Should have listened to her parents. They alone didn’t herald Elijah with trumpets. They called Elijah “Hellstar,” mostly because it had spent the past thousand years crossing through a whole lot of nothing: not nothing because they knew for sure that it was empty but nothing because it was silent, like a held breath. Elijah had spent the past millennium in—(hell).
“Hey, Zee. What exactly do you think is out there? Is there a bug hunt I can join?”
She pressed the microphone closer to her chin. “We’d be the bugs, Captain.” Over the comms, she heard the two men laughing and tried to will herself to laugh with them.
But before they reached the pre-assigned site for first break, Xenia spotted something a mile left on the SAR: a tiny, perfect circle inside a tiny, perfect heptagon. She asked the rover to hold.
“Are you sure it’s not a mountain?” Captain Kadan asked, eager to continue this most noble quest before the Great Tero Starfleet was able to close in with their ship-sized drills and claim first break, claim that Elijah belonged to them.
She was sorry to have to give him the worst news he had perhaps ever heard. “It’s geometric,” Xenia said. “It looks manmade.”
* * *
Of course, Xenia had dreamt about Elijah. They all had. She had friends who dreamt of seeing peppermint-colored Elijah in their lover’s eyes or of dogs running up to them on the causeway with Elijah tucked between their teeth, a lovely saliva-covered marble. But in most of the dreams she’d had since childhood, Elijah was enormous instead of shrunken, swollen far larger than the minor planet ever could have been in Sarai’s sky a thousand years ago and growing larger by the minute. Her father would be pouring out oil onto a fire nearby, glumly saying, “No good, no good,” and Xenia would try to point to the rapidly approaching planet, but her father could never see.
Even as Elijah filled the half-light of the sky; even as a large rift opened along Elijah’s equator and revealed a gigantic, all-seeing eye, visibly rippling with veins and blood vessels; even as that eye fixed its ne’er blinking gaze upon Xenia and her father; even then, he didn’t see it.
* * *
No one spoke while the rover drove over to the structure. No one wanted to say what they were all thinking: that they had lost the race, even though they had had a figurative eternity to plan and deployed every resource possible—including a formidable army of spies—to ensure that they came in first on Elijah. The Remina had hid behind a long-period comet on its way out of habitable space and rode the momentum until the drop down to Elijah’s soft, slushy surface. And yet, for all this, they had lost. Someone had outsmarted them. Someone else wanted Elijah more. The fact didn’t seem possible, considering their desperation for its sweet silicates, its delicious platinum and palladium.
Once Captain Kadan and Ariq reached the heptagonal structure, Xenia didn’t have to switch to their video feeds to know that whatever it was, it meant first break. The slew of curses coming over the comms was evidence enough. Slugged by a wave of nauseating unfairness, she briefly rested her head on her arms. First break was an awful rule, but Sarai had signed onto it because it beat the alternative: to the captor go the spoils, which would have worked solely in favor of the large and heavy, like Tero. When she raised her head again, her eyes briefly lingered on the view from Remina’s perimeter camera: the distant foothills of ice and glimmering misshapen methane swamps, all dark, all the time. Al
l dark, yet Elijah had seen it all.
“What is it? Whose is it?” she said, turning on Ariq’s video. She saw the tips of white boots she assumed to be Captain Kadan’s. The corroded hexagon lined a round tunnel burrowing into the ice, all glowing a sharp, military green. Whoever built it hadn’t gotten very far; there was nothing but black at the bottom of the well.
“They must have done it the last time Elijah was in habitable space.”
“Last time?” Captain Kadan scoffed. “You mean a thousand years ago?”
“Probably more like nine hundred and ninety years, but yeah.”
Xenia cut in. “I don’t see any Tero markings on it. But there’s something else . . .”
The two men stopped, and Ariq stooped, zooming in on the etchings carved into the hexagon. It just looked like knife marks to her eyes, but when the computer took a look, the cuts became words: “Property of the Free Paaten Nation. Hail Elijah, Our New Home.”
There was a lot of angry mumbling that she couldn’t quite hear because her mind had been swept away by thoughts of the long-suffering Paateni, hiding on the peripheries of Tero’s storms like beaten animals. She had read a sad statistic about them in school: no other nation-group had filed so many colonization requests and been denied every time. Nobody wanted to make Tero angry, so Tero got away with everything. And because the “Free Paaten Nation” would have still, technically, belonged to Tero, Tero was going to make off with Elijah too.
“We have to destroy it,” Captain Kadan said.
Silence. That went utterly against first break’s principles, though neither Xenia nor Ariq wanted to say that out loud. Ariq’s video tilted up toward Captain Kadan’s greenlit face, and their fearless leader looked downright skeletal: eyes bugged out, cheeks hollowed-out with terror.
“No one knows about this,” he went on with escalating desperation. “Tero clearly doesn’t know. The ICG doesn’t know. We’re the first ones here . . .”
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 45