[anthology] Darrell Schweitzer (ed) - Cthulhu's Reign

by Unknown

  “Who? What are you saying, Harleyann?”

  “The Yuggothi.”

  “Impossible. I just saw them leave their planet.”

  “They’re here. They’re circling overhead. Their ships are unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. They look like—like cyborgs. They’re monsters, something like bats, something like octopuses, something like humans. And machines. They’re machines, too.”

  “But—they can’t have traveled that far in a few minutes.”

  “They can, Jing-kuo. They must have—I don’t know—we manage to skip messages through wormholes or subspace or however our system works. We don’t really understand, do we, we just know that it works. And they’ve found a way to travel, oh, not through space. Between space. Whatever. And they’re heading toward earth, Jing-kuo. I can see. I can see waves of blackness sweeping across the planet. The atmosphere is burning, the oceans, forests, ice caps. Oh, my God, my God, my God. It’s worse than—”

  The transmission ended.

  Chen Jing-kuo studied the surface of Yuggoth, pulsing red, filling the sky above Beijing 11-11.

  The virus doesn’t hate its host, she thought, and the host doesn’t really hate the virus. There is nothing personal about it. Nothing personal. If the host doesn’t destroy the virus in time, the virus will kill the host. But even if that happens, once the host is dead, the virus also will die.

  Chen Jing-kuo turned the telescope toward Earth. The image was magnified until it filled a screen. As she watched, bits of black appeared on the blue-and-white disk. They spread from points to irregular blots. More of them appeared, and more, until they began to run together.

  For a moment the planet disappeared against the solid black background of space. Then points appeared again, became blots, multiplied and grew until Earth was a red disk. Like Yuggoth, it began to pulse, to pulse like a malevolent heart. Now Chen Jing- kuo understood what she was seeing. The Yuggothi, she realized, had devised a means to convert the normal matter of earth, contact with which would have been instantly, disastrously fatal to them, into contraterrene matter. Antimatter.

  Now they could live in earth, and now there remained no other life to compete with them.

  But Yuggoth itself was also contraterrene. The Yuggothi had erected no shield against a potential plunging space station of terrene matter. For all Chen Jing- kuo could tell, the Yuggothi were as unaware of the station as a human would be of a single fatal bacterium.

  Earth was dead. Chen Jing-kuo knew that now. The Yuggothi had wiped it clean. The atmosphere was gone. The oceans, the forests. The ice caps were gone. The planet had been wiped clean. It now had new owners. Octopus-bat-man-machine things that even now were walking or slithering or flying across the black, dead surface of the once blue-green, beautiful world. The black surface that was now pulsing with a red, evil beat.

  The oblate globe of Yuggoth spun beneath Beijing 11-11. Chen Jing- kuo set the controls, activated the verniers, sent Beijing 11-11 plunging toward Yuggoth. This time, the sequence of events was reversed. The host had killed the virus, but the virus retained enough vitality for one final act. The virus would kill the host.

  REMNANTS

  Fred Chappell

  I

  Echo was thrashing and muttering in her sleep and would soon have cried out if Vern had not crawled over in the dark to her pallet and addressed her ear, making only a whisper- noise and no words. “Psss, psss, psss.”

  “Psss psss psss,” she answered imitating his exact sibilance, as she always did.

  “Hush now,” he murmured. “Don’t cry out.”

  These five words she repeated also, her inflection reproducing his. She had not wakened.

  “What is it?” he said, speaking ever so softly. “Is it a shiny? Is it a waggly? Is it a too-bright?”

  All this she mimicked.

  “No,” he said. “Say what.”

  “No. Say what.” Then, in a while: “Dirt. Broke dirt.”

  “Broken dirt,” her brother said. He was trying to lengthen the loop of her phrases so that more information would filter into its sequence of repetition. He was four years older than she; he was going on sixteen now, but he had learned to be almost tirelessly patient. He looked to see if Moms had been wakened by the girl’s unrest, but she seemed to sleep soundly, lying in the leaf pile with her face turned away and covered with scraps of cloth and burlap and canvas. She shivered a little; it was impossible to sleep warmly in their cave behind the waterfall, and they were reduced to rags for blankets.

  “Broke dirt,” Echo said.

  “Why broke-dirt? What for broke-dirt? Where is broke-dirt?”

  “Psss psss psss. Hush now. Don’t cry out. What is it? Is it a shiny . . .” She had started from the beginning again, her voice copying his in every breath, but not becoming louder, so probably what disturbed her sleep was not an Old One sweeping a thoughtprobe through the landscape in random search, as they so often did. The black mixed collie, Queenie, lay watching the brother and the sister, and she was peaceful, with her head on her paws and not bristling. Nor was she growling in that dangerous but almost inaudible manner that meant she understood that Echo had detected something perilous nearby.

  Vern decided he could go back to sleep. Whatever Echo had encountered could wait till morning. She was a little easier to communicate with when she was awake, but communication required an immense store of calmness.

  Which I have not got, he thought, as he lay down in his place and recovered himself with rags and leaves. I have just about run out of calm, the way I have run out of ideas about where to find food.

  He thought about that, staring into the darkness above. The stream whose bed roofed the cave in which they lived offered fish, the small speckled trout native to these mountains. In summer there were berries and rabbits and other small game, but that season was dwindling and the trees were dropping their leaves so quickly they seemed to be racing to denude themselves. The family had not managed to put much by for the winter. The Old Ones and their shoggoth slaves had been active in this area all through the summer, so Vern and Moms had foraged less often than they desired. Also, Moms and Vern did not like to leave Echo alone in the cave, even with Queenie there to disguise her mind and to protect her.

  This was the main reason they shared food with Queenie. The dog thought in the same way that Echo did. She thought in pictures and not in words; she thought in terms of smell and sound as much as in visuals, and this was true too of Echo. The Old Ones who swept a casual thought probe through would probably identify Echo as a dog or an opossum or raccoon. If Vern and Moms kept their feelings at a low level and were as careful as possible not to think in large generalizations like “weather,” “time,” “yesterday,” “the future,” and so forth, the pictures in the heads of Queenie and Echo would pretty well mask the ways of thought of Vern and Moms.

  Of course, if the Olders—as Vern called them—set out to make a thorough and deliberate search, there would be no way to hide. And no way to defend themselves. They would be captured, examined inside and out, and when that bloody, shrieking inventory was complete, they would be discarded, unless the Olders found something in one of their minds to isolate and store in their cyborganic memory banks.

  But this latter possibility was extremely unlikely. In their family, only their father, Donald Peaslee, had known anything that could have been of use to the Olders. They took it from him, whatever it was, along with his sanity first and then with his life.

  Vern would not think about that. If he thought about the way his father, or what was left of him, had looked the last time he saw him, his emotions would rise like a scarlet banner run up a flagpole and then maybe an Older would notice and come hunting. Or maybe the Older would send a throng of their stupid and disgusting shoggoths to search them out. The cosmetic ministrations those creatures wreaked on humans prettified them no more than did the interrogations of the Olders.

  But something had nudged Echo’s sleeping mind with its str
ange faculties and it was needful to know what that might have been.

  When morning came, he would make an attempt, if she had not forgotten . . . Well no, Echo was incapable of forgetting anything. Everything that had ever happened to her, everything she had seen and felt and heard and smelled and tasted was all there in her mind. But it was hard to draw it out because she had no categories. You had to find a specific detail and then add that to another and then another and another until some sort of picture was suggested.

  He sighed and turned to sleep and just as he was letting go, he fancied that something touched his own mind too, with just the whisper of a whisper. Then he decided he was only imagining; he lacked Echo’s quick, delicate talent.

  Vern wanted to question his sister the first moment the three of them were awake, but there was no chance of that. For Echo, everything had to fall into place in a customary routine. First, Vern had to go outside and “scout,” as Moms put it—meaning that he had to find a tree and take a leak, fill a can with stream water, and look for dangers or for nothing until Moms had cleaned up Echo and brushed her hair as best she could and made her feel Echo-ish. This was one of the few times she enjoyed being touched by others, except for petting and hugging Queenie and guiding Vern’s hand during the drawing sessions.

  So out he went into a gray, chilly dawn with its sky streaked here and there with scores of dropping meteorites. This time he really did look about for signs of danger because of Echo’s restlessness and his own vague feeling that something was waiting to happen. He toured the small, handy game traps he had set, but they were empty this morning. He had been seeing raccoon sign by a little streamlet that fed into the waterfall stream and was pretty sure he could capture it some soon morning before dawn. That would be glad news for the family, meat and pelt together. He did not bother to look into the fish trap set at the farther end of the waterfall pool; he had seen yesterday evening that a large brook trout was captured in the willow-withe cage and he would let it stay there to keep fresh. They already had stocked two smoked trout in the cave, one for now and one for the other meal of the day.

  He let himself recall, for the most fleeting of moments, the great, lush blackberries he had gathered some forty-odd days ago, so juicy-sweet they had made Echo tremble as she crammed them into her mouth by handfuls while Moms watched her with teary eyes.

  Then he turned the thought away. It might make his emotions rise to a detectable level. The Olders . . .

  Time now to go back. Inside, he saw Echo all freshened up to the best of her mother’s ability. She was hugging Queenie and singing her wake- up song: “All night all night all night . . .”

  He found his length of steel—a flattened lever two feet long—and went to the ember hole, lifted off the slate covering, and dug out one of the cylinders of foil. The other he left for supper. He covered the hole over again and brought the trout to where Moms and Echo sat waiting.

  Mom looked more tired than yesterday, he thought, but Echo was as happy as ever she could be. She liked the taste of the trout smoked in foil, but more than that, she liked the anticipation of eating it. She drummed her hands on her crossed legs, smiling and murmuring softly her song, “All night all night.”

  “Thank you, Vern,” Moms said when he handed her the packet. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Echo was hearing something,” he said. “She was almost awake.”

  “I know.” Moms took the one metal knife they possessed from her belt and divided the fish. Her belt held up the britches she had stitched together with nylon fishing leader from an old, mostly rotten tent they had found in the woods. They needed to find some more fabric soon or roam around naked. Echo would not like that; she must have her many-colored robe, cloth scraps of every kind held together with pins and wire bits and paper clips and whatnot. She would squall if she had to go naked.

  “There is something she wants to tell us about,” Vern said.

  “The Old Ones?”

  “I don’t know. Should we try to find out?”

  “Maybe we should. I heard once long ago that they make parts of forests like this one into preserves and stock them with all sorts of animals that might harm us. To this particular environment, they might import grizzly bears and gray wolves and panthers. Wolves and panthers used to inhabit here.”

  “I know,” Vern said. But he didn’t know and he wouldn’t inquire. I heard once long ago—this was Moms’ phrase to indicate something her husband had told her. Best never to say his name, for sorrow would rise in them and such a feeling—or any strong feeling—was so alien to the Olders that they could detect it at fairly long range.

  His father had known many things: history and science and music and numbers and stars. He had known too much about the stars. He had known too much about everything. See what grief his learning had brought them . . . Vern turned aside these thoughts.

  But Moms had remembered some of the history her husband knew. He had told her of the caves in this part of the mountains where remnants of the Cherokee nation hid out when the soldiers came to drive them away and to rape and kill and burn. Those who did not hide in the caves were herded on the Trail of Tears, to suffer and die on the brutal march westward. Vern had found signs and leavings in their own cave. A rose-colored flint knife was his special treasure.

  Queenie had trotted out of the cave when they began eating the fish. She would scout the area, ranging farther than Vern had done, and then return for her own meal. It had taken a long time to reconcile her to this routine, but they needed a sentry in this hour. When Echo ate, she could concentrate on nothing else until the breakfast ritual was complete. When Queenie returned, Vern would feed the dog the smoked opossum buried in the ember hole. Now he passed to his mother and sister the can of water brought from the stream. Each drank, then both washed their hands and faces, Echo mimicking Moms’ actions closely.

  Tasks awaited Vern. He needed to fashion new traps from whatever pliable materials he could find. He already had a good-sized stock; the woods were full of discarded things, trash that was treasure for the family. He also needed to pile wood to dry for burning and to fashion into rude tools to dig and scrape with. But he was concerned about what Echo might have discovered. This was a good time to try to talk to her; she was calm and good-natured after feeding.

  He sat on the earth floor beside her and began slowly. “Echo?”

  She shook her head and would not look at him. Sometimes she was shy about contact; sometimes she seemed only to be teasingly coy, but of course she was incapable of such an attitude.

  “Echo?” He kept repeating her name until she did look at him, her bright gray eyes staring into his face, her gaze now locked to his.

  “Broke dirt. Do you remember? Broke dirt. Dirt broken. Do you remember?”

  Yes, she remembered. She never forgot anything. But getting her to speak of one specific subject in the past was difficult because she knew no past. Everything was immediate.

  “Broke dirt,” he said again and, for a wonder, she repeated the phrase—three times in a row.

  “What for, broke dirt?”

  She repeated this phrase too for awhile and then interrupted the loop. “Go. Go broke dirt.”

  “Where is it?”

  This question would make no sense to her and he regretted asking it. Sometimes when words made no sense, she would fall into a spooky silence and sit unspeaking, unmoving, for hours.

  He had found out, though, that something had spoken in her mind, or to it, saying that the three of them must travel to Broken Dirt, wherever and whatever that was. He waited and then said, “Draw?”

  She nodded, solemn-faced.

  “Let’s go to the drawing sand,” he said and when she nodded again, he crawled over to a space toward the cave mouth where the light was brighter. Moms took Echo’s hand and they joined him and Moms sat beside Echo, to be near and reassure her.

  This space was a circle about four feet in diameter. Vern had cleared away the pebbles and smoothed
the floor and brought fine sand from the bottom of the stream and poured it and spread it out. This was where they wrote and drew and Moms taught Vern mathematics and geometry and a little geography. Here too Echo and Vern drew the pictures that came into Echo’s mind. Echo had many words in her head, but she could not order them into concepts; she could not abstract. Her world was made up of separate, individual things that could be, and sometimes had to be, placed in rote positions. She had no categories to put things into. Queenie did not belong to the family of dogs; she belonged to the family of Queenie and there were no other members. For all the masses of words heaped in her capacious, seemingly unlimited memory, Echo could not know what a word was.

  It made everything extremely difficult, for she was their best detector of the Olders. She could hear sounds as acutely as Queenie, perhaps, and she could see even better, for the dog was less receptive to color. As for odors, there Queenie had it all over the girl. Queenie was particularly sensitive to the Old Ones’ smell and if it became too strong she was uncontrollable, yelping and howling and snapping. She might bite even Vern in her terror.

  “Let’s draw how dirt is broken,” Vern said. “Show me how.” He took up the curved stick lying by the sand circle and held it in his right hand. It was a slightly arced, two-foot length of a sapling maple branch he had trimmed and sharpened.

  It took some time before Echo would touch him, but at last she laid her small, porcelain- like hand on the back of his wrist and with slight but not tentative movements began to guide. The marks she directed Vern to make were incomprehensible, but he had learned to wait for the process to conclude. First a mark here by her knee, then one over there so that he had to lean to make it and then one to the left almost out of the circle . . . Vern could not draw things in that way himself and he was always surprised when the marks joined together to form an image.